Nagasaki has always lived off its harbour, and the harbour is a long, deep, hill-framed bay that looks, from the hillside streets, like a Scottish loch with a Japanese accent. The Kosuge Slip Dock sits on the eastern shore, a stone-lined cradle where ships were once hauled out of the water for repair. It dates from the very start of the Meiji era, the late 1860s, and was built with the help of Scottish engineers and a Scottish merchant, Thomas Glover. Mitsubishi took over the yard in the 1880s and the company is still building ships on the same shoreline today, which is why most of the neighbourhood is working industry rather than a museum.
This is a quiet corner of a loud industrial story. The stonework is fitted with great care and has the neat, almost fussy look of Victorian dock engineering, surrounded by brick sheds and cranes. Around the bay you can also spot the giant cantilever crane, a monster from the early twentieth century, and the old pattern-shop buildings that now carry a World Heritage label as part of the Meiji industrial sites group. It is the sort of place a naval architect would weep over and an ordinary rider would walk past in ten minutes.
Riding in Nagasaki is a lesson in gradients. The city climbs the hills in tight terraces and the roads can be astonishingly steep, with hairpins and one-way lanes hardly wider than a bike and a bicycle. Trams still rattle along the main streets. Fuel and food are no problem, as this is a city of four hundred thousand, and you should treat it as a place for slow, low-gear pottering. Head up Mount Inasa after dark if the weather allows; the harbour lights from there are the best view in Kyushu.
Do not skip the food: champon, a noodle soup piled with seafood and vegetables, and sara udon with its crispy fried noodles both grew out of the Chinese community here, and castella sponge cake came with Portuguese traders. The city was the only Japanese port open to Europeans during the long isolation, through the Dutch trading post on the island of Dejima, which is why it feels different from anywhere else in the country.
Spring and autumn are gentle. Summers are muggy, and typhoons in September can shut the roads for a day.