Aso Milk Road and the Yamanami Highway: Kyushu’s Best Riding

Fifty-eight kilometres of highland road from Beppu, a grass rim above one of the biggest volcanic craters on the planet, and a stretch of tarmac Japanese riders named after a 500cc world champion. This is the best day’s riding in Japan.

The day everyone remembers

Twenty days in Japan produces a lot of good riding. The Sea of Japan coast, the climb to Mount Daisen, the Fuji Skyline, the run through the Japanese Alps to Matsumoto. Ask riders afterwards which day they would repeat tomorrow and a surprising number of them say the same one, and it is not any of those.

It is day seven. Beppu to Kumamoto. A hundred and fifty-five kilometres, which is short by the standards of the trip, and which takes all day because you keep stopping.

What makes it is a pair of roads laid across a landscape that has no business existing. Kyushu is the southwestern island, it sits on top of a great deal of geothermal activity, and the middle of it is a volcanic caldera so large that fifty thousand people live inside it with their own towns, railway and rice fields. You ride around the rim of that, and then you ride into it.

Leaving Beppu, which is a strange town to leave

Beppu produces more hot spring water than anywhere else in Japan, by a distance. Steam comes up out of drains, out of hillsides, out of gaps between houses. On a cold morning the whole town smokes.

It also has the jigoku, the “hells”, which are a set of hot springs so violent or so strange that nobody could ever bathe in them and which have been turned into a viewing circuit instead. One is cobalt blue. One is blood red from dissolved iron. One is a geyser on a timer. It is unapologetically touristy and it is also genuinely extraordinary, and it is the sort of thing you appreciate more having ridden past a hundred ordinary hot springs on the way.

You leave all that behind climbing west, and within twenty minutes the town is gone and you are on the Yamanami.

The Yamanami Highway

Fifty-eight kilometres connecting Beppu in Ōita prefecture with Aso in Kumamoto prefecture. It climbs above a thousand metres and then, unusually for a Japanese mountain road, it stays there.

That is the thing that makes it different. Most good Japanese roads are a climb, a summit, a descent, and the good bit is a twenty-minute window. The Yamanami gets up onto the Kuju highlands and then runs across open grassland for the better part of an hour, with long sweeping curves, sight lines that go for kilometres and almost nothing in the way of trees to close it in. It feels more like Scotland or New Zealand than most people’s mental image of Japan, right up until you notice the volcanic cones on both sides.

The Kuju range sits to the north of the road and it is properly alpine, with a hot spring resort at Makinoto and pampas grass that turns silver in autumn. The surface, like almost every surface in Japan, is immaculate. Japanese road maintenance is a national obsession and the practical effect on a motorcycle is that you spend the whole day trusting the front end in a way you learn not to do in most of Asia.

There are no tolls on this stretch, which matters more than it sounds. Japan’s expressway network is extensive, excellent and expensive, and a fair chunk of route planning for a Japanese motorcycle tour is about deciding when the toll is worth it. On the Yamanami the question does not arise, and the road is better than the expressway anyway.

The caldera, which needs a paragraph of its own

Aso is not a mountain with a crater on top. Aso is a hole in the ground roughly twenty-five kilometres north to south and eighteen east to west, formed by a series of enormous eruptions, the last of which was violent enough to spread ash over most of Japan.

Inside that hole there are five peaks, a town, farms, roads, a railway and around fifty thousand people. When you first ride over the rim and look down into it, the brain does not immediately accept what it is being shown, because the scale is wrong. It looks like a valley until you notice that the far wall is also a rim, and that the whole thing is circular.

Nakadake, one of the central peaks, is active. It vents sulphur dioxide continuously and it has a habit of throwing ash. Access to the crater rim is controlled by a volcanic alert level system, and the road up is opened and closed accordingly; even when it is open, people with asthma, chronic lung conditions or heart problems are advised not to go up because of the gas. Whether you get to look into the crater on any given day is decided by a committee of geologists rather than by your itinerary, and any operator who promises it is promising something they do not control.

The Milk Road, and the name riders use for it

The Aso Milk Road runs along the northern outer rim of the caldera. It is called the Milk Road for the least romantic reason imaginable, which is that it was built to get dairy from the highland farms down to the towns. The cows are still there. You will ride past them.

What it delivers is a long series of flowing curves following the contour of the rim, with the whole caldera dropping away on one side and open pasture rising on the other. There is a lookout at Daikanbo on the northern edge where the view down into the crater floor, with the five peaks standing up out of the middle of it, is the photograph that ends up as somebody’s desktop wallpaper for the next five years.

