Laugh. Love. Create. Travel. Eat.

This tale is both cautionary and a lesson in that all too human quality, faith. It is not much a story about what I discovered about a place so much as what I found in people.

Like all good stories, it starts on a deserted island. Well, not quite. But Yakushima Island does remain a small player in Japan’s tourism landscape, often skipped entirely by Okinawan sun seekers. Far from crystal beaches, this island has been plucked from a wild imagination of ancient cedar forests, greens beyond counting and mischievous kodama (Japanese forest spirits).

Yakushima’s trails don’t just carve through the woods, they’ve grown amongst it. As such, you’ll need hiking boots and a wardrobe that caters to all seasons. After all, when the locals say that it rains 35 days a month, you need to approach any cloudless morning with a sumo-sized helping of skepticism. Public transport on Yakushima is also remarkably scarce- there may be only two services a day to some trails. This is certainly not the place for a come-what-may itinerary.

After finishing our second hike, my friend and I found ourselves at the mercy of such retrospective wisdom. The next bus was over two hours away and we were facing plummeting temperatures, intermittent showers and local deer that decided we’d make wonderful playmates. We must have appeared as unprepared as we were because a group of Japanese rangers offered us a lift back to town. As two young women travelling alone this course was probably ill-advised but, spurred on by a few whispered reassurances, we took it.

The euphoria of escaping a cold purgatory was still buzzing under our skin when we stopped to drop the group off at a midway carpark. Alone with a single driver, we then abruptly turned onto a overgrown farm track. Our guide had promised to show us something cool but my elation sunk like a punctured balloon.

After a few uneasy minutes the car halted on a monolithic concrete bridge, cast over a vast forest valley. It was here that our guide emerged with bubble blowers that were so comically over-sized I wondered if he’d stolen them from Wonderland.

Now beaming he asked, “Shall we blow bubbles?”

That grin was contagious and the rest, they say, is a travel story. It’s a story that reminds me that people still have the capacity to inspire faith and that strangers needn't always be wrapped in an invisible cloak of suspicious motives. Sometimes they just want to share their country.

Sometimes they just want to blow bubbles.