Day Nineteen

Ahhhhhhh....another day under the sea.

To back up for a quick moment - last night I saw an e-mail from Jan (with whom we'd dived). He'd had an ear infection and had been diving with earplugs, but it had gotten much worse, and he wasn't able to equalize. This makes diving impossible, so he'd put the word out to contact Doug from Reef Encounters, to see if we could dive with him. 

I got this e-mail pretty late at night, so I got in touch with Doug before 7am, as per Jan's instructions. He seemed a bit put out about me tagging along at the last second, but I found out later he'd just woken up. Nobody wants to deal with anything remotely complicated when they've been awake five minutes. Fair enough.

We went out to the shop, Doug took us out to the boat, and we learned there were just five of us (him included) diving that day, with a boat to ourselves that would take as many as 24. Most excellent. 

It's pretty unusual for the boat captain to come along diving, usually someone stays behind but in this case it was just Lindsay left topside to snorkel and read. At least someone was there to call for help in case something went wrong...

Everything went pretty right though, and I dove with an older gentleman named Max, and Doug's assistant who's name escapes me. We were diving on a pair of mountains with peaks at about 30 feet below surface, and a big valley between the two at 75-80. You could just see one peak in the distance from the other...it was pretty spectacular. 

Looking carefully, the second peak can be seen on the right...tilt your screen to change the contrast a bit...

Doug's assistant was a really hands-on sort of diver...in a way I'm not a fan of. He's very much into picking things up, holding on to stuff, and demonstrating by way of touch...often in a destructive way. For example, when sea cucumbers are about to be eaten, they have a defense mechanism that sprays out silk strands in all directions to frighten off the predator, as though it's about to eat something poisoned. If you pick them up, or toss them about, they'll do it on command. It doesn't hurt the sea cucumber per se, it just seems kind of invasive, and a little disrespectful. Something to show off to the tourists. I'm not a fan.

That aside, he was a great diver to lead the way because he's damn good at spotting things. He found an enormous amount of cool stuff, many things i'd never seen before.

There was a fair bit of current on this site, which makes it a little more work to cruise along. You always dive against the current, so when you're done you can lean back and let the water push you back to the boat. At some points, we were kicking hard just to stay in place, but for the most part the sea mounts shadowed us from the wind. 

Then one of the scariest things ever happened. 

We were swimming from the farther peak, over the valley back to the first peak, and I was shooting a slow pan of the landscape, when I saw this in the corner of my eye.

I snapped around as fast as I could and there was a GIANT SNAKE TWO INCHES FROM MY FACE.

Fortunately, he was clearly as scared as I was and immediately turned around to dash away...but HOLY CRAP I was nervous as all hell. Had I not been wearing a full wetsuit, I would've felt it hit my leg as I turned...it was RIGHT next to me. The weird thing is we were off the reef, so it's not as though I passed too close to it by mistake...it must have come up to see what was happening, or something. I don't know...I'm just glad nobody got bitten. Yeesh.

Most of the snakes on Okinawa are Blue-banded Sea Kraits, as I mentioned before they're poisonous, but not particularly dangerous. This one, looked to be a beaked sea snake. Here's the info on the beaked sea snake...you can look at the photo and judge for yourself what it was, but whatever it was...I keep watching the footage and getting the serious shivers. 

The second dive was a little less eventful, but no less exciting. Gorgeous soft corals of every imaginable variety, strange fish with rear-set top and bottom dorsal fins, and ball coral, another thing i'd never seen before - frilled and spotted on the outside, white and smooth as a hard-boiled egg on the inside. It looked like a dragon's egg.

Doug's right hand man found a little Moray Eel (see him in there?)

A really big puffer fish (almost three feet)

And at our exit point...a real prize

...a Lionfish! My camera battery died just as we approached it, but I caught this shot of it...it was so regal and beautiful. It looked like a fantastical pirate ship, it's fins spread apart like oars from the deck and it's dorsal fin like a series of sails. It looked effortless in the current, drifting along looking for food. We had a three minute safety stop, so we hung out with the lionfish and watched it do it's thing. 

Two dives and 40 degree heat and I was wiped. Hadn't  been sleeping much since the days had been so busy, and started so early. We grabbed some pizza at an italian place outside America town and headed north to Nago, where we'd been told there was quite a bit to see. 

Nago's the far north end of the island, but not too far from Naha, the capital. Maybe just under two hours...the roads keep you going pretty slow, and there aren't really any highways. Not having an english GPS we sort of used it for a map, and got more and more detailed when asking for directions. We'd heard that Okinawa's aquarium is the 3rd largest in the world...so we went to have a look (in keeping with the day's theme).

I don't know if the moniker "3rd largest in the world" refers to the physical water-tank portion, but the grounds of this place were ENORMOUS. Stretching out across acres, it took almost 25 minutes to walk from where we parked to the main event, a massive series of underwater habitats ranging from coral reef, to deep sea.

I'll tell you, seeing Japanese kids be kids has been pretty interesting. They're not yet old enough to have what it means to be Japanese fully ingrained, so they're spontaneous, sometimes loud, highly inquisitive, and totally uninhibited. The parents react two ways - by laughing, as though seeing something bizarre for the first time, and by being somewhat confused, uncertain, and hushing the child into obedience. This one kid had a total lack of inhibition. He came to the aquarium to be a fish.

