Today, Monday Oct 17th, we took another tour bus, this time it took us to Nikko, which is a very important place to the Japanese people. It is where some of the remains of Ieyasu Tokugawa (the first Shogun) are laid.

Though he had never been there, in his time the place was already famous for it’s shrine, and so one of his last wishes was to be partly laid to rest there, as well as in his home town at the base of Mt Fuji (I don’t recall the town’s name off-hand).

It was an almost 4 hour bus ride to and from, so we had to be up and on the bus by about 4:30AM and didn’t come home until around 8PM. It was wet/rainy and a tad bit cold, and I wore my Five Fingers, so my feet definitely felt it, needless to say, LOOONG day, but well worth it in the end.

Lots of pictures of the shrine, the 200+ stairs leading to another part of it, and the Japanese countryside along the way to a river boat ride we did at the end. Saw lots of rice paddies, though I didn’t get any photos of them from the bus.

The one part I missed out on, and I was kinda bummed about, but was certainly my own fault for trying to beat the lunch rush was the parade they had coming from the shrine, similar to that parade that happened at Yokosuka over the weekend.

I decided to eat early knowing that all the restaurants would probably be packed, but by the time I finished and was ready to head out, the parade was over and everyone was headed back to eat, pick up souvenirs, and load up and such, so while the part of the my plan to beat the rush was good, the failure was eating at a point where I missed something interesting.

I took some photos and a single video on the river boat ride using my phone because I didn’t want my non-waterproof and slightly expensive DSLR camera to get wet from the occasional splashes in the rapids. (Thankfully it wasn’t like white water rafting, so I probably would have been okay to have the camera out, but not terribly worried about the sizing or orientation of the pictures and the camera on the phone is decent enough.)

Note = “Audio has been removed from the video, about half way through it flips sideways (couldn’t edit that easily), and there are a LOT of pictures.”

At the end of the trip I was able to see the Tokyo Sky Tree tower when we passed by on the highway, but sadly because it was dark, the only pictures I could get of it lit up were blurry because the shutter had to remain open so long to capture enough light. I’ll be going there next week to get pictures up close and from the top, and will try to hit it on the way out of Tokyo when it’s dark and lit up again. Same goes for Tokyo Tower (at least get some pictures from outside the tower and with it lit up at night).

Video:

Coming soon….