Nikko is a small town located Northwest of Tokyo. It is a popular tourist attraction with Shinkyo bridge and famous temples. Edo Wonderland is also located by Nikko. To get to Nikko, you can take Shinkensen from Tokyo stations to Utsunomiya Station. It takes about 50 minutes. Then take Nikko Line to Nikko station and it takes about 50 minutes. The train on Nikko line leaves around every 30 minutes.
From Nikko station to Shinkyo bridge, it takes about 15 minutes of walking time up hill. Another option is to take bus directly from Nikko station to Shinkyo bridge. We recommend to walk to Shinkyo bridge since there are many interesting shops along the street.
As we walked up the street, we visited Utakata Kimono shop. This is a Kimono rental shop with a large selection of Kimono and Yukata for tourist to wear for the day. We also went in there to pick Kimono and Yukata to wear. Other than providing Kimono rental, Utakata Kimono shop also provide hair styling service for 1500 Japanese Yen. They can do a hair put up style, cute style, or traditional Japanese woman style. We also requested for professional photo shoot at Shinkyo bridge, and the photos look amazing! The photographer was very professional! Originally, we were only supposed to get 12 photos, but they really liked us and gave us like 60 photos. Communication was not much of a problem since they knew some English. We also used Google translate to communicate between English and Japanese for some complicated discussion.
After crossing the bridge, we went up the hill to visit the temples on the top of the hill. The temples here are quite amazing and were built long ago. There were also many stone lanterns places in a row on the side of the street. The only thing that we did not like was that it costs 1000 Japanese Yen to enter the temple. The temple is not even that big and we felt that 1000 Japanese Yen was a bit too much.
Overall, we enjoyed visiting Nikko. It is quite different from many other tourist place in Japan. This place is less crowded and still had quite a lot of interesting things to see. The most satisfying thing was having a chance to try out the Kimono and take some good photos with it. We really loved the photo.
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