Bicycle: 96 km
Total ascent: 1105 m
Average speed: 16,2 km/h
Riding time: 5:53 h
Weather: very sunny, warm but not too warm, 26C
I had read about a cycle path in Northern Kyushu years ago when I prepared for my 2 months cycling adventure through Japan on my brompton, but I didn’t spend that much time in Kyushu back then and that cycle path seemed to be out of the way. However this time I managed to build it into my course.
But I wouldn’t say that this cycling path was the highlight of the day. It want bad, but Kyushu mountain roads are better.
I started the day with this view from my hotel window.
A small lake in Yufuin, which seems to be a nice onsen town, a bit different from your normal onsen town as the center of the city doesn’t have ryokans all lined up but rather a shopping street and a park and the onsen are more on the outskirts where this small town already merges with the farmland.
I didn’t linger in Yufuin and started my ride, the longest of my rides here in Kyushu but with the last 40 km or so downhill or flat. However I still managed to rack up over 1000 meters of climbing. Yes, there was some climbing straight out of town, later in it was more an up and down affair.
Climbing out of town I came through a vast training ground of the military. It probably took me about 1/3 of the ride to cross that area. Not only due to that training ground this area was mostly void of population. Just rolling hills without forests, which is special for Japan, where elsewhere it seems there are forests everywhere (or fields). Wide open grass landscapes I so far only connected with Hokkaido.
I had lunch in a very old , small restaurant in Kusu. Run by 3 very old people, probably all of them into their 90s that seemed to use the restaurant more as their living room rather than a restaurant business. At least they were pretty surprised to have a client, but managed to cook a curry.
From there you nice again into the mountains and countryside on roads with names but with hardly any traffic. In some areas so few traffic that one wonders why such a road would even exist. And this lack of traffic is also a reason why the cycling path wasn’t such a nice discovery. That said, where the cycling path is the main road actually has a lot of traffic, so definitely very good to have the path.
But before that through the mountains I came by two places with these rock formations.
The cycle path is on an old railway track that was decommissioned in the early 1970s and winds it path through the valley, through tunnels and over a few old railway bridges.
The day ended with an other view over water, this time the ocean.
However, what could be a very nice view of the ocean is actually hard to get to and totally cordoned off. Quite typical for Japan, a country too afraid of natural disasters to just enjoy the nature. Most rivers are heavily regulated, the view of the ocean often blocked by flood prevention dams (instead of nice green dikes like in the Netherlands) or the highway runs along the shore and blocks all views and sounds of the ocean. It’s strange for a country with so many hikers and so engrained appreciation of nature and the change of seasons. But control of nature is more important than nature itself. Probably because of that Japanese flower arrangements are ikebana, a very controlled way to represent nature.
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