Around Utsunomiya is a connection of roads called the "ring road". Kind of similar to 270 in Columbus, or the Beltway around Washington D.C. accept that it is not a highway. We use this road often to get around, and often we pass this collection of caves. Since it seemed like another interesting place, we stopped by there on one excursion.
It is called the Hundred Caves at Nagaoka. There are not 100 caves but only 52. Apparently these caves had at one time been Tumuli. (I didn't know what it meant either, everyone but David click on the Link......). Each had a Kannon statue carved in the back of it. It was rather spooky at times, at first Daniel said that it was "too scary". 
They were quite interesting. Sometimes it felt as if we were looking into tombs in the Egypt or the middle east:
Others were clearly Asian:
Overall, it was a fun place for the "kids" to climb:
Then to the left of the caves was a staircase up into the forest. So, we followed it up about 50 meters to this small shrine:
From here, there was yet another path to the left up into the trees:
After about 15 minutes walking up hill, through the forest and around several hills and valleys, we came to another small shrine, much like the previous one:
Then we went back to the caves. Maybe that's a little anti-climactic for those of you that are still reading, but overall we had a fun hour or so climbing around!!!
2 comments:
Yet another cool place in Utsunomiya! :)
You mean I'm the only one who sees tumuli as an obvious variant latinate pluralization from the same root as "tumor" and the shapes as containing straightforward functional alignment with primitive native people's burial rituals?
That can't be true....
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