CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: planning record, not independently verified geometry.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distances and riding times are planning figures. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
From Fukuechō it runs 701 km to Fukuechō; allow about 5 h of riding. The stops in between: Villages on Kashiragashima Island, Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado, Egami Village on Naru Island and back through Villages on Kashiragashima Island.
Slow enough to look. The surface follows the shoreline, so the corners arrive where the water decided, not where an engineer did. Water arrives beside the road and stays for 46 km. The line follows the shore because there is nowhere else for it to go.
Egami is a small Catholic church on Naru Island in the Goto archipelago, off western Kyushu, and its story is one of the most remarkable in the history of Japanese Christianity. After missionaries arrived in the sixteenth century, the shogunate banned the faith and for about two and a half centuries persecuted believers. Some communities went underground, hiding their rosaries and their prayers in the guise of Buddhist or Shinto customs, and became known as the Hidden Christians. In the Goto islands, families who had fled from Nagasaki in the late eighteenth century cleared poor land and kept their faith quietly, and when the ban was lifted in the 1870s they came into the open.
Read the complete Egami Village on Naru Island write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Egami Village on Naru Island is where the day begins. Next is Villages on Kashiragashima Island.
Kashiragashima is a scrap of rock off the northeast coast of Nakadōri, in the Gotō Islands west of Nagasaki, and for a long time nobody wanted to live there. In the nineteenth century the island was used as a place to isolate smallpox patients, and that very isolation drew a small group of Hidden Christians, Japanese Catholics who had kept their faith in secret through more than two centuries of persecution. They settled in a cove, farmed the steep slopes and fished. After the ban on Christianity was lifted, they built a church out of the local sandstone, quarried and carried by hand, under the direction of the master builder Tetsukawa Yosuke, who designed many churches across the region. Completed in 1919, it is a sturdy, beautiful building, and the village is part of the UNESCO listing of Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region, inscribed in 2018.
Read the complete Villages on Kashiragashima Island write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Villages on Kashiragashima Island comes up about 105 km into the recorded legs. Next is Remains of Villages on Nozaki Island.
Hirado is an island off the northwest coast of Kyushu, connected to the mainland by a bright red suspension bridge, and for a brief moment in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was one of Japan's windows on the world. Portuguese traders arrived in 1550, followed by Jesuit missionaries, and later the Dutch and English East India Companies set up trading posts here. When Christianity was banned in the early seventeenth century and foreign trade was moved to Nagasaki, the Christians of Hirado went underground. Kasuga, a farming village on the western side of the island, is one of the places where these Hidden Christians, the Kakure Kirishitan, maintained their faith in secret for more than two centuries, outwardly following Buddhism and Shinto while worshipping Christian images disguised as Buddhist statues and reciting prayers in a garbled mix of Latin, Portuguese and Japanese. The village and the sacred mountain of Yasumandake above it are part of the UNESCO listing of the Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region.
Read the complete Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado, about halfway. Next is back through Remains of Villages on Nozaki Island.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Egami Village on Naru Island write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Remains of Villages on Nozaki Island sits at 390 km, about halfway. Next is back through Villages on Kashiragashima Island.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Villages on Kashiragashima Island write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Villages on Kashiragashima Island comes up about 599 km into the recorded legs. Next is Egami Village on Naru Island.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Egami Village on Naru Island write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Egami Village on Naru Island closes the day.
Egami Village on Naru Island → Villages on Kashiragashima Island is 105 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Villages on Kashiragashima Island → Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado is 145 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado → Back to Egami Village on Naru Island is 245 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Villages on Kashiragashima Island → Egami Village on Naru Island is 105 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.