Toshogu, Wimping Out and Not Regretting It

Today was a planned day off of cycling for us. When we visited Nikko last year, it rained so hard, we couldn't really go out and see anything on the day we had set aside. Nikko is a UNESCO World Heritage site, known for many shrines, but none more than Toshogu, the burial site for Ieyasu Tokugawa, the first Tokugawa Shogun. Built in the early 1600's by his son HIdetada and grandson, Iemitsu, it's a large, sprawling series of buildings whose artwork has to be seen to be believed.

We headed to the bus station, grabbing some breakfast on the way, and got some bus day passes from the Tobu-Nikko station

Looks more alpine than Japanese.

A quick bus ride up the mountain to Toshogu, and we were struck by how huge the trees, were planted no doubt when the shrine was built.

Hard to see here, but they well over 100 feet tall, surrounding the shrine buildings.

We spent several hours there, walking around and taking pictures and only captured a small fraction of what was there. Every building had many painted wood carvings, each one of them unique. There were, quite literally, thousands of them. I'm just going to share a few highlights:

One panel of the Yomeimon gate. Notice three separate carvings top, middle and below.
There were about 30 of these panels, each one unique

The famous 3 Wise Monkeys: See no Evil, Hear no Evil, Speak no Evil.
Bet you didn't know it came from Japan!

One of the more curious carvings that we saw were the elephants. Let's be clear: there are no elephants native to Japan. They were known about, from what is modern day Thailand, but it was a rare Japanese person to have ever seen one. So, when the artist, Kano Tanyu, was told to make elephant carvings....well, he'd never seen one before. They are known as the "Imaginary Elephants", because that's exactly what they were: Kano's best guess at what an elephant looked like, based on what he had heard and other illustrations.

Um, kinda creepy.

All things considered, he did a good job, though they look a little like demonic elephants.

There was also one of the cuter (and more famous) carvings above one of the main doors in the shrine, showing a certain importance. It was that of the Sleepy Cat(nemui neko).

sleeping among the flowers

In an odd mispronunciation, all the school children who were swarming the area, were all excited to see the Sleeping Cat (nemuri neko)

We could have stayed and looked at the carvings for hours, but it was getting very crowded with tour groups and field trips, so we decided to buy some Sleepy Cat souvenirs and head out. Unfortunately, we had made it to the entrance before we realized there was only one vendor of Sleepy Cat trinkets. That vendor was only reachable after climbing 232 steps. Don't ask me how I know that.

We headed back to the lodge to use the Internet to try and get the hotspot working. We ended up contacting the company and they are sending us a new one, but it won't reach us for a few days, so we'll be without for now. We also got to spend some time talking to Yuji-san, who turned out to be an interesting fellow. When he found out where we were heading next, he looked at our trailers and said "really?". You see, it turns out the road to Yuumoto, our next stop, is entirely uphill. A change in elevation of almost one mile in less than 20 miles. He recommended we ship our trailers to our Thursday destination (Oigami). Sumi took almost no convincing and, after yesterday, I didn't either.

So, we packed up everything we didn't absolutely need, headed out to a coin laundry to get everything clean, stopped at the absolutely wonderful Kamiyama Cycle Shop to pick up a spare tube for the trailer.

grabbed some food at a restaurant across from the station

I wasn't going to get it, but the guy next to us was eating his, and it smelled sooooo good!

then, grabbed the laundry, separated our stuff into our backpacks and trailers, shipped the trailers, then headed back to the lodge feeling only a little bit guilty. I got more work done as we chatted with Yuji-san, who, as it turns out, did the full 88 temple henro pilgrimage in Shikoku. Longtime readers of our blogs will remember that we visited, and stayed at, some of the temples along the pilgrimage. He brought out his book, where all 88 temple priests stamped and wrote some calligraphy in it. It was very cool to see. It also made me quite sure if it was a guy who walked over 1,000km in 42 days said we should ship our trailers, then we made the right decision.

Tomorrow, we climb a mountain without our trailers for the first time!

