kyushu road trip

hi uji! i have to apologize for not having yet written a trip report of my previous road trip (osaka - sanin region) which was fantastic. well, summer's here and my friend and i will be going on another road trip... this time to kyushu. what we plan to do is to rent a car in fukuoka and drive, drive, drive! whenever we travel in japan, we just go with the flow and have no special plans... and we've never been disappointed. japan is full of interesting things and i just know this trip will be fantastic. i'll take a notebook this time and try to keep notes and then post them later.

i'll be taking my digital camera again and will try to take a ton of pictures.

we'll be landing in fukuoka on the 27th of july and will fly back to hawaii on the 4th of august. it'll be hot and humid but that won't dampen our enthusiasm.

if anyone has any recommendations, i'm all ears. otherwise, we'll just wake up and drive along the coast till we end up back in fukuoka!

thanks.

My recommendations include:

Fukuoka, Nagasaki, Kumamoto and Kagoshima are the most interesting cities.

Beppu, Yufuin, Kurokawa and Ibusuki are some great hot spring resorts.

Aso, Unzen and Kirishima offer natural beauty.

How much you can pack into 1.5 weeks depends on your travel pace and interests.

Have a good trip!

hi uji. i just wanted to let you know that the road trip was AWESOME! i'm working on a blog now cuz i'd like to post pictures along with a description of what happened and when it's done, i'll post a short message in the trip report section and include a link to the blog.

one thing that i'd mention now is that the car rental service through this site is excellent. i've used it 3x now and it's always been great.

for whatever reason, i couldn't book a hotel for the first night in japan through this site. i'd go through the process but a day or two later, i'd get an email saying that there were no rooms at the published rate. in our case, it wasn't a problem and we just searched on foot once we got there.

keep up the great work uji! japan is such an awesome place and we had another wonderful road trip!

Very happy to hear about your successful trip. And looking forward to take a look at your trip report.

Regarding the hotel reservation service that returned a "no rooms available" message, are you refering to Asiarooms?

yup, that's right. i guess it was a busy time of the year, but i applied to around 5 different places and each place finally replied with a "sorry, no rooms available" email. oh well...