His dad was totally happy to let him go to town in this fountain, and he sort of crouched by the sidelines and laughed, amazed. I'm sure part of this is the wonder of seeing your child do something for the first time, but it was oddly refreshing to see a Japanese person enjoy their kid go wild in public for all to see. He was clearly having the time of his life...and it's nice to know that the sterner parts of the culture aren't instilled quite so strongly at an early age...or maybe it's that they have their place. At the end of the day, a kid playing in a water fountain is just being a kid...it doesn't matter where you're from. But I digress...

The Okinawa aquarium starts with a touch tank, much in the vein of the Mote Marine Museum in Florida I've been to with my family, and you can handle starfish and sea cucumbers and the like. This tank is weird though...it's pretty wide, and one side's against the wall, so the animals naturally crawl to the centre to avoid being handled...and there's a person who's job is to stand at the back with a big long pool utensil, and shove them against the glass so they're accessible for touching...I didn't feel very good about that.

I know that aquariums are not the most ethical places (a la zoos) but I'm fascinated by underwater life, so i'd never really really clued in to it before...and I don't know if it's aquariums in general, or just Japan (which is notorious for it's unethical sea life treatment; see The Cove, Sharkwater, Whale Wars, etc) but this one really put the knife in me. It was still fascinating...but what became more fascinating was the spectacle, and the way these massive crowds responded to it. 

The other odd thing was seeing this stuff after diving with much of it this morning. Puffer fish, parrotfish, and much of the smaller life seemed someone listless in their tiny tanks...prone to swimming in endless circles like so many goldfish. There were some young sharks as well. 

I saw a lionfish much like the one i'd seen earlier, only with far less majesty than his oceangoing counterpart. 

Then there were the Jellies.

Jellyfish are always beautiful...and they always display them under blacklights so they look particularly psychedelic. The motion of them is what's so interesting...it's hypnotic. I don't understand jellyfish. When I look at a creature, or a human, or anything alive, really - I imagine that inside of it is a whole network of tubes, nerves, veins, and other biological machinery that makes it work, somehow. I don't need to know how, I just need to know that the parts are there within. With a jellyfish, it's not like that. You see everything. You see right through them, and see every part of them. They're all membrane, flesh and tendril. Where is the brain? The heart? What makes it go? It's like a glass sculpture of an animal...it has no business perambulating about the ocean. 

We came upon the main attraction - a massive tank, with fifty foot high glass, containing no less than three Whale Sharks.

I'm fascinated by the whale shark. It's the largest fish (remember, whales aren't fish) in the ocean. I went all the way to Honduras a few years ago to try to get a chance to swim with one but in spite of doing many dives, and being there in the peak of the season, I was not so lucky. So it was amazing to come face to face with the giant in the flesh, at last.

I felt pretty awful about it though. When the shark was fed, it lay straight up and down in the water to access the surface, and was easily the height of the tank it was in. That's no way for something to be kept, let alone with two others of it's size, let alone with the dozens of rays, sharks, fish, et al that were in there with it. I think what really put the bad taste in my mouth was the spectacle. You can become very critical of something when you're outside the language. Seeing what was going on, but not being able to understand it, you really put your own perspective and interpretation into it. Have you ever watched a TV show on mute, and tried to figure out the plot? That's what it was like. The thing was, this was an easy show to read. The shark was to be fed according to it's schedule. The announcer doled out some facts, as well as some precautionary tidbits about how well it's treated here. And lo, the people did stare.

It's the purpose that hurt me. These animals aren't here for research, nor for observation. They're here to be gawked at, by thousands of eyes, all day. They're fed on a schedule that's fed to the tourists, and people come, and stare, and ooh, and ahh. 

This is not what I would want my life to be - and I can't in good conscience wish that life on anyone.

After that, the aquarium kind of seemed like a sad place. Everything written excitedly on the walls with exclamation marks. Kids running amok, spellbound by the giant fish. Sharks in a bare aquarium, circling aimlessly, over and over and over, eyes dead. The end of the walk through the aquarium was literally dead, preserved things in formaldehyde.

The face of a basking shark, 14 feet long, and quite dead.

An oddly grotesque ending to the charade of the aquarium - as though to say "This is where we put them when they die." We stepped out to a beach just outside to sit for a moment. It was a nice reprieve. 

We'd heard a dolphin show starting up as we walked back to the car, but neither of us really wanted anything to do with it. The dolphin tanks were really, really small, and the announcer, kooky music, and canned crowd responses carried across the empty promenade of the entranceway. 

It was getting on in the day, so we drove back to Naha and talked about what we'd seen. 

We'd heard the owner of our hostel owned a bar on the second floor of the building, and when we'd settled into our room, we had found two tokens for a free drink there. So we though it would be a good time to check it out. 

We were, again, the only folks there. Monday it seems is no better than Sunday for the night scene on Okinawa. The navy's in bed, and the natives have to work tomorrow. Our bartender spoke a little bit of English though, and taught us some Okinawan dialect slang. Hai tai, for hello, Hai sai (if you're female) and instead of "Ite!" when you hurt yourself, it's "Agaaa!" Ouch. She was going to visit her sister in Vancouver in the coming months. We told her what to expect, and urged her on. We got to speak a bit of Japanese too, which was getting a little easier.

Two guys dropped into the bar, and we took turns playing songs on the speakers in the place. One was visiting his girlfriend in the military, the other a local who was a friend of his. He gave me his business card, which had the ambiguous job title of "Solutions Provider". I wondered about what he did...

Another long and drawn out day in the sun left us gassed, so we headed to bed after two beers to catch an early start on the day tomorrow - when we'd planned to visit Okinawa's most famous and nefarious tourist trap... Pineapple Park.

Stay tuned. 

-Jeff