Beautiful Ishigaki

Our exploration of Okinawa continued at another island, a bit further south, called Ishigaki. Ishigaki, and in particular the surrounding islands (like Iriomote), is much less developed than Okinawa island. So should be a pretty good place to chill out for a few days.

We started off by having dinner at a rather cool place near our hotel. The place is called Tony's, in honour of a famous Japanese actor called Akagi 'Tony' Keiichirō. The owner, clearly a big fan (based on the pictures of Tony covering all the walls of the restaurant), must've been about 90 years old. Anyway, we rather enjoyed the goat soup (a local speciality) he served up. 

The next day, it was time for me to re-take up an hobby of mine, scuba diving. I dived quite a lot when I used to live in the UK (absolute ages ago...), but I redid a CMAS course in France four years ago, and then sort of stopped diving again. But, coming to Okinawa without doing a bit of diving would be a shame...

So, I headed out with a very professional outfit called Prime Scuba. I did three very enjoyable dives with them - all quite shallow, nice and easy to get back into the flow, so to speak. I saw plenty of cool stuff - mostly small fish and coral reefs (reminded me a bit of the Similand Islands in Thailand), The highlight was probably a giant green turtle I got to pose for a photo with ;)

Back in Ishigaki, we decided to take out the hotel bikes for a ride. We cycled around the port area, and crossed a suspension bridge to a nice park located on a small island just next to Ishigaki town. The sunset views in the port area towards the end of our ride were just fantastic...

The next day, I was off diving again. I did three dives again, and enjoyed all of them a lot again. The highlight was definitely the third dive, appropriately named Manta City. Basically it's a manta ray cleaning station (literally a place where manta rays queue up to be cleaned by smaller "cleaner fish" - you may remember the cleaning station scene from Finding Nemo?). What a sight those majestic creatures are, as the they glide past. I reckon we must've seen 8 of them in total! What a beautiful experience...

The next day, we decided to explore some of the nearby islands. We started off with Kohoma Island, which is about 1 hour by boat from Ishigaki. Upon arrival in the tiny port, we rented bikes, and headed up to the main tourist sight of the island - the Mount Otake viewpoint. It was quite a sweaty hike up a rather steep hill to reach the top - but well worth it for the nice views we got to enjoy at the top.

I actually haven't been to a beach yet during our Okinawan adventure (Mathilde had, during my scuba diving), so we decided to head down to a beach on the western side of the island. It's definitely what one could call a paradise beach with great sand, an emerald coloured sea, and not a soul in sight. The only problem was that the water was too shallow for any meaningful swimming. Still, nice to soak in the warm water....

Rather than taking the boat back to Ishigaki, we headed over to nearby Taketomi-jima. The main village on the island is famous as being an example of a perfectly preserved Ryukyu village - basically almost all the houses are built in traditional Okinawan style, surrounded by walls and guarded by Shiza (lion-like statues). A nice place to have a quick walk around (although there isn't much to see as such). We also got to see the local traditional mode of transport (carts pulled by buffalos). 

For dinner, we decided to try the local beef - an Ishigaki speciality. We ended up going to what is apparently the second best place to have Ishigaki beef - and it was indeed absolutely delicious (if a wee bit expensive). 

On our last full day in Ishigaki, we decided to do a tour to an island a bit further away called Iriomote. It's the second biggest island in the Okinawan archipelago, almost completely undeveloped, with nearly 90% of the island being  covered by mangrove forests and jungle. Sounds like heaven ? 

Maybe not heaven, but not far off either. We started off with a nice boat tour along Urauchi river. It's a pretty stretch of river, to be sure, and we even saw a couple of wild pigs along the ways (it has to be said though, the river tours we did in Florida earlier this year where much more rich in terms of wildlife). After the cruise, we had about an hour to walk around - the highlight of our short hike was Kampire falls (apparently one of the "Top 100 scenic waterfalls in Japan").

Our tour bus (which was rather big, considering there was just one Japanese guy on the tour in addition to us) then took us to a wonderful beach on the Northern tip of the island. Again, the water was very shallow, so it wasn't really suitable for swimming (which was fine, since we didn't bring our swimming gear), But a great place to just wade around in the water. 

Our Iriomote tour wrapped up with a visit to Yubujima, a small island just off the eastern coast. This being a package tour, we had the honour of transferring to the island by buffalo cart (we were even treated to some local music by the driver). As the water was very shallow between the two islands, we could've waded across I reckon - but hey it was all good fun. The island is a kind of botanical garden (built by two of the islands inhabitants who stayed there after the rest of the people moved back to the mainland) - the hightlight was probably the butterfly garden. 

That, sadly, brought and end to our stay in Ishigaki - time to catch our flight back to Naha (would've loved to stay for a couple of days more). We still had a day to visit Naha, before continuing our adventure in South Korea. Upon arrival, we checked into our hotel, which turned out to be a love hotel! (or at least a former love hotel). Love hotels are another wonderful Japanese invention - a place where you basically pay by the hour, if you get the drift... But actually, love hotels are used a lot by young couples and even married couples, to get a bit of privacy...

We decided to visit Tsuboya, which is a pretty interesting neighbourhood, famous for its pottery. It's hands down the nicest area in Naha to just have a walk around. I'm not what one would call a big fan of pottery in general, but there were some pretty nice, cute little shops that we checked out.

For dinner, we decided to check out the rather unimaginatively named Food Street, just off Kokusai Dori. Basically it's a collection of restaurants serving various sorts of local food. We had an OK, if a bit pricey, meal there.

That brought an end to our 3 month-visit in Japan. Somewhat wistful, but somehow I think we will be back soon ;-). South Korea, here we come!