Yesterday was an incredibly frustrating day. At 11pm the previous night, I find out that there’s a category 5 typhoon heading directly for Taiwan while brushing against Okinawa. At the time, winds were estimated at 180 mph at the strongest part of the storm. Okinawa was going to get hit with about 45 mph winds and heavy rain for several days. Although the typhoon wasn’t forecasted to directly hit Okinawa, you never know if the storm would decide to change course suddenly. The biggest risk was that we were flying in on Thursday when the storm would begin. Worst case scenario, there’s massive flooding and we’d have to go to emergency shelters. Best case scenario, heavy rain for 4 days and we’re stuck indoors with nothing to do.

This was a huge bummer because it was the part of the trip I was looking forward to the most. It took about 4 hours to do damage control by cancelling flight, rental car, and hostel reservations and then figuring out what to fill the 5 day gap. The problem is that it’s a holiday week commemorating the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki so everyone is traveling in Japan. The challenge was finding a place to go that had enough activities to do to fill 5 days, beds for the 3 of us, and was easy to get to. With the unlimited bullet train passes, transportation isn’t an issue, it’s just a matter of where to go.

EVERYWHERE was booked, I tried AirBNB and Hostelworld and couldn’t find anything in or near the following places:

  • Fukuoka Prefecture
  • Nokonoshima Island
  • Tottori Prefecture
  • Yamaguchi Prefecture
  • Tsunoshima Island
  • Kobe
  • Sizuoka Prefecture
  • Myazaki
  • Amanohashidate
  • Takayama
  • Kyushu
  • Yamaguchi
  • Hokaido
  • Shirahama
  • Nagoya
  • Kamogawa
  • Tanegashima island
  • Kagoshima

I finally decided to give up at just looking for a place to stay and instead switch my strategy to activities I wanted to do. I did a google search for best places to go surfing in Japan, of course Okinawa popped up at the top – -” But a place called Chiba just south of Tokyo came up as well. I found a surf school and checked out their site. Turns out they also double as a guest house. The owner and surf teacher is from Hawaii and so I called him directly. He apologized that he didn’t have any rooms available and then told me to wait a moment. He came back and said that a girl had to cancel her reservation the previous day and now he has availability for us. This was an incredible relief after 4 hours of endless research and planning.

We’ll be staying at Eugene Teal Surf Family Surf School and Clubhouse for 4 full days. He said we’ll start surfing lessons when we get there and we can rent the boards the rest of the time. There is also scuba diving in the area but I think I’l play it by ear for now.