This summer while traveling throughout Asia I had the wonderful pleasure of visiting a tiny remote Pacific island called Iriomote-jima. The island itself is part of the Ryukyu Island chain just East of Taiwan, and is part of Okinawa Province, Japan. There's no air strip on the island so my friend and I had to take an hour-long ferry ride from nearby Ishigaki just to get there. Considered to be one of the last island frontiers of Japan, Iriomote-jima has no banks, no schools, and no hospitals. There's a tiny shop for food, a few small restaurants, and there's one ATM on the island, but we never saw it.
What we did see were some of the most beautiful beaches in the world and looming behind it a vast unforgiving jungle and rolling dark mountains. By day, we were snorkeling along vast coral reefs screaming with aquatic life and some of the most vividly colored coral I could imagine. By night, the sky was so clear we could see not just the Milky Way, but point out individual satellites as they passed high over head. In the ocean water below us, we could see hundreds of luminous micro-organisms flash in a flurry of blue and green.
After seeing a beach like this and having this kind of experience, I don't know how I'll ever be able to enjoy something like the Jersey shore ever again.
