December 5, 2025
Day 94 — Naze, Amami Island to Motubo, Okinawa
Marilee here.
This time, we had only ourselves (and our phones) to depend on to get us up in time to catch our 5am ferry. The Port Tower Hotel had many surprisingly great features (a good restaurant, a decent onsen, front desk staff fluent in English who invited us to store our bikes in the lobby), but early morning wake up calls was not one of them. Fortunately, we had our middle-aged super powers to draw upon: the ability to wake up multiple times in the night to fret about things, such as whether we’re going to miss the ferry.
We didn’t miss it. We got up in plenty of time and stumbled around stuffing the last few things randomly in bags, then pushed the bikes out into the dark street and pedaled the two blocks to the ferry terminal.
When we got to the waiting area (very familiar to us from our long pre-dawn sojourn there the day before yesterday), there was no one at the ticket window. So we waited. And waited. Getting increasingly anxious, because we didn’t have actual tickets yet, just reservations. The blinds were drawn, but I could hear someone coughing and rustling papers in the office — if only they’d open up and sell us a ticket!
A young man opened the ticket window at 4:40am, and then it was our turn to make others anxious, because we were the first in line and the other hopeful passengers behind us had to wait while we got through all the complications of our transaction: filling out Japanese language forms, communicating to the ticket agent that we have bicycles, trying to understand his directions about where to go to board the bicycles, getting everything correctly stamped and initialed (its rather charming how old school many transactions in Japan still seem — things are often very paper based compared to North America). With tickets in hand at last, we raced down to the bikes, headed to the boarding area ….and waited some more.
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Eventually the traffic conductors ushered us onboard during an interlude between truck entries and exits, and we wedged the bikes into a tight space alongside some huge military vehicles. Then we went upstairs and bagged some tatami mats in one of the second class lounges, as we planned to do some serious napping on this voyage, to make up for our interrupted night’s sleep.
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The ferry had a number of ports of call between Amami Island and Okinawa, so we had fleeting glimpses of other tiny isolated islands: Tokunoshima, Okinoerabu, and Yoron. In between, there was napping, wandering around the ship, eating, contemplating the ocean, and more napping.
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At about 4:30 we pulled into the harbour at Motubo, Okinawa. We had chosen to get off at this port in the northern part of the island rather than go all the way to the main city of Naha, so that we could spend a few days exploring some of the less busy and touristy parts of Okinawa first.
With only an hour before sunset, there were two crucial items we had to accomplish: buy some food, and find our guesthouse. We had booked a guesthouse on the nearby island of Sesoko (I know, another island! But this time there was a bridge), and then afterwards discovered that there were no stores on the island, and the few restaurants might or might not be open. Luckily we managed both things before darkness fell, and in short order we were ensconced at the Mosura No Tamago guesthouse, looking forward to the next few days of exploring Okinawa.
Today's ride: 3 km (2 miles)
Total: 4,657 km (2,892 miles)
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