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.
A 338 km round trip from Sakai - roughly 5 h 32 in the saddle. The stops in between: Byodo-in, Pilgrimage Routes - Ômine Okugakemichi and back through Byodo-in. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 850 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Sakai is a port city of well over seven hundred thousand people, and yet in the middle of its houses and factory roofs sit green islands with water around them. Zenemonyama is one of those islands: a burial mound from the age of the great keyhole-shaped tombs, built in the fifth century or thereabouts for someone powerful enough to move an entire hillside of earth by hand. You will not see much of the keyhole from the ground. The shape only makes sense from the air, which is rather the point, because it was made for an audience of gods and passing clouds.
Read the complete Zenemonyama Kofun write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Zenemonyama Kofun is where the day begins. Next is Byodo-in.
Take a ten-yen coin out of your pocket in Japan and you are holding a picture of this place. The Phoenix Hall of the Byōdō-in in Uji, with its wings stretching out on either side of a central hall and bronze phoenixes on the roof, is one of the most famous buildings in the country. It was built in 1053 by Fujiwara no Yorimichi, a member of the most powerful aristocratic family of the Heian period, who converted his father's villa into a Buddhist temple. Its reflection in the pond in front was meant to evoke the Pure Land paradise of the Amida Buddha.
Read the complete Byodo-in write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Byōdō-in comes up about 59 km into the recorded legs. Next is Pilgrimage Routes - Ômine Okugakemichi.
The Ômine Okugakemichi is not a road at all, at least not one you can ride. It is a mountain trail that runs for about a hundred kilometres along the spine of the Ômine range in the Kii peninsula, linking Yoshino in the north with Kumano in the south, over peaks, ridges and rock faces. For more than a thousand years, yamabushi, the mountain ascetics of the Shugendo tradition, have walked it as a spiritual practice, combining Buddhist, Shinto and older mountain beliefs, with rituals at sacred rocks, waterfalls and cliffs along the way. It is part of the UNESCO-listed Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range, inscribed in 2004.
Read the complete Pilgrimage Routes - Ômine Okugakemichi write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 160 km into the recorded legs you reach Pilgrimage Routes - Ômine Okugakemichi. Next is back through Byodo-in.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Byodo-in write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Byodo-in, late in the day. Next is Zenemonyama Kofun.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Zenemonyama Kofun write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Zenemonyama Kofun. That is the ride.
Zenemonyama Kofun → Byodo-in is 59 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Byōdō-in → Pilgrimage Routes - Ômine Okugakemichi is 101 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Pilgrimage Routes - Ômine Okugakemichi → back through Byodo-in is 118 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Byodo-in → Zenemonyama Kofun is 60 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.