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.
334 km from Hirado to Hirado, about 17 h 44 of riding. On the way it passes Villages on Kuroshima Island, Ono Village in Sotome, Nagasaki Shipyard/ Mitsubishi Former Patte and back through Ono Village in Sotome. The line favours views over speed.
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 36 km. The line follows the shore because there is nowhere else for it to go.
Hirado is an island at the far northwest of Kyushu, joined to the mainland by a bridge, and it has a stranger history than most. In 1609 the Dutch East India Company opened a trading post here, and for a while Hirado was the only place in Japan where Europeans traded openly, before the shogunate shifted them to the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki in 1641. The town still has a harbour and a castle on the hill, and the sea is never far from any road.
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 is where the day begins. Next is Villages on Kuroshima Island.
For more than two centuries after Christianity was banned in Japan in the early seventeenth century, small communities of believers kept their faith in secret, disguising prayers as Buddhist chants and images of the Virgin Mary as Buddhist figures. Kuroshima, a small island off the coast of Sasebo in Nagasaki Prefecture, was one of the places where these hidden Christians lived and farmed, and when the ban was lifted in the 1870s they emerged openly. Their villages are part of the UNESCO listing of Hidden Christian sites in the Nagasaki region, listed in 2018.
Read the complete Villages on Kuroshima Island write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Villages on Kuroshima Island comes up about 58 km into the recorded legs. Next is Ono Village in Sotome.
For more than two centuries Christianity was banned in Japan, and in the villages along the Sotome coast north of Nagasaki, communities practised their faith in secret, disguising prayers as Buddhist chants and hiding images of the Virgin as the bodhisattva Kannon. These were the Hidden Christians, the Kakure Kirishitan, and their villages, including Ono, are part of the World Heritage listing of Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region, inscribed in 2018. At Ono the small Ono church, built by the French missionary Marc Marie de Rotz in the late nineteenth century after the ban was lifted, has thick walls built in a local technique of stones bound with mortar, known as de Rotz walls.
Read the complete Ono Village in Sotome write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 135 km into the recorded legs you reach Ono Village in Sotome. Next is Nagasaki Shipyard/ Mitsubishi Former Patte.
Nagasaki's harbour is a long, narrow inlet surrounded by steep hills, and on its western shore the Mitsubishi shipyard has been building ships since the late nineteenth century. The yard was one of the engines of Japan's rapid industrialisation in the Meiji era, when the country transformed itself from a feudal society into an industrial power in a few decades. Several of its historic structures are part of the UNESCO listing of the Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution, inscribed in 2015. The Former Pattern Shop, a red-brick building from 1898 where wooden patterns were made for casting metal parts, now houses a museum of the yard's history. The Giant Cantilever Crane, installed in 1909 and made in Scotland, is still in working order, and it dominates the waterfront. The yard built many famous ships, including the battleship Musashi, one of the largest warships ever constructed.
Read the complete Nagasaki Shipyard/ Mitsubishi Former Patte write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Nagasaki Shipyard/ Mitsubishi Former Patte, about halfway. Next is back through Ono Village in Sotome.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Ono Village in Sotome write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Ono Village in Sotome sits at 147 km, about halfway. Next is back through Villages on Kuroshima Island.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Villages on Kuroshima Island write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Villages on Kuroshima Island comes up about 274 km into the recorded legs. Next is Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
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 closes the day.
Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado → Villages on Kuroshima Island is 58 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Villages on Kuroshima Island → Ono Village in Sotome is 77 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Ono Village in Sotome → Nagasaki Shipyard/ Mitsubishi Former Patte is 32 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Nagasaki Shipyard/ Mitsubishi Former Patte → back through Ono Village in Sotome is 32 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Ono Village in Sotome → back through Villages on Kuroshima Island is 75 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Villages on Kuroshima Island → Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado is 60 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.