Okinawa

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Once the immigration process is complete we are on our way an hour late. The day is sunny and the temperature is 64. It is a perfect day for touring. Our guide is Hatsuea (call me Sue). Sue speaks English fluently and appears to love what she does which makes our day quite wonderful. She is assisted by Nana.
Nana is about 4’8” and weighs about 85 lbs. Her duty is to insure the group stays together and the count is right. Her English is limited but her smiles are not. We take to calling her “our sheep dog” as at every stop she herds the group along and rounds up stragglers.
We leave the pier and drive through downtown Naha, the capital. It is an intriguing city. The architecture is totally random, tall buildings and small jumbled together. There is lots of traffic. The signs are primarily in Japanese but a few are in English. Private homes have a pair of temple dogs guarding the entrance. The entrance of even the most modest homes or apartments is decorated with pots of flowers, ferns or palms. The streets are clean and if there is graffiti I don’t recognize it because it would be in Japanese.
As we drive into the countryside, every available plot of land is under cultivation; sugar cane, vegetables, flowers or fruit. There are small cow barns here and there. The climate is temperate with high humidity and crops grow well in the volcanic soil. A farmer in a conical hat working his plot of land by hand could be a photo out of a pre-war magazine. The terrain is hilly with steep slopes and deep valleys. It looks like a Japanese print come to life.
Our first stop is Okinawa World, a cultural theme park and site of the Gyokusendo Cave. It is the larges cave of it’s kind in Asia and is renowned for its limestone formations. Over 900,000 stalagmites and stalactites (who counted them) are contained along the two miles of cave. It would have been very impressed if I had not visited Karchner Caverns in Arizona. This cave can’t hold a candle to Karhner. First the formations are all grey and beige and look like concrete. Color is added by means of spotlights with rotating gels. It looks, as it is, artificial. It is a wet cave and streams run along the bottom. I saw a couple of fish standing watch and an eel.
In order to provide access and head room, the formations were sawed off. This reminded me of the extraordinary efforts Arizona made to insure that the caverns were protected for which we all should be grateful. I heartily recommend a visit to Karchner Cavern. It is really magical. Reservations must be made in advance as access is strictly limited. Now back to Okinawa.
Okinawa World has demonstrations of the culture and articles for sale. There are musical instruments, blown glass, textiles and local beer. The strangest is snake sake! A coiled snake lies in the bottom of the bottle of sake. It is really creepy yet my fellow passengers buy it. We have a few minutes to enjoy a cultural show before it’s back on the bus.
We follow Sue who is carrying a blue flag with our bus number on it. We have seen these flags in Japanese tour groups in Hawaii and thought “how quaint” but here I am grateful to have one. Nana is rounding up the strays. When we board the bus she does her head count, always bowing to us from the front of the bus. She is really adorable.
Our next stop is the Okinawa Peace Memorial Museum.

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