Finally... :D
Last Friday I left the main Island of Japan to go to Okinawa for a nice little holiday, which I had been looking forward to for a looooong time :D
Bording time?
The first thing which estonished me when I arrived at Nagoya Airport was the size of the plane they send down to Okinawa several times a day: a Boeing 747-400 or in other words a plane which has 3-4-3 seats in one row, and two stories... For a 2h inland flight...
For all of you who are not quite familiar with the location of Okinawa - here comes the map. The flight itself was very comfortable, I had an entire row at the emergency exit for myself! The weather was gorgeous, giving me the opportunity to see quite a bit of Okinawa from above. It was especially nice when we got lower and you could see the coral reefs in the crystal clear water... hmmmm, paradise... I could not wait to get out of the plane.
However, we kind of left Okinawa again, and the captain's slightly odd approach to Naha made me wonder whether I really caught the right plane or not, but I figured that probably all of the smaller and larger Islands south of Okinawa would bee a nice getaway as well :D
At the airport I was picked up by Doug who did not really seem to have any problem to figure out who I was ("Just look for the blond girl who lookes a little lost"). We headed to the boat, a bit north of Naha, to get out diving. I guess Doug must have thought that I was pretty weired almost jumping into the water in the harbour because I saw more colourful fishes there then I had ever seen in Oslo before...
For the first dive - which was my 30. in total :D - we went out to a place called "Naganu" (# 3 in the map below).
"We" being Dough, Chris, Hanako (Diveguides), Adrian (Australian though living in Japan) and I.
Doug and Chris
Adrian, looking forward to go DIVING ;-)
I could not wait to get into the water, it was so warm outside, the weather was perfect, the water so incredible clear and deep blue... On the first dive we got to see two seaturtles, a big steam of, according to Doug, "silver tasty fish" (bigeye trevalley)
and an huge amount of other cute fishes in all colors, formes and shapes you possibly can imagine. Diving in Okinawa sure is a bit different from diving the Oslo fjord... It was just amazing down there!!! I don't have that many great pictures from the first dive since I was still trying to figure out how to get the best shots with the underwater camera - but I think I improved slightly over the next 7 dives... :-) I got however a nice short clip of "Nemo" bravely defending its anemony, have a look: http://folk.uio.no/yvonner/Japan/ (Okinawa_1_Nemo)
No doubt - I had a great time!! :D
I don't really know what Adrian was talking about here... but let's just assume that he was elaborating on fish sizes with Chris...
For the second Dive we went to the Kamiyma Labyrinth, dive site # 1 on the map.
The underwater landscape was really beautiful, with canyons & caves etc.
Doug and Adrian entering a small "cave"
And again - the visibility amazed me a lot! Beeing used to fumble around in a maximum visibility of 10-15m on a good summerday in Oslo is just not comparable to 20-30m of the clearest deep blue water!!!! Not to speak of the temperatures... the water was around 23 degrees warm, compared to some 8-15 degrees in Oslo in summer, depending on how lucky you are...
I got to see just way to many corals, fishes and whatever lifeforms you can imagine to possibly be able to list them all... But here are some of the most beautiful ones/the ones that were slow enough so I could take a proper picture :p
A Lion fish
some "sjøpølse"
"Nemo"
a little Yellow Box Fish" (makan til lite "aquadynamikk" åss...)
a Clown Trigger Fish
and some other fish & sea creatures which I have not identified yet...
After we had finished diving for the day we returned, logged dives and had a couple of beers & snacks. (http://folk.uio.no/yvonner/Japan/ Okinawa_2_DiveLogging, unfortunately almost without sound, I guess the camera still was inside the underwater case :p).
Dive logging: Hanako and Chris
My 30th dive
A little later we watched the dive video from the previous couple of days. We had really great fun studying Adrian and Hanako trying to go backwards :D. By the way - this is not quite as trivial as it may sound... Have a look on http://folk.uio.no/yvonner/Japan/
(Okinawa_3_DiveTechnique)
Unfortunately, I had to leave just before 11pm to check into my hotel (just to make it before they closed the reception). I decided to go out to a pub next door to grab some food, & met a couple of american marines/air force and navy at the pub. We had a rather funny time... :p
At 2 pm I called it a night - I was still tired from having to get up really early in order to catch my flight from Nagoya.