A main attraction in downtown NIkko. We did not partake.

Who's Idea Was This Anyway?

I was awake at about 4am (thanks, jet lag) with the sun just starting to rise. Sumi was still passed out, so I took the opportunity to get caught up on my three certification classes that I'm taking this summer. They are all online. They all started the last week of classes. So, I'll be spending some of our downtime here doing homework and reading. It's not that bad, really.

We got moving and hit the road around 6:30. Leaving Koga was a piece of cake, and we hopped back on the cycling path and continued on to our eventual destination of Nikko. The cycling path, at this section, had a lot of points where it would start and stop, joining city streets for a short time, etc. The maps that we were provided by the web site that does all of this were, in a word, terrible. They highlighted obvious intersections, then ignored confusing ones. We pieced together, from three maps, mostly where to go. it was at this point that the first problem was discovered. Our Wi-Fi hotspot that we had rented for the trip...wasn't working. We could connect to it, but it couldn't connect to the Internet. This meant that Maps and Google Maps, which we relied on a lot in our previous trips, wasn't working. We had GPS, thankfully, so we were able to plot ourselves using another app, but the map was not nearly as detailed. Well, we'd have to deal with it today, and figure it out when we got to our hotel.

The ride was more of the same for the first part of the trip. Flat, sunny, hot and uneventful. Other than getting lost, it wasn't bad, but getting lost took a lot of time.

The name of the river watarasegawa, and occasional kilometer markers were
written very large across the bike path so the small aircraft flying
above could read them

Lots of dam apparatus along the river

There were, of course, some amusing signs along the way.

A better mascot than Smokey the Bear

It says pedestrians have the right of way. That's not how I read that picture!

We finally made it into Ashikaga, a city about one third of the way to Nikko at around noon, several hours later than we'd hoped. We worked our way through the city and just made it onto the last section of the path when I noticed that one of Sumi's brand new trailer tires had gone flat. We backtracked to find some shade where I could work my magic once again, and found a nice little playground with some nice shade and a place to sit.

These small 12" tires are real pain to work with.

Now, about two and a half hours behind, we headed back out. And promptly got very lost. We both thought we were going the right way, but after about 30 minutes of flailing around, we realized we had no idea which way we were facing.It was noon, so the sun was almost directly above us, so it was no help. Our bad maps didn't help, and no Internet was just icing on the cake. We finally got out of town around 1pm, now three hours late.

Eventually, after passing through the wonderfully named town of Ohmama (pronounced exactly as it looks), we hit Kiryu, the last town before the mountains. It was getting late, and we had a mountain to climb before getting into Nikko. There will now be almost no pictures, because our only thought was getting to the guest lodge in Nikko before the owner went home.

The climb up to Nikko was about 32 miles. 32 miles of almost constant uphill cycling with 50 pound trailers. It was getting dark, we weren't even on top of the mountain yet and were just totally drained from the heat, the twelve hours of cycling. It was quite reminiscent of the first day out of Tokyo on our last trip, where we limped into our hotel at Mt. Fuji around 9pm with no working lights. That was not an experience we were keen on repeating.

And we almost did. Cresting the mountain, we came to a tunnel 2.8km long. Getting our lights set, we discovered Sumi's wasn't working. What else could go wrong today? Luckily, I had planned for just such an occasion. I pulled out a headlamp I had in my handlebar bag for use in an emergency. Well, this qualified. I swapped my light with Sumi, rigged my headlamp onto my handlebar bag, and off we went. It was also a turning point in the trip. We had been climbing the mountain for the last seven hours, but we finally hit the downhill. And by downhill, I mean down a mountain. We had about 15 miles left to Nikko. Without pedaling, we rolled into town in about 40 minutes, which included stopping several times to check the map. A huge, welcome relief after once of our worst days of cycling.

Yuji-san, the proprietor of the Narusawa Lodge, was friendly and understanding of our bad day. He showed us to our room, let us park the bikes and trailers inside and we gratefully showered and passed out almost immediately.

Narusawa Lodge, our Elysium