Japan 2019 - Kyushu (part 1)

Yakiniku is probably our favourite type of restaurant here and it’s where we go to satisfy our once-a-week meat cravings. You order bite-sized bits of meat and grill them over a small gridiron, accompanied by salads, vegetables or soups. Needless to say, we’ve been staying away from the guts!

Along the coast it is difficult to avoid big cities, industrial areas and heavy traffic. After spending an afternoon riding through heavy air pollution (car industry), we decided to head south and inland to get into more remote areas.

Even through the mountains we have to pick our roads carefully. Without local knowledge, it takes a considerable amount of research to find the smaller roads with little traffic. By reading other people’s blogs and studying Kirsten’s cycling GPS, Google earth, Google maps and my ESRI maps, we usually get it right. And when we don’t, it is terrifying! We made a big detour to get off this road. It was busy with over-sized logging and construction trucks and they didn’t obey the 50km/h speed limit.

Nakatsu has one street with lots of Buddhist temples, all different and all beautiful. The white walls of this one are said to be stained with the blood of samurai which were executed here, so they painted them red.

Nakatsu castle.

We cycled past so many rice paddies, all of which are being planted at the moment (mostly with the help of machines, but some still manually). These are discarded rice seedlings. It seems they are grown on a dense mat and then separated into small bundles for planting.

There used to be a train running between Nakatsu and Morizane Onsen, the tracks of which have been converted into the Maple Yaba Cycling Road, a 35km rail trail. Note the aquifer on the left to water the rice paddies.

 In Hita we visited an old Sake Brewery.......

..... and between Yufuin and Beppu we cycled over a pass and took a cable car up to Mount Tsurumi.

Beppu has several hot springs called jigoku (hell). Some are for viewing only, some for bathing.