Issue 15 - warmth! (eventually)
A possibly weekly email about what's been going on in my brain
26 February - 4 March 2023
This and future issues will be light on photos - my laptop suffered a fairly critical and likely unfixable failure this past week which has meant I've not been able to use Lightroom to do any photo editing. I don't want to oversell it, but the night when it all went wrong was tough, maybe the closest I've gotten to throwing in the towel on this whole odyssey. To call that laptop a lifeline for me would be an understatement. But, this wouldn't be an adventure if everything went to plan, so onward.
Ishigaki
My arrival on Ishigaki was... not the most auspicious. The journey from Nikko to Tokyo (train), to Haneda Airport (MONORAIL!), then to Ishigaki (plane) went smoothly enough, even using the automated check in proceeded without issue. Each stop on that journey I shed and stowed another layer of clothing as it got warmer the more south I went. The weather on landing early evening was despicable - 30mph winds, carbon grey clouds, and pelting rain. And I was supposed to drive thirty minutes from the airport into the heart of Ishigaki city.
For context: I only passed my driving test in February of last year (2022), and for various reasons (anxiety, environmental, situational) I haven't accrued a huge amount of experience since then. So renting a car for the first time, driving in a foreign country, in a car I'm not familiar with, on roads I don't know... I was nervous. And that weather was not helping.
But it went fine. Sure it took a while to actually start the car (a Toyota Aqua) - I learned in a manual turn-key-engine-goes-vroom car, this was an automatic hybrid with many, many controls - but the roads were quiet and despite the darkness and the rain and the wind, it was a smooth drive. And I may have parked like a twit at the hotel, but I'd been travelling since 8am that morning and I was exhausted and that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.
The weather for the first couple of days on the island was, unfortunately, similar to that evening; one of those days was eaten by laptop troubleshooting, and the other I exhausted all of the nearby indoor sights. So it was a relief when the sun came out on the third day and I travelled to the idyllic Taketomi island with a traditional Ryukyu village on it, then back on Ishigaki to the utterly lovely Kabira bay where they harvest black pearls (only one of two locations in Japan to do so).
Even with the initially foul weather, Ishigaki was really quite splendid, certainly not the introduction to the Okinawan islands that I expected! One minor regret I do have is that I didn't manage to sample the local speciality: Ishigaki beef. I certainly tried, but three nights in a row I made a circuit of the local yakiniku establishments at different times, only to be told by each they were all full. Now a smart person would have reserved a table after the first unsuccessful night, but... So Okinawa.
Okinawa
It's a short hop from Ishigaki to Okinawa island - only an hour on the plane - and before I knew it I was in Naha, the prefectural capital city.
And it is every bit the capital: taller buildings, denser streets, busier roads. The latter two of which I would experience up close when trying to navigate my rental car (a modern Toyota Corolla) around it. Leaving Naha to visit Churaumi Aquarium in the north was tricky enough with a myriad of traffic systems jostling for comprehension, but coming back during rush hour was heinous. Especially if, for instance, you change into the incorrect lane and you realise halfway over and the traffic has stopped, so you just get to marinate in the shame for a solid few minutes while a bus driver glares at you. Just a hypothetical example.
The aquarium itself was fantastic, vast clean tanks with a whale shark and manta rays being the key attractions with a huge variety of other water dwellers, including deep sea critters, on display as well. It's a far cry from Osaka's aquarium which is the last one I visited, and for good reason: cramped tanks and dirty, unhappy looking animals put me off visiting another without scrupulous research beforehand.
A half hour drive east onto Kouri island is the Ocean Tower, a kitschy 82 metre tower that trundles you up to its entrance on automated golf carts, depositing you into a shell "museum" (display cases filled with random shells) before you get to the look-out point. A fine view certainly, but not worth the drive if you're not already in the area.
With Shurijo Castle's main buildings destroyed by fire and the Peace Memorial Museum closed for renovations until April 30th, I headed to the ruins of Nakagusuku castle and Shikinaen Royal Gardens on my second day; a far more leisurely drive were it not for Google Maps' propensity for idiocy at the worst possible moments. No harm, just choice swears from me. The weather threatened to rain for the entire day but both places are wonderful bits of Okinawa's history and strolling around them was a fine way to spend my last day down south.
Side note: laptop failure
To summarise a fraught saga - my laptop stopped recognising the hard drive, and due to the way Windows 11 works, I can't access or boot from it externally. The drive itself seems to be fine (I've been backing things up scrupulously so data loss isn't much of a concern) but the laptop refuses to recognise any drive which is supremely concerning. For the moment I'm running Ubuntu from an external enclosure, meaning I can update my diary (a rambling brain dump of every day's activities), watch videos, make photo backups and the like, but with Darktable and RawTherapee nowhere near as powerful or user friendly as Lightroom, photo editing isn't currently possible without a lot of compromises.
All said and done, I'm heartbroken by that. It was one of the lynchpins of the holiday for me and a much needed creative outlet and, I think, it makes me a better photographer. So to not be able to do that is vexing. I'm trying to be sanguine about it because there's not much else I can try that I haven't already, but there's definitely a slow burning core of fury in me about the situation.
Going forward I'll try and use some decent "straight from the camera" shots to break up my ramblings here. But it will be a little like showing someone a first draft - you'll get the idea, but it's in rough shape. I can only ask for your understanding, and if I do manage to sort something out you better believe there'll be a bumper issue of photos that follow. Otherwise I may have a backlog of two months worth of editing to do on my return.
10-day itinerary
- 5th Mar - transfer to Yakushima
- 6th Mar - Yakushima
- 7th Mar - Yakushima
- 8th Mar - transfer to Kumamoto
- 9th Mar - transfer to Kurokawa Onsen
- 10th Mar - Kurokawa Onsen and Mount Aso
- 11th Mar - transfer to Nagasaki
- 12th Mar - Nagasaki
- 13th Mar - Nagasaki
- 14th Mar - transfer to Fukuoka
This was hand-crafted by John.