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 792 km round trip from Fukuechō - roughly 14 h 22 in the saddle. On the way it passes Villages on Kashiragashima Island, Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado, Villages on Hisaka Island and back through Villages on Kashiragashima Island. An island ride, so the sea is never far.
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.
Hisaka is a small island just across a narrow strait from Fukue, in the Goto archipelago far out in the East China Sea west of Nagasaki, and it has a quiet, particular history. Christianity arrived in Japan in the sixteenth century, was banned by the shogunate in the early seventeenth, and ruthlessly suppressed. Yet in the countryside around Nagasaki, communities went on practising in secret for more than two hundred years, mixing Catholic prayers with Buddhist and Shinto forms in order to avoid detection. They are known as the Hidden Christians, or Kakure Kirishitan. In the late eighteenth century, the lord of the Goto islands asked for farmers from the mainland to settle his empty land, and many of those who came were secret Christians, glad to move to a remote place where they might be left alone.
Read the complete Villages on Hisaka Island write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Villages on Hisaka 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 119 km into the recorded legs. Next is Villages on Kuroshima Island.
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, about halfway. Next is back through Villages on Kuroshima Island.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Villages on Hisaka Island write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Villages on Kuroshima Island sits at 456 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 676 km into the recorded legs. Next is Villages on Hisaka Island.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Villages on Hisaka Island write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Villages on Hisaka Island closes the day.
Villages on Hisaka Island → Villages on Kashiragashima Island is 119 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 160 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado → Back to Villages on Hisaka Island is 277 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Villages on Kashiragashima Island → Villages on Hisaka Island is 119 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.