Yakushima In Pictures

In vague order, here are some of the things I've seen on Yakushima.

 Where the fish fly, so do my spirits. This is the boat I took from Kagoshima.

First impressions.

Shortly after arriving at the campsite the famous Yakushima monkeys made their presence felt.

I was surprised to have all the images I held of the island in my imagination met with their uncannily similar physical counterparts in such a short time after my arrival.

I was dwelling on this when the Yakushika (Yakushima deer) turned up in droves.

A carefully angled photograph to show the campsite in a good light.

Sunset on one side of the peninsula.

Nighttime.

Sunrise on the opposite side of the peninsula.

My walk on the Yakusando trail the next day.

About 7 hours of this, all silent apart from the whistle of startled deer.

Part of the now-abandoned forest railway.

Ryujin sugi (dragon cedar), with obligatory where's wally pose.

Back down the mountain in the afternoon.

I've mentioned to a few people that I think Yakushima is where twin peaks would have been filmed in Japan.

It's a combination of the great beauty and awe-inspiring darkness of the natural surroundings and the fascinating socio-economical situation arising from the once-huge industries of logging and fishing, and the waves of employment that followed Yakushima's forests gaining world heritage status in 1993.

Add into that a population peppered with some incredible characters. Yesterday in 40 minutes I was picked up on my way to the capital by a Shizuoka farmer/Tokyo DJ, an English teacher from Yorkshire and a campsite owner who spent 6 years in a Thai prison for selling heroin. A rich mix. I've said enough for now!

A Video

An Omen

When in the morning you find an atlas moth on the vending machine you buy your tea from, you know good times are around the corner.

I think it's this moth which gave me the power to complete what is meant to be a 5 hour walk to Tachu-dake, one of the mountains in the richly forested centre of Yakushima, in 3 and a half hours.

Good things on their way

That computer cable has taken a leaf out of Lazarus's book and decided to start working 3 days after....the event.

I am going to spend the night in a hostel by the port so as to be bright and early for my boat out of Yakushima. This evening I'll put up all my photos (I've already started bringing my flickr back up to date if you want to check that in the meantime).

Jerry's

right now I'm staying at Jerry's and my morale has returned to full capacity. Tomorrow is my last day on yakushima and its meant to rain for half of it. Since my last writing I have taken two more (long) walks in the woods, meeting poisonous snakes that wouldn't get out of my path and playing around the bases of waterfalls.

I'm hitching up to Hyogo prefecture (central Honshu, quite near Osaka and Kyoto) to start Wwoofing in Sasayama with some friends I've not seen since the first time I came to Japan. Definitely ready to be working in the countryside again and I'll update you more from there.
Sorry there's been a lack of photos recently, my laptop cable was rendered kaputt by that rain just after I updated the last post. I've found a temporary replacement cable and if I find time to do it here without monopolizing the living room with my laptop antics I will put a few photos up.

Yakushima- an update

I haven't given this blog enough attention but I'm now forced to. I'm 4 days into my Yakushima trip and its the first day to represent the famous rain they have here (the locals jokingly say it rains 35 days a month).

Everything I own is completely soaked, including my guidebook which I am hopefully expecting to sprout shiitake mushrooms any minute now, that being the Japanese way and here being such a fertile location for all lifeforms.

But, as I've not said a word since Zamami I'll return there.

Now, Zamami Jima was a leisurely 5 days of dipping into the sea on my doorstep, walking in the hills and hearing the racket of American adolescents who were at a spring break camp just opposite my campsite as they engaged in all manner of japes from body boarding to night-time rounds of glow frisbee (complete with glowing shields, it was Tron basically) to haunting sing-alongs that I couldnt hear the words of over the drum machine. I stayed about an hour's walk away from any amenities, which is turning out to be a recurring theme, and as a result I spent a couple of days eating less than I'd have liked to but as much as I'd have liked to without walking an hour through rain (if I'd known about Yakushima's version of rain I'd have clacked my heels together and waltzed down the road in any downpour on Zamami).

