okinawa – ishigaki island

finally i’m back to posting pictures of okinawa, but a closer look at my photos just now made me realise that all the nice pictures werent taken by me!! so i have nothing nice to show for the sueyoshi park in naha, the pineapple park and the ocean expo park in nago, and the nakijin castle ruins.. :(

i took a few more pictures when we left the main island of okinawa and headed to ishigaki island, one of the many outlying islands. ishigaki is about 2 hours away from naha by plane, but about 14 hours by ship! air travel was less than 3000yen more expensive than sea travel, which is nothing in terms of the time saved !

ishigaki is also the entrance point from the rest of okinawa to the other islands in its vincinity, all way south of okinawa.

in fact, as can be seen from above, ishigaki is closer to taipei (270km) than it is to naha (410km), or the rest of japan for that matter.

there unfortunately was little of interest on ishigaki itself that was accessible without a car.. the island seems completely reliant on tourism, yet there was the sense that the residents dont really like tourists (who can blame them?) and definitely arent as friendly as the people in naha or nago. in fact, we got into a small problem with a restaurant owner who was annoyed that we parked our rental bikes in the space behind the back door of his restaurant, when it wasnt even like we were blocking the door OR preventing other customers from parking their cars in that space (we didnt even know it was a parking lot, as there were no markings of any sort to identify it as such!). we certainly didnt deserve the rudeness he showed us..

we spent our two half days in ishigaki doing nothing much at all.. just walking around and relaxing in our room, and visiting the small shopping area many, many times (cos we were absent minded and kept forgetting one thing or another, or otherwise going there too late when all the shops have closed).

one of the things that we found slightly interesting was this:

there’re lots of world peace bells in japan..

and of course, ishigaki declares non-nuclear peace, although i would certainly not call it a city: