Despite my best efforts to remain an object of singular rarity and therefore capture maximum sexy-foreigner cool points, from time to time people manage to make their way down to this island for one reason or another. Sometimes they are here entirely of their own volition, and their decision to come here is in no way related to my presence on this island.  I hate these people, because often I do not even know they were on the island, until everyone else on the island is telling me my brother sure drinks a lot, or my sister is really pretty.

More often than not though, if other gaijin (oh snap, take that political correctness!) show up on this island it is entirely because of me.  Two such gaijin showed up over the last week, and another is coming in on the 4:30 am ferry tomorrow morning. In exchange for getting up and meeting him at the ferry port at this god-forsaken hour, he is acting as a Western-camping-goods equivalent of a drug mule.  The regional licensing and distribution agreements we’re breaking could easily get us killed by a powerful cabal of backwoods suppliers, but there is no way I’m running around the country for 3 weeks without really fancy underwear.

Anyway, since I am in kind of a “not really doing anything particularly blog worthy” stretch right now, and may very well not bother posting anything until I’m done looking at temples, drinking with salary-men, and trying to find a minor Japanese noble who can get me into the imperial palace for the next 3-4 weeks, I figured you might like to see a few of the photos from the adventures here on Kikai.  Be forewarned, they involve puns in Japanese.

Let’s get started.

In Which Old Friends Visit

For those of you not in my immediate circle of family members and friends I have known since I was six, the gentleman agreeing emphatically with the signage is Eli. In Japanese we would be what is called osananajimi (幼馴染) which we can clearly see from the kanji means childhood-experienced-dye. Sometimes kanji do not translate well.  You could call it “childhood friends” in English, or just “guys you cannot seem to get rid of, even when you move to the opposite side of the globe, and then hide on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere”. Eli lives in Kagoshima, a short 13-hour boat ride away, doing more or less the exact same thing I am.  Or at least he does for another few days. Before he returns to America-land he just had to see the weird little chunk of land I was living on these days.

We went diving about 4 hours after he stepped off the ferry, but since I am a total waste of bottled air, I do not yet have a camera which works underwater so you will have to take my word that Eli performed admirably.

Also, for those of you who are curious as to what exactly the giant finger sign is pointing to, it is in fact this tree:

Now depending on which Board of Tourism you ask, this is either the 2nd largest Banyan tree in Japan, the largest Banyan tree in Japan, or the largest tree in the world.  There were some translation issues in some of the tourism literature. Enough said.

Aside from looking at particularly large flora, (and fauna, the Kikai giant spiders are back with a vengeance this summer) we also managed to make our way up to Hyakunoudai which is a park/vantage point up near the highest point on the island.  Here is a picture of Eli looking pensive and contemplating the deep mysteries of the sea, as well as the transitory nature of human life, and the ephemeral beauty of clouds:

And here is a picture of me pretending to be Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic:

Why yes, those are in fact bright orange shorts that come down to the middle of my calf. Thank you for noticing.

After climbing up to the top of the island, and checking out the weird little cave system on the island (not particularly photo-worthy) we drove over to Butterfly Road, which actually has a lot more giant spiders than butterflies right now (and now we know why the spiders are so giant), but also has one of the weirdest “careful, ______ crossing” signs on the world:

The five characters of the sign read: Cho ni Cho Chui. The Japanese word for butterfly is Cho, the 2nd Cho is a word meaning “totally, extremely, very” which is particularly popular among high-school girls, and Chui means “careful”.  But since the little kid version of Butterfly is Cho-Cho, the sign is in fact an elaborate pun in Japanese, which we all find just hilarious. You can’t really explain puns in foreign languages, so you will have to trust my words and Yoda-san’s smiling face. Does he not look amused!?

We also managed to make it out to Suigira beach for a little bit of swimming and snorkeling, but Eli was only on the island for a day and a half, so it was pretty brief unfortunately. Here’s a photo of the beach though.

All of the middle school boys were diving off of those coral islands on the right, as part of an elaborate island ritual of manhood. For some reason when they were scared they jumped in really really close to the jagged wall of coral , which made for some harrowing “oh god, there’s going to be blood everywhere” moments. Fortunately, nothing actually went awry.

We also made it out to my favorite little live-house (bar + music) where one of the island kids who grew up and moved to Kobe happened to be playing.  Unfortunately one of the guys she was touring with was just god-awful, and she was really nervous for some reason.  She has an odd quirk of laughing uncontrollably and breaking into spontaneous sing-conversation in the middle of songs when she gets nervous.  It was funny for the first half, then it got kind of painful.

Still, good times had all around, during Eli’s brief taste of island life.

In Which a Couchsurfer Somehow Makes Her Way to Kikai

Kerry is a couchsurfer, a generally fantastic group of people I have been associated with to varying degrees for about 2 years now. Here is the customary successful couch surf “actually surfing on the couch” photo:

Kerry for some reason, on her first trip outside of Europe, on her first time in Japan, decided to come down to Kikai and hang out for 3 or 4 days.  I’ll write more about couchsurfing at some point I’m sure, but for now go check the website out and poke around.  It’s  a very cool idea, and so far I have had nothing but amazing luck with it.  Everyone I meet through the site has been amazing and weird in the best way possible. I mean take Kerry. She’s from England, has lived up north on the Shetland Islands, and currently lives in the Canary Islands.  There is nothing in her history which would suggest an unhealthy attraction to small islands, it’s just how things developed in her life.

We had a blast hanging out with all the island weirdos, and I got to practice interpreting which was actually a lot of fun. If would consider doing it professionally, if doing it professionally didn’t include wearing suits, and not saying “Oh hell, what do you call that in English?” every time I can’t think of a word.

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Some day I’ll have to start writing about the island in earnest, but for now hopefully this gives you some small idea of the weird world in which I find myself.  Seeing as how I have to be up and at least questionably lucid in a very short number of hours, I think I might go pass out on something.  Talk to you all again in about a month, unless I get ambitious from the road.