DAY 340: Tokyo is a huge sprawling metropolis with the area of 2,187 sq. km., almost 400 times larger than a football field. With so many buildings spread out over such an expanse, it's no wonder Tokyo was chosen to be the battlefield for Godzilla and all his monster movie enemies. It's so big that it is often called "Mega-Tokyo" in Japanese sci-fi anime films.

However, there is a retreat from Mega-Tokyo, just a couple of hours north by train: Nikko, "one of the most popular day trips from Tokyo... Worth to slot into even the most whirlwind tour of Japan" (Lonely Planet). Nikko is the site of sacred shrines and temples dating back to the 17th century, all in a mountainous countryside where bright colors come not from neon signs but from foliage.

Like most Japanese, Liz had the day off for the Japanese national holiday celebrating the Autumn Equinox, and led the way to Nikko on a day trip we'd extend to a day and a half trip since she didn't have to do another corporate English training lesson until the evening of the next day. We packed up weekender bags and head on out to Asakusa, the old area of Tokyo where the train to Nikko departed from, its beginning marked by what my friend Sam (Moscow) called "The Golden Turd," a poorly-rendered golden flame sculpture atop the Asahi Brewing Company building. Asakusa was also the home of a shrine within Tokyo, the Kannon-do Shrine.

We killed some time in the Asakusa area while waiting for the next train. We strolled around the shops of souvenirs and Japanese sweets, most made of mochi (rice dough) and sweet red bean paste. We wandered the Kannon-do Temple, crowded with people on their day off -- some people treated the sacred shrine as a tourist attraction while some others legitimately prayed at a building under the towering pagoda. At the entrance of the shrine was the traditional cauldron of incense, emitting sweet smelling smoke into the air -- smoke that is supposed to give good luck if you surrounded yourself in it as much as you can.

"A lot of students come here right before exams," Liz told me. Made common sense.

THE NORTHBOUND TRAIN TO NIKKO sped down the train tracks through Mega-Tokyo. "Watch how long it takes before we see the country and you'll see just how big Tokyo is," Liz told me. Building after building after building whizzed by with no break in between as we ate our bento box lunches that we got at a department store in Asakusa that sold big sushi rolls and assorted katsu pieces. We finished our food and our beer all before Tokyo ended. In fact, it wasn't until I woke up from a decent nap that I noticed we were riding through the countryside, over an hour after departure.

Liz and I didn't have any hotel reservations in Nikko yet so we went to the tourist office at Nikko Train Station. The older Japanese woman there made some calls for us and got Liz and me a reservation at a guest house in town with its own on-site onsen, the traditional Japanese steam bath, at roughly the same price if we roughed it in a youth hostel and had to pay for the public municipal onsen. Liz's Japanese skills contributed to the discount we got, although the Japanese woman wasn't completely devoid of some English-speaking ability.

"You have a very beautiful face," the old woman told me in semi-broken but comprehensible English. "You have very big eyes. Mine, very small." She was at a loss for English words to continue complimenting me and pulled out a dictionary -- she appeared to be quite keen on learning and practicing new English words. She spoke to Liz in Japanese and tried to tell me that I looked -- according to her dictionary's translation -- "smart." She and Liz had more words to each other in Japanese.

"Oh, you mean 'common sense'," Liz corrected the old woman. "She says you look like you have good common sense."

"Arigato," I said. "Thank you, but I really don't."

Liz continued to translate. "She says you look like you have the eyes and the common sense to explain things to people, like a teacher."

Common sense? Explain things to people? Little did the old woman know that just a couple of minutes before, when we had arrived in the mountains, I asked Liz, "Are we higher up?"

"Uh, yeah. Because we're in the mountains."

"I'M FEELING REALLY CALM IN MY SOUL right now," Liz said as a bus took even higher up the mountains to the shrines. "I like it here." With Liz's erratic work schedule back in Mega-Tokyo, seeing green countryside and forests was always a welcoming treat for her.

Touring the temples and shrines of Nikko was indeed a relaxing retreat for us and the Mexican couple we met on the bus who looked just as confused as I would have been if not for traveling with Liz. Liz invited them to join us and the four of us walked to the first shrine, the Rinnoji Temple. Sulin and Arturo from Baja California were day-trippers from Tokyo on their three-week vacation trough Japan. Liz planed tour guide for the three of us taking us through the shrine grounds, with its scenic gardens and pond full of big hungry fish. She took us all afternoon from shrine to shrine, the main one being the Toshogu Temple, near the tomb of Ieyasu, the shogun who united Japan from the many different groups of feudal society in the 17th century. The shogun (and the relief sculpture of him) may have been the center point of attention, but that honor went to the other well-known relief carving of three monkeys, depicting the famous "hear no evil, speak no even, see no evil" saying (picture above) -- which inspired many souvenirs to sell tourists.

AFTER JUST ONE AFTERNOON, all the temples and pagodas, as great as they were with their architecture and guardian demons, started to look a bit the same to me, coincidentally when the rain started getting a bit heavier. Sulin and Arturo took a bus back to Nikko for a train back to Tokyo, while Liz and I head back into town for dinner. We had our meal at a family restaurant reminiscent of Sizzler at a table with an interactive screen with many colorful attractive buttons with Japanese letters on them that I couldn't help but push, since it made pictures come up of Winnie the Pooh. This was all going on out of Liz's eyesight who was at the front desk trying to arrange a transport after dinner to the guesthouse.

"I think you just charged [a bunch of games] to our bill," Liz informed me back at the table. It didn't even occur to me that that might be the case, but it turned out I had been pushing the "Yes, I accept the charges" button in Japanese over and over. So much for having common sense.

A TAXI TOOK US to the Pension Sunshine, a nice cozy guesthouse with a room for us with two beds and a TV that ran an Autumn Equinox Day TV special, a variety show that talked about the biggest things in the world: tallest man, biggest eel, etc. At one point they found the two heaviest babies in the world -- a massive 6-year-old from Russia and a massive 4-year-old from Georgia -- and pit them together for an in-studio wrestling match. The younger boy slapped the older one who ran off crying.

As funny as it was to see that, the main To Do at the guesthouse was use the onsen, the traditional Japanese steam bath. The guesthouse had two individual ones, one indoor, one outdoor (but covered from the rain). Liz gave me the outdoor one for the quintessential onsen experience. The onsen was in its own little building in the backyard.

I did the traditional onsen procedure as Liz had described it to me: strip down to my bare ass, shower myself clean in the shower room and then enter the onsen for a hot, relaxing soak. If I had been in a public onsen with other naked guys around, I might have felt a little more self-conscious with my nudity, even in the water because it was so clean it was crystal clear. But with just me, I took full advantage of the steamy one-man nudist colony. I set up my little camera at the edge of the hot water tub to take a bunch of onsen photos of myself. There was no way to really get a good shot unless I really chanced putting the camera on the edge of the pool -- leaving it susceptible for falling in or steam up or getting drenched with the water level rising from displacement of my own body -- but I did it anyway for my own stupid amusement. Not very good common sense -- I don't know what the old woman at the Nikko tourist office was talking about -- I completely ignored the fact that I had a camera that broke because it got wet at Victoria Falls.

I posed in silly poses that one can when he's in an outdoor Japanese hot steam bath by himself in the middle of the countryside: pretending to be a Vietcong soldier, as a hippie about to drown, and the gratuitous ass cheek shot. Common sense? Really now; that old woman had me all wrong. If only she could have seen me then, she would have completely retracted her comments.

(With a photo like that last one, it's no wonder that third monkey was covering his eyes.)

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