Just returned from 4 days Ishigaki. Great experience, a very beautiful and nice small island! Thanks a lot to Yuli for providing such a wealth of information, without you I wouldn’t even have known it exists 
Some hints for people who want to go as well:
I used DTS, cost for the return tickets Taipei Songshan - Hualien - Ishigaki was ~10.000 NTD per person
[quote]大榮 (Daiei) gogojp.com.tw/
DTS TOUR AGENCY TEL:02-25223219
Sales - Noelle
[/quote]
Just make sure you pick up your luggage in Hualien, and check it in again. in Taipei they told me the luggage would go directly, but turned out that’s not correct. The flight with Transasia Airways is very short (35 minutes to Hualien, and a bit more than an hour to Ishigaki).
If you want to rent a car, better call up front, since sometimes they don’t have many cars left there. I used Toyota, which is right next to the Airport. They will pick you up by bus, and after returning the car bring you back there: rent.toyota.co.jp/en/index.html reservation only by telephone. If you didn’t reserve (like me) then go to the information at Ishigaki airport, they can hopefully connect you with a car rental service. Any car is OK on that island, seriously! I had the smallest 1000cc Toyota, which was already oversized given the speed limits there (40 mostly, some eastern streets 50). Caution, left hand driving! Fun though. No speed cameras visible anywhere, though. I don’t remember the exact price, but I think this was ~8K NTD. It came with a mostly Japanese GPS, after some playing around I found the best way was to enter the telephone number of where you want to go, and it will guide you there. Also looking up on Google maps or on a paper map first (bring one, or get one from the car rental) and then just scrolling and zooming till you find it helps. YOu have to press some symbol for getting north up first, else the island can look pretty weird and it is hard to find stuff
I booked a room at hotel cucule (“heart” in the local language) over booking.com, because the local booking is only in Japanese. I found it using Tripadvidor, which so far didn’t let em down finding nice hotels abroad. Price was also ~10K NTD for a double room 3 nights. Small, clean, comfortable. Right next to the “city center”, if oyu can call it like that, and the port. Free parking across the street. Don’t speak much English, but it’s enough to get by. The small restaurant connected to it is quite good I felt, and the only place opening in the afternoon where you can still get something nice to eat (grilled Ishigaki beef and sashimi in my case) before the flight back leaves. Most other restaurants open at 17:00 or so.
To find stuff to do, try:
wikitravel.org/en/Ishigaki
ishigaki-japan.com/
I can especially recommend:
Climb Mount Nosoko for an astonishing view. Caution, only the “long” way is open right now, the short cut is closed.
Go snorkeling. Maybe you might want to take a guided tour which takes you out to the reef on a boat. They know the nicest spots. If you go by yourself, you might find the super shallow water in many places where the reefs are most accessible very uncomfortable to swim in. Not to speak of disturbing the reef fauna and flora, which should be avoided at all costs.
Enjoy the beaches, especially the less known ones. Think “a tropical beach for you alone”, you are not too far off. But even the most accessible beach near the airport, in prime season (till October), on a Saturday afternoon, was not crowded at all. Maybe… I don’t know. 25 people in total?
Eat. If you don’t speak Japanese (like me) it will be a bit hard, since English or Chinese is not prevalent at all. Reading Chinese you will be able to figure out some stuff, due to same characters used. Make sure you find places with pictures ion the menu, or even the rare restaurant that has an English menu. Or take one of the Japanese language free guide books you get everywhere, select by photo, find that restaurant, and point at what you want
Note: Ishigaki Beef is DELICIOUS! Too bad that during my stay there no one served beef sashimi. Why? No idea. Even the few people speaking English could not give any more explanation than “You know, they have troubles in mainland Japan right now, so cannot serve raw beef. We have raw fish though if you want?”. I have no idea what locally bred ishigaki cattle, served locally, have to do with anything in mainland Japan though. Well, my solution was to go to a place where you BBQ your beef on your own, and just eat some raw. No idea what kind of disease I will get, but that was very, very good. Highly recommended, but not the most cheap food on earth for sure.
If you have some more time, it is surely interesting to dive into the local culture and history. Probably several parallels to Taiwan, too, since the island was not always Japanese either…
