Trip 40 — Niue and Dogojima Walks

Dogojima day 5: Misakimachi to Saigo Port
Sunday, 10 March 2024

Yesterday: 13103 steps/10.31 km/6.41 mi/1h 53m
Grand total: 123316 steps/94.94 km/58.99 mi/17h 18m

As I headed to breakfast at the B-Stone Garden, it was sunny and snowing. It would be both, sometimes alternating and sometimes simultaneously, throughout the day.

I could have made it to Saigo Port in under an hour, but there were a couple of points of interest on the south side of the airport. A path led down to the white Saigo-Misaki Lighthouse, which was built in 1921 and resembled a church with its front to the sea and a room behind it. A hundred meters below was the round half-bowl of a crater. The other half was blown away by subsequent volcanic activity, when rising magma hit the sea above, producing a sudden burst of steam, like an instant tea kettle.

It could be said that the runway at Oki Global Geopark Airport is the oldest runway in the world. Rolling lava 550,000 years ago paved a natural gently sloping plateau with good sea views, perfect for air traffic. All they had to do was fill in the holes and build the terminal. From my vantage point overlooking the airport from the lighthouse road, I happened to see the daily Izumo flight take off — there's hardly a better place for plane-spotting.

As I descended the path to rejoin the road, a woman came by walking her Shiba Inu. This was the only dog I saw on Dogojima.

I soon reached the pinkish steel arcs of Saigo Bridge. The quick way to the port would have been to cross over and then take two other bridges to the east. But a closer examination of the map showed me that I couldn't do that. Those bridges connected a string of other little islands within Okinoshima town, and Article 47.6J.1000002Z of the Abecedarian Walks Keen Wayfinding and Routing Document specifically states:

"A walker must remain on the Current Island for the duration of the Abecedarian Walk, except for brief excursions by boat that do not allow the walker to set foot on another landmass. A walker may not cross a bridge or otherwise proceed from the Current Island to an intermediate island or landmass in order to proceed further to another part of the Current Island, even if such intermediate island or landmass is politically or otherwise considered part of the Current Island. A walker may cross a bridge from one part of the Current Island to another part of the Current Island, provided that the crossing is a single span that does not provide the walker the opportunity to set foot on any intermediate island or landmass other than the Current Island." Hey, I don't make the rules, I just create them.

So instead of going east after Saigo Bridge, I would have to go west and take the next right turn to curl around to the port. It was not much extra distance, and I'd get to see the outskirts of Okinoshima — the suburbs, one might say.

I strode up almost to the entrance to the bridge and was horrified at what I saw — or didn't see. It was a narrow, two-lane vehicle bridge with no space allocated for walking.

Had I missed something? Was the walkway under the roadway? I backtracked and looked: No, there was nothing there. What had happened? This island that had cared for me all the way around, with lit walkways through mountain tunnels, had failed to accommodate a footpath linking the airport, the lighthouse park, and a popular nearby hotel with the main part of town?

There was no other bridge to the east, and the only way around to the west was back to near the B-Stone Garden and via my route from the day before: a 7.6-kilometer detour. I was not going to do that.

Saigo Bridge wasn't heavy with traffic, but it wasn't devoid of it. It did, after all, get people to the airport, and there was still one more plane to come and go. The bridge was about 300 meters long and crested slightly at the center. I couldn't see cars entering the bridge on the other side until they got to the middle. If I was going to go, I would have to stay on the side with the traffic, rather than facing it.

Most of the bridge traffic was headed toward the airport. I could see a fair distance behind me. It had been clear for a minute and remained so. I ran across the bridge — Article 26.2 of the AWKWARD allows for brief sections of running, such as for safety reasons or if it's raining — while checking for traffic behind me every couple of seconds. When I reached the middle, there was oncoming traffic but none in the lane in which I was running. I made it to the other side as a bus turned onto the bridge in the airport-bound direction.

