The Tomari port was just 300 meters away from our hotel, so we could take our time to get there for the first ferry of the day to Zamami. The high-speed Queen Zamami III takes about 50 minutes to get to this island, so we arrived around 10 in the morning there. Strangely enough we had 3G reception during the entire route. We never knew it could reach that far.

It was quiet at Zamami. On the ferry there were only about 30 people and most of those were picked up by small buses to go to a hotel or join a whale watching tour. Why they wanted to do a whale watching tour from Zamami instead of from the main island of Okinawa is beyond us, since you go to the exact same area of the sea but with a huge detour. Anyhow, after 5 minutes we were alone on the pier. No shops, no restaurants, no souvenirs, no nothing. Off-season really is off season here.

We decided to walk to one of the beaches, Ama beach, by following the road along the coast. It was just a short walk of 30 minutes but with taking pictures of the whale statue in the sea, the Marilyn dog statue and of course the awesome looking sea it took a bit longer. The beach itself was very white, however not due to the sand but because of all the white coral pieces that washed ashore on the beach. After some shell hunting and shellfish watching we continued along the coast to the Kaminohama observatory. It's located on a coastline hill and gives an excellent view of the surroundings. By this time we had been on the island for about two hours and saw only a few people. Tourists were non-existent and the locals were nowhere to be found. We were wondering how to get lunch as we didn't take some with us and this island was not as touristic as we expected.

On the road back to the 'city' we saw a group of tourists. They were likely dropped off by a bus, could take pictures for five minutes and were hauled back again. We did see some locals in small white vans on the road. Often with people just sitting in their open trunk. One of them had a foreign girl in the back. She was standing in the trunk holding a small goat. When we turned our heads to this strange sight we saw she was standing there with many more goats! It sure did not look safe. After a small detour through the jungle which was intended to be a short-cut but wasn't, we arrived at the pier again, found the small supermarket and bought some sandwiches.

Next stop was the Furuzamami beach, which was a much nicer beach than Ama. The water was not too cold to swim in. We stayed for a while, but we were on the clock now since we could not miss the only ferry back to Naha at 16:20. We were on time of course. When the ferry left a lot of locals gathered to wave at their guest leaving. We guess they were the people of hotels, whale-watching and diving tours. They sure waved energetically!

When we got back we took a small break at the hotel and had delicious fresh sushi for dinner. Afterwards we took another stroll through the touristic and very lively main streets before we went back to our hotel.