Tochigi

The shrines sit where the plain meets the volcanic highlands, and the way from them up to the lake and the falls is a pair of one-way spiral switchbacks climbing several hundred metres. It is a fixed-capacity road with no alternative, which means that on the busiest weekends of the year the journey is not slow, it is stationary — a queue measured in hours rather than minutes.

The fix is timing, not routing. Go up first thing, before the day-trippers arrive from the capital, and come down in the middle of the day rather than at dusk with everyone else. Better still, sleep in the valley or at the lake and do the climb on a weekday morning. If your dates fall in the peak fortnight of autumn colour and you cannot start early, do the shrines and skip the mountain rather than spending the day in a car.

Two days, split cleanly. Day one is Nikko: the shrine complex takes a morning at minimum and deserves longer, and it is about two hours from Tokyo. Day two goes up the mountain to Lake Chuzenji and Kegon Falls, which is a bus of roughly fifty minutes from Nikko up a famously switchbacked road, or across to Nasu for the highlands and the hot springs.

Three days lets you add Mashiko for pottery — about an hour and a half south-east of Nikko and awkward without a car — or Ashikaga for the wisteria in early May. Utsunomiya sits in the middle as a transport hub and a dumpling town rather than a destination.

One day is Nikko and only Nikko, and that is a legitimate trip. What does not work is trying to add Chuzenji to it: the mountain road is slow, and in autumn the traffic on it is the single worst bottleneck in the prefecture.

Two railways compete for Nikko and the private one usually wins. Tobu's limited express from Asakusa reaches Tobu-Nikko in about two hours with through-ticketing to the bus network; JR's route runs via the Tohoku Shinkansen to Utsunomiya and then the Nikko line. From either station, buses climb to the shrines, the Irohazaka and Chuzenji, and a Tobu area pass usually pays for itself. Kinugawa Onsen is on a Tobu branch. Ashikaga Flower Park has its own JR station. Outside the Nikko corridor, buses are sparse — the Nasu highlands and the smaller onsen are much easier by car.

Peak foliage weekends at Chuzenji, roughly the middle two weeks of October, unless you are prepared to start before dawn. The mountain road is a fixed-capacity switchback and the queue on it is measured in hours; this is the most reliably miserable travel experience in Kanto.

Mid-winter takes the mountain out — the Chuzenji area is cold, several of the higher roads close, and Nikko's shrines in snow are beautiful but the onward routes are not there. And avoid assuming that Nikko in August is a cool escape: the town sits low enough to be humid, and it is the lake, five hundred metres higher, that is actually cooler.

This prefecture grows more strawberries than any other, and the season runs through the winter and into spring rather than in summer as visitors from the northern hemisphere generally expect. Greenhouse farms across the warm southern half open for picking by the half hour, and a slot at one of them is one of the few genuinely good outdoor activities available in January in this part of the country.

It pairs well with the way the rest of the prefecture behaves in winter. The mountain corridor is cold and partly closed, so the sensible cold-season plan is the shrines in the morning and a farm in the afternoon rather than an attempt on the highlands. Farms take bookings and the popular ones fill at weekends, so reserve rather than turning up. Ask which variety is being picked; several were bred here and they are not interchangeable.

Nikko is entirely doable on rails — the private line from Asakusa is direct and comfortable, and the buses from Nikko station up to the shrines and onward to Chuzenji are frequent and designed for visitors. For that itinerary, do not hire a car.

Everywhere else in Tochigi is better with one. Mashiko's kilns are spread across a small town with a slow branch line; Nasu's highlands, farms and baths are a road network rather than a rail one; and the small towns of the Kanto plain in between are not served usefully. The exception is autumn, when the Irohazaka road up to Chuzenji jams badly enough that the bus, which uses the same road, is still the less painful choice.

Utsunomiya has argued with Hamamatsu for years over which city eats more gyoza, and it has a cluster of specialist shops around the station where dumplings are the entire menu. Nikko is yuba country: the sheets skimmed off simmering soymilk fed the vegetarian temple kitchens and are now served in course meals along the shrine approach. The prefecture grows more strawberries than any other, with the Tochiotome variety picked from January to May. Nasu's highland dairies supply cheese and soft-serve on the way to the onsen.

Autumn is the reason to come and the reason to plan. Colour reaches Oku-Nikko and Lake Chuzenji in early to mid-October and the lower shrines around early November, and the Irohazaka road jams badly on October weekends — go on a weekday or take the first bus. Winter closes parts of the plateau, and Nikko sits high enough for real snow while Utsunomiya on the plain barely gets any. Summer is the other case for the highlands: Oku-Nikko stays around 25°C when the plain is above 33°C. Strawberry picking in the south runs from January to May.

First visit: Nikko, and give it more time than the guidebooks suggest. The mistake is treating the shrine complex as a two-hour stop between trains — it is a dense, decorated, deliberately overwhelming set of buildings in cedar forest, and rushing it produces exactly the "it was crowded and gold" reaction people report. Arrive at opening, stay a night in town, and go up to the lake the next morning.

A second visit should go to Mashiko and Nasu, which is a completely different prefecture: a pottery town where you can throw a bowl yourself, and a highland plateau of farms, small museums and hot springs that Tokyo treats as a weekend retreat. Both need a car, both are best in late spring or autumn, and neither has anything to do with the shrine circuit that brings everyone else here.