Okinawa Adventures.
So, I promised pictures of Okinawa, and here they come. Very few though, not to overcrowd this entry.
This photo was taken on Miyako-jima, the main island of the Miyako-shouto peninsula. I didn't know Okinawa had THAT many islands.
So we went to Okinawa's main island, Okinawa-honto, via plane from Kobe. The airport is in a city called Naha.
The thing that became apparent about Naha very, very quickly is that despite being a city of 30,000 residents, its entertainment factor zeroed in on a few sights that were marked on a map you could get at the monorail station.
You might as well not use the monorail at all, as we used it only to get from the airport and back, seeing as the entire city has a radius of maybe 2km.
The three of us are also very good at walking.
The picture youc an see above was taken from Shuri castle.
This is what Shuri castle's main building looks like:
I am reasonably surprised that all of tehse pictures seem to be good-weather pics, as most of the time itw as very cloudy. I think we went there with the high expectations our brochures had wanted to instill in us - that it was a beach lovers dream, hot as Hawaii, blah blah. Ok, 20 degrees on the first day wasn't bad, and seeing how I didn't even get 15 ever since I got back, that's even better, but it's not magical.
After two days it became obvious that we had already seen everything there was to see, literally everything. So we started seeing about leaving Naha, only to become aware that this would... not be possible. If you go to Okinawa, you either take a bus tour elsewhere or you get a rental car. I swear there are more rental car shops than supermarkets or... people on the entire island.
Ok, 5000yen for a trip to the Okinawa Aquarium, apparently the best in all of Japan, plus a trip to Pineapple Land/Fruits Land is actually a good deal, but it is still a lot of money, so we voted on it and decided not to do it, even more so because Pineapple Land is basically just an exuse to stuff your face with pineapple all day + a mascot dressed as one.
I mean, we live near Osaka, which ahs the second-best aquarium in the entire country, so we just weren't swayed.
So after a long long time of planning and me quizzing as many Japanese travellers and the owner of my hostel on it, we found a bus that went to Okinaa Land a, hey would you guess it, Okinawa-themed... theme park.
The bus trip there took us an hour and the bus went every 2 hours until 6pm.
Okinawa Land was half really great and half a solid disaster. You could choose between a ticket for the park's "Cultural Village" plus stalagmite cave, or another ticket that came with those two and a habu snake show.
Since we had at this point been thoroughly taught on the viciousness of the many many habu snakes on the island but actually never seen one (seriously, I think the most fun we had on the five days in Naha was go around and scare the shit out of people by randomly shouting "OH MY GOD! A DANGEROUS HABU SNAAAKE!" and singing Badger Badger Badger Habu Snaaaaake), we decided to go all out.
Ok, so to get to the cultural village, you had to enter through a souvenir shop with several floors, and you had to go through them all to eventually resurface in an area where they did traditional Okinawan dancing and also tried to sell you stuff.
The souvenir thing is even more obnoxious if you stay in Naha where everyone' profession seems to be to sell you shite you don't need.
Funnily enough, the same shit you had to wade through to get into the village is what they sell you there as well. The replicas of traditional Okinawan houses are of course all concrete, no explanation no nothing, and the guy playing flute there only does it to try to sell it to you, the women's traditional clothing has price tags you can see from 500m away, no explanations on the culture, no nothing. The only good thing was a museum on Okinawan porcelain, musical instruments and toys.
You then go through what at this time of year is a dead tropical fruits orchard.
We then walked all the way back to catch the habu show on time. The show was basically fun animal cruelty, where the trainer person would hit cobras on the head to show you how dumb they are or let a habu water-race against a mongoose only to explain that habus actually can't really swim. It was interesting, I just felt sorry for the snakes.
There was also a habu snake museum that taught us more about them and in the back there were more snakes of different kinds and tortoises.
The cave was great, but I marvel at Japanese people. They race at high speeds through everything, take pictures in the appropriate places and never look at anything twice.
We had so carefully reserached the bus times for the second-to-last bus that we missed it in the end because we couldn't find the bus stop until we saw the bus leave from there.
We walked for several kilometres until we ended up near a harbour.
Already having been disappointed by Naha and its "beaches" (I mean the pit with the huge motorway bride going right through it), we just arsed around near the harbour for a while.
This picture is of one of the Chinese gardens we visited.
I love Chinese gardens much more than japanese ones. They are much wilder and more fun to explore.
