Just Two Gai-Jin in Japan: Takachiho

Last weekend Serenity & I went to the mountain town of Takachiho for our first wedding anniversary. It's a small town tucked in the hills, famous for it's beautiful gorge.

A short walk from town down to the river leads to the gorge, where you are surrounded by greenery. It was definately one of the prettiest places we've seen in Japan.

We took a ride on a rowboat through the gorge past the waterfall, weaving between the many other boats (most people had no idea how to steer the boats, and there were a few traffic jams).

Serenity enjoys the boat ride while I rowed us along, careful not to row underneath the waterfall.

At the bottom of the gorge, just above the rowboats, were restaurants and plenty of fish ponds. Most of them had koi, but this one was full of Rainbow trout. We rested with a beer and watched this little girl pull one trout after another from the pond.

That night we went for some niku (meat). Some restaurants have this kind of BBQ at the table, sometimes gas (like this one) and sometimes charcoal. They serve you small strips of meat and vegetables and you cook it yourself. Delicious! (oishii!)

The next day we went to visit some more shrines in the town that were tucked away in the trees.

Here I am washing my hands before entering the shrine.

We didn't know until we sat for a while, but this shrine is for couples. The two trees are tied together with the ritual straw rope, and couples hold hands and walk around the trees three times. So, since it was our anniversary, we wrote our names on a prayer placard (hanging below on the fence) and then walked around three times for good luck. (This was after watching enough older couples to assure it wasn't a fertility shrine...)

This guy stood guard outside of Amano-Iwato-jinja, a shrine where the sun goddess used to live.

The trail to the sun-goddess' shrine went along the beautiful creek. That's Serenity standing on the bridge.

Here's the sun-goddess' shrine, sitting in a big cave right next to the creek. The entire area was covered with little piles of stacked rocks, each one a request to the goddess for a prayer to be answered.