The Long Way Home: Okinawa

Our final stop on the long way home was Okinawa, or as Michael likes to call it, "Japan's Hawaii". Located about 750 km south of the "main" Japanese islands, the Okinawan islands were, until 1879, the seat of the Ryukyu kingdom which incorporated cultural elements from China, Japan, and various south Pacific islanders.  Held as a Japanese colony until 1912 when it's inhabitants were formally granted representation in the national government, Okinawa is now a (usually) sunny tropical getaway and also home to a major US military presence.

After "roughing it" in Borneo for two weeks we decided to take it easy at a seaside resort.   We remembered pretty quickly that we're not really resort people, especially when the resort has as many fiddly rules as the ones in Japan.  It didn't help that there was a typhoon blowing in and so it was pretty cloudy and cool the whole time we were there. 

The hermit crab racetrack was pretty neat, though.

Our first night out we escaped the resort and found a fun Izakaya, or Japanese pub, up on the main road.  We got an array of sushi and noodles, and Michael discovered Awamori: Okinawan rice brandy.

Hooray for sushi in Japan!

Somehow our children got pulled into an origami lesson from the Japanese grandmother at the next table over

The next day, with the weather still crummy and the troops restless, we decided to brave the Okinawan mass transit system and go to visit a promising Soba noodle shop and the local cultural village.  Unsurprisingly, the bus system was great.  It was still Japan, after all.

The noodle shop had goats on their roof, a wide assortment of musical instruments lying around, and we got to order way too much food from a vending machine.  The food doesn't come out of the vending machine, that's just where you get the tickets to hand to the waiter who has been hovering over your shoulder while you try to figure out which buttons correspond to what food using Google Translate.  I'm sure this solution is more efficient in most circumstances, since we saw it at every hole-in-the-wall restaurant we went to.

Japan is super great.  The end.

"What the heck are Juicy Noodles?!"

After lunch we visited the cultural village, where the kids did handicrafts and then a scavenger hunt.

Middle child has opinions

We also found a fortune-telling tree, and all dropped coins in the box to get our horoscope that we could tie around the railing at the right zodiac symbol.

Three of us are "sheep", which is probably either really good or really bad.

There was the obligatory lion dance and musical performance.

Okinawa is actually closer to Taiwan than it is the rest of Japan, so there were a lot of Chinese cultural influences

And Maxwell found an animal to pet.  The village was comprised of historic buildings gathered from all over Okinawa and brought to this site to show the traditional architecture and way of life of the Ryukyu people.

Why yes, it was raining

Finally, treasure hunt complete and afternoon ice cream consumed, we headed back to the resort.

The next day we decided to walk up the coast to investigate something on the map labeled "Glassworks".  On the way we had a delicious cafe lunch and way too much dessert, and collected shells and played in a stream on a relatively deserted stretch of beach.

Ice Kachang meets S'Mores

A fine Borchert tradition

The region of Okinawa we were in was known for its glass, and the glassworks we found was merely one of many such institutions catering to tourists.  We declined to do our own glass-blowing (apparently you can spend a fair amount of money to have people shout urgent instructions at you in Japanese!) and just toured the showroom and eventually found a mirror maze up on the second floor.

America Time!

Never found the crystal minotaur, though

For our last dinner in Okinawa we went to a Yakiniku restaurant, where Michael and the big kids cooked meat and veggies over a little grill in the center of the table.  The kids all got to try the Wagyu A5 beef, but Michael declined to let them try to cook it.  Middle child was pretty terrified of the flame at first, but he warmed up to it.

Fire makes everything better.  Even vegetables!

Totally accurate

The next morning we took a taxi back to the airport, listening to the American military radio station the whole way in.  Then it was off to Tokyo, and onto our very last plane, good old Delta Airlines winging us back to Minneapolis, Minnesota.

On our way home!

Thanks everyone for following along with our adventures!  We've enjoyed having you look over our shoulders as we've explored Asia, even though we feel like we've only scratched the surface.  It was truly an amazing opportunity, and we'd love to tell you more about it or help you plan your adventure if you're ever headed to that part of the world!  We're largely settled back in to our lives in the US by this point, so don't hesitate to reach out if you're local and we haven't had a chance to connect yet, and if you're not local, you're always welcome to come visit!

The Long Way Home: Bako National Park

With the music wrapped up it was time to say goodbye to our jungle lodging and return to the hustle and bustle of Kuching.

Conquering boulder beach

Back in town we did some souvenir shopping and our last laundry of the trip!

The hornbill is a sacred omen in much of SE Asia.  Danger Monkey is unimpressed.

The gentleman on the left had strong opinions about temperature settings.

Our flight to our last hop on the long way home left late at night, so we decided to spend the day visiting the Bako National Park just a little ways to the east.  The park covers a large peninsula and is home to a variety of native and endangered species.  It has no roads into it, and so the only access is from the coast by boat.  We took a taxi ride to the ferry terminal where there seemed to be a number of competing "official" ferry services, and eventually hired a boat to drop us off at the visitor center and then pick us back up at a bay a few kilometers down the trail.

