Location: off the Northwest shore of Okinawa-honto. From Motobu Port, about 1 hr ferry. If you need help booking a ferry ride, especially if taking your car, you can ask an on-base travel agent (preferably Japanese speaker), to call the port on your behalf. Car reservations close about a week before the departure--don't think you can sweet talk someone to getting your car on the same day. The Okinawans are pleasant and helpful, but there are rules to be followed. Be there about 30 minutes before to buy tickets (your name goes on a list for the car): Y8500 for 1 person+1 medium car roundtrip. 1 adult RT is about Y1600. Options for scooter/bike transport. You are directed in reverse into the ferry's belly by numerous uniformed personnel. You can choose to stay in your car (with the engine running?!?) or go up on the deck to the theater-like seating and watch Japanese TV shows. A lovely smooth trip as you coast along past Minna Island toward Ie Shima. You will know Ie by its prominent mountain--Guskuyama.We arrived by noon, and we lucky enough to get an early check-in at the YYY Resort. It is the most popular and largest hotel for the island, visited by Japanese, Okinawan, and Americans. Good in that the hotel staff effortlessly answer questions, bad in that the experience is not really a getaway from what you know all too well.
Ie Resort picks you up form the port. The room was clean and spacious, surprisingly nice with a great view of the island cove. The grounds are small but well maintained. The pool is small and was filled with families. The poolside bar/grill was a nice cheap place to get a quick snack (300-600Y; yakitori, soba, fries) or drink (around 500Y). The beach access is just beyond, to a narrow strip of soft white sand beach which is long enough for a short stroll and pretty free of people, considering it was Labor Day weekend (with an American tour group present). The hotel provides breakfast/dinner (a common plan for Okinawan hotels), which were both fine. The breakfast is an unexciting but filling collection of standard Western/Japanese breakfast items. The dinner is much better; the front desk gives you options for meal seating times as well a choice of Western, Asian, or BBQ (ie grill-it-yourself) meals. In general, the meals were 5 courses (soup, appetizer, salad, main entree, dessert/coffee), seemed freshly made, and done with good effort for the fixed meal setting. Nothing crazy but nothing bad. Not many other dining options about town anyway.
Ie Shima itself is a quiet farming community island without a discrete center or much to do, outside of being in the water. The hotel has some nice brochures that layout the most popular things/places to visit. This is the island famous for its lily fields/festival. Otherwise, you can visit the Ernie Pyle (WWII journalist) grave - look closely, it is a small and understated little plot on a coastal road. Good luck if you get lost, the road and farm plots all look alike and we circled for a while before we found the special fertility monument/cave. It was tucked off the road in a watery cave with the special infant-sized rock that is lifted to grant good fertility. Watch out, the chain likes to fall off the rock.
The boat dives through the Ie Resort were great but not cheap, about Y6000 per dive (2 tanks). The divemaster was nice, and was able to get past the language issue with diagrams explaining the dives. We went off the Northern (groups of fish and monstrous coral head) and the Eastern (good crevasse/cave exploring) shores. Both sites are remarkable for the array of hard corals and fish species.