I don't even remember what we did on the last day, can't have been much. ON the last day, one of us went back to Kyoto, super relieved to be able to go back and rejoin civilisation, and I went on to Miyakojima with my mate.
Miyakojima has a radius of 30km and has 55,000 residents, which makes it smaller than my countryside hometown.
After fighting off the rental car firm representatives at the aiport, we were picked up by the owner of the hostel we had booked.
Miyako has two hostels and I think 3 hotels, so we basically had to go with that specific one, as it was the cheapest. It was also a total shithole. My mate's a guy so he of course would later go on describing it as comfortable and clean, but I can only say that futon's don't belong on western beds, flakes of human skin also don't and neither does mould. An old towel is not appropriate bedding, and when I showered I wore my trusty bath slippers and was careful not to touch the walls.
Everyone else who stayed there, including my friend, also smoked at least 2 packs of fags a day, which made it impossible for me to stay around any of them.
I don't know why, but fag smoke makes me seize up completely, very bad cough and watery eyes included.
Again we got ourselves a map and just started walking. One thing became obvious once we looked around and when we reached our first beach: I think they were rebuilding the entire island. I mean, you get that feeling on the mainland already, but everythingw as aconstruction site.
On our first day it rained a bit but was a very balmy 25 degrees, both beaches we went to were construction sites and we didn't meet one person the entire day.
Miyako has no restaurants , arcades or shopping opportunities, I honestly have no idea how people live there.
My friend had read about a German cultural village, so we poured over the bus map and found a bus that was supposed to go there. After passing the "bus terminal" twice, we realised that the bus terminal was just meant to be this one bus stop sign that had absolutely no writing on it.
Out of the blue a wild old man appared and we asked him if we wwere in the right place - my friend, who is seriously overeager to speak to local Japanese people... given his seriously wonky Japanese I admire him for it though, then started chatting with that old man, who turned out to be our bus driver and thenw ent to get the bus out of the depot, which amde it look as if he was just doing his job for us. He told us that people who need the bus tend to call in advance and reminded us that the bus again only went every 2 hours and that the last one was due at 6.
The cultural vilage is very funny for Germans, in that way that makes you squirm, but it was also completely abandoned and half of the buildings had already been closed or scarpped. I ended up with a severe case of home-sickness.
We had really taken our time but there was so much time till our next bus that we decided we might as well take the last time and try and get to the beach - which was supposedly 5km from our location.
We had the map and as my friend liked to emphasise, he used to be in the military (for a year after compulsory service, I might add)and so nothing could go wrong, and so we walked through the middle of nowhere, just towards the horizon, or... well, the sea.
When we got to the bus stop my friend said would be the one near the beach, we found out that buses wouldn't run from that one on Saturdays, which of course it was.
He persisted all of this would be no problem and if I just kept following him, everything would be fine because he used in the military, to which I said if he mentioned the words military and fine one more time I would leave him there to die.
Miraculously it was me, the person who can't tell left from right on most days, who found the beach, but we had about half an hour until we had to leave and find an alternate bus stop.
We did. I think we walked a good 30km that day though, so much for 5km to the beach.
The next day would be my last, and so we decided to try and go to a fairly famous beach 4km from our hostel that would be easy to find since there were enough signs and I had decided to speak up whenver my gut feeling told me where to go (it works! Sometimes.)
It was so hot that day, Jesus Christ, that was so pleasant.
This is it, and its called Sunayama, mountain of sand. It wasn't a beach as much as a small bay, and when we arrived around noon, my mate went into the water straight away, crystal clear but amazingly blue from a distance, and he just went in in the shorts he wore since there had been nowhere to buy any proper swiming shorts.
I had no bikini, so I watched him for a while, but it became apparent that we was planing on staying the entire afternoon, so when I realised that the Japanese people just got there, took 5 snaps and left again, I decided just to go into the water in my underwear and man, it was perfect.
I don't remember the last time I swam, wasn't in California since that was just too cold, but on that day I really had the time of my life. It was perfect but for the thunderstorm that caught us when we left and military boy got us lost, again. (And I got us out of it, again. I am actually Bear Gryllis, yo)
Regardless of all this I was so glad to get back to Kyoto.
I appreciate adventures, but one of these days I want to have a normal holiday. Hotel and continental breakfast, beach nearby, period.
There were other things I wanted to talk about but then this got so amazingly long that I will save that until later.
