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: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
394 km from Nagasaki to Nagasaki, about 5 h 47 of riding. The stops in between: Sakitsu Village in Amakusa, Misumi West Port and back through Sakitsu Village in Amakusa. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Thomas Blake Glover arrived in Nagasaki in 1859 as a young Scot in his early twenties, and within a decade he had become one of the most influential foreigners in Japan. His house stands on Minamiyamate hill above the harbour, built in the early 1860s, and it is the oldest surviving Western-style building in the country. It has wide verandas, a stone-flagged garden and a view of the bay that must have been a sales tool in itself. Glover traded tea and ships and, more controversially, guns and warships, supplying the domains that overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate. He also helped smuggle young Choshu samurai out of Japan to study in London, and later worked with Mitsubishi on shipbuilding. Some historians say he brought the Industrial Revolution to Japan through the back door.
Read the complete Glover House and Office write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Glover House and Office is where the day begins. Next is Sakitsu Village in Amakusa.
A small Gothic church with a spire stands right at the water's edge in Sakitsu, a fishing village tucked into an inlet on the southern coast of Amakusa's Shimoshima island. It looks almost Breton, a surprise in rural Kyushu, and the story behind it is one of the most moving in Japanese history. When Christianity was banned in the early seventeenth century, the people of Sakitsu kept their faith in secret for over two centuries, disguising prayers and objects as Buddhist or Shinto practice, and using things from their own fishing life, such as abalone shells whose inner patterns recalled holy images, as objects of devotion.
Read the complete Sakitsu Village in Amakusa write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Sakitsu Village in Amakusa comes up about 121 km into the recorded legs. Next is Misumi West Port.
At the tip of the Uto Peninsula in Kumamoto, where the land narrows towards the islands of Amakusa, there is a small Meiji-era harbour that looks almost unchanged since it was finished in 1887. Misumi West Port was designed by the Dutch engineer Rouwenhorst Mulder as part of Japan's rapid modernisation after it opened to the West, and its long stone quays, drainage channels and carefully fitted granite blocks were built by Japanese stonemasons using their traditional skills. For a while it was a busy export port for coal from the Miike mines across the bay, but when the railway reached another harbour its importance faded, which is precisely why it survived. It is now part of the World Heritage site of Japan's Meiji industrial revolution.
Read the complete Misumi West Port write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 199 km into the recorded legs you reach Misumi West Port. Next is back through Sakitsu Village in Amakusa.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Sakitsu Village in Amakusa write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Sakitsu Village in Amakusa, late in the day. Next is Glover House and Office.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Glover House and Office write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Glover House and Office. That is the ride.
Glover House and Office → Sakitsu Village in Amakusa is 121 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Sakitsu Village in Amakusa → Misumi West Port is 78 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Misumi West Port → back through Sakitsu Village in Amakusa is 74 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Sakitsu Village in Amakusa → Glover House and Office is 121 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.