Yakushima pt 1

Well Golden week has come and gone but I figured it's about time I let you know what I got up to. I’ve become more than a little burned out with all this hard work so its good to finally get an opportunity to relax. Golden week is a bunch of Japanese holidays that are organised together to allow for the maximum amount of holiday time during the week, and many people take the extra intervening days off as well.

My first destination for golden week was to be the gorgeous, sub-tropical, island paradise of Yakushima. It lies a couple of hundred kilometers off the coast of Kyushuu, the southern most region of Japan’s mainland. The journey there itself was quite an adventure. Due to a miscommunication with my friend I  did not have a flight ticket booked to Kagoshima. Disaster. Thankfully Japanese trains are incredible so it turned out to be no problem whatsoever.

I took a 5am sleeper train out of Himeji followed by a 3 hour Shinkansen ride to Kagoshima, good job I like trains and the Shinkansen are more comfortable than planes anyway, you even get a charger point for your phone or laptop. Once at Kagoshima it was another twenty minutes on the bus to the port and then a two-hour jaunt on a high-speed jetfoil to reach Yakushima itself.

The boat ride itself was amazingly comfortable thanks to a very still sea. We were treated to some excellent views of the many Islands of Kyushuu’s coast along the way including an active volcano. Even more of a surprise at about halfway we were joined for a short while by a pod of dolphins.

Yakushima is a hugely impressive site upon arrival. It is predominantly mountain and from the coast you can see what appears to be an impenetrable wall of towering peaks. It also gets an incredible amount  of rainfall , about 10000mm a year, and as such is full to the brim of plant life.

It is the plant life in fact that Yakushima is most famous for, in particular the giant cedar trees, or Yakusugi (屋久杉)These towering green giants live for millennia and attract tourists from all across Japan, and the rest of the world, to visit and bask in the glories of nature.

The cedar themselves were once harvested for building materials, mostly to be fashioned into rough tiles. They are particularly tough, the wood itself is very hard and due to the consistency of the resin within also highly waterproof. Sadly this meant the great trees were felled in their hundreds for several centuries. Sometime in the Edo period however it was decided that they were a national treasure and should be preserved.

This has now been extended to giving around two thirds of the island natural world heritage site status and the trees are no longer cut down. Now people come to the island to trek through these, almost, virgin forests and escape the drudgery of everyday life. Whilst it isn’t the wonderful isolating experience one would hope for it is still astoundingly beautiful and Yakushima caters for everyone from the casual stroller to the hardcore mountaineer.

Once on the Island our first port of call, after the port, was to get to our accommodation. This was a little easier said than done. The Island buses were on a pretty irregular schedule and stopped running fairly early. This isn’t helped by the fact the island really only has one main road.

Still somehow we made it to the sleepy little town of Onoaida and our lodging for the next few days, Jerry’s Mandela campsite. It was a nice enough little place run by an elderly Dutchman called Rainer, who’d travelled the world it seemed and decided to settle on the island, and his wife (I assume though I didn’t ask) Naoko. They were both friendly and very helpful the whole time. I think had we not been so knackered from travelling and hiking it would have been nice to chat to them a bit more.

Settled in we then wandered around the village a bit. It really was very quiet, with a single shop and a couple of restaurants. Apparently it had been a bit more of a hub of activity in the past with the southern administrative office being situated here but this, along with most of the official buildings had been moved to Miyanoura.

We wandered around a bit more before attempting to get to the coast. As I mentioned Yakushima is almost exclusively mountain so there is not much space to build inland. With a bit of clambering we got down to the sea and I was hit with another wave of nostalgia. Sitting on those large granite outcroppings and peering into rock pools took me right back to childhood trips around the Wirral and into Wales. It helped that the weather was absolutely beautiful as well.

As the sun began to set we made our way back up to the guesthouse and started making plans for tomorrow. Thanks to the quirky bus schedule it’d be a pretty early start, those buses were the bane of my existence I need to learn to drive. Since we’d been up at 4am that morning and not really stopped since it wasn’t long before we ventured into the land of nod, softly dreaming of the wonders to come. 

Mata kondo ne