Nikko Park

We drove to Nikko, a national park about 3 hours northwest of Tokyo.  First we visited the To-sho-gu, which houses a temple where one of the greatest shoguns is entombed.  In this first picture you can see the "hear no evil", etc. monkeys carved near the roof of a building.

Here's what another building in the complex looked like.

Here's a close-up of the structure supporting the roof.  It was amazingly intricate and colorful.  The layers of wooden slats are just sitting on top of each other, and they're designed so that in a large earthquake they are free to flex and shift slightly, to relieve the energy without collapsing.

Here's another example of the incredible workmanship.  Every dragon had a different mouth design.

Here we are at the temple, doing what we spent most of our trip doing.  (We had 5 cameras, including four 35mm SLRs and one 35mm point-and-shoot, between the 6 of us - embarrassing, I know.)

The leaves were also turning in the Nikko area.  The white stuff hanging on the tree branches are bad fortunes people had purchased from a vendor.  Apparently, if you receive a bad fortune, you can nullify it by tying it onto something in the temple.  Usually, there are strings where you are supposed to tie them, but it seemed like most people improvised...

Here we are having lunch after visiting the temple.

Next we drove up a road consisting of dozens of switchbacks, with each straight section about 100 yards long, and each turn very close to 180 degrees.  If you do a roundtrip, you go through 48 switchbacks, just enough to cover the entire Japanese alphabet.  So it is called "Iroha-zaka", where "Iroha" is the old name for the Japanese alphabet, and "zaka" or "saka" means hill.  Here's an attempt to show you the downhill side of the switchbacks...

 ...and the photo Isako took to show people taking photos at the same site :-)  (Matt's mom just put her camera down, so Isako missed the rare shot of all four SLRs in action.)

In this area you commonly see wild macaques, and we were lucky enough to see some.  A couple of other cars pulled off to the side of the road next to us and everyone was looking and taking pictures.  We opened the sunroof so my mom could poke her head out to take a picture, and a macaque jumped up on our van and I thought it was going to climb inside - it was a little scary.  We were told that they like to steal people's glasses.  Despite "Do Not Feed the Monkeys" signs everywhere (in Japanese and English), apparently some people do feed them, which is why they're so aggressive.  My mom took the very nice picture below.

At the top of the switchbacks, we visited Japan's tallest waterfall, Kegon Falls.  Somewhat like a smaller version of Yosemite Falls.

...and a family portrait!

Then we stayed in a hotel overnight.  The next morning we walked to a field across the road from the hotel - as you can see, the area was very scenic.  There were a bunch of cows and 2 horses in the pasture below.

Here's another field just up the road from the hotel.

We did see one more macaque the next day, we were on a walkway near some waterfalls and the macaque strolled up the top of the handrail in the other direction and disappeared.  It basically ignored us as it passed.  Isako got the picture below.