Miyakojima Travel Report – Part 1
Arriving at Haneda airport, I realized that it’s been a hell of a long time that I would board a domestic flight. Last time was probably a flight to Osaka on a business trip a good ten years ago. All other domestic traveling usually happens by train or to all the islands off Tokyo via ship.
Therefore I found it kinda weird that nobody even wanted to see my fresh, new 48-page passport when boarding the first plane to Okinawa. I also heavily miscalculated how long it takes to get to Naha. I thought the flight takes 90 min, oh…. It takes two and a half hours, not one and a half. Japan is bigger – longer than you might think.
From Naha then it took another 40 minutes to get to Miyako island. Well, it’s sort of next door to Taiwan already, where I was last year for Golden Week.
Riding a car is still a major challenge for me and I was very nervous because of it and woke up early. Now what? I was supposed to pick up my rental car at noon. (Since the return flight was also around noonish, I didn’t want to pay for an additional day for a few hours and thus rented the thing from noon to noon.) Going to the rental place by taxi would have taken fifteen minutes… So I walked the five kilometers to the car rental! It made me appreciate going to have a car and it also gave me a nice first impression of my surroundings.
I arrived at the rental place at 11:30, had a bit of downtime, then got the car. It was my first time in a Honda N-Box of course and I drove the first hundred meters with hand break on, parked at the side and searched for the bloody thing! Lol. It was a foot break, so no wonder it took time to find it.
Then I was ready for adventure and drove north to a beach called Sunayama, very pretty, and then on to the lonely cape of the main island, then back home, in total some 40 km, not bad for me. Most of the roads were easy and traffic was sparse, max speed limit I encountered was 50 km 
This island proves to be the same or even worse than Izu Oshima, no way to get around without a car. It’s too big for getting around by bicycle, at least for my pace and stamina.
The parking back at the hotel was a nightmare. I almost hit another car, and almost a pillar. there were maybe three centimeters left before hitting something! I needed a good fifteen minutes of maneuvering before I stood somehow right. Jeez! Nice practice!
I met the lady who is in charge of the premises later and we discussed about the parking and she said, oh, I had thought you’d park in that spot nose first, while I had tried back first! Lol.
We negotiated another spot (the pic below) and that proved to be not much but at least a little bit easier to get into, especially because of no danger of hitting another car, just pillars and walls. I must admit that it helped immensely that nobody was watching my parking endeavors! Lol.
After riding some 40 km on the first day, it was 55 km on the second. Apart from the island of Miyako itself, there are four inhabited islands around it which are connected to Miyako by three bridges. I tackled the biggest bridge and the biggest separate islands first, which are called Irabu and Shimoji. Those two are only a stone throw apart from each other and three tiny bridges lead from Irabu to Shimoji. Heard around 800 are people living there. Shimoji even has an air strip. On both islands it was for the most part very lonely. That’s how I like driving, with no one else around!
Lol. Very nice scenery with lonely beaches and sink-hole-like ponds and my favorite spot, the rock-dotted bay. To the north of Irabu are maybe 50 meter high cliffs. Wandering out there, I fell and bumped my knee pretty bad, sigh. Back over the bridge I had still too much time on my hands and went to a small mangrove forest. But then I got tired of driving, it still costs so much of my energy, and rode home.
More pics on Flickr later, at the moment there is upload trouble, hmpf…
A few words about the island people.
Many still greet you in the streets and not only because I am a foreigner. Then I twice met a 70 year old grandpa from Saitama prefecture on his bike who even spoke two sentences of German. Next I met a couple from Kanagawa, where I live too on the lookout parking bay on top of the bridge, then two elderly men at the Irabu cliffs. Not only the tourists talk to each other, also the islanders greet you. Very nice, that didn’t happen in the Izu islands I so far visited, nor on Ogasawara. Must be outer Okinawan island flair More next week 