The paltry pedestrian provisions continued: I turned left onto a moderately busy road, and there was no good place to walk there, either. I even found two unstocked vending machines. The day before I'd been bracing against horizontal snow and tramping through noisy tunnels; yet this was the most discouraging part of the circuit.

I worked my way back into town. It snowed fiercely for three minutes and then stopped. Houses backed onto a river, with boats parked below: a neighborhood of serenity so close to town.

I reached the port just before noon. The large, slow ferry was boarding for its afternoon visit to the Dozen islands — the three smaller inhabited Oki islands, considered children to the mother, Dogojima — after which it would swoop back around and head for Japan's main island of Honshu.

I celebrated the island's completion with an okonomiyaki lunch. It's possible to find regular okonomiyaki — a pancake usually made with cabbage and egg, usually topped with pork or seafood — in the United States, but I like them Hiroshima-style, filled with noodles. In Japan they're grilled right in front of you, and the oyster okonomiyaki at Tetchan, filled with soba, was somehow both light and filling. Best of all, the chef didn't slather the mayonnaise on but rather handed me the bottle, so I could apply as much as I wanted (none).

In the afternoon, I visited the Oki Islands Geopark Museum. Not surprisingly, the focus was on geology. These islands really have been through a lot in the past few million years. Once part of the single landmass that used to float around the globe, they drifted from Eurasia along with the rest of Japan. But they were still under water at that point. It took a giant volcanic explosion to get them to surface.

Since then, with the repeated cycles of global warming and cooling over hundreds of thousands of years, the water levels have gone down and up accordingly, making Oki variously an archipelago and a peninsula of what is now Honshu. As a result, plant species have ended up in Oki that wouldn't have naturally grown there, such as the Japanese cedar, which drifted this way in search of a warmer climate during the last glacial period or Ice Age. Similarly, endemic animals have evolved, such as the Oki salamander.

During all those climate changes, Oki was subjected to extreme volcanic eruptions, which sent materials up from the earth's mantle. This is one of the few places where mantle xenoliths — rocks encased with other rocks that include minerals from the earth's mantle — can be found, such as the ones I saw along the eastern coast.

Now here's something that never occurred to me, something I read in the museum that left my mouth agape. We haven't yet reached the earth's mantle. Humans have drilled down far into the crust, but the farthest they've gotten was about 12 kilometers, a third of the way to the mantle, at the bottom of the Kola Superdeep Borehole in northwestern Russia, the deepest hole ever dug. We've gotten to the moon, but we haven't made it a day's walking distance to our planet's interior.

So in order to see what's below the crust, we have to rely on gifts from the earth itself, such as in the form of eruptions that deliver rocks from the mantle right to the roadside of the Kuboro Coast. Oki hasn't had one of these eruptions for about 400,000 years, so we have to study what we've got.

It's because of this volcanic activity that Oki got put on the trading map: Obsidian, a usually black, naturally sharp glass made from rapidly cooled lava, is especially high-quality in parts of Dogojima. From 30,000 years ago — longer than the Oki Islands have been islands — people have sought Oki's obsidian for hunting and other purposes. In the 19th century, Oki was a convenient stopping point for trading ships on the Sea of Japan side of the country.

For the first time in almost a week, I had to find a place for dinner. Okinoshima town's restaurants were of two types: those that were full and required a reservation, and those with no patrons in them. Of the latter, I stepped into Aoyagi, where I was warmly greeted by a husband-and-wife team and a grilled sazae (turban shell). I kept to the yakitori theme for dinner, with a grilled giant oyster, a bai (ivory shell), and a threeline grunt, which sounds like a play in football but is actually a kind of white fish.

Okinoshima town had an alley with a few restaurants and bars; at the bend in the alley, I had a nightcap at the DJ Bar Yulayula. The owner played light jazz from his personal collection of hundreds of records, and I talked with someone brought over from Honshu to teach in a junior high school.

He's teaching geology, of course. And if there's anywhere to study it, it's Dogojima.

Next trip: Yell Walk