Our Travels In Japan (and other places): Kinen Koen

The whole reason we spent half a day getting to the northern part of the island was to visit Kinen Koen (Ocean Expo Park). It's an indoor/outdoor set of exhibits that spans a few miles and includes the Churaumi Aquarium, a botanical garden, a traditional Okinawan village, and the like. It is also directly next door to our hotel (good planning, Sumi! We'll forget all about the "no food" thing!)

Speaking of no food, our hotel "almost" had breakfast. For ¥500 (about $3.50) they did offer a "breakfast bento" which was basically a very stripped down buffet of mostly carbohydrates. Small waffles, small croissants, small muffins, small...you get the idea. They also had the automatic pancake maker.

90 seconds and you, too, can have a silver dollar pancake

It was not the most underwhelming breakfast I have ever had.

If I let her, there would be about 300 of Sumi's fish pictures from this visit, but I must say the Churaumi Aquarium is one of the best I have ever seen. There are cutting edge researchers there that travel the world with some of their custom made equipment, learning more about a variety of marine animals. They appear to be the only place in the world that has bred a manta ray in captivity, using a special handheld underwater scanner to monitor gestation (they published several papers on this) and so on. They have done this with several species and are currently working on Moray Eels and researching whale shark gestation.

Speaking of whale sharks

Close to 10m long and weighing about 6 tons, he was amazing. It's really hard to get a sense of how big he was without seeing him swim by you, just a few feet away. The giant manta rays in the very large tank with him are 6m across and looked small next to him.

Very quiet and slow to move. We were fortunate enough to get to see him eat. When they do, sometimes they will go vertical, staying in one place and feeding. It was really cool to see. We have a picture from lunch where you can see him in the background.

The exhibits were excellent, both the large fish like the whale shark and manta rays, and the smaller exhibits. The facilities were top notch and other than far too many children whining and crying far too much, it was a really pleasant few hours. Here's a SMALL sample of Sumi's photo collection

They had a "restaurant" in the basement of the aquarium that had tables set up at small viewing stations of the big tank, so you could (for a small ¥1000 fee) reserve a table right next to the tank and watch the fish while you ate.

Yes, we totally did, You can see the whale shark "standing up" in the background

The "restaurant" food.

OK, so mine was a "margarita pizza" that looked like a calzone and tasted like high school hot lunch. Sumi has some explaining to do to the creatures we'd been watching all morning, as she ordered fish and chips. Whose cousin were you eating, hmmm?

After lunch we walked up the Ocean Park and took a look at some of the other exhibits. There was a lot of interesting topiary along the 7.5km route

The old Okinawan village had a lot of recreations of what buildings were like before Okinawa was subsumed into the Japanese empire during the Showa era.