How to Drive Around Okinawa
We take a daytrip around the Island
We’re starting to really enjoy renting cars and touring around. A lot of tourists in Okinawa rent a car for their whole stay, but it gets quite expensive very quickly, with rentals starting at over $50/day.
There were a few sites in Okinawa (outside of the city of Naha) that we wanted to visit, but buses are infrequent and cost almost as much as renting a car for one day. The rental car allowed us to visit several locations instead of just the one spot that the bus would take us to.
Our first stop of the day was Katsuren Castle, which is included in the island’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites listing. The castle is one of five on the island and is significant because it was the seat of a lord who in the 15th century tried to overthrow Shuri Castle, failed, and brought Okinawa under one rule.
All that’s left of the castle are ruins of the stone walls. It’s situated on a steep hill with excellent views of the surrounding landscape and ocean. The castle isn’t large but the surrounding views are nice and we were lucky to get good lighting, which made the ocean water look beautiful.
From Katsuren Castle we drove north to Cape Manzamo. The cape is popular among tourists as a scenic spot because there is a rock formation that looks like the head and trunk of an elephant.
We got our photos and left quickly because we were frustrated by a foreign newlywed couple and their family, who chose to climb over the rope fencing to walk all over the vegetation and get photos with their “just married” banner. Sigh.
Cape Manzamo was pretty touristy and there are boutique souvenir stands on either side of the parking lot. We left quickly and did a 5-minute drive down the coast to a lesser known beach, which I’d found earlier on Google Maps.
Walking through a tunnel of overgrown jungle, we popped out to the coast at Apogama, named “the appointment cave”. This was without a doubt the best and most scenic part of our little day trip. The cave was large and there were tide pools filled with weird looking starfish and small fish.
On the other side of the cave, we found a great vista looking up the coast towards Cape Manzamo.
Although it was threatening to rain, we had enough time to explore and got some epic photos.
Once we got back to the car, the sky opened up and it began raining. It let up when we reached a third castle ruin, Zakimi Castle Ruins. Unsurprisingly, this ruin is also in the UNESCO World Heritage Sites listing for Okinawa. It’s smaller and not as grand as Katsuren. We weren’t even intending on visiting the castle but had routed our GPS there to get to that town for lunch, deciding to stop and have a look anyway.
After lunch we tried to visit Cape Maeda, which is supposed to be very scenic. It was pouring rain when we arrived and there was a parking fee, so we went to Cape Zanpa Lighthouse instead. The lighthouse was covered in scaffolding for repairs and the clouds were threating to open up again, so we didn’t spend too much time here.
We’re really glad we rented a car and toured around the island for a day because we got to see some very interesting sites. It’s not hard to find scenic places in the world and it’s always nice when we find them — especially when they aren’t trampled by tourists.
