Morning all. My ten-day trip to the Yaeyama Islands came to a close yesterday and I am now back in my bed in the city of Tokyo. Luckily for my avid readers, I kept a detailed diary of my adventures, which I have typed up below. Enjoy!

Monday 19th 10:45AM

I’m on the plane in my 500-yen-costing, right side-facing window seat in row 24. A family approaches me. The child looks about seven. The mother is speaking to him in a language that sounds something like Russian (Uzbekistan as I later find out). The father looks vaguely Japanese (half as I later find out) and is sporting a Brown University sweater. I hear the words “twenty-four” and they stop and look at me in my right side-facing window seat. There’s some fussing–I assume with the bags–and the mother and son sit down in the seats next to me. The father is across the aisle.

The mother turns to me. “Hi… excuse me… I hope you don’t mind but I was just wondering…”

She’s eyeing up my mask as she talks and I imagine she’s going to ask me where I got it. I prepare to semi-boastfully tell her I bought it from a second hand kimono store in Asakusa and it’s one of a kind. But she doesn’t ask me where my mask is from. She asks me if I wouldn’t mind changing seats with them so that they could sit together.

She wants my seat. My 500-yen-costing, right side-facing window seat. Worse, her seven year-old kid wants it. I look from the window to her to the window to her and I um and I ah. Am I going to be a dickhead or am I going to give up my window seat? They are hardly separated and she can reach out and touch her husband if she wants to. I say, “Sorry, ordinarily I would but I paid extra for the window seat.”

The kid looks disappointed and she nods. I feel like an arse. We momentarily make small talk to dissipate the awkwardness of my refusing to let her family sit together. She asks me where I’m from and where I’m staying in Ishigaki and vice versa. We discuss what the weather will be like before slipping into silence. It takes me about half an hour to relax again. I worry that the plane might crash as karma for my selfishness but we land safe and sound four hours later. I take some pictures on her phone during the descent and everyone’s happy.

Tuesday 20th 9:15PM

Today I met up with Su who has gained a tan and a toy boy since I last saw her in Tokyo. We sunbathed at Kabira Bay (beautiful) before taking the employee shuttle bus to Club Med (where she works). We snuck down to the guest beach for a few hours of sun before her boyfriend came to join us. I took the bus back to Ishigaki later that evening.

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I read a New York Times article where the writer by chance ended up in Cafe Taniwha, which is a bar tucked into the side streets in the town centre. There she met a load of English-speaking Okinawans who instantly befriended her, offered to drive her around the island for the rest of her holiday and she became such good friends with the owner that on her final night they made her a cake. Basically she attributed the success of her trip to this bar. So in I walked with high hopes.

I don’t know if she went there on a different day but the bar was not popping off at six o’clock on a Tuesday. I chatted with a young girl and an old man at the bar (in Japanese!) and the owner brought out a globe so they could all take a look at where England was. But mostly everyone kept to themselves and after my goya awamori cocktail and chicken curry, I headed back to the hostel.

Wednesday 21st – Day trip to Taketomi Island

It’s hard to describe Taketomi. It’s small and the inside mostly consists of green fields with large grazing cows plus a small village with brick walls, sandy roads and bungalows dotted around it. And then once you’ve cycled out of the village and far enough down the sandy tracks, you hit the white sand beaches with turquoise water, which are beautiful.

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I took the ferry with Becca, an English girl from my hostel. Becca announced on the ferry that she never ate lunch, which made me slightly apprehensive since I knew I would definitely be wanting lunch. Luckily we covered most of the island on our rental bikes in the morning and so she took the ferry back to Ishigaki and I went for Yaeyama noodles and a beer at Takenoko noodle bar.

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Thursday 22nd

It rained a lot and I moped around a lot.

Friday 23rd 10:15PM

It rained a lot and I was desperate not to mope around a lot so I took the bus to Yonehara beach. I hoped that the rain would clear up during my hour-long bus ride but it did not. The beach was empty (and kind of scary) so after deciding I definitely wouldn’t be going for a swim, I walked back up to the main road. The next bus was hours away so I headed to the palm tree grove. The endemic Yaeshima Palm Trees are found nowhere else in the world than Ishigaki and Iriomote (a neighbouring island). They are also insanely tall. Underneath them, you have to pretty much bend backwards to see the top.

I had read about a noodle place a mile or so up the road called Kato Soba. The pictures online looked delicious so I braved the rain and headed towards it. I was cold, wet and very hungry when I arrived. And it was closed. So I ploughed along the main road, passing the occasional cafe each with the same ‘Closed’ sign in the window. Eventually, I passed an open one, which according to the menu served the best curry in Ishigaki. I didn’t expect to be ordering butter chicken for lunch on a tropical Japanese island and it was no match for the Woodford Tandoori Cottage if you ask me. Anyway, I took the bus back to the ferry port in the early afternoon and managed a good few hours of moping before bedtime.

