Nikkō

Never say kekkō until you have seen Nikkō, runs the old proverb — never say magnificent. In these cedar mountains north of Tokyo, the Tokugawa shoguns built their most extravagant statement: Tōshō-gū, a shrine of hundreds of carvings, gold leaf, and the famous sleeping cat, set in forest so solemn it humbles the ornament. Beyond the sacred precinct, the Irohazaka switchbacks climb to another world — Lake Chūzenji glittering at the foot of Mount Nantai, the Kegon Falls dropping sheer into mist below. Nikko is where Japan's grandest architecture and its wildest scenery agree, for once, to share a single stage.

From Tokyo, the journey is a chauffeured pleasure in itself: the Tōhoku Expressway north, then the Nikkō-Utsunomiya Road into the hills — around two hours from the city's heart in the hush of a Lexus LM or Toyota Century. Your FFGR chauffeur will time the departure so that you pass the vermilion Shinkyō bridge before the day-trippers arrive. The climb to Lake Chūzenji by the Irohazaka's forty-eight hairpins is best left, with some relief, to professional white-gloved hands; in late autumn and winter the car carries chains for the upper road. By dusk you may be back in Tokyo — though we rarely advise it.

Stay at the Nikkō Kanaya Hotel, the grande dame of Japan's classic resort hotels, where Einstein and Frank Lloyd Wright once signed the register, or at The Ritz-Carlton, Nikko on the Chūzenji shore, its baths fed by the sulphur springs of Yumoto. Momiji is the great event: colour ignites around the lake in late October and pours down to the shrines through November, the Shinkyō bridge framed in crimson. Spring answers with snow still on Nantai and the solemn pageantry of the Yayoi Festival; summer offers a coolness Tokyo can only envy. See Tōshō-gū at opening hour, then let the forest, and your chauffeur, set the pace.