An other early wake up that day to catch the ferry to Uehara, on Iriomote island, leaving at 7:30. The cruise was 40 min long. When we arrived arrived at Uehara, we took a shuttle bus from the ferry company (no ticket needed) to Urauchigawa (Urauchi river). While the second-largest of all Okinawa islands in size, Iriomote's population is barely over 2,000 and visitors, at over 150,000 a year, outnumber residents by almost 100:1. 90% of the island is covered in ...

We woke up early that day, to catch a bus to Yoshihara, which is in the North part of the island. The plan is to meet people from Apnea adventures and to go sea kayaking with them. We discovered them on the internet, and we called them a few days earlier to book the trip. The woman we got on the phone, Miyuki, was very friendly and helpful and spoke good english. When we left Ishigaki bus terminal, the weather was not good : grey sky and rain was threatening...

Since the beginning of our stay in Japan, we have Yakult for breakfast almost every day. What is Yakult ? To french people, it could be described as an equivalent of Actimel. But it is a much older product for japanese people. A little bit of history: Yakult (ヤクルト, : Yakuruto) is a Japanese probiotic milk-like product made by fermenting a mixture of skimmed milk with a special strain of the bacterium Lactobacillus casei Shirota. It wa...

Contrary to what we expected, the weather in Ishigaki and the Yaeyama islands is not always sunny ! Today has been the proof of that, unfortunately. We first decided to go to the tourist office to get information on the things to see on the islands. Most of the documentation there was in Japanese, but we were happy to find there a young woman speaking pretty good english. She gave us a few papers in english, and also tried and called several car rental offices ...

After more than 2 weeks in the main islands of Japan (Honshu and Kyushu as far as we are concerned), we decided to make a change of scenery and head for the most southern part of Japan : Okinawa prefecture. More specificaly, we will spend 5 days in the Yaeyama Islands, the most southern and most western islands of the archipelago. The Yaeyamas are far closer to Taiwan (125 kilometers) than to Okinawa Island, much less the Japanese mainland. The islands form th...