There were clear seas, a few big names of ocean fauna, whales painted on everything and I got a lot of reading done.

After 5 days I returned to Okinawa for another weekend and was taken out on my last night by the hostel staff to a friend's newly opened Mexican restaurant where I saw the most endearing musical family act I've born witness to, a newly-engaged couple and father-in-law jamming out on sanshin (three-stringed Okinawan instrument) and two guitars in a relaxed

The next day was my 25 hour ferry ride up to Kagoshima where I spent a most enjoyable evening as a couchsurfing guest with Kasumi-san. She told me tales and showed me photos of her travels in America, Pakistan and Thailand, and she creates clothing accessories that demonstrate a dexterity I can barely fathom (with my fingers as they are, a police station line up of squashed, gormless and guilty-looking ex-boxers).

The next day Kasumi took me to the Yakushima ferry port where I discovered the ferry I'd planned to take was on holiday for 8 days so I had to take the high speed jet foil at twice the cost. This was disappointing but I let such things slip in the name of just enjoying a place I have been trying to visit for three years.

When I arrived I had another great moment of realizing how variable the term 'small island' is as I walked for 2 and a half hours to my campsite. I'd read on the websites of other travellers that this campsite doesn't meet the description in the one English guide to Yakushima and so was less surprised than I'd have been otherwise.

It is the set of a particularly niche horror movie, or at least the toilet block is. You have to walk up and down and up a couple of hills (With 20kg on your back grunting, gasping and emitting hearty oaths, preferably) and then you come past two buildings. The one on the right is a one-room structure with windows and the bottom half of a door. It is long-abandoned and filled with: plants, skeletons including that of a monkey and bird, a beer crate and droppings of every shape and size.

On the left the abandonment theme is continued with a pair of public toilets that would garner a call to the health and safety inspector in the UK, which here means they, well, they're simply beyond the pale. If I were Japanese I'd think I'd been the victim of a particularly cruel mirage or one of those visions of hell you hear so much about, but for three days I called these toilets home (in so much as they were part of the campsite generally.... and their sinks were my only water source...).

So the rest of the campsite, to cut a description of grottiness short, was a covered cooking area filled with wood and rusty pans and broken taps, irritatingly far from the toilets, and even further from that a flat area either side of the road, partially gravelled. I was the only camper and in throes of ecstasy over the good weather I observed both the sunset and sunrise whilst playing ukulele, as well as lying out on my rollmat for most of that first night playing and watching the stars.

The second day on Yakushima I decided to hitch to a hiking route I'd read about called the Yakusando trail. To give a brief background to hiking in Yakushima, the trails are

centred around the numerous mountains( with the largest being Miyanoura-Dake, the tallest mountain in southern Japan) and the Yakusugi, particular ancient trees peppered throughout Yakushima with claims to ages as great as 7,400 years or so.

Now the Yakusando trail goes up a mountain whose name I forget to a yakusugi whose name I just about remember....Kigen sugi. It's apparently a fairly unpopular trail and the reason I chose it is because in theory I have a while on this island and I preferred the idea of going on a shorter trail before working my way up.

I can't for the life of me understand why I saw but one other soul that day, it was one of the most scenic walks of my life. You walk a 3km road alongside a river, rising up the base of a small mountain. Then the road becomes a series of moss covered, irregular steps that look like they've always been there. These steps go through dense woodland and every so often you come across a Yakushika- the native deer species. These deer have tails like gigantic white cotton balls that float behind them and I can't help but think are a great aid to those hunting them. The deer give a shrill whistle after you get so close and they all scarper headfirst downhill, how they do it without breaking their necks is beyond me but I sometimes shout "Please take your time!!". Occasionally the steps are broken up by a level walk around the mountainside, alongside sections of the old forestry railway.

