Ancient Tombs

The Hundred Caves of Yoshimi Hyakketsu (吉見百穴) in Saitama are standard school field trip and a nice addition to a full day of stuff. It's not really anything to make as a singular destination, but if you want to spend the day in North Saitama or the Chichibu mountains, you definitely want to include it on the itinerary. About 500 years AD Buddhism came to Japan and the Japanese started to adopt it's concepts of life and death, leading to construction of this sort of tombs dug into the sides of mountains. Seeing the hundreds of little chambers cut into the rocky cliffs made us think of the tombs among which Jesus was buried. Surprisingly, we were allowed to crawl into most of them. Overall about a half hour of walking, with a little museum of period ceramic figures called haniwa. In all, about an hour or two if you take your time. But from there, it's only an hour out to the Chichibu mountains. Driving up, we passed two monkeys sitting on the roadside. It was so cool, seeing a monkey just sitting there, looking at us. We ended on a high damn an hour above Nagatoro.