After spending the night in Kagoshima, I travelled to the island Yakushima. Yakushima is in the south of Japan, so imagine you go island hopping from Kyushu, you end up in Yakushima first and eventually you end up in Okinawa. The island is simply beautiful, it’s also a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site and it is really worth visiting, and definitely worth the trickiness to get there! In case you’re thinking of visiting the island, I used this website a lot, though back then it was only a website and the book hadn’t been published.
Anyway, I went with the ferry from Kagoshima to Yakushima. I was being kind of dumb so I couldn’t find the ferry terminal at first, but fortunately I arrived on time. It took a few hours to get to Yakushima and included a stop at Tanegashima. We also passed by the island Sakurajima, which is a still active vulcano.
So anyway, I arrived at the port in Anbo, and then needed to get to the tourist information center. Clueless as to where it was, I asked one of the other passengers that had just left the ferry. The girl told me she was heading that way too, so we went together. After I got lots of information and a two-day bus pass for the island, the girl actually offered to take me to my hotel and offered to take me along as she drove around the island. So I was super grateful for that, because it is so much more convenient to explore the island by car! She was very kind as well, and even though her English wasn’t great and my Japanese even worse, we got along great :)
We drove around and stopped at a few beautiful waterfalls: Senpiro no taki and Ohko no taki. We also stopped at the coastline and other interesting sights. We also saw cute monkeys on our way, that were just lounging on the road as if there was no car near. The temperature was lovely (around 20 degrees celcius in December!) and it felt like I was on a tropical island. Around seven my brand-new friend dropped me off at my hotel, Shiki no Yado Onoaida. Staying there was great, the owner spoke perfect English and the food was all traditional, local food which gave me the opportunity to try out a lot of Japanese food. The room was very big and the bathroom luxurious, so that was a great change compared to the youth hostels I had been staying in before!
Unfortunately, it already turns dark at seven pm at Yakushima, and with “dark” I don’t mean twilight or anything, but complete darkness! However, I was very tired from travelling all day, so an early night was quite nice.
