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.
From Hirado it runs 665 km to Hirado; allow about 23 h 42 of riding. The stops in between: Villages on Kuroshima Island, Ono Village in Sotome, Takashima Coal Mine/ Hashima Coal Mine and Sakitsu Village in Amakusa. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
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 Takashima Coal Mine/ Hashima Coal Mine.
From the sea, Hashima looks like a battleship: a small rocky island off Nagasaki surrounded by high concrete walls, crowded with tall, empty apartment blocks. The Japanese call it Gunkanjima, battleship island, and it is the most famous ruin of Japan's industrial age. Mitsubishi mined coal here from undersea seams from the late nineteenth century, and as the mine grew the island was extended with land reclaimed from the sea and built up with concrete housing, schools, a hospital and shops. At its peak it was one of the most densely populated places on Earth. When the mine closed in 1974, everyone left within weeks, and the island has been slowly crumbling ever since.
Read the complete Takashima Coal Mine/ Hashima Coal Mine write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Takashima Coal Mine/ Hashima Coal Mine, about halfway. 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 sits at 178 km, about halfway. Next is back through Takashima Coal Mine/ Hashima Coal Mine.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Takashima Coal Mine/ Hashima Coal Mine write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Takashima Coal Mine/ Hashima Coal Mine comes up about 476 km into the recorded legs. 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.
about 531 km into the recorded legs you reach back through Ono Village in Sotome. 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, late in the day. 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.
The route ends here after 665 km.
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 → Takashima Coal Mine/ Hashima Coal Mine is 55 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Takashima Coal Mine/ Hashima Coal Mine → Sakitsu Village in Amakusa is 143 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Sakitsu Village in Amakusa → back through Takashima Coal Mine/ Hashima Coal Mine is 143 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Takashima Coal Mine/ Hashima Coal Mine → back through Ono Village in Sotome is 55 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 59 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.