Saturday 24th

Monkey park and a second trip to Kabira Bay.

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Sunday 25th 11:10PM

I returned to Yonehara beach and this time the sun was shining. The snorkelling was incredible and the fish were colours that I didn’t know were possible to naturally exist. Honestly amazing. Definitely recommend.

Kato Soba was open for lunch so I enjoyed a bowl of king prawn noodles before I returned to the beach for a second snorkel and a few more hours of sunbathing.

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I made a friend at the hostel last night. Her name is Ai (pronounced eye) and she was getting in the lift as I was coming out. We said konnichiwa in passing and then she held the lift as I ferreted in my bag for the key card that allows me into the hostel room. I thought she was taking hers out to let me in but instead she stood there for a moment before typing some Japanese characters into her phone. She then held the translation up for me to see: If you don’t mind, shall we?

I was a bit unsure how to respond. Google Translate seemed to let us down here. Luckily there’s one word in Japanese I have mastered. Wakarimasen. (I don’t understand.) So she typed again whilst I stood awkwardly next to her, key card now in hand as the next translated message popped up on the screen: Would you like to have dinner with me tomorrow night?

So I said sure and this evening I met Ai outside the hostel. My conversational Japanese (age, job, hometown, what did you do today and what are you doing tomorrow) lasted the walk from the hostel to the restaurant and so a lot of the dinner consisted of occasionally making eye contact, smiling at each other and repeatedly saying the word oishii (tasty) as we tucked into our dinner. Anyway we had a nice time and as it turns out she lives in West Tokyo so we’re doing it again in a few weeks time.

Here’s a picture of Ai and I.

Monday 26th to Thursday 29th

Under Ai’s recommendation, I took the ferry over to Kohama Island on Monday. I was planning on giving this one a miss as I had heard it was the further and more difficult to navigate alternative to Taketomi, but I am very glad I went. Both of those facts may be true but I rented an electric bike for my adventures this time and over the course of three hours, I covered the island in its entirety. The sun was shining and I had a beautiful day.

Here are some pictures.

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So then on Monday afternoon, after I had sufficiently scaled Kohama Island, I returned to Ishigaki where I checked into my hotel. The plan was this: check into my fancy hotel on Monday, lie by the pool for the rest of the day, swan around the hotel in my cool new khaki linen PJs (which I wasn’t allowed to keep) on Tuesday and check out Wednesday morning. I was supposed to return to the hostel for my final night to save a couple of (thousand) yen. But guess what I didn’t do? That.

Just a mere three hours into said swanning on Tuesday I realised I would need at least another day of luxury. Booking.com was just a thumb’s touch away and pay day was yesterday after all. So I ended up staying for the rest of my trip.

On my first night, once I had sunbathed, taken a bath (which is incidentally the first bath I have taken alone in nine months) and put on the aforementioned swanky PJs, I realised that no part of me wanted to leave the room or put real clothes on. I’d had a big lunch so I poured myself a big cup of green tea and settled in for the night. Breakfast was the only meal included and I planned to more than make up for it at tomorrow’s buffet, which ran from 6:30-9:30AM.

To get my money’s worth, I planned to go first at 6:30, return to bed for a few hours and then back again at 9:30 for my second meal of the day. Unfortunately Art Hotel Ishigaki has a policy in place to prohibit scroungers such as myself from breakfasting twice and my name was sadly crossed off the list on arrival.

So it dawned on me at 6:30 on Tuesday morning that I just had this moment to eat not only today’s breakfast, but today’s lunch and also last night’s dinner. I picked up my tray and accepted the challenge.

So I started with steak. Then noodles followed by mango salad, stir fried tofu, miso soup with rice. Next I moved onto fruit: passion fruit, pineapple, lichee and orange. After that was an omelet, a slice of bacon and then croissant after croissant the condiment of which alternated between mango and papaya jam. And finally, once I’d topped it off with a custard cream bun, I did it all again.

I went back to bed at eight that morning and slept till ten.

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Anyway I’m aware this blog post is getting a little lengthy so I’ll try to wrap it up here. The following days were spent lounging by a pool and taking it very easy. In the evenings, I retreated to the thirteenth floor where I would sit alone at the sky bar, listen to the soft jazz coming out of the speaker and sip my complimentary guava juice as the sun set on Ishigaki Island. And then I would laugh at the fact that this is my life now.