While I do unfortunately spend many many hours with my eyes glued to my computer sitting at a desk, I am fortunate enough to live in a truly beautiful and WARM place, meaning I can take the occasional break from forced sedentary life to explore the great outdoors.
This weekend I did just that, taking a four-hour ferry ride to Kume (Koo-may) Island. I traveled with John and Abbey as well as Ben, another teacher at my school, two Pauls, two Japanese friends of ours, and a visiting friend, an Italian named Teresa. What can I really say about the trip other than it was truly beautiful. We picked our camping site, made camp and enjoyed the sunset on the ocean. We cooked fish and meat in our campfire, played with sparklers on the beach and even managed to surprise one of our party members by celebrating her birthday, smuggling a cake with us all the way from Naha. We experienced a wide array of wildlife, from the GIANT spiders that seemed to buddy up to Teresa to the thousands of crabs that took over the beach at night (literally thousands. Luckily, we only saw their tracks the next day. We pitched our tents far enough away from the ocean that we were left alone.) In the morning, most members of our group ran in a half marathon, quite a feat considering the intensity of the sun combined with temperatures upwards of 80 degrees (30 degrees cel). I woke up early to see the start of the marathon at seven am and then sent my friends off on their own race at nine thirty. I was truly amazed when I saw a man in the full marathon group running the race with two prosthetic legs. You read about these things relatively frequently, but I have never seen it with my own eyes. It was surprisingly moving to me to see him running, and was a very inspirational start to the day. On a lighter note, many of the runners were decked out in elaborate costumes and hats. I could not believe it. Somehow Japanese people seem to have this amazing ability of running marathons without looking sweaty, disgusting and disheveled at the end. While our friends were running, John, Abbey and I took a stroll to see the famous "Turtle Rocks" of Kume Island. These are rock formations that are supposed to either look like turtles OR when put together like the back of a turtle shell. I'm not really sure which, but the swimming was wonderful. The ocean is so clear and blue in Okinawa- I could never get tired of it. Unfortunately we could only stay for one night as we had to be at school on Monday so we left our friends and headed back onto the ferry. I was again struck by how beautiful this part of Japan is. Sailing back to Naha, I couldn't help but feel like I had gone back in time to some supernatural and majestic place where the gods weren't so very far away. The islands really give me this feeling, partly because they are so isolated and so foreboding in their appearance, partly because of their intense beauty. I absolutely cannot wait to go back!
No comments:
Post a Comment