Between Dec. 18th and 20th I visited Okinawa for the second time, to attend the 3rd Japanese Symposium on Evolutionary Computation. Since it was a school-paid trip, I was not allowed any extra days to have some fun in Okinawa, but I managed to squeeze some time before and after the conference.

The report is broken in two posts – this first one will focus on the fun stuff I did in Okinawa, the second one will focus on “school stuff”.

Okinawa is an island far to the south of the Japanese archipelago. It is considered to be a beach resort by many people. I have actually been here for tourism only in 2006, when I came with the rest of my lab. This time, I decided to try and do some exploring by myself – I downloaded about 20 different geocaching locations around Naha (the main city) to find while I was there.

In the first night, I went out around 22:30, after having dinner with a Sempai (see the other post), with the goal to find about 7 caches within 1km of my hotel. Unfortunately, the force was not with me that night. I could not find the first two caches, and when I went to search for the third one, I somehow managed to lose the papers where I had all cache information written down – I was quite dejected.

In the second day, though, lady luck smiled at me. First thing, I found out that the hotel I was staying in let us use their bicycles for free! That was a big relief, because the bike rental prices in Okinawa were quite above the rest of the country. Now on wheels, I could check more caches before having to head for the conference.

That morning I found two very interesting locations. The first was the Fukushu-en. It is an incredible Chinese garden, with a large waterfall, two ponds, and many environments. You could walk there for hours looking at each small detail. The cache (which I didn’t find), was located somewhere inside a series of artificial caves under the waterfall. Finding these kind of places is 90% of the fun of Geocaching for me :-) The second interesting place I got to that morning was a cache on the top of a hill – the thing is, I had no map to get to the cache, just the GPS coordinates, so I had to try many small streets to find out the correct location, backtracking all the time. While doing that, I ran across an unkempt cemetery, an old church, and an abandoned shack! A true adventure in getting lost :-P.

But not as lost as I got at night. That night I decided to use my extra time to check some caches further away, near the famous Shuri Castle. One problem (or is it a feature?) of geocaching, though, is that by following the coordinates to your location, you take the most straight way to it, which is not necessarily the easiest way. In my case, I ended up crossing this giant hill in the middle of the island, which was also a huge cemetery, in the middle of the night, under light rain. Can you say spooky? At least the way down was this old, old, steep slope which was quite charming (even though It was so steep I couldn’t just ride my bike down). I ended up finding only two of the 4 caches I searched for that night, but the adventure was well worth it. When I got back to my hotel room, I fell asleep almost immediately.

Although not as successful as I hoped, caching in Okinawa was rather fun. It is interesting to note the differences between the caching styles of different areas. I was a bit disappointed by the number of “shop-caches” in Okinawa – caches that were located not in interesting places, but in front of shops. One of the caches was actually located INSIDE a bar, just under the cashier. Can you say monetization? Also, even in the caches you can feel the looming presence of the American Military in Okinawa – many cache containers were army supplies, and the geocoins featured lots of silly jingoist messages (“support our troops”, blablabla). I longed for the more family/geek friendly caches in Tokyo. It is funny how you can feel welcomed/un-welcomed through an inanimate object hidden behind a rock.

Of course, the trip was not all fun an games. In the next post I’ll report on the “research” side of the trip.