Sunday - On the road to Nikko
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As planned, we headed for Nikko at 6:30am, though M-san had wanted to leave at 5am.
The day was sunny and gorgeous, but we hit the first bad sign about 1hour into our drive: traffic jam. We then pulled into a rest area, which are called P (for Parking) in Japan. Rest areas in Japan are like a strip mall with shops and restaurants besides rest rooms.
The 2nd bad sign: the parking was chocked full of cars, trucks, bikes, and people. It felt really like a holiday shopping area. We managed to find a parking spot, then hit the rest rooms. What a line! The women's section was the worst, especially when there was a tour bus pulling in. There was a line at the men's section too, but it turned out that the line was only for the toilet stalls. If you just needed to pee, then it's wide open.
Kunsei Tamago (くんせい卵, smoked egg)
At the rest stop, we bought some smoked eggs (五えもん くんせい卵 brand) to snack in the car. They were good, first time we tasted this type of egg. Ingredients including salt, kelp, water and seasonings (amino acid). They could be stored anywhere from 3 to 6 months, and could be eaten with ramen etc.
We hit the road again, and ran into traffic jams after traffic jams, stretching for 9 km at a time. We finally reached Nikko exit, but we didn't take it since we wanted to head to the highlands where there were better chance to see the leaves turning colors. From here it's a non-stop traffic jam. Some cars turned back, but true to the Japanese spirit, M-san refused to give up, and thus we kept pressing on.
We then reached the point of no return when we started driving up the one-way Iroha-zaka mountain pass full of hairpins and switchbacks. It's a one-way 2-lane road winding uphill towards lake Chuzenji and Nikko. The pass is part of Route 120, also known as the Nihon Romantic highway, with 48 named curves going up and down, labeled using the entire 48 Japanese syllables (Iroha is the old name of the Japanese alphabet). The road we were on, going uphill, is called the Second Iroha, with 20 named curves. The one-way road leaving Nikko going down the mountain is called the First Iroha, with 28 named curves.
At 2:30pm there was the sound of siren and an ambulance passed us. There was an accident where someone had a medical condition. What could be worse, stuck on a mountain pass with no way to turn back but to follow the flow upwards? In the earlier picture you could see we were behind this Nissan March the whole way from before even reaching Nikko. It's not just us who were persistent! Along the crawl, parents would drop their kids (sometimes with their mother) on the side of the road so they could answer nature's call, and could you imagine when they were done it's just a short stroll to catch up with their car ahead? That's how stuck we were. There were many tour buses along with us, and every time we passed one (or one passed us) we could see the same sad expression on the faces the female tour guides and the passengers on them. They must have run out of things to talk about.
I kept wondering why everyone was hitting the road to Nikko on the same day, and a Sunday no less! Why didn't they go up there the day before, Saturday? Granted that many of them probably planned for a night's stay at one of the numerous hotels and onsens in the area, but as you can see, the drive down from the mountain was no less crowded! By now we were not even sure if leaving an hour earlier in the morning would have gained us anything.
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Akechidaira Panorama rest stop
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5pm: we reached the Akechidaira (明智平) Panorama Rest House, and the Kegon fall was still up ahead, its entrance was closed at 4pm! We finally gave up, pulled in for a bite as everyone was hungry and tired. Go here for a map of the place.
Here the parking was fulled as well, M-san had to stay in the car for a good 15 minutes until we found a space. There was a line in front of all the food stands that we looked.
Besides the usual corned dogs, fish cakes and shrimp cakes, we tried for the first time the ayu grilled fish on a skewer. It's not cheap: „500. The head and tail were dabbled in coarse salt. Very sweet and tasty, perfect food to eat while on your legs. My wife went back for more. Reading more on this fish, I learned that it's in the smelt family, and is a favorite with Japanese. Its life is similar to the salmon in the northwest except for the short life span: born in fast flowing fresh water, grown in salt water, then come back and lay egg and die in fresh water, all within a year.
From this rest stop there was 3-minute ropeway car up to a viewing platform for a panorama view of the area: lake Chūzenji, Kegon waterfall, and Mt Nantai. As it's getting late, we didn't try it.
We did get to see how autumn color would look like (click on to the next 2 photos as well). As maples were a native plant here, Japan's autumn color pallette is unlike anywhere else. You could see a lot of small red dots making up the color carpet. A week later after we returned from Kyoto, M-san would showed us a color picture in the newspaper talking about Nikko in full color, and the picture had exactly the same color pattern as what we saw here. I think we were pretty OK in this respect.
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We left the rest stop and continued on the remaining part of the second Iroha road, passed the then closed Kegon waterfall entrance. When we reached the traffic light that let us merged into the First Iroha road, it's already nightfall. Traffic was exactly the same as when we went up. Some tour buses also came down the pass with us. It's dark and we're moving so I couldn't take a picture of the 28-turn zigzag way down. But at this point we didn't care any more, all we're looking forward to was HOME.
But things took their time. At one Parking rest stop that we passed by, the line of cars waiting to exit extended for about 500 meters. We didn't get home until 11PM that day.
I'm sure we'll talk about this experience for years to come. For this whole experience, we had to give kudos to M-san for being a solid driver behind the wheel of his Toyota Altezza (the predecessor of of the Lexus IS) the entire day, and managed to be in good spirit, and his 5-year-old son S-chan who were extremely well-behave during the whole trip, and who still had energy for a couple good shots.
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