Princess Mononoke in Yakusugi Land

One hundred kilometers off the coast of Kagoshima is an island 25 km in diameter called Yakushima. It's a UNESCO world heritage site, which they let you know there at every opportunity. I guess Yosemite is one too, but I'd never heard that before I visited Yakushima. Seventy-five percent of the island is covered with steep, densely forested mountains that are supposedly snow-capped in winter, while the coast is subtropical, with coral reefs. It's famous for its ancient cedar trees, growing in an incredibly green forest that is one of the wettest places in Japan, which is really saying something. 

We took the jetfoil ferry from Kagoshima for the two hour trip to the island. This little girl at the ferry terminal took an interest in Theo. It was raining the whole time, and I took a non-drowsy seasick pill, which put me right to sleep. We rented a car to get to the place that Masami had reserved for us, a nice place with a tatami room that opened up onto a deck and a yard surrounded by trees. I went to sleep around 6 PM with the rain falling outside the screen door,  and didn't wake up until the next day.

We drove to the National Park, an area with developed trails called Yakusugi Land. It sounds like a theme park. Yaku from Yaku-shima (shima means island) and sugi- cedar. So it was like a tree Disneyland. It was still raining, and the moss was dripping wet. It wasn't bad under the thick canopy. The trails were well maintained, which is a rarity in Japan, where the steep hills and amount of rain regularly washes out roads, not to mention trails. The trails were originally logging roads, built 400 years ago. A thousand years ago, the ancient cedars (some three thousand years old) were considered sacred in the indigenous animistic Shinto religion. Around  the year 1600, however, a Buddhist priest advocated development of the island, including logging the sacred trees ... to make roofing shingles. So trees thousands of years old were logged for shingles. This priest is now revered as a saint. So basically, the hiking is past a lot of really big stumps, with an old tree here and there. But it still is beautiful, and the forest wasn't cleared, so it still is an old growth forest. The old stumps serve as nurse stumps, and younger trees grow on top of them as well as a mess of epiphytes. They are particularly proud here of this beauty created jointly between nature and their logging activities. There were many different kinds of trees and shrubs, but they were so intertwined and covered with moss that it was hard to tell one from another. The remaining big trees were all named, my favorite being the Bug You cedar.

We had some good wildlife sightings there. There are Japanese Macacques (monkeys) that hang out grooming each other, sometimes in the road. There were a few with babies. We heard some monkeys fighting in the forest, squealing like pigs. Those cute little furballs can be pretty violent. We saw a few of the diminutive deer of the island, some with fauns, and this buck, which came up to the parking lot. On one of the remaining ancient Yakisugi, we saw a green-backed Japanese woodpecker perched on a craggy dead branch.

Masami was pretty beat from the hiking, so Theo and I dropped her off at the inn and went to see some waterfalls. We saw two of Yakushima's great waterfalls. Senpiro is an 80 meter waterfall in a massive granite canyon, that reminded me of Yosemite. Yakushima is a big chunk of uplifted granite, like a piece of the Sierra Nevadas. We couldn't get very close to the waterfall as the trail was closed (rainy season, not summer yet on June 17). 

The next waterfall, Okonotaki, you could get as close as you wanted. At 88 meters, it was officially one of Japan's top 100 waterfalls (who decides these things, the ministry of falling water?). It was a gusher, completely drenching the little gorge into which it fell. Theo and I got soaked, and had fun playing on the rocks in the mist.

We stopped at a drive-through banyan tree on the way home and made it home for  our dinner of flying fish.

We had to move from our fancy inn the next day to a fancy Yurt down the road. It was a rubberized canvas yurt with bunks, carpeting, AC, cable tv. They were built by a retired mechanic who lived there with his wife. He was a very friendly guy and gave us a bowl that he had made out of cedar and gave me a piece to make something else out of. I tried to refuse, since I feel awkward receiving such gifts, and they were big, too and I didn't want to carry them, but Masami grabbed them up. She can never refuse anything that's free. 

Surprisingly, Masami was up for another long hike in the forest, this time on the other side of the island, to the Princess Mononoke Forest. This one had another pop culture tie in, as the inspiriation for the setting of the cartoon blockbuster. The whole area was called Shiratani Unsuikyo. This nice butterfly was trapped in a building at the entrance. The trail followed a swiftly flowing river up a granite gorge. The weather was better, no real rain, and the sun even peeked out once in a while. It was cool in the forest, and the path crossed water many times, through impossibly green ravines and over moss smothered rocks. The tree roots twisted around massive rocks, and there were trees you could walk through where the stumps they had grown over had rotted away. I didn't see anything particularly special about the Mononoke part of the forest, but at least it got Masami there. We hiked to Taikoiwa Rock  and got a brief view of the river valley below as the clouds parted momentarily.

We stopped at a tiny run down onsen Ohura by the ocean, caught the owner just as he was about to close up early. It was a tiny bathtub, but had a nice view of the coast, and we had it to ourselves, except for one guy who came later. The owner, a old wiry guy with huge glasses, let us stay and eat our dinner of instant noodles.

Masami had found some info on nesting sea turtles for us and made a reservation for us to go see them. We needed reservations because they only take 80 people to see them at a time. They have a well organized tourist deal there, where volunteers monitor the nightly visits of the turtles, then collect the eggs to hatch and release the babies. We got to Nagata beach early, watched the sunset, then waited, and waited ...

They started us off in a shack with a couple of sea turtle displays, then talked about the turtles a little, then showed a video taped off of tv, complete with commercials. It was blaring so that the people outside could hear. We were attacked by a huge emergence of winged termites that were attracted to the light in the trailer, and they kept flying into our faces and getting down our shirts. We realized after about an hour that they were playing the same tape over and over again, so we went to sit outside.

I could see volunteers hovering over huge dark blobs on the beach. We had to wait until the turtles were actually laying before we could go out, since they could be scared away if we went out sooner. I guess I would be scared too if I saw 80 people walking toward me on a dark beach.  So finally, after two hours of waiting, they took the only 50 or so of us (slow night, I guess) down to the beach and we paraded past a laying turtle. We actually got to see the eggs plopping out and falling into the sand pit. It was dark, and 50 of us were circling around this turtle as the volunteers shined these tiny pen lights on it. They really needed a big red spotlight or something, because the penlights only lit up a tiny part of the turtle at a time, so you had to use your imagination to picture the rest of it. But it was an amazing sight, seeing this huge turtle thrashing around in the sand as she buried her eggs, then scooted down to the ocean the full moon rose.

We left Yakushima the next day, and I was sorry to leave, not least because it meant our travels were over for a while, and it was back to Amami Oshima, Masami's home island, and a more domestic life, which will be the subject of the next entry in this blog.