Tropical island
From Tokyo we flew with Vanilla Air to Naha, main island of Okinawa. When we arrived in Naha we rent a car, public transportation on the island is not as good as on the main island of Japan. With the rent car we were quite flexible and the traffic on the island is not as crowded as on the main island of Japan, but somehow I had to get used by driving on the left side…
Just when we arrived here we felt that we are now on a tropical island, the temperatures are mostly above 30°C and the humidity above 90%. Unfortunately when we arrived here, it was heavily raining…
On the island we actually made holiday from our world travel :-) We cosy drove with the car across this island, from the north to the south. We went to a pineapple farm, tried so many delicious stuff they made from pineapple and just relaxed on some of this island beaches...and of course we ate tons of ice creams ;-)
We wanted to visit one of the small islands around Okinawa Main Island by boat, but the sea was so stormy that some operator cancelled their tour due to bad weather. They told us it might happen that we get stuck on one of the islands due to too high waves. According weather forecast there was a typhoon just passing Taiwan and we get a bit of its storm and heavy rain. Therefore we decided not to go and spent our time on the main island.
On the main island there is an Ocean Expo Park where the Churaumi oceanarium is located. There you can spend your time the whole day, further information see Dennis animal corner.
In the northern part of this island there is a wildlife sanctuary. There you can find the endemic Okinawa rail, a bird similar like the Kiwi, not really able to fly and live on the ground of the forest. We saw this bird while we were driving, but we were not fast enough to take a picture. In Naha I visit a Mangrove forest and took some pictures of the animals living there.
On the main island of Okinawa there is a U.S military base, with round about 20000 soldiers, it´s quite huge. Their influence on this island is visible, there is an American village which we also visited and lots of fast food restaurants everywhere.
For us it´s time to say goodbye to Japan, it was a fantastic time. Now we are flying to Shanghai, China.