What’s Carrot Island, without a carrot observatory with carrot benches? Our first stop on Carrot Island was the Carrot Observation Deck. The observation deck definitely needs an update and paint job, but it offered incredible views of Okinawa, Tsuken Island, and the surrounding ocean.

After seeing the beautiful ocean waters, we couldn’t wait to get to the beach. The first beach was Tomai Beach. This might very well be the prettiest beach I’ve seen in Okinawa to date. Crystal clear and calm water with various shades of Blue and a white sand beach, can it get any prettier? 

Tomai Beach is part of a resort on the island but is free to the public. The beach is about 1 Km in length. We snorkeled around here for a bit. Although the beach is gorgeous, snorkeling was a little underwhelming. It’s not that it wasn’t beautiful, it was just a sandy and shallow beach with nothing else really to see. We did see a 6 legged (or armed?) starfish. 

Surprisingly, there was an incredible amount of Sea Glass around the island. For those that don’t know. Sea glass is just regular glass that has been weathered or worn down over time so that the edges are smooth and round. White and Brown glass is pretty typical, but these beaches were full of green and light blue sea glass. 

After walking and snorkeling at Tomai Beach, we kept walking beaches around the island. None of the other beaches could come close to the beauty of Tomai Beach, but we still enjoyed coming them for sea glass, sea shells, and finding fun critters, like the Red Eyed Rock Crab in the photo below. He was so cute! 

Japan has these tetrapod things everywhere that we love. My friend Kimball is fascinated by these. They are his favorite! These tetrapods are usually set up along seawalls to limit erosion and longshore drift. 

That kind of wraps up the beach portion of Tsuken Island. Honestly, there is not a whole lot else to do. But we found some other cool sites. We stumbled upon a few Tombs of Okinawa. These tombs fascinate me because they are massive! 

The Golden Orb Weavers or Wood Spiders are getting massive this time of year. I guess if you hate spiders, avoid August in Okinawa. These spiders are all over the place and massive, I nearly came face to face with one as I almost walked in its web. Jill was brave enough to give you a size comparison of the spider with her hand!