Japanese riders call it Kenny Road, after Kenny Roberts, the American who took the 500cc world championship three years running at the end of the seventies and who is roughly as revered in Japan as he is anywhere. The naming is applied a bit loosely and you will hear it used for more than one stretch of road around Aso, which is what happens when a nickname is bestowed by riders rather than by a highways department. Nobody local is confused, and if you ask about Kenny Road in a car park full of bikes in Aso you will get an answer and probably a conversation.

It is worth saying why a road gets named after a racer at all. This is one of the great motorcycling cultures on earth. Japan built the industry, it has a domestic racing scene with real depth, and on a weekend the good roads in Kyushu are full of riders on everything from restored two-strokes to current litre bikes, riding well and riding fast. Turning up on an adventure bike as a foreigner gets you nods, and parked up at a viewpoint it will get you company.

The other thing about Kyushu, which is the food

Kumamoto at the end of the day, and Fukuoka two days later, are two of the better eating cities in a country that does not really have bad ones.

Kumamoto’s speciality is a ramen with a pork bone broth and burnt garlic oil floating on top, which sounds unpleasant written down and is exactly what you want after seven hours in the saddle. Fukuoka is the home of tonkotsu ramen proper and, more importantly for a rider, of the yatai, the little open-air food stalls that set up along the riverside at dusk with eight stools and a canvas roof. You sit shoulder to shoulder with strangers, you point at things, and the whole apparatus is packed away by two in the morning as though it had never been there.

Sitting on a plastic stool at a yatai in Fukuoka with your helmet under the counter is a specific kind of good evening, and it is one of the reasons the itinerary puts a rest day there.

Riding in Japan, the practical differences

Nobody arrives from Europe or Australia and finds Japanese roads difficult. They find them different in a handful of ways that are worth knowing before you set off.

Traffic runs on the left, which most of our riders are used to and which catches out anybody coming from continental Europe or North America. Speed limits are low and the enforcement is real; the national open road limit outside expressways is modest by European standards and there is very little tolerance. Nobody rides fast in Japan and nobody needs to, because the roads are good enough that the pleasure comes from precision rather than speed.

Filtering exists but is done conservatively, and the aggressive European approach reads as rude. Fuel stations are frequently attended, and the attendant will take the nozzle, ask if you want it full, wipe your mirrors and then stand in the road to stop traffic while you pull out, and you will feel like a minor celebrity every time.

The other difference is the parking. Every motorcycle in Japan is reversed neatly into its space in a straight line, and the collective effect is so tidy that leaving yours nose-first feels vaguely antisocial by day three. You will start doing it without being asked.

When to ride Kyushu

The route runs Kyushu early, in the first week, and the season for the whole trip is built around avoiding two things: the rainy season and the typhoons.

The wet season, tsuyu, arrives in southern Japan around the start of June and hangs around for six weeks. It is not the tropical hour-of-rain-then-sunshine pattern of Southeast Asia; it is grey, humid and persistent, and the highland roads spend a lot of it inside cloud. Typhoon season runs through late summer into autumn and Kyushu, being the southwestern corner, gets the first and worst of them.

Which leaves spring and autumn as the sensible windows, and autumn is the better of the two on this particular island. The Kuju grasslands turn gold, the pampas grass silvers up, the humidity drops and the air gets clear enough that the caldera rim views actually deliver. Spring has the blossom, which is spectacular and which comes with the entire country travelling at once during Golden Week.

The earthquake nobody mentions any more

In April 2016 a pair of large earthquakes hit Kumamoto prefecture, and the second of them, at magnitude seven, did enormous damage across exactly the ground this day covers. Kumamoto Castle, one of the great fortresses of Japan, lost walls, turrets and a substantial part of its stonework. Roads and bridges around the caldera came down, including the Aso Ohashi bridge, which slid into the gorge and took a chunk of mountainside with it.

What has happened since is worth seeing in its own right, because the reconstruction has been done with a thoroughness that borders on the obsessive. The castle keep has been rebuilt and reopened. The stone walls are being reassembled block by numbered block, a job measured in decades rather than years, and you can watch it happening. A new bridge crosses the gorge where the old one fell.

Riders coming from countries where a damaged public building sits behind hoardings for fifteen years find this startling. It is also a useful reminder of what you are actually riding on. Kyushu is geologically busy. The hot water in Beppu, the caldera at Aso, the steam venting off Nakadake and the earthquakes are all the same phenomenon seen from different angles, and the landscape that makes the riding extraordinary is the landscape that occasionally rearranges itself.

