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!

Snorkling @ Cap d'Antibes

A few pictures from my snorkling trip @ Cap d'Antibes after work with my colleagues Gilbert & Cedric. I shall let the pictures speak for themselves ;-)

Snorkeling with Jukkis and Gilbert

Snorking time again! My cousin Jukkis is visiting, and is quite a keen diver. So I figured I'd take him out for a bit of snorkling to Cap d'Antibes, where I occasionally go with my colleague Gilbert (who's a real pro snorkler, unlike me...).

I've taken my employer's GoPro camera out once when going snorkling, and decided to do so again (a GoPro Hero 3+ this time). I was happy to find out Cyril also had a proper underwater camera to lend me - a waterproof Olympus compact. It only goes down to 10 meters, which isn't really a problem for me when snorkeling... ;-)

After picking up Jukkis at my dad's place and managing to get slightly lost in Antibes, I eventually fond the beach where Gilbert was already waiting for us - so off we went, keen to get some snorkeling in before sunset. The sea was quite rough compared to my previous visits, which unfortunately meant a rather sub-optimal visibility. So not ideal conditions.

Nonetheless, as far as underwater fauna was concerned, it was my best session so far. Not only did I manage to see the small Moray eel Gilbert pointed out to me, but I also saw a scorpion fish. Gilbert spotted one of the local residents, a grouper, which is unfortunately a bit too deep for my skills...

All in all, a pretty good session, then! Jukkis at least insisted he had a good time, in spite of the less-than ideal conditions. And I got some pretty decent shots done with the Olympus as well... (although Jukkis reckons the best pictures we got were of the Lamborghini and Ferrari we saw driving past the parking lot... ;-) ).

Snorkling @ Cap d'Antibes

Diving's a hobby I was quite into a looong time ago when I lived in the UK - and my passion was briefly rekindled a couple of years back before I changed jobs, when I had some spare time on my hands to do a bit of diving. But it's been a while since my last dive... So I jumped on my colleague Gilbert's suggestion to try a bit of snorkling with him. He goes regularly to Cap d'Antibes after work -  so I figured "why not" ?

I decided to borrow my company's work council's (not sure whether that's the correct term??) GoPro submersible camera to capture some of these underwater moments.

The snorkling was great fun. I felt like a bit of an amateur, with a rather "heavy breath" so to speak, compared to Gilbert (whose time under water at each dive seemed to be measured in minutes, rather seconds, as for me ;) ). I was a bit disappointed by the lack of underwater fauna - I saw plenty more fish during the dives. I guess it comes to the French passion for harpoon fishing, and the fact that the site is accessible from the beach. A pity - but anyway, I had a brilliant time.

Did take me a while to sort through the 1400 or so pictures the GoPro managed to capture (I had it set to a mode where it took 2 images per second) - much to my surprise there were even a few semi-decent shots in spite of the less-than-perfect visibility we had.

Diving at Cap Ferrat

I was quite an enthusiastic diver in my youth (not sure whether I should use the past tense or not there…?), back when I lived in the UK. I accumulated 69 dives (yes, I checked my logbook…) over about 3 years, in more and less exotic locations such as Stony Cove, Chesil Beach, Porthkerris in Cornwall, Thailand, the Red Sea and Australia. But I gave it up nearly 10 years ago. I’ve had some half-baked plans to pick it up again for quite a while, but nothing has come out of it so far.

Until today! The plan is to do some diving on our upcoming holiday to Mexico, so I figured a bit of a practice dive or two is definitely called for. Since our good friend JayJay (who will be our guide in Mexico), is heading back to Mexico soon after his 6 month stay in Nice, it was pretty much now or never. The plan was to do an afternoon dive at Cap Ferrat, led by Merlin, who’s dived quite a lot in the area.

Unfortunately, Merlin’s daughter got sick the morning of the dive, so it was just me and JayJay, then. Armed with a map from Merlin, we set out for the dive (after picking up some dive gear in Nice). Unfortunately we struggled a bit to find the dive site, but did finally find a beach which sort of vaguely matched the location on Merlin’s map. The concrete platform Merlin had described was clearly there, as well as the staircase he had mentioned. So we decided to chance upon this spot, got changed, hid the car keys in the bushes, and off we went!

The dive went surprisingly smoothly, considering my break of nearly ten years from diving (I have to admit to a bit of nervousness before the dive). I managed to control my buoyancy, didn’t panic, and had a great time all in all. It’s true that the water was rather nippy at 12.8 degrees (according to JayJay’s dive computer), and my air consumption is still rather bad (although it doesn’t seem worse than it used to be – I managed 52 minutes bottom time, 22 meters maximum depth with a 15-liter tank – filled to 250 bars though). The dive wasn’t particularly scenic though – we didn’t see all that much. There was some nice sponge, some really big clams, some nice coral and some big schools of fish. But no sight of the octopuses and moray eels that apparently are to be found.

We got the explanation later – we never found the actual cave where the octopuses and the Moray eels live. Oh well, next time I suppose, maybe with Merlin… ;-). But all in all, I was very happy to have done the dive, in spite of my hands which were numb from the cold. I think JayJay suffered even more from the cold, though… ;-)

After a late Breton crepe lunch at Villefranche, we called it a day, freezing a bit but rather pleased with ourselves…