The breakfast provided amazing selections but we only had 30 minutes to enjoy as we had to take a taxi to the ferry terminal for the 7:45 am sailing to the UNESCO designated island. The round trip fare costed more than our air tickets from Okinawa to Kagoshima (15000 yen per person)! It took slightly more than two hours to get there.
The original plan was to drive around the island once as it should take about two hours to complete the loop. We drove to the star attraction of the island - Kigen giant cedar that is about 3000 years old. The top was gone and branches spouted from the trunk. The drive to the giant cedar was very treacherous. The road was very narrow, barely able to have two cars at the same time, not to mention the twists and turns, driving on the opposite side, and climbing high attitudes to about 2000 m above the sea. It reminded me of the Hana drive in Maui.
The next stop was doing a light hike around the park. The trails were well marked and relatively easy to walk on. We spent more time at the park than planned as the walk was quite enjoyable but that affected our plan to drive around the island. We decided to skip a few attractions and visited the water falls and the natural mineral onsen in the sea during low tides. The onsen was so delightful and we wished we had more time to enjoy the amazing view and the very hot water. We arrived in perfect timing for the onsen as the tides were coming fast when we were leaving.
Yakushima is very popular with the locals and hotels are incredibly expensive. We were thinking of staying one night on the island but cancelled the idea when we learned that hotel costs between three hundreds to 1000 Canadian dollars!! For such a popular island, it has the most stinky washrooms. We tried two and the one in the park was most unbearable, reminded me of some of the toilets in China. Very unusual in Japan!
Beautiful island.
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