Have a lovely journey!

Following my previous blog post Rabbit Island , we remain in Japan to discover an enchanting star sand beach. It’s Hoshizuna-no-Hama (which literally means “star sand beach” ) , in Japan's Okinawa prefecture, and if you l ook closely, you’ll see that the sand of this beach is very special:  the sand grains really are stars! According to a local legend these tiny star creatures are the offspring of the North Star and Southern Cross. It was said that their children were born in the sea of Okinawa, but a serpent swallowed them leaving only their skeletons behind. See also  Touching a rainbow The truth is that these unique grains are not really sand but actually the exoskeletons of tiny unicellular organism, called Foraminifera that live among the sea grass. Their exoskeleton (or shell) is shaped like a star with 5 or 6 pointed spines that help them, move from one place to another. When they die, they leave their star shaped shells behind ...

Bunnies … who doesn’t like these little cute, fluffy and cuddly animals? Be prepared to the incredible: there is even an entire island where rabbits rule undisturbed… and I’m not talking about Alice in Wonderland and the white rabbit! Welcome to Japan’s Rabbit Island , Okunoshima, an island with a dark history, which is now home to hundreds of wild adorable rabbits. The Japanese army, during World War II, secretly produced over 6,000 tons of lethal gas on Okunoshima, which was even removed from maps as the mission was top-secret and they brought a colony of rabbits to the island in order to test the effects of the poison. It is believed that those rabbits were all, unfortunately, killed when the island was abandoned at the end of the war and that the rabbits that are now on the island are the descendant of just eight rabbits, brought to the island by schoolchildren in 1971, which multiplied until they reached their present population of seve...