The last 1km to the top is almost half of the walking time, the trail gets very steep and starts winding its way around swollen old tree roots and after spotting a particularly gnarled and ominous looking tree you're ready to drop to your knees and bathe in the magnificence of Kigen sugi. 

But its not Kigen sugi and you have to fling yourself vertically up the hill, in the manner that a hamster that knows it shouldn't climbs back up the side of its cage to have another go at whoever's fingers linger nearest the bars.

So after three such false ends I at last found Kigen sugi. It is gigantic, and looks like about 8 trees in different stages of life.

After that I walked back down the hill and most of the way to the capital before a friendly schoolteacher named Shun-san picked me up and drove me back to my haunted campsite, telling me about saxophones and almost crashing the car on finding out I was 22.

I was happy with my cumulative 16km that day, and the next day decided to give my legs a bit of a rest. I just stayed in Isso reading and planned my next campsite. The following morning I set off at 10am to hitch to Kurio which is about 40 km from Isso and on the map it seems quicker to go anti-clockwise which is what I tried.

My first lift was an anonymous driver who from the moment I stepped in the car told me all about his year spent as a student of English in Norwich. I was flabbergasted and overjoyed and hopefully I will remember to tell Emma before I post this! He dropped me off in a spot destined to develop my virtue of patience as my new longest wait in Japanese hitchhiking has increased by 18 times from 10 minutes to three hours. Eventually I was picked up by a couple from near Manchester and was once more floored by what felt to me in my lonely wanderings like a day spent in the UK.

Nick and Jane had the same guidebook as me and have been out in Japan for a couple of weeks, driving around the south. They warned me that in their experience the direction I was headed seemed to turn into a fairly quiet road but I said I'd try it out anyway. They dropped me off at a beach carpark, hitchhiking gold most of the time but I instead had another three hour wait. I wasn't annoyed by this, I was expecting some sort of recoil for all how smoothly everything generally goes. I also knew their was a campsite near that beach which although was expensive seemed a good plan B. After my three hours I decided to take this plan B when I found it to be not a campsite, but a farm. 

So I decided to walk down this route from Nagata to Kurio in the last hour or two of sunlight to see if I could get a lift further on down from the beach. I didn't want my 6 hour wait to be in vain (little did I know), and at any rate there was a lighthouse 5 km further up the road where I imagined to be some flat ground should I need to pitch the tent. I bought some biscuits and a can of mackerel at the nearby shop and into the coastal jungle road at sunset went I. It was utterly beautiful, deer every 5 metres to whistle and scarper from me and after 3km some particularly creepy abandoned huts to quicken my pace a tad. I found the lighthouse (which is I think the largest on the island, being called Yakushima Lighthouse and not Nagata lighthouse) just after sunset and put up my tent on a tiny patch of grass in front of it. I slept till 5 and woke up. Just as I was nearly packed a white sports car pulled up and out came an early morning fisherman who laughed at my plan and said take care.

Thinking an early morning departure would put me in good stead to get lifts from such fisherman on the same road I gleefully plodded onwards. In the end no-one else turned up and I walked the 21km this morning in complete solitude, passing through a great swathe of that UNESCO world heritage rainforest in wonder that it was such an unpopular drive. There were monkeys, deer, wild fig trees, what more could you want?

Now at the end of my 21km I reached the new campsite, only for a great storm to whip up in that part of the island 5 minutes before my arrival. I wouldn't have minded were it just rain but that wind was on a level I considered fairly dangerous. After walking at length around the campsite with the owner, both of us stroking are chins and angrily peering carefully at all substrates and surfaces, I decided that as I've only spent £4 from Tuesday to now that I'd stay in a hostel tonight. So after that great pilgrimage, I got the bus to Anbo where there's no wind but the rain is unrelenting. The hostel turned out to be £8 more than the book said which is frustrating as they don't have internet, but as the weather's similarly horrible till Monday I am going to stay indoors tomorrow in a slightly more expensive and much nicer hostel that does have internet so I can at least make a start on planning the rest of my trip post Yakushima (and post this message).

