Author archive
8 July 2023
Getting to Incheon airport Today, the plan is to fly to Istanbul on staff standby tickets. There are three flights during the day with one to two hours between each one of them and a final and fourth flight at night. We chose to try Asiana Airlines at 1025 as it would be silly not […]
7 July 2023
Wall Museum We woke earlier than yesterday but with a less “full-on” day ahead, we took it easy and had breakfast later. We headed out to the nearby City Wall Museum to take a look at the history of the city’s wall. The displays were very well done, showing the scale of the wall and […]
6 July 2023
Hanok Bukchon Sunrise in Seoul now is about 0500. I stirred around 0600 and fell back asleep till 0740. We ventured downstairs to the good hotel breakfast around 0800. I had hoped to have an early start to avoid the expected 33 deg C heat but it wasn’t mean to be. We left around 0900 […]
5 July 2023
Above: Dongdaemun Design Plaza. Flying on the Airbus A220 We have an 1145 departure from Naha airport to Incheon today. We left by monorail after 0800 and got to the airport 3h before the flight. As today’s flight on a small plane, an A220, I didn’t expect check-in to be open that early. I did […]
4 July 2023
Mass suicide bunker The mall in which Banana Car Rental is located opens at 1000. But they had set up a desk outside for our 0930 collection in a highly professional and organised manner. We turned up a little earlier and managed to hit the road in our Suzuki Solio at 0930 heading to the […]
3 July 2023
Bad news I had pre-booked our ferry tickets to Zamami Island and back, having read that the ferry can fill up. The departure point involved a bit of a walk from the monorail so we treated ourselves with a taxi ride ordered through Uber. Then bad news struck, my credit card number had been used […]
2 July 2023
Interisland flight We woke to stunning weather today. Damn! We could have done with this yesterday for our exploration, but today all we’re doing is a short interisland hop by flight from Ishigaki to Naha on Okinawa island. We left our hotel by foot around 0850, slightly ahead of our intended 0900 departure time. We […]
1 July 2023
Our rental car Today’s the day we have a comprehensive exploration of Ishigaki by car. We walked to the port ferry terminal to collect our rental car at 0900. We had been warned that they would hold the car for fifteen minutes only if we were late. No-shows or cancellations beyond 1500 yesterday would be […]
30 June 2023
Today was reserved for going to Taketomi Island. With low tide at 1100, it didn’t make sense to go in the morning as swimming would not be good. We spent the morning indoors checking our to-do lists from home and paying bills before heading out around midday. We grabbed some food from the convenience store […]
29 June 2023
I got picked up by Hangout Divers before the appointed time of 0800 and got to the large dive boat shortly after. I had booked online through their website that had a couple of English pages. English-speaking dive centres are hard to find in Ishigaki. My driver and divemaster, Natsuki Yanagisako turned out to be […]