Okinawa: Scuba Diving (and tacos!)

One of the major draws of Okinawa for us was scuba diving.  We got certified in Bali more than two years ago, and we wanted to go again before we forgot everything we learned.  Okinawa is half-wetsuit territory in summertime, but very dive-able with full wetsuits in winter.  As the aquarium taught us, it is also home to a majority of coral species in the Pacific (or South China Sea, as it were) and has no shortage of legitimately exciting dives around it.  Being somewhat out of practice and not that experienced to begin with, we opted for a few non-technical shore dives with a dive shop recommended by some of our colleagues.  We had the best weather of the whole trip on our dive day, which probably did wonders for the underwater visibility, and got picked up bright and early by our dive guide, who was impressed and confused that we'd found such a remote and unheralded campsite, which he had not known was there.  We have a whole bunch of pictures on Flickr.

 The dive guide brought us to a beach on the far side of the Motobu apparently known to the divers of Okinawa as "Gorilla Chop" because of this rock formation. It looks like a gorilla making a karate chop action, if you can't see it.

 Walk right on into that - all the good stuff is right out there.

 Nice broad clean beach and the only people there were a few groups of divers.  The guide said that this off-season seemed particularly dead.  Fine with us!  There isn't anything wrong with the coral just because people usually visit in the summertime.

 We were definitely slow getting our gear assembled and put together.  I think the guide had doubts about us (probably rightly so) but at least for me I felt I clearly remembered all the really really important stuff like how to get emergency air, dealing with a blown regulator, and not getting the bends, along with the mechanics of diving like clearing the mask and controlling buoyancy but not so much the exact process for tightening tank straps. 

 In Bali our underwater camera case put our camera decidedly more underwater than we liked, costing us a camera and the ability to take pictures for most of the rest of that trip - this was attempt #2 for the casing with a replacement camera, a new o-ring, insurance, and a threat to sell the case on Ebay for 10 bucks if it failed.   It is uncertain which element was decisive, but the casing worked fine this time.  Our dive guide cleverly bought a waterproof camera in the first place, then bought a case to extend the safe depth.  If his leaks, he'd still have a camera.  If we melt the camera again at some point, I think we'd do that for the replacement.  This picture is one of the first ones taken by the cased camera before diving.  Though photography is principally my responsibility at this point due to my fascination with all the shiny buttons the fancy camera has, underwater photography is Ana's job because she championed the idea and bought all the technology involved.  One of the few points during our vacation where there are a lot more pictures of me than her!

 Jeez, maybe we should switch back to pictures of her for being easier on the eyes.

 With shore diving, you obviously start off pretty shallow, but these reefs off Okinawa were quite close to the surface and I think we never went deeper than 10m at any point.  At shallow depths, you use less air (deeper = higher pressure = more air vented per breath) and less nitrogen gets forced into your blood (more time = still safe) so we could stay down a fairly long time.

 The dive guide took the camera when a sea snake came by and went in for close-range pictures.  He'd told us earlier if we saw one not to worry because they're not aggressive.  That's nice and all but I wasn't going to get too close because aggressive or not, my understanding is that if they bite you you're dead where you stand / swim.  Pretty cool to see from a distance, or up closer in a picture though, and it did indeed prove a civil acquaintance.

 We did encounter some pretty cool stuff.  I'd love to see what the big camera could do, but cases for that one cost about as much as the camera itself plus all the cases and accessories I own for it.  We don't, at this time, dive enough to justify that.  The elderly one that fits our casing did a pretty good job sometimes.

 This school of fish was very friendly and hung out for a few minutes.  Wiggling fingers would sometimes get nibbled on.

 We did two dives and Ana responsibly filled in our dive logs after each one.

Much happier with the underwater case this time.

Ana apparently put a knee onto a sea urchin at some point, and then stopped to take a picture of the offending organisms.  She finished the dive, the break, and the next dive before peeling off the wetsuit and pulling the spines out of her knee.  Said she wasn't really sure if she'd just knocked it or actually been stuck.  Show her a spider and she'll probably "Eeek!" like a four-year-old, but put her underwater and impale her on spines, and she gives it a "Whatever" and the first I hear of it I'm being called over to take pictures of the blood. Seriously.  Her knee was fine, if a bit more hole-y than pre-dive.

After the dives were over and the gear was cleaned up, we talked to the guide and got a recommendation and transport for our late lunch / early dinner.  Worked out well for everybody because we got a ride to town and he didn't have to detour back out to our campsite on the way back to his shop.  We got dropped at a sort of roadside strip mall with a bunch of small stores and restaurants he said were good.  We found a タコ (taco) place and were sold.  Tacos and taco rice (pretty close to a taco without a shell) count as Okinawa cuisine at this point because the Okinawans adopted and adapted them from US service members after WW2, and they are now counted among things distinctively Okinawan by the rest of Japan and the tourist literature.  Plus we like tacos, and would have picked the place anyway.  We pretty much ordered one of everything on the menu.

 The tacos themselves were quite good, the taco rice was as one would expect, and Ana especially liked the enchiladas, but was quite wary of the taco balls.  This picture series shows her investigating the nature of the taco ball.

 Despite the skepticism, it turns out that when you deep fry balls of meat and cheese the results are pleasing.  We went back for seconds of some things - very satisfying lunch.

 We walked a couple of miles back from outside of the main town area of Nago to the bus terminal, to catch a bus back to our campsite.  The day remained nice and the view past the highway was pleasing.

After making it back into town, we did catch that bus, but not before encountering an actual honest-to-goodness drive-in restaurant.  There can't be many left in the US and I doubt this would fly in mainland Japan, but apparently in Okinawa there exists at least one of them, branded with the A&W logo.  Who knew?  I don't think I've ever seen one outside of a movie.

One post left to go in Okinawa, where we explore the wild interior of the island and feast upon wild boar.  That probably sounds more dramatic than it actually was, but we have some nice pictures of a waterfall and I used my big telephoto lens to get close-up pictures of some birds so it may be worth tuning in anyway.  After that the updates will be activities in Tokyo and Hakone, so the string of publications will continue for a while yet.