Yakushima

For Golden Week I went down to Kyushu and Yakushima. Yakushima is a small island that is a 2 hour speedboat ride from the city of Kagoshima on Kyushu. The island is a UNESCO World Heritage Centre, mainly because of the extremely old cedar trees in the island's interior. The island's oldest tree, the Jomonsugi, is estimated to be somewhere between 3,000 and 7,000 years old. There are also many monkeys (yakuzaru) and deer (yakushika) on the island. This picture I took at the Oko no taki (Big River Waterfall). The Japanese love to rate things, and so this waterfall is considered one of the 100 best in Japan.
The people on the island were incredibly friendly. As there were very few foreigners, all of the school kids would either stare at me, or approach and talk to me in Japanese, or say anything they knew in English to me. The people speak a dialect called Kagoshima-ben, which was not only extremely difficult for me to understand, but it was even hard for tourists from other parts of Japan to understand.