Day Trip to Nikko: Part Two

I spent the first part of Thursday walking around the shrines of Nikko!

This bridge is famous too for some reason. It's really beautiful and you can see the mountains in the background. This is the same river that ran behind the back of our hostel.

When we woke up on Thursday morning, we walked from the hostel to the center of town, which took all of three minutes. Also, the center of town is basically one street. It was much smaller than I expected, but that was cool with me. Here is a little rock-waterfall-thing that you are supposed to use to wash your hands.

Here is a really random and really cool phone booth that I saw near the bus stop.

 

After we explored the center of Nikko a bit, we made our way to the Toshogu Shrine. We had to take a ton of stairs and then walk up a hill.

While we were looking for the shrine, we passed a 400 year-old garden (at least that's what the guy at the ticket booth said). It was really beautiful, so here are a few pictures.

Do you see the mountain peeking beneath the trees? I don't know what mountain that is. All I know is it's not Mount Fuji.

And we finally made it to the entrance of the shrine.

The first thing we saw was this pagoda. I posted a picture of a pagoda in Asakusa, but the colors on this pagoda were brighter and it seemed more elaborate.

Here is a close-up of the detail.

I believe these are light posts of some sort.

Finally we got to the shrine part of the shrine. There were lots of buildings leading up to the main shrine, which is dedicated to Tokugawa Ieyasu. Here are some of the minor buildings, and a monk. Apparently the monks are responsible for raking the rocks...?

This frieze of three monkeys is probably the most recognizable feature of the shrine. Most people would know it as "hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil."

Here is the main shrine. It was just as detailed and colorful as the pagoda.

This is the side of the shrine. I don't really know what else to say, but it looks cool.

And it turns out there was a "sacred horse." He had a schedule and everything.

After we left the shrine, we looked for some lunch. On the way, we found a shop that sold "yuba pudding." Yuba, Japanese for tofu skin, is Nikko's specialty. I was interested to see how tofu skin combined with pudding, and it was alright. Not good, not bad, but okay. Sort of weird.

And last but not least for this post, here is a picture of a souvenir I bought from a shop underneath the restaurant where we ate lunch. It's a small hand-carving of the monkeys from the Toshugu Shrine frieze. (Not sure "frieze" is the correct name here, but I'm going with it.)