We woke up early that day, to catch a bus to Yoshihara, which is in the North part of the island. The plan is to meet people from Apnea adventures and to go sea kayaking with them. We discovered them on the internet, and we called them a few days earlier to book the trip. The woman we got on the phone, Miyuki, was very friendly and helpful and spoke good english. When we left Ishigaki bus terminal, the weather was not good : grey sky and rain was threatening...

Since the beginning of our stay in Japan, we have Yakult for breakfast almost every day. What is Yakult ? To french people, it could be described as an equivalent of Actimel. But it is a much older product for japanese people. A little bit of history: Yakult (ヤクルト, : Yakuruto) is a Japanese probiotic milk-like product made by fermenting a mixture of skimmed milk with a special strain of the bacterium Lactobacillus casei Shirota. It wa...

Contrary to what we expected, the weather in Ishigaki and the Yaeyama islands is not always sunny ! Today has been the proof of that, unfortunately. We first decided to go to the tourist office to get information on the things to see on the islands. Most of the documentation there was in Japanese, but we were happy to find there a young woman speaking pretty good english. She gave us a few papers in english, and also tried and called several car rental offices ...

After more than 2 weeks in the main islands of Japan (Honshu and Kyushu as far as we are concerned), we decided to make a change of scenery and head for the most southern part of Japan : Okinawa prefecture. More specificaly, we will spend 5 days in the Yaeyama Islands, the most southern and most western islands of the archipelago. The Yaeyamas are far closer to Taiwan (125 kilometers) than to Okinawa Island, much less the Japanese mainland. The islands form th...

3 am. Time to go to bed ? It could be so on regular vacation. But today, it was the time when we woke up! Why so early ? Because we wanted to go and have a look at Tsukiji Market. Best known in English as the "Tokyo Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market", Tsukiji Market is the biggest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world and also one of the largest wholesale food markets of any kind. The market opened at 5am in Tokyo, so we had to leave Tsukuba at ...