We stayed here for one night at the start of September. The host Ken, was brilliant with suggestions of where to go and how to get there. He gave us a lift into town in the morning.
The hostel itself isn't anything fancy, but it was clean and comfortable and they have private rooms. This definately wasn't a 'hotel', but it was fine for us and exactly what we expected :)
They provide both breakfast (we had scrambled eggs and french toast) and dinner (we had chicken teriyaki) and they were both nice. It was good to have a decent western breakfast after a week of 'random' breakfasts :) Nice mix of price and service and the common area with the book shelf was pretty good.
We found it a bit hard to find (clearly we can't read the directions...) so we just grabbed a taxi. Since it's up the hill in the mountains, I'd suggest this as it was fairly reasonable and once you go there once it's easy to navigate back to. They also run shuttles into town in the morning and will hold your bag for you in the lodge in town.
Overall, great stay. Nikko is absolutely beautiful and I would really reccomend it for a visit.
Also, I would really go and visit the tourism office in town. It's about halfway up the main street, they provide a really good informative map of the area with some additional information on each temple. It helped us, as there wasn't many English signs in the shrine area.
- Nikko Park Hotel