Getting the day right

A few practical things that turn a good day on these roads into a great one.

Start early. The Yamanami and the Milk Road are popular with Japanese riders and with tour buses heading for the caldera viewpoints, and both build up through the morning. Leaving Beppu at eight rather than ten changes the character of the first hour completely. It also gives you the highland light before the haze comes up.

Check the volcano before you plan the crater. The alert level for Nakadake is published and it governs whether the road to the crater rim is open and how close you can get. Treat the crater as a bonus rather than a fixture, and you will never be disappointed by it.

Take warm layers even in summer. The Yamanami sits above a thousand metres for an hour and the temperature difference between Beppu at sea level and the Kuju highlands is substantial, particularly with a wind across open grassland and no trees to break it.

And do not treat the hundred and fifty-five kilometres as a transit. This is the shortest riding day in the first half of the trip and it is short deliberately, because the stopping is the point. Daikanbo, the Kuju viewpoints, the grasslands, lunch somewhere with a view down into the caldera. A guided tour that runs this day at a hurry has misunderstood what it bought.

What you learn about Japan on this one day

There is a version of a Japanese motorcycle tour that is entirely urban and technological, and it is not this one. What day seven does is demonstrate that a large part of Japan is empty, agricultural and mountainous, and that the country’s genius for maintaining infrastructure applies just as much to a farm road on a volcano rim as it does to a bullet train.

You will ride sixty kilometres of highland grass without passing a shop. You will stop at a lookout with an immaculate toilet, free parking and a vending machine selling hot coffee in a can. You will pass a farmer moving cattle who will wave. And you will do it on a surface that has not got a single pothole in it, on a road built to move milk, around the edge of a hole in the earth that once buried half the country in ash.

Anybody who has only seen Tokyo has not seen the country that riders come for.

Why Kyushu and not the famous stuff

Ask somebody planning a first ride in Japan what they want to see and you will get Fuji, Kyoto and the Japanese Alps. All three are on the route and all three deserve to be. But they are also the three most visited things in the country, and a road with a famous view at the end of it comes with everybody else’s rental car on it.

Kyushu is where the riding is best and the crowd is thinnest. It is far enough south that the international coach circuit largely skips it, it has the volcanic landscape, the hot springs and the food, and it has a domestic motorcycling culture that treats these roads as its own back garden. On a Sunday morning on the Milk Road you will be the only foreigner and one of forty riders.

There is a broader lesson in that for anyone building a big biking tour of Japan. The country’s reputation was made by its cities and its icons, and the actual pleasure of riding it is in the empty prefectures between them: the karst road at Akiyoshidai, the coast at Tsunoshima, the Izumo shrine road, the Tottori dunes. None of those are on a bus itinerary. All of them are better on a bike than anything you can reach on a train.

Cost, and why Japan is not as expensive as you think

Japan has a reputation for being ruinously expensive that is about twenty years out of date, and riders planning a trip should know that the arithmetic has changed.

The yen has been weak for several years, which has made everything on the ground substantially cheaper for anyone earning in dollars, euros or pounds. A very good lunch in a rural town is a few hundred yen. The vending machine coffee at a mountain viewpoint costs about the same as it does anywhere. Fuel is comparable to European prices rather than a shock.

The expensive things are the expressway tolls, which is why a well-planned route avoids them wherever a better road exists, and accommodation in the peak seasons, which is why booking matters. A ryokan with dinner and breakfast included is not cheap, but it also replaces two meals and an evening’s entertainment, and the comparison people make against a bare hotel room is not a fair one.

Riding Kyushu for real

Day seven of our twenty-day Japan motorcycle tour runs Beppu to Kumamoto over the Yamanami Highway and the Aso Milk Road, and it sits in the middle of a Kyushu block that also takes in the Kintai Bridge, the Akiyoshidai karst road, the Kanmon crossing, Yufuin, the Dazaifu shrine and a rest day in Fukuoka before the route heads back north up the coast.

Small group, road captain, mechanic and support vehicle, bikes chosen for exactly this kind of riding, and hotels and onsen booked so that the only decision you make all day is where to stop for photographs. Have a look at the 20-day Japan Endless Discovery tour, or the Japan motorbike tours page for the wider picture. If you want to know which departure catches the Kuju grasslands at their best, message us on WhatsApp and we will tell you which fortnight to book.