Kyushu travel guide: what to do, when to go and which route

Fukuoka, the liveliest city on the island, is best discovered in the evening at its yatai, mobile street stalls set up along the Naka river, where you eat the local tonkotsu ramen. The Dazaifu shrine, 40 minutes away, draws students praying before exams and is covered in plum blossom in February. To the south-west, the Kawachi Fuji-en park and its wisteria tunnels bloom in late April, by reservation. The street feel is more relaxed than in Kanto.

Nagasaki was the only port open to the Dutch and the Chinese during Japan's closure, before becoming the second city hit by the atomic bomb in 1945. The Peace Park and the museum retrace that episode; the Glover Garden, the Chinatown and the abandoned industrial islet of Gunkanjima, visited