Iriomote is remote, wild, and far off the beaten path. First, you fly to Ishigaki, which is an island in the remote Yaeyama island chain southwest of mainland Okinawa. Then, you take about an hourlong ferry to Iriomote. Here, we are closer to Taiwan than to mainland Japan.
If you know no Japanese, you won’t be getting very far here. There are very few signs in English, and none of the rental car companies on the island speak English very well. None of the road signs are in English, unlike on the mainland.
The rain was really coming down when we landed in Ishigaki midday, but more importantly, we were surrounded by tropical winds and palm trees! It was warm! The rental car company told us the ferry we were originally planning to arrive on was not running due to winds, so we ended up going to the southern port, about a 45 minute drive from our hotel.
Ishigaki island is relatively flat and filled with farms and beaches. Iriomote is a giant jungley mountain. There is one road. I found one stoplight on it on the entire 45km stretch we drove. There are no banks or ATMs, but there is one Disney Showtunes radio station. It has mangroves, beaches, rivers, and mysterious clouds in valleys. Navigation doesn’t work very well here on the google, but there’s only one road which is surprisingly wide, so whatever.
I discovered sadly that Iriomote is home to mosquitoes. It’s also home to a species of very endangered cat, the Iriomote mountain cat, and lots of croaking frogs.
Even though we didn’t want a 45 minute drive to the hotel, because we are now closer to the equator, the days are less dramatically short. The sun sets at 6pm instead of 4:30 (f.lux tells me we have 11 whole hours of daylight!). The rental car company met us at the terminal and we picked up our tiny car. I’ll post a picture of it when it is not dark, but it’s pink and kind of like a short bus and an SUV had a baby. It’s a relatively common car style in Japan. The inside was roomy. We fit with all of our stuff. Yay!
I took off and got my wipers-not-blinker mix-ups out of the way fairly quickly. Since it was still daylight at 5pm, we got to see quite a bit of the island from the one road as we wound around the coast.
There were signs every few hundred feet warning people to go slow because of the cat. They are particularly active at twilight and we kept our eyes peeled. We identified at least seven clumps of cat-like leaves and one cat-ish stump, but no actual kitty.
We drove past our hotel about six times in the dark before arriving. It’s tucked back behind some trees and the sign isn’t lit, so it’s tricky to find in the rain without any lights. The proprietor doesn’t speak English very well and I am beginning to forget to translate for my travel buddy because I am a terrible friend and keep forgetting he doesn’t understand Japanese.
Tomorrow we will be lazy. We will go to the beach. It will be great. I will post non-crappy pictures and non-googled pictures.