Day 92 — Somewhere in the East China Sea to Tomori Beach, Amami Island - Tom and Marilee Retire to the Road

December 3, 2025

Day 92 — Somewhere in the East China Sea to Tomori Beach, Amami Island

Marilee here.

The sign on the ferry information desk said that passengers for Amami should be ready to disembark at 4:35am. So we set multiple alarms, tucked ourselves into our berths, and got ready for one of those restless nights when you wake up to check the time every hour or so: is it time to get up? Nope. How about now? Not yet. Now?

As it turned out alarms were not needed; there was a lengthy, loud announcement on the ship’s intercom at 4am, which I guarantee no one slept through. In fact, there were so many people gathered in the lobby, I think some people with tickets to other islands must have been convinced by the announcement to give Amami a look. We were a bleary group as we shuffled off in the pitch blackness. Tom and I descended back into the bowels of the ship and waited for a signal from one of the workers frantically directing traffic to let us know when it was our turn to leave. For scenes of controlled chaos, there is little that can top the unloading and loading of a ferry that does double duty as a container ship, in the dark, with less than hour until it needs to depart in order to stay on schedule.

Of course, once off the ship, we had nowhere to go, and we didn’t want to be out on the roads at this hour of the night/morning. So we wheeled the bikes over to the passenger terminal and hung out in the waiting room — waiting for dawn. Sunrise comes late in December. It was after 7 by the time it seemed light enough to safely bike. And by then we were pretty hungry.

We were able to keep busy through the early morning hours by translating all the signs in the ferry terminal waiting room.

There were only a couple of spots near the ferry port offering breakfast at that early hour — both of them hotels. So we headed for the nearest one, and it turned out to be a dauntingly upscale place offering a rather pricey breakfast buffet. Since we’re very much aficionados of the Japanese hotel breakfast buffet at this point, we went for it.

And whoa — this was possibly the best breakfast buffet of the whole trip. There were tons of local specialties: fish cakes, brown sugar mochis wrapped in palm leaves, stewed bitter melon, chicken rice, stir fried papaya and ground pork were just a few of the items that stood out for me. There were more options than we could possibly try in one sitting (and we did our best, believe me!). After some intense, focused eating we staggered out, in danger of overbalancing on the bikes thanks to our heavy midsections, and decided to get out of town.

It was nice to be in a smaller place where leaving town didn’t involve a full morning of grinding through kilometres of strip mall highway mess. A few blocks past the hotel, we left the town behind us and were swooping around coastal curves.

There was a strong wind, and the surf was crashing against the shore.

A few kilometers out of town, the road left the coast, turning inland, and we decided to trade the highway for a smaller, quieter road through the mountains. Of course, small roads through the mountains are quiet because they involve lots of up and down. This road focused solely on the “up” part of the up and down for the first 10km or so, which gave us the opportunity to work off the big breakfast. Once we were on the “down” portion we had more of a chance to look around and appreciate the wild mountain scenery that was flashing past. Amami is a very lightly populated island, and its towns are dotted along the coast, in sheltered bays and fishing ports. The interior is filled with steep mountains and deep gorges bristling with thick tropical vegetation. The views from the switchbacking road we followed across the island were of brilliantly green hills rising one after the other, with no signs of habitation and no other roads visible.

As we descended, the scenery gradually became more civilized and orderly, wild tropical vine-laden trees and giant-leafed palms giving way to sugar cane fields and gardens. And soon we were back at the coast. And beaches!

It’s Christmas time! These poinsettias bordered a grove of mandarins.

It was a cool, windy day and the surf was crashing, so I wasn’t tempted to swim (much) — but even if I had been, this would have dissuaded me pretty fast:

Don’t need Google translate to tell you what this is about.

It’s OK, I haven’t been attacked by a shark. I’m enjoying the beach.

A beautiful beach and crystal clear water. It just needed to be a little warmer (and no sharks).

The surfers are braver than us. Or maybe they didn’t see the sign.

Amami is a big island, and we were only planning on staying for a couple of days before heading on to Okinawa, so we weren’t going to see all of it. We had decided to do a loop up to the northern end of the island and back, and our destination for this first night was a small resort hotel on Tomori Beach.

In fact it was such a small resort, we almost missed it. There was no sign for it at the turnoff on the highway, and we spent some time nosing up different laneways and farm roads, to see if any of them looked likely to lead to a hotel. Eventually we stumbled across the right road and cruised into the hotel in the late afternoon. It had a vibe that is becoming very familiar to us on this trip: fading resort past its best years, in the off-season. These places are charming in an off-kilter way, with staff who are happy to help (here we were invited to store our bikes in the lobby, next to the unused rental snorkeling gear) and big rooms, but they are also echoingly empty. At the Coral Palms, there were maybe a half-dozen other rooms occupied while we were there, the pool was drained for the winter and no one was renting the snorkeling gear.

But the hotel was on the beach, and the beach was lovely: a long swoop of white sand, protected by a coral reef, with shallow bright blue water. We took a long walk before dinner, beachcombing for shells. We found a few but they mostly had occupants (crabs) so we left them where they were. There would be more beaches, and more opportunities to find treasures, tomorrow.

Part of the tropical ambiance of the island: exuberantly decorated buildings.

Today's ride: 37 km (23 miles)
Total: 4,599 km (2,856 miles)

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