South Slav Exploring: Yaeyama Islands - Taketomi, Iriomote & Ishigaki

We are now back home and reflecting on our journey while we set up our new house in Christchurch. The Yaeyama Islands, just off the coast of Taiwan, was the last leg in our journey through Japan. We visited 3 islands - Taketomi-jima, Iriomote-jima and Ishigaki-jima. Unfortunately the weather was not really with us for this part of the trip due to the tail end of the typhoon season, but despite the constant wind and random rain storms, it was still pretty warm and we were rewarded with some occasional sun and beautiful sights.

We spent our first night on Taketomi-jima, a little island just 10 mins ferry ride from Ishigaki-jima and a UNESCO World Heritage site - home to a collection of very quaint traditional Okinawa-ken houses with red tiled roofs, coral roads and coral rock walls. Our accommodation at a local guesthouse with a beautiful tropical garden came with wonderful local meals of fish and seaweed and a bottle of awamori (the local spirit) to share between guests. This was a great icebreaker despite not being able to really speak each other's language and one of the other guests had lived in London for 4 years so his english was certainly better than our Japanese and he ended up as group interpreter. After dinner we all wandered down to the local pub where we were the only customers and were treated to live music and singing. The next morning we walked around the whole island (it's pretty small!) and the rest of the settlement, then caught the high-speed ferries out to Iriomote-jima (via Ishigaki) on rough seas, where we would spend the next 2 nights.

Traditional Taketomi-jima houses with tiled roofs and coral walls and roads

Traditional Okinawan music at the local pub

Kate trying out traditional Okinawan dress!

We arrived on Iriomote-jima at Ohara port in the south as the seas were too rough to land in Uehara. If you buy a ticket for Uehara, even if cancelled, they include a bus ride all the way around to Uehara in the northeast and will also drop you off at your accommodation. It's a really good way of seeing the island actually so we were reasonably glad the weather was so bad as we would never have gone down as far as Ohara. Iriomote was super quiet - really is the off-season as nothing is open. We were really glad we had booked a place that served breakfast and dinner as I think we would have got rather hungry! The owner of our accommodation (Sawayaka) was this very talented young guy with his family that was an amazing cook, musician, dancer and he drove us out to some places when we needed it (public transport is a bit erratic). That evening we went for a walk around the northeastern tip of the island, visiting Hoshisuna-no-hama, the star sand beach, with tiny skeletons of foraminifera that are somewhat star shaped. The next morning we set off up Urauchi-gawa on a river cruise and hike through the jungle to some waterfalls that takes 3 hours all up. We were the only ones on the boat but we did meet a number of other people on the track. If you keep going past the waterfalls it turns into the Across Island Track, all the way to Ohara in the south. It's home to the very rare Iriomote wild cat or yamaneke (literally mountain cat) with only 80-100 left. They're super shy and nocturnal so unfortunately we didn't see one, but we saw heaps of geckos, birds and butterflies.

River cruise and walk up Urauchi-gawa, Iriomote-jima

Dave & Kate in the jungle, Iriomote-jima

We spent our last 2 nights in the Yaeyamas on Ishigaki-jima, the main island. The weather was still very rough so we didn't do a lot of swimming and couldn't snorkel on the reef edge but we hired a car for the day and explored the island. We drove out first to Ugan-zaki, a lighthouse on the western edge of the island, with a great coastline of big waves (seems popular with surfers) and geology. We then headed to Kabira-wan and the beach at Sukuji where we got some brief sunshine before the rain decided to really set in. We had planned to do some exploring of the reef at Yonehara but it was still raining and windy so we continued up north around the island and stopped at the Tamatori-zaki viewpoint on the northeast. We finally managed get some swims in at the nice beach outside the ANA international resort back near Ishigaki city.