Okinawa Touring Day 4: Start Touring !

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This is my first visit in Naha, so I did some local sightseeing on foot in the last two days. It was a lot of fun, but I didn't ride my bike and I won't introduce it for the enjoyment of those who will come here to visit.

In the morning, I get up at 8:00 a.m. and pack the leftover vegetables from the fridge into a tupperware, soak the brown rice and soybeans in water and put this in another tupperware too. I cook the rice at dinner time, but I usually soak it in water before I leave.
I left at 9:30 a.m. after chatting for a while with an uncle I met at the inn while drinking coffee. Since the rice cake I had eaten yesterday was very tasty, I bought some purple sweet potatoes, brown sugar and yomogi rice cakes for a snack in the shopping street near the guesthouse.

It's lightly cloudy, but muggy and hot in the sun. The headwind was quite strong and there were frequent minor ups and downs, so the riding pace was slow. I arrived at the Himeyuri Tower around 11 o'clock. Since they were selling flowers at the entrance, I offered them for 200 jpy. I decided to go ahead because it costs money to go to the museum.

Next stop is the Peace Memorial Park. It's only about 3km from the Himeyuri Tower, so I arrived in no time. The park is large and well maintained. It costs money just to climb the Peace Memorial Tower, but it's no problem to take pictures from outside. The museum looked interesting, so I paid the entrance fee and went inside. There was similar to the one in Naha and explaining from the Japanese confiscation of the island to the fighting in the Second World War, and the story of the island after it was returned to the Japanese after the war. However, this museum has more materials and explanations about the battle. After that, I visited the joint graves of the war dead. There are inscriptions of 240,000 people, both inside and outside the city.

After that, I rode about 7 km to Gyokusen-dong. I thought the cave was a stand-alone one, but it is attached to a theme park with a lot of souvenirs, and people have to pay 1250 yen to get in. I hadn't researched it beforehand, but since it is the second largest cave in Japan, I decided to go in, even though I usually avoid paying to enter the site seeing spots. Indeed, the inside is large, there were very many stalactites. It was good that the passage is well maintained and good things. But unlike the mainland's cave, the interior is very warm and always seems to be around 20 degrees Celsius.

Well, today's sightseeing is almost finished, and then I'm going to eat and sleep, but I don't have any plans yet. First of all, I searched for supermarkets, and found several of them in a cluster about 3 km away, so I went to Dongfudaira JA Coop for now. The vegetables here were cheap. Two pieces of bitter gourd were 220 jpy, but now I have some on hand, so I'd like to buy some and make bitter gourd stir-fry when there are fewer ingredients on hand. Five green peppers, bean sprouts, four packages of natto (fermented soybeans), and 400 grams of Okinawan tofu were 370 jpy, which was very cheap.

Now that the food is in hand, the next step is to find a place to sleep. I looked around for a park, but there was no good place to sleep outdoors. I went to Motobu Park, but the children playing there asked me a lot of questions as usual. Afterwards, I finally came to a place called Osato-Uchihara Park. There is a baseball field and tennis courts, but it doesn't look like it's very well maintained. There are covered benches and water toilets, so it looks like a good place to stay. Although it is past 18 o'clock, the children are still playing, so I just have a snack and see how it goes. I decided to cook rice and set up the tent when nobody was there. It would be a bit of a problem if I would be told not to go in at night, but I'd like to set up the tent here (where it's roofed) because it's supposed to rain tomorrow.

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Southern Okinawa Main Island Tour 33km