Today was our snorkelling tour! We boarded the Lucky Clover which was a really fun ride – it’s just a little boat so it bounced over every wave. Our first stop was the phantom island, a coral-strewn sand patch that only appears at low tide.

The Lucky Clover staff lent us rubber flip flops to stop the coral ruining our feet – the Japanese people on the tour were a lot more prepared than us and had brought their own.

They lent us really decent waterproof cameras for free too if you have your own SD card! It was hard work to wade to the island from the boat, as the sand was so loose that bits of sand and coral kept running over our flip flops under the water. Crocs would have been a good investment. Incidentally those are stupidly cheap to buy here, I saw pairs going for just 450 yen!

We had fun exploring some of the rock pools and I pretended to be a beach supermodel (pahahaha).

The island is completely exposed to the full sun so after a while Tom and I took refuge in a shady patch of ocean next to the boat and enjoyed some people-watching instead. There were a lot of boats taking people out here to visit so it’s not exactly a private experience. One of the Japanese families had even brought a giant inflatable shell sofa! It looked so ridiculous on the tiny little phantom island, haha, I’m amazed the coral didn’t totally wreck it.

After this the boat took us to the snorkelling spot! Ahhh it was so fun, so many pretty fish everywhere!

I took a lot of underwater pictures and a bit of video too, but the video was really unsteady compared to the GoPro. It’s easy to run the camera battery down in a short time if you’re not careful! Tom did some skinny diving on the coral reef and found me an iridescent shell.

We had a great time! Obviously not as awesome as diving but it was really nice for me to get up close to some fishies after being so crap at diving a few days ago, and the half day tour was only about £40 each so it wasn’t so bad in terms of cost. I’d really recommend the Lucky Clover guys, their tour can be accessed via the Hirata tours desk at Ishigaki ferry terminal. There is an English speaking guy on the Lucky Clover staff who translates everything for you as it’s mostly conducted in Japanese.

We got back to Ishigaki port at lunchtime and picked up some tasty things from the supermarket, then we drove back up towards Kabira Bay to visit a super sekrit beach! We’d been tipped off about this by the American dude working on the Hirata tours desk – he marked it on our map and we had to completely trust his verbal directions as the car sat nav didn’t even think we were on a road when we drove to it. And super secret it was! The path down is mostly overgrown and you have to actually climb down part of the cliff to get there. But it was so worth it – after the two crowded beaches we had been on like Kaiju beach and the phantom island, it was so nice to be able to explore somewhere lovely just the two of us.

We had our picnic lunch in the shadow of some rocks, and once again we were surrounded by little hermit crabs! There were even some yellow fish swimming in the tidal pools right opposite us. Here’s the view from our lunch spot!

We had great fun climbing up on some of the rocks – what an ocean view!

But the tide was starting to come in, we could see from our vantage point. Tom grew up by the ocean and was very conscious of how quickly the incoming tide could cut off intrepid adventurers, so we scrambled back down again, crossing the tidal inlet before it was rapidly inundated. On the beach behind the rocks we found some people having a barbecue! Tom told them in Japanese that their food smelled good and they laughed – they had so much tasty stuff including little fish on skewers and fresh peaches. There is so much good food to eat on Ishigaki!

We had a quick walk up the beach – it was interesting as the upper shore was covered in a network of tropical vines.

But the sun was starting to get really strong, so we decided to head back to the car, picking up some coral pieces on the way and finding some more butterflies.

We drove back to Kabira Bay – although we were staying here, we hadn’t actually explored the Bay yet, despite it being one of the top recommended places to visit on the island. Our plan was to finally explore it this afternoon, but at this point we both started to realise we’d caught a bit too much sun and were starting to feel unwell. We ended up spending an hour or so in the gelato parlour in Kabira Bay to restore our energy and enjoy some air conditioning. The parlour had completely run out of all their savoury lunch items by 2pm and ended up closing early, so I’d suggest if you’re planning to visit Kabira Bay on a weekend to do it in the morning before places run out of stuff. They let us stay in there while we finished our gelato though! Tom had passionfruit and mango sorbet, while I had acerola cherry and goya ice cream. Goya is a type of bitter melon only available in the island and can be used for both savoury meals and desserts. It’s pretty good, I had it quite a bit!

I was feeling a bit better but Tom was starting to develop a full headache, so we abandoned our Kabira Bay exploration plans and went back to the hotel, which let me catch up on a few blog posts. After a couple of hours sleep Tom felt much more functional, so we returned to Umuara for some more teppanyaki! It was a shame to not see more of Kabira Bay, but at least we’d enjoyed some nice views of it while driving around.

