Day Seven: Nikko, Part One |
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Nikko is Nippon, or so the posters plastered all over the Tokyo metro proudly proclaim. After reading a bit about the place I was impressed enough to set aside two days for exploring it. First day I planned to go up to the Lake Chuzenji and Kegon Waterfall and then go on a hike in the park, and second day was to be devoted completely to the temple areas. With that in mind I took the Shinkansen (bullet train) then the local train route and arrived in Nikko two hours later.
But, a Mentsh tracht und Gott lacht (A man plans and god laughs). God of traffic, in this case. The trip from Nikko to the lake was supposed to take about 50 minutes one way. Instead, on the way up the mountain I got stuck in the bus for three hours most of which were spent practically at a standstill. The ride up is very scenic but after a certain point you just can't get off the bus and turn back, unless you are prepared to walk down along the highway. Incidentally, the point of no return coincided with the beginning of traffic. There I was with nothing to do just staring at the frozen scenery. By another stroke of my incredible luck, every time the bus would come to a dead stop it would have a wall at one side and some scraggly looking bushes at the other. All the picturesque reds and golds of leaf changing would zoom by in a second leaving me to enjoy the view of other sad souls stuck in the same predicament. When we had finally practically reached our goal something possessed me to stick to the original plan and get off a stop before the lake to take in the supposedly magnificent view available from Akechidaira plateau accessible by rope-way. The ride up took two minutes (cable cars are not subject to traffic), ten minutes on the plateau to take in the sights and photograph them from every available angle, two minutes back down and then a forty minute wait for the next bus that unsurprisingly arrived thirty minutes late. Even Japanese punctuality is susceptible to modern traffic.
While waiting for the bus I got really bored and my brain must have gone into a sleep mode because I actually bought some food on a stick and even ate it. It originally looked like a fish but on closer inspection might have been a squid. In an effort to keep it down I didn't investigate the origin of the consumed product any further. Finally, when I was just about starting to think that a hike up the mountain to the lake might be a viable option, the bus showed up. It slowly inched its way around the parking lot taking about ten minutes to finish a curve and then, just as it pulled up to the stop, the traffic finally picked up. We reached the lake shortly and were greeted by a sight of a huge crowd waiting for the bus to take them down. It was already past three and it gets dark really fast here and as soon as it gets dark it also gets a lot colder. Trying to keep my mind concentrated on something other than getting onto the bus and heading home, I raced to the lake, snapped some pictures without bothering to find any acceptable vantage point, raced the opposite way to the waterfall, took the elevator down to the observation platform, photographed everything in sight and ran for the bus.
The area might have had some other sights worthy of note but by then I couldn't care less. I was getting onto the first available bus and nothing was going to stop me, not even the fact that the only seat left on the bus was the rather uncomfortable fold-out middle seat in front. Luckily, on the way back we didn't encounter any traffic. An hour later I was on my way back to Tokyo where I arrived tired and frozen to the bone. Complete album: |
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