“Feels like a typhoon is coming, doesn’t it?”
“It does?” I turned left to look at my elderly walking companion in the dark and windy Yoron night.
Noboru pursed his lips and nodded gravely. “Hai. This is typhoon season, you know,” he replied. Hai is Japanese for yes.
I’d come to Yoron island after reading the five short lines about it in my guidebook. The description sounded just like a place I’d love to experience, and when I landed here, the 20.8 square-kilometre island more than met my expectations with its quiet charm and picturesque land and seascapes.
My snorkeling experience here is among the best I’ve had to date, considering the colour of the corals and the hundreds of colourful fish. Also, Yoron was also the place I dived for the first time ever! A special attraction here is the white-sand Yurigahama island, which surfaces every day off the coast of Yoron during low tide.
Noboru and I communicated fairly well combining sign language and broken English. He was not only the same age as my father, but just as health-conscious as my old man! He did a round around the island every evening, and it took him a little more than an hour.
A bus runs around the ring road every hour, but the last one is at half-past-six in the evening, and that was two hours ago. In 2014, which is when I was visiting, the only town on Yoron, Chabana, was next to the pier, and my guest house happened to be on the other side of the island.
I had come to town in the evening to visit a particular pub (that my guidebook recommended) and was heading back after trying out yusen, a local liquor made from sugarcane.
It had been cloudy and windy all day, and the walk was pleasant. We spoke a little about our families and I got to know that Noboru had a son who lived in Tokyo. When we reached my stay, I thanked him for walking with me before parting ways.
At the guest house, I found all the other guests sitting together with our host, Miyojoso, who had opened a big bottle of yusen — the very booze that I had gone to the town to try — and furnished some baked potato and fish to go with it.
It was a lively bunch and even though all the rest of them were Japanese, they often switched to whatever little English they knew so that I could be a part of the conversation. There was the very handsome Shinichi, who was deaf and mute; the girls Akiko and Chiho, the latter had gone snorkelling with me the previous day; and the guys, Yusuke and Daisuke.
Both Miyojoso and Daisuke alternatively played the Sanshin, a musical instrument from this region (Okinawa and Amami Islands). It has a snakeskin-covered body, three strings, and is somewhat similar to a banjo.
Two days later, I met Ryosuke at the pier, when the both of us were waiting for the ship to take us to Kagoshima. Most of the last two days had been windy, and it seemed to be gradually picking up. We found a man standing at the edge of the pier with an instrument in his hand that rotated fast — apparently measuring wind speed.
I told Ryosuke, who was around the same age as I was, about what Noboru had told me on our walk. He agreed that it did seem that way.
Officials of the ferry company too appeared to be thinking on the same lines. They decided that it would be best if the ship didn’t dock at Yoron on this day, and the next several days.
The vessel operated between Naha, the capital of Okinawa prefecture, and the city of Kagoshima, with several stops on the way. The ship had already left Naha and Yoron was its first stop. However, since it’s a fairly big ship operating on the overnight route, every stop would eat up at least an hour. The company wanted the boat to safely reach Kagoshima before the typhoon hit.
Consequently, we saw our blue-and-white vessel speed by right in front of our eyes while we stood on the pier.
The company immediately refunded our tickets, packed the few waiting passengers in a van, and dropped us at the tiny airport on the island.
At the crowded little airport, Ryosuke and I found all flights to Japan’s main islands already booked for the next eight days! Yet, on the flight to Kagoshima later that evening, they put us on a reservation against cancellation list — just like Indian Railways does — but predictably, we were told about a hour or so later that no one had cancelled, so that plan wasn’t working out.
We met Daisuke from my guest house, who was flying to Naha. Being the capital of Okinawa prefecture, the airport there was bigger, and we thought we would have better chances of getting flights from there the next day. So, even though Naha was in the opposite direction of the way we planned to head, we bought (very expensive) tickets on the only available flight out of Yoron.
We still had some five hours to kill before our flight, and the three of us went to have lunch at a local restaurant. Daisuke and Ryosuke ordered for me. We had thick soba noodles in soup with seaweed. Just outside of the restaurant was a car standing on its side with a notice in Japanese stuck on its bottom.
When I asked them what was written, they told me it said a previous typhoon had turned the car on its side that way! I fully understood why people around here took their typhoons seriously.
We chatted about my travels and about our lives over lunch. Neither of them had been out of Japan, even though Daisuke, an avid diver, had travelled extensively across his country, and the nearby Palau.
“We still have a few hours to kill. What is it that you want to do,” Ryosuke asked me, before adding, “My treat!”
I protested but he’d hear nothing of it. When I said I had no clue, he called a taxi, and the three of us drove down to a place, that reminded me a lot of Greece pictures I’d seen. It was a green hillside facing the sea with white buildings dotting it. We found a popular cafe called Umi Cafe — a cute white building with a dark blue door. We went inside, took some pictures and Ryosuke bought tea for all of us.
The flight to Naha took twenty minutes. Both Ryosuke and I wanted to buy tickets for our flight the following day right when we reached. But all airline counters at the airport were closed (they apparently close at 8pm, and it was after 8:30pm when we reached).
Daisuke had booked his stay at a hostel and we decided to tag along. On the way to the city from the airport on a monorail (it was my first monorail ride), looking out of the window, I loved how the place looked.
Realising that I had landed in Naha by chance, I decided right then to stay in the city another day before taking my flight back.
At the ramshackle hostel, which turned out my cheapest stay in Japan, I found the owner and the motley group of guests sitting in the small lobby, drinking and talking together. We joined them, and everyone gave an introduction in English for my benefit.
Afterwards, the three of us went to a nearby bar where we ordered, among other things, Umibudo, which is sea grape — basically a kind of seaweed that pops in your mouth when you bite. With the change in islands, the default alcohol had also changed to the rice wine awamori from the sugarcane-made yusen in Yoron.
And the best thing was that you only had to order the food, the awamori was free of charge.