The visitor center had a bare-bones cafeteria, a camping registration desk, and kind of a lot of "wild" animals.  We saw herds of bearded pigs that seemed to have become pretty accustomed to humans, a lone proboscis monkey sitting in a tree, and a green viper chilling in a bush.

Low tide makes for a long walk

Looks like someone has a regular feeding spot

The staff claimed the viper was "very friendly".

Then it was off down the trail.  The trail itself was an amazing track of roots and cliffs and trees and wildlife.  We saw ant trails that stretched for a hundred meters, families of monkeys crashing through the canopy, and this super-awesome caterpillar:

No worse than a typical BWCA portage

Ants.  All the bugs in Borneo were 10x the size of bugs in Minnesota.

We found a swing!

Not pictured: her Pineapple Majesty getting stuck at the top.

Apparently Michelle Yeoh beat us here.

There are like 10 monkeys in this picture, I swear.

Eventually we reached the spine of the peninsula, and found the top was dry and barren!  Bako park is notable for containing a surprising number of climactic zones, from mangrove forests at the shoreline to lush jungle on the lower slopes to cloud forest filled with epiphytes and orchids in the upper reaches to this alien rocky and sandy arid savannah on the top of the ridge.

Suddenly parking lot

We assumed the boardwalk is there to protect some endangered microbial environment.  Or maybe it just gets really muddy when it rains?

We eventually made it to Telok Pandan Kecil, the bay where we would meet our ride home.  There was a stunning overlook built on top of a profoundly strange rock formation that looked more like mushrooms and tree roots than anything else.

Danger Monkey rides again!

Non-zero chance that middle child is standing on an enormous alien brain

We climbed down about 500 feet of rickety steps and spent some time cooling off in the ocean and exploring the cliffs and estuaries before getting back in the boat.  On the way back we did some sightseeing of the geological formations that the guide insisted we see.

Mandatory tourist photo

After getting back we called a car, zipped back to the hotel to collect our mountain of luggage, and then off to the airport where we found out our flight had been moved up an hour and we were the last ones to board!  Luckily it was a small airport and the staff were amazingly helpful (Michael now considers his karmic relationship with Malaysia Airlines square after they stranded him in rural Malaysia on his birthday once) and so we were able to make it on board.  We had a hop to Kuala Lumpur to change planes, and then a red-eye to Tokyo for our connection to Okinawa, the last stop on our trip!

The Long Way Home: Rainforest World Music Festival

The linch-pin of our entire trip back to the US was the Rainforest World Music Festival, a huge gathering of traditional musicians from all over the world for a 3-day event full of indiginous art, crafts, and of course music.  It's held under the shadow of Mount Santubong at the Sarawak Cultural Village, about 45 minutes outside of Kuching.  We were staying at a jungle resort a few minutes' walk down the road; close enough we could hear the sound check!

Obligatory

Our digs.  You can barely see our breakfast building peeking through the jungle...

Couldn't have asked for a better venue

Pretty relaxing, even on the busy days

They had multiple stages with performances, introductory sessions for dance, drumming, and traditional instruments, panels with the musicians, and all sorts of great local food and hands-on crafts.  The festival pays special attention to highlighting the culture of Sarawak, and over the last 20 years has been responsible for a huge surge in the local music scene of traditional instruments and styles.

Tribal dancers just chillin' in the background

Chinese fan dancing lesson

Middle Child shows off his skills with the Sape, the traditional stringed instrument of Sarawak

Batik painting

Our favorite bands were a Maori group called "Wai" that was a family band (down to the 10-year-old percussionist) that combined traditional songs and word games with a more modern hip-hop feel, Oki/Kila which was a collaboration between an Ainu tribesman from northern Japan (Oki) with a traditional Irish band (Kila) playing original music, and a group of string players calling themselves "The Violins of the World" which featured a french classical guitarist, a Swedish Nyckelharpa player, a Mongolian morin khuur (like a 2-string square cello) player, and Guo Gan, one of the world's premier erhu players all playing original compositions which frequently included Mongolian throat-singing.

Oki on his own, thrashing on his electric tonkori

Fangirl shot with Wai

Wai on the Theater Stage

There was also a Chilean ballet company that had dedicated themselves to keeping alive the dance traditions of Rapa Nui (also known as Easter Island), a band from the Canary Islands, and a group from the Sangtam Naga tribe in northeastern India that had one foot in the Hindu cultures of the Indian subcontinent but also a foot in the indigenous animist cultures of south-east Asia demonstrating their traditional dances and songs. 

Sangtam Naga tribe doin' a dance

Overall, there was an amazing amount going on at all times.  Everywhere we turned there were world-class musicians and performers from every corner of the globe sharing their culture with an energy that pictures and youtube videos can't really convey.  Some of the more energetic performers we caught:

Her Pineapple Majesty is being taught how to shake her hips by the band from Mauritius

Mandatory drum circle

Someone has music festivals figured out.

Hell yeah.

Almost done in Borneo!  After the RWMF was done we had another two days in Kuching, so decided to visit the Bako national park.  Stay tuned for the next post!