Summer Vacation

Trip Start Mar 18, 2004
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Trip End Apr 12, 2006


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Friday, August 12, 2005

At the beginning of our summer holidays, I was able to book rooms in a small villa on an island in Okayama Prefecture, about 600km west of Nagoya. The villa was part of Okayama's foreign tourism program, and thus was open only to "foreigners and their Japanese friends." Being foreigners, Chris and I took it upon ourselves to gather some Japanese friends and head to Shiraishi Island for three nights and four days to stay at the villa. Shiraishi is a small island in the Seto Inland Sea, the area that separates Honshu and Shikoku. It was a little like Georgian Bay, with small tree-topped islands poking out of the water and boats and jet-skiis whizzing around them. After a two-hour Shinkansen ride and a 30-minute ferry ride from the port at Kasaoka, we arrived at Shiraishi. The island was peppered with houses, most of them in traditional japanese style, with gardens in which fruits (particularly melons) and vegetables were being grown. The area closest to the ferry port was condensed into a small village, with winding alleys (no more than 5 feet across) serving as streets running between the walls of the houses 01 - Tomoko & Yoko
01 - Tomoko & Yoko
 . Along these narrow paths we would occasionally find a grocery store, or a post office, or some other kind of useful building, but private residences and their gardens took up the majority of the space. We had to walk through these streets to get to and from the villa, and they were really fun to ride our bikes through.

The villa itself was situated on top of a rather large hill, with a nice view of the bay and the beach. A 4-minute walk down the hill and between some vegetable gardens got us to the beach, where there were a few little restaurants and cafes, as well as a place renting kayaks and windsurfers by the hour. We spent most of our three days swimming or paddling around near the beach, or sitting on the deck up at the villa and playing cards or scrabble. It all felt very cottage-y and relaxing, although the cicadas and horseflies were the size of small birds.

Overall, it was a highly successful trip.
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