Ikei Island

So this is a non polish related post, but I wanted to share some pictures with you. If you aren't interested turn back now hehe. This is going to be pretty picture heavy too, I had a hard time only picking a few photos to post out of the almost 500 taken between my husband and I. (Most of those are his fault :P)

Anyways, on the weekend my husband and I went exploring a bit, we went out to some of the outlying islands, in particular Ikei Island. It was a beautiful day and I felt like I was in a little piece of paradise, I'm truly lucky to be where I am! We ended up at Ikei Beach around 5pm or so, the beach was empty except for 3 other swimmers, my guess is they were actually closed for the day but the owners let us go check it out anyways. We wandered the beach and took pictures for a while, I have to go back and spend a day there soon. I thought I'd share some of the pictures with you :)

Now, the island I live on, Okinawa, is a very small island itself. It's roughly 70 miles long and 7 miles wide. We're about 950 miles south of Tokyo and the climate is considered subtropical, which means even in winter it's pretty darn nice out :) If Okinawa is small, Ikei is teeny tiny. You drive there over a long land bridge and two other islands connected by bridges. Once you hit that first land bridge it feels like you just left reality and hit paradise, it's so incredibly beautiful and seemingly isolated. Anyways, on with the pictures :P

This is an Okinawan family tomb. You see these all over the island in some of the most random places. They'll be in the middle of a bunch of houses, scattered through the parks, up on uninhabited hills, or tucked into secluded spots overlooking the ocean. They're almost as abundant as the vending machines :P 

I love this picture, it reminds me of playing Gran Turismo on the Playstation lol! 

 A photo my husband took, the rock looks like a lizard :P

 The dock on Ikei Beach.

 Ikei Beach.

 Ikei Beach.

 My husband snapping photos on the beach :P

 This is all coral. It was almost magical, as the waves came in it pushed coral up onto the beach and as they went out you could hear the coral tinkling. It sounded like chimes :)

 The sand is so soft that as soon as you step into the water you sink lol. Pretty much any step in the water has you in sand up to your ankles :P

 The beach. If you look really hard you can see me standing at the dock :P

 Oh. There I am lol.

 This is across the road from the beach, there was a boat launch there so we had to take a couple pictures there too.

 A mushroom rock. You see these a lot along the coast of Okinawa. I don't know if there's a proper name for them but they're really cool.

 A funky tropical plant. No clue what it is.

 Nakabaru Vestige. This is remains from a village approximately 2500-2000 years old. There's lots of little sets of ruins like this around these islands. All those little bunches of rocks were actually houses. They're about the size of a small closet lol.

 A really cool evening sky line. I loved how dense the clouds were back there, they almost looked like a second tree line :)

 One of a pair of Shisa dogs guarding the bridge to Ikei. Actually this is on the Ikei side so I guess they're guarding the bridge to Miyagi island :P 

And his mate on the other side of the road.

So, if anyone managed to make it through all these I hope you enjoyed them :) I absolutely love living in such a beautiful part of the world and I like to share that once in a while. Sometimes I do miss living somewhere that speaks english. The people here are so incredibly nice but I don't speak much Japanese and it's a difficult language to learn so I do a lot of pointing and pantomime lol. However, I wouldn't trade this experience for anything!!

Thanks for looking :)

Meeka