I am starting to feel a bit tired and look forward to sleeping like a king tonight.

Zamami is full of butterflies.

All found within the same 10-metre stretch of road.

Bienvenido A Zamami

Off to Zamami jima for 5 days snorkelling and camping. Right now I'm in Okinawa and it has been nice to have a bit of contact with the world but after two days I'm definitely ready to leave the city. Coming back on Saturday and heading up to Yakushima on Monday by 18 hour ferry.

Realize I wrote this more like a short email than a post but it's just in case I forgot to tell anyone I was going.

Yoron

The bungalow I mentioned, some delicious pasta Toshi-san made, photos of a recreation of an italian fresco a friend painted on his restaurant wall (note the hermit crab) and scenes from a bike ride.

Grand times on Okinoerabu

Technical error

Ok due to a technical hitch I've been unable to send these photos by email to Emma (hello Emma!) so I'm going public. There's no reason not to, they're just a bit awkward and unrelated. Tomorrow when I've condensed the rest of my pictures I'll be able to upload a few but right now it's just the ones on my flickr I've been able to put up and these.

Enjoy!

Lengthy Update

A hopefully lengthy update

I'm writing from a bungalow I've rented for a night in Yoron-To. By the time I send this I'll be three islands (well more if you want to count all of them but three more of my planned ones) down from my last update. I've been writing this and adjusting it as often as possible, hard to capture everything as ridiculous turns of luck and interest keep happening.

I left Ohama campsite in the north of Amami-Oshima with a view to go and buy fuel and then check out the campsite at Yadori beach in the very south of the island. I'd walked all of about 50m when I met a group of women out on a family walk. A grandmother, her three daughters and one granddaughter. We chatted for a while, they asked about the ukulele and my family, I showed them some photos and they offered me a lift to Naze as they were headed that way and I gratefully accepted.

In Naze I thanked them, went to the internet cafe briefly and then went to find fuel for the trangia. Well I didn't find any despite a very lengthy search, resigned myself to raw food for the next few days and hitched a lift to Yadori with an Okinawan man in his 60's named Orichii-san who had moved to Amami a year before to look after his mother. It was a long drive over mountains and alongside mangrove forests in the last two hours of sunset. He dropped me in Koniya, ten minutes from Yadori and just afterwards a car pulled over and a gardener who didn't give his name drove me along the last small roads past a few shrimp farms (strange looking things, fields of pools of water with oxygen pumps) to the campsite.

I arrived just before sunset to find it deserted except for on the beach itself where the guests from the hotel next-door were having a drink and a chat. I walked to a point further down along the beach and sat toasting the sun with a cup of soymilk.

In the morning I went snorkelling, Yadori was even better for this than I'd heard. I saw a lot of fish I couldn't name, small and multicoloured. The only thing I recognised was a distinctly gloomy pufferfish. My swim was cut short by the discovery of a tommy hilfiger wallet on the reef bed. I dove down and shooed a wrasse out of the way before picking it up and swimming back to shore. When I landed and opened it to have a proper look a crab scuttled out.

I handed it in to the woman who owns the bar closest to the campsite, and between her and a man who trims the palm trees they found a name and number and within ten minutes the owner turned up, saying he'd lost it on the coast about 15 miles away.

I spent most of the rest of the day reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse and then walked to a nearby beach I'd heard about. On the way I met a man from Osaka who has his second home in Yadori and I talked to him a little bit about Osaka and my trip. We then split ways and I found Hoshinohama, a beach that to me looked thoroughly like Budleigh Salterton near Exeter.

