Wednesday - day trip to Nikko
We all had terrible jet lag those first days. I had a tendency to wake up several hours before everyone else for this initial leg in Tokyo and had the habit of jumping outside and enjoying the morning, often shortly after dawn. Meguro is a very nice neighborhood, less packed than most of central Tokyo, with a pretty refined vibe and nice services. I would find my way to Meguro river and walk through the low lying residential hood on the way to way get coffee and breakfast pastries for the family. The houses were all very colorful here, with custom architecture and a bit of flair.
Nikko was about 90 minutes each way from the center of Tokyo. The town itself is really charming, with excellent food. The main attraction is a series of temples and shrines established by Tokugawa Ieyasu and his dependents.
Nikko (日光, Nikkō) is a town at the entrance to Nikko National Park, most famous for Toshogu, Japan's most lavishly decorated shrine and the mausoleum of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate.
Nikko had been a center of Shinto and Buddhist mountain worship for many centuries before Toshogu was built in the 1600s, and Nikko National Park continues to offer scenic, mountainous landscapes, lakes, waterfalls, hot springs, wild monkeys and hiking trails.
The artistry and even decadence of the temples and shrines in Nikko were like nothing else that we would see on the trip. But it wasn't just the human creations. The forest that these works of art were nestled into was equally stunning, and it was clear the man made structures had been laid out to extend the natural beauty of the environment. I stopped often to look up and around and take in the timelessness of it all and marvel at a very different way of thinking about design and our relationship to nature.
The combination of human design and nature would be a repeating theme of our trip.
