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 Fujiyoshida it runs 421 km to Fujiyoshida; allow about 6 h 14 of riding. The stops in between: Nirayama Reverbatory Furnaces, Musée National des Beaux-Arts de l’Occiden and back through Nirayama Reverbatory Furnaces. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 850 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. The line favours views over speed.
Mount Fuji's lava does strange things to trees. When a flow of molten rock surges through a forest, it wraps around trunks and hardens, and when the tree burns away it leaves a hollow cast, a round tube in the rock that looks like a well or a chimney. The lava tree molds at Yoshida are formed in this way, found along the lower slopes in the dense forest known as Aokigahara, where the ground is black, rough and honeycombed with caves. The flows come from eruptions of Fuji in the ninth century and later, and the forest has grown up over the cooling rock ever since.
Read the complete Yoshida lava tree molds write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Yoshida lava tree molds is where the day begins. Next is Nirayama Reverbatory Furnaces.
Two pairs of tall brick chimneys stand in a quiet suburb at the base of the Izu Peninsula, looking strangely European against the green hills. They belong to the Nirayama reverberatory furnace, built in the 1850s to melt iron for casting cannons, at a time when Japan felt threatened by Western warships arriving in its waters. The project was led by Egawa Hidetatsu, the local magistrate, a forward-thinking official who studied Western military technology from Dutch books. He died before it was completed, and his son finished the work. It is the only surviving reverberatory furnace of its era in Japan that was actually used for casting, and since 2015 it has been part of the UNESCO site of the Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution.
Read the complete Nirayama Reverbatory Furnaces write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Nirayama Reverbatory Furnaces comes up about 67 km into the recorded legs. Next is Musée National des Beaux-Arts de l’Occiden.
Ueno is where Tokyo keeps its museums, and the National Museum of Western Art sits at the park's southern edge, a few minutes on foot from the station. The building is the point. Le Corbusier drew it in the late 1950s to house a collection of European art that Japan had won back from France after the war, and it later joined the UNESCO list of his works spread across several countries. It is a raised concrete box on pillars with a ramp-like logic inside, meant to grow outward as the collection did. In the forecourt Rodin's Gate of Hell and The Thinker sit in the open air, and on a grey morning the bronze looks wonderfully out of place against the Tokyo sky.
Read the complete Musée National des Beaux-Arts de l’Occiden write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 211 km into the recorded legs you reach Musée National des Beaux-Arts de l’Occiden. Next is back through Nirayama Reverbatory Furnaces.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Nirayama Reverbatory Furnaces write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Nirayama Reverbatory Furnaces, late in the day. Next is Yoshida lava tree molds.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Yoshida lava tree molds write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Yoshida lava tree molds. That is the ride.
Yoshida lava tree molds → Nirayama Reverbatory Furnaces is 67 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Nirayama Reverbatory Furnaces → Musée National des Beaux-Arts de l’Occiden is 144 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Musée National des Beaux-Arts de l’Occiden → back through Nirayama Reverbatory Furnaces is 144 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Nirayama Reverbatory Furnaces → Yoshida lava tree molds is 67 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.