When I went back to the camp I found my bread was on the turn from having spent most of its time in a hot tent, and I was trying to work out if that could really be called a loss of the day given everything else having gone so well. Just as I was deciding it wasn't the point was driven home by the approach of Mr and Mrs Nishiyo, the Osakan man and his other half walking down the road to me with a small cooler of beer. I thought they were visiting the family who owned the bar but they instead came up to me, gave me the cooler with three beers and a pot of yoghurt inside, asked if I wanted to use their hot shower, offered me some instant noodles and said they were driving up to Naze the next day if I needed a lift in that direction.

I was overwhelmed. It took a lot of persuading them that I was alright for the shower and noodles but I accepted the beers and yoghurt and said I hadn't decided exactly where I was going tomorrow but it would definitely be north and a lift would be great. I wanted to go to Tokunoshima fairly soon after but wasn't sure how to go about it, the ferry leaving every other day at 5am from Naze. I'd have go back up and camp in Ohama and leave early in the morning by taxi with a wet tent or sleep in the internet cafe in Naze.

That evening in Yadori A-san of the family from the bar came over to my tent and asked me about my plans for Tokunoshima and then invited me into the bar whilst he and his sister Mie-chan did a quick google search. They told me that I could get a ferry from Koniya (which was about 15 minutes north of where I was) at ten in the morning which would save me the problem of accommodation in Naze. I thanked them both and A-san and I played bongos and ukulele for a while.

In the morning the Nishiyos took me to Koniya, gave me their business card and wished me good luck. I arrived in Tokunoshima and within 3 minutes a father and teenage son offered me a lift to Aze, a 15 minute drive from the port. They told me I should come back in May for the famous bull-fights which I gather are bull-vs-bull.

They dropped me off and I wandered off to find the campsite deserted of people but with three permanent-looking tents. I set mine up and sat in the shade reading for a few hours until it got a bit cooler at which point I walked the 40 minute path to the nearest village that had a shop. Bought some bread and mackerel and on the way back a pickup truck slowed down alongside me. The round-faced, wild eyed and rambunctiously healthy Yamakura-san asked where I was headed and informed me "We're going now!" he told me a bit more about the agriculture in Tokunoshima and recommended I try any potato-based spirits I find. His driving was as rambunctious as he and we were soon driving along the pedestrian footpath of the campsite, the sides of the car shaving a few inches off the hedges on either side. He seemed intent on making sure my feet left the truck and arrived in the tent without touching anything between and came close to parking squarely on my ukulele in the effort.

He roared a ganbatte and honked his horn about 15 times on the way out of the campsite and I ate my dinner, took some photos of the stars when the sun had set and went to bed.

The next day I read some more and attempted to walk to town to find internet access and contact Emma. I'd just walked up the long road from the campsite to the main roads and ten steps after that a car slowed down and Yamada-san of Kobe offered me a lift as he was also heading to Kametoku to go shopping. He lived on Tokunoshima for two years in his teens but comes here twice a year to see his mother who lives alone. Well we got to the capital only to be told by a gaggle of schoolgirls that there aren't any internet cafes of any sort. Yamada-san offered to drive me back on his return home after shopping so I went with him and bought a couple of bananas.

On the way back we talked about towns near Kobe and it turns out Yamada-san used to work at a hospital in the first town I wwoofed in back in 2009, Sasayama in Hyogo-ken, home of some amazingly good black bean tea.

Having no internet I decided to hasten my pace, thinking there might be some on Okinoerabu-jima (the next island down). Well I arrived there the next day and on the way from the port to the campsite I decided to stop in a hotel and ask if they could recommend a place. The woman at reception said there wasn't anything in terms of internet cafes but I'd be welcome to use theirs and she handed me an ethernet cable before walking off into the hotel. I wanted to be as quick as possible and having sent the message I was putting my laptop away when she came back and gave me a cup of green tea before disappearing again. I started looking at my map and she reappeared again with two onigiri (triangular blocks of rice wrapped in seaweed) which she put down before me and said she thought I looked hungry. I accepted them and when I finished eating I said thanks and tried to give her some money for the internet, tea and food but she insisted I hold onto it. I said thanks again and started to leave, and when she asked where I was heading it emerged her colleague was driving that way in five minutes to pick up a guest, so once again I found myself being driven to a campsite. It was ridiculously windy in Kibiru and once I'd set up my tent I started walking to orientate myself. I keep thinking these islands are smaller than they really are, after two and a half hours of walking fairly slowly and taking photos I'd gotten nowhere near as close to a full circuit i.e. back round to my tent as I had imagined I would.

