Ride Okinawa maps the Ryukyu islands for people planning a trip there.

Who writes it

Adam Bognar edits Ride Okinawa. He's a designer who runs The Still, a brand studio in Vancouver, and he started the site while planning his own trip to the islands. Ride Okinawa is the sister publication to Ride Hokkaido. Write to him through adambognar.com.

How we build it

The guide covers 36 islands, 131 places to stay, 88 beaches and dive sites, 72 ferries, flights and ports, and 9 cycling routes. Facts come from the islands' own municipal and tourism pages, operators' and hotels' published pages, ferry and airline timetables and rules, the Japan Meteorological Agency and the Okinawa Prefectural Government. Every page lists its sources and the month we last checked them.

Route statistics are our own measurements. We route each ride over OpenStreetMap with a bike profile, sample AWS Terrain Tiles elevation data every 25 m along it, and read the road class and surface from the map data. That gives distance, climbing, the steepest stretch, how much of the ride is on quiet roads, how much runs beside the sea, and the konbini, cafés and water along the way. We compare each month's prevailing wind from the Japan Meteorological Agency with every stretch of road to say which way to ride. The 3D maps and the contour plates, sea-floor depths included, are drawn from the same data.

We say when a figure belongs to an operator and when it is ours, and we leave a field blank rather than guess. Research is compiled from published sources with help from AI research tools, then checked and edited. We don't claim to have eaten, stayed, dived or ridden anywhere unless we did, and we say so with a date when we have.

Sacred places and memory

Okinawa's utaki are living sacred places, and some are closed to visitors altogether. Pages for them set out the access rules from the sites and their communities. Battle of Okinawa memorials and the US base presence are covered from the prefecture's own records and Okinawan sources. Our notes on visual culture, and on what we leave alone, are in our design research.

Photographs

The 177 photos on the site come from photographers who publish under open licences on Wikimedia Commons, Flickr and Unsplash, credited by name with their licence beside each image. Where a hotel or operator provides press images, we credit them as theirs.

How the site makes money

Some booking links pay us a commission when you book a stay, a tour, a car or an eSIM through them. They're marked and cost you nothing extra. The same places appear whether or not a partner pays us, and no business can pay to change what we write.

Corrections

Ferry timetables change with the season and a restaurant can close between visits. If something here is out of date, tell us and we'll fix it and date the change.