Gina and I flew to Kumejima, a small island that’s about a 25 minute flight away to the west of Okinawa. Our Japanese language teacher grew up there and we decided to go visit. It takes about 45 minutes to drive all the way around it at 25 mph and only 10,000 people live there. To say this place is laid back is an understatement. Farming and scuba tourism appear to be the primary industries. There is likely some healthy amounts of fishing happening as well. This morning, we hiked to some waterfalls that flow up when the wind blows. There wasn’t enough water to really get the effect today, but there were some really big banana spiders there. This one pictured was about 10 inches from end to end. Each square in his web was about 1/2 an inch to give you some perspective. His web was about 6 – 8 feet in diameter and would move back and forth some 2 – 3 feet in the wind. This made it challenging to get a picture and also made him float uncomfortably near my camera a couple of times. We had to be careful of a few of his brother’s webs on the walk in and out of the observation area from the parking lot. I’ll have many more cool pictures and details later. Enjoy this one for now:

Really big banana spider

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 6th, 2009 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Okinawa, Photography, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.