Went to the bus stop to find the last bus had left ten minutes previously so I started walking back and decided to give hitching one more go. A few cars went past but then one came by in the opposite direction and the grinning man driving, as well as the young man and woman in the back all shouted hello.

I said hello back and it carried on on its way. I carried on walking but soon it came back to me and slowed down.

It turned out to be Takashi-san and friends. He'd been given a call by friends who had driven past me a few minutes previously saying there's a foreigner hitching down in China town (the name of the town in the south of Okinoerabujima, pronounced Chin-na) and as they were just out on a wander they decided to come and get me. Takashi was enthralled to find out I was camping right by his family home and when he dropped me off he invited me out for drinks later on and said he'd be back in an hour or two.

A very warm welcome to Erabu, elated I returned to my campsite where I met the most disturbing and frustrating stray cockerel. It was such an effort to construct that evening's mackerel sandwich without it getting into my food bag. It was persistent to say the least, I chased it round in circles about seven times but it wouldn't leave. Eventually I threw a small stone at it and that convinced it. I have the ghost of remorse as it was only hungry but frankly it was a horrible looking chicken, caked in grime.

Anyway!

Takashi turned up with his grandmother in the car who couldn't stop laughing hysterically when I got in. I soon learned between them they'd devised a plan to surprise everyone in the family. Takashi had told his parents he was having a friend for dinner but didn't say anything else, the great shock being I'm a tall caucasian ( I had no idea foreigners were this rare on Amami, Tokunoshima, Okinoerabu and Yoron. I knew you didn't see many but I was surprised I was such a novelty) . We drove off to pick up his uncle who was mildly surprised and amused and then went to the Sugawa family home.

Well, his mother and father gawped and the first things they said were "Takashi!!! Does he speak Japanese?!!! Does he like Japanese food?!!!" But as soon as I introduced myself and we worked out that my small Japanese would be sufficient for a sustainable stream of conversation (everything eased by Takashi's grandmother who was still chuckling long and hard) they soon relaxed and were incredibly warm to me. Dinner was delicious, we had sushi along with meat and vegetables cooked on an electric hot plate placed on top of the table. We talked about, well everything but in particular fishing and families. After dinner Takashi and I were dropped off at a friends house (Nori-san) where we chatted and had a few drinks with everyone who was back from studying for the spring holiday.

As it got so late Nori invited us to stay over so we pulled a few futon mattresses out of the cupboard and went to sleep. In the morning Takashi and Nori asked me to stay that night as well (my last night in Erabu) and that day was spent with Takashi checking out a few of the scenic spots on the coast, proving I didn't find the water cold as an Englishman by awkwardly paddling in my zip-off shorts, and in the evening we helped set up a barbecue organised by Yurika-chan's family. Yurika is studying hair-dressing in Osaka (Takashi's there too studying business) and five of her friends had come to spend part of the holiday in 'Erabu.

We ate barbecued meat and vegetables and drank beer and potato-shouchou Yurika's father grows potatoes) and lit some fireworks and I played ukulele for quite a while and taught a few chords to those that wanted to learn and again went back to Nori's that evening to sleep.

In the morning Takashi dropped me off at the port and came to wait for the ferry with me, I've been blown away by his generosity and that of everyone I met on Okinoerabu jima and if you're reading this Takashi- "どもうありがとうございます！！いちばんたのしかった！”

I arrived on Yoron shortly after and started walking to the campsite at Yurigahama where I'm now staying in a structue like a mushroom, it's a one room house on top of a concrete pillar.