I will nowmake some pancakes and watch more Homeland <3
See you around.
This photo was taken on Miyako-jima, the main island of the Miyako-shouto peninsula. I didn't know Okinawa had THAT many islands.
So we went to Okinawa's main island, Okinawa-honto, via plane from Kobe. The airport is in a city called Naha.
The thing that became apparent about Naha very, very quickly is that despite being a city of 30,000 residents, its entertainment factor zeroed in on a few sights that were marked on a map you could get at the monorail station.
You might as well not use the monorail at all, as we used it only to get from the airport and back, seeing as the entire city has a radius of maybe 2km.
The three of us are also very good at walking.
The picture youc an see above was taken from Shuri castle.
This is what Shuri castle's main building looks like:
I am reasonably surprised that all of tehse pictures seem to be good-weather pics, as most of the time itw as very cloudy. I think we went there with the high expectations our brochures had wanted to instill in us - that it was a beach lovers dream, hot as Hawaii, blah blah. Ok, 20 degrees on the first day wasn't bad, and seeing how I didn't even get 15 ever since I got back, that's even better, but it's not magical.
After two days it became obvious that we had already seen everything there was to see, literally everything. So we started seeing about leaving Naha, only to become aware that this would... not be possible. If you go to Okinawa, you either take a bus tour elsewhere or you get a rental car. I swear there are more rental car shops than supermarkets or... people on the entire island.
Ok, 5000yen for a trip to the Okinawa Aquarium, apparently the best in all of Japan, plus a trip to Pineapple Land/Fruits Land is actually a good deal, but it is still a lot of money, so we voted on it and decided not to do it, even more so because Pineapple Land is basically just an exuse to stuff your face with pineapple all day + a mascot dressed as one.
I mean, we live near Osaka, which ahs the second-best aquarium in the entire country, so we just weren't swayed.
So after a long long time of planning and me quizzing as many Japanese travellers and the owner of my hostel on it, we found a bus that went to Okinaa Land a, hey would you guess it, Okinawa-themed... theme park.
The bus trip there took us an hour and the bus went every 2 hours until 6pm.
Okinawa Land was half really great and half a solid disaster. You could choose between a ticket for the park's "Cultural Village" plus stalagmite cave, or another ticket that came with those two and a habu snake show.
Since we had at this point been thoroughly taught on the viciousness of the many many habu snakes on the island but actually never seen one (seriously, I think the most fun we had on the five days in Naha was go around and scare the shit out of people by randomly shouting "OH MY GOD! A DANGEROUS HABU SNAAAKE!" and singing Badger Badger Badger Habu Snaaaaake), we decided to go all out.
Ok, so to get to the cultural village, you had to enter through a souvenir shop with several floors, and you had to go through them all to eventually resurface in an area where they did traditional Okinawan dancing and also tried to sell you stuff.
The souvenir thing is even more obnoxious if you stay in Naha where everyone' profession seems to be to sell you shite you don't need.
Funnily enough, the same shit you had to wade through to get into the village is what they sell you there as well. The replicas of traditional Okinawan houses are of course all concrete, no explanation no nothing, and the guy playing flute there only does it to try to sell it to you, the women's traditional clothing has price tags you can see from 500m away, no explanations on the culture, no nothing. The only good thing was a museum on Okinawan porcelain, musical instruments and toys.
You then go through what at this time of year is a dead tropical fruits orchard.
We then walked all the way back to catch the habu show on time. The show was basically fun animal cruelty, where the trainer person would hit cobras on the head to show you how dumb they are or let a habu water-race against a mongoose only to explain that habus actually can't really swim. It was interesting, I just felt sorry for the snakes.
There was also a habu snake museum that taught us more about them and in the back there were more snakes of different kinds and tortoises.
The cave was great, but I marvel at Japanese people. They race at high speeds through everything, take pictures in the appropriate places and never look at anything twice.
We had so carefully reserached the bus times for the second-to-last bus that we missed it in the end because we couldn't find the bus stop until we saw the bus leave from there.
We walked for several kilometres until we ended up near a harbour.
Already having been disappointed by Naha and its "beaches" (I mean the pit with the huge motorway bride going right through it), we just arsed around near the harbour for a while.
This picture is of one of the Chinese gardens we visited.
I love Chinese gardens much more than japanese ones. They are much wilder and more fun to explore.
