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.
A 991 km round trip from Togitsu - roughly 17 h 05 in the saddle. The stops in between: Villages on Kashiragashima Island, Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado and back through Villages on Kashiragashima Island. 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 65 km. The line follows the shore because there is nowhere else for it to go.
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.
Ono Village in Sotome 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 252 km into the recorded legs. Next is Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado.
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.
about 496 km into the recorded legs you reach Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado. 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, late in the day. Next is 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 at Ono Village in Sotome. That is the ride.
Ono Village in Sotome → Villages on Kashiragashima Island is 252 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Villages on Kashiragashima Island → Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado is 244 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado → back through Villages on Kashiragashima Island is 244 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Villages on Kashiragashima Island → Ono Village in Sotome is 252 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.