That evening the public address system in Kabira Bay was sounding an alert that we couldn’t understand – a quick check of Twitter suggested a storm was passing through, so we battened down the windows and got ourselves an early night.

Today we took the ferry over to Taketomi Island – it’s only 10 minutes from Ishigaki and is a lovely little place to visit, as it preserves the red-tiled roofing and fossilised coral/stone walls of pre-war Okinawa.

Everybody hires bicycles or takes a water buffalo cart ride around the village, but we decided to explore on foot.

A lot of the walls are made out of bits of coral, and when we were walking around we found a massive stack of coral piled up against a shed.

We found a little shrine on our travels – nobody was there, it was just a simple building with an archway. I thought I saw a Buddha statue nestled in the trees so I walked through the archway to find myself in an empty, circular clearing. It felt wrong, straight away, and what I thought was a statue was actually just a tree stump. So we quickly exited – later we found out that these little clearings are very sacred areas of worship and we could have been chucked off the island if anyone had seen us going in there! Taketomi has very little English language information and signage as a whole so there was a lot of stuff we just didn’t know. It’s definitely worth checking out this website before you go, which is what we should have done:
http://www.japanvisitor.com/japan-city-guides/taketomi-island

On our explorations we found quite a few tombs as well. These are often on the roadside and deliberately face the sea, but we found some in the middle of a random field on our way back to the ferry port.

It seemed really odd, but as we continued our walk (being mindful of snakes as the path was overgrown), we found lots of remains of stone buildings, and eventually a sign stating that these were the remains of a 12th century village on the now uninhabited west side of the island.

We also checked out Kaiji beach, which is one of two beaches in the whole of Japan where you can find hoshizuna – star sand. Japanese families come here to sift through the sand for little star shaped pieces which are actually the fossilised bodies of tiny shell fish.

It was the hottest part of the day so we didn’t stay out in the baking sun sifting for them, but we enjoyed a nice walk along the beach and found loads of hermit crabs which was awesome! They were all different sizes, scuttling along the tide line.

We got the last ferry back to Ishigaki and enquired at the Hirata tourist desk about a cool Iriomote Island tour that I’d found online, which involved kayaking, hiking and caving. Unfortunately they weren’t running that tour anymore, and the other Iriomote tours available were full bar the one involving jumping off a cliff into a river basin – which Tom was very up for but I definitely wasn’t!! So we booked ourselves onto a snorkelling tour for tomorrow instead (not very exciting for Toms but definitely less terror-inducing for me!)

We grabbed dinner at a random izakaya which had baseball stuff EVERYWHERE.

While we were eating, we heard the sound of drums. Curious, we followed the sound and ended up in a market square – turned out that tonight was the night for Ishigaki’s annual night market! We arrived just in time for the soba-eating contest! Minamicon in Southampton has run a variety show at the start of the convention weekend for years, and it always involved some silly eating competition or another, like rice balls or dried seaweed, with the Benny Hill theme or something going on in the background. Turns out this was EXACTLY like that XD Here’s a photo of the winner!

What did he win? Eleven kilos of soba, of course! ELEVEN KILOS. Geez, I think I’d never want to see a bowl of soba again after that XD

It was pretty hot so I queued up at one of the food stands to get us a cold drink. Tom abandoned me to go stand somewhere out of the way of all the crowds, and whenever he abandons me I try to be brave and order stuff on my own and it goes wrong! What I thought was a cold drink ended up being a cup full of flavoured ice chips. Oops. But we got two tombola tickets! They do a thing here to encourage you to buy from the food stands – if you do, you get a ticket that lets you enter the lottery. So we went over to the tombola stand, but it turned out we needed five of these tickets to be able to have a go on the tombola. Well, we’d just eaten, so we didn’t want to go and buy more food, so we hovered around the food stalls to see if we could give our tickets to somebody else. But I guess we really stuck out as not knowing what we were doing, as instead some random little kids and a teenager saw us holding onto our tickets and gave us theirs! We didn’t know how to tell them that wasn’t the plan, haha, so we just had to accept them and say thank you. In the end we just bought a drink and that gave us the final ticket we needed to have a go on the tombola.

But when we got to the tombola and handed over our tickets, we realised there was a snag – all the prizes were massive! They were things like portable electric fans, and rice cookers, and so on. What were we gonna do if we won something? We were already just on the luggage weight limit! Fortunately, we actually didn’t win anything and just came away with some little sweeties, after all that. Phew! But it was a fun way to spend the evening – there was a guy performing on the sanshin on stage just as we were leaving, and it was such a nice atmosphere with lots of families enjoying themselves.