Adventures at SeaSeed

We just passed our two-year "Japanniversary" and with roughly only 8 months left on our little island paradise, I am determined to make it to the end of my Okinawa Bucket List!!  To this end, I took the kids to SeaSeed a couple of weeks ago, which is just a hop, skip and a jump up the road in Yomitan Village.

SeaSeed is a Coral Farm where they basically "raise" coral.  Okinawa offers some of the world's best snorkeling and scuba diving, but the live coral is continuously destroyed because of these pasttimes.  The coral farm's mission is to "raise" coral at the farm - no easy task - and then transplant it via root clumps to the ocean's coral reefs in their natural environment.

It was amazing, it really was.  That first picture up there is how the baby coral starts out.  The second picture is the bigger coral after it has been "raised," I think. There wasn't a whole lot of translation, but this is what I gathered from it.

 Pretend this picture is turned counterclockwise 90 degrees.  It's a picture of some of the fish.  They have tons and tons of beautiful fish - it's like going snorkeling without the equipment ! They even had small sea turtles, which the kids loved.  They had some open ponds, and then they had a path that went down underneath the bottom of the pond so you could look through all these really cool windows like the one below. 

Wyatt and Olivia thought these were their own little personal windows to sit in and stare at the fish!

After we looked at all the fish and coral, we went out toward the beach it sits on.  There with this crazy little footpath (below) that you can walk all the way out to the water on.

 So of course we took the footpath out there, and Olivia kept falling down because the rocks were uneven, and then she wanted to take off her shoes, but then her feet hurt on the rocks. Then I spent the next 10 minutes try really hard to not let the kids jump/fall over the edge of the platform and into the sea.  So that was fun. :)

Once we had made it back safely to shore, the kids discovered the massive amounts of shells and coral that had washed up.  They sat amongst it for a good 20 minutes, Olivia playing in it and throwing it, Wyatt looking for shells to add to our collection.  It was hot out, but the breeze off the water felt amazing and we enjoyed what was left of the sun.  The kids and I were amazed by this little-known gem here on Okinawa.  This island just never ceases to amaze me, and it made me think for the 100th time that week how much we'll miss this place when we move.