I don't even remember what we did on the last day, can't have been much. ON the last day, one of us went back to Kyoto, super relieved to be able to go back and rejoin civilisation, and I went on to Miyakojima with my mate.
Miyakojima has a radius of 30km and has 55,000 residents, which makes it smaller than my countryside hometown.
After fighting off the rental car firm representatives at the aiport, we were picked up by the owner of the hostel we had booked.
Miyako has two hostels and I think 3 hotels, so we basically had to go with that specific one, as it was the cheapest. It was also a total shithole. My mate's a guy so he of course would later go on describing it as comfortable and clean, but I can only say that futon's don't belong on western beds, flakes of human skin also don't and neither does mould. An old towel is not appropriate bedding, and when I showered I wore my trusty bath slippers and was careful not to touch the walls.
Everyone else who stayed there, including my friend, also smoked at least 2 packs of fags a day, which made it impossible for me to stay around any of them.
I don't know why, but fag smoke makes me seize up completely, very bad cough and watery eyes included.
Again we got ourselves a map and just started walking. One thing became obvious once we looked around and when we reached our first beach: I think they were rebuilding the entire island. I mean, you get that feeling on the mainland already, but everythingw as aconstruction site.
On our first day it rained a bit but was a very balmy 25 degrees, both beaches we went to were construction sites and we didn't meet one person the entire day.
Miyako has no restaurants , arcades or shopping opportunities, I honestly have no idea how people live there.
My friend had read about a German cultural village, so we poured over the bus map and found a bus that was supposed to go there. After passing the "bus terminal" twice, we realised that the bus terminal was just meant to be this one bus stop sign that had absolutely no writing on it.
Out of the blue a wild old man appared and we asked him if we wwere in the right place - my friend, who is seriously overeager to speak to local Japanese people... given his seriously wonky Japanese I admire him for it though, then started chatting with that old man, who turned out to be our bus driver and thenw ent to get the bus out of the depot, which amde it look as if he was just doing his job for us. He told us that people who need the bus tend to call in advance and reminded us that the bus again only went every 2 hours and that the last one was due at 6.
The cultural vilage is very funny for Germans, in that way that makes you squirm, but it was also completely abandoned and half of the buildings had already been closed or scarpped. I ended up with a severe case of home-sickness.
We had really taken our time but there was so much time till our next bus that we decided we might as well take the last time and try and get to the beach - which was supposedly 5km from our location.
We had the map and as my friend liked to emphasise, he used to be in the military (for a year after compulsory service, I might add)and so nothing could go wrong, and so we walked through the middle of nowhere, just towards the horizon, or... well, the sea.
When we got to the bus stop my friend said would be the one near the beach, we found out that buses wouldn't run from that one on Saturdays, which of course it was.
He persisted all of this would be no problem and if I just kept following him, everything would be fine because he used in the military, to which I said if he mentioned the words military and fine one more time I would leave him there to die.
Miraculously it was me, the person who can't tell left from right on most days, who found the beach, but we had about half an hour until we had to leave and find an alternate bus stop.
We did. I think we walked a good 30km that day though, so much for 5km to the beach.
The next day would be my last, and so we decided to try and go to a fairly famous beach 4km from our hostel that would be easy to find since there were enough signs and I had decided to speak up whenver my gut feeling told me where to go (it works! Sometimes.)
It was so hot that day, Jesus Christ, that was so pleasant.
This is it, and its called Sunayama, mountain of sand. It wasn't a beach as much as a small bay, and when we arrived around noon, my mate went into the water straight away, crystal clear but amazingly blue from a distance, and he just went in in the shorts he wore since there had been nowhere to buy any proper swiming shorts.
I had no bikini, so I watched him for a while, but it became apparent that we was planing on staying the entire afternoon, so when I realised that the Japanese people just got there, took 5 snaps and left again, I decided just to go into the water in my underwear and man, it was perfect.
I don't remember the last time I swam, wasn't in California since that was just too cold, but on that day I really had the time of my life. It was perfect but for the thunderstorm that caught us when we left and military boy got us lost, again. (And I got us out of it, again. I am actually Bear Gryllis, yo)
Regardless of all this I was so glad to get back to Kyoto.
I appreciate adventures, but one of these days I want to have a normal holiday. Hotel and continental breakfast, beach nearby, period.
There were other things I wanted to talk about but then this got so amazingly long that I will save that until later.
I will nowmake some pancakes and watch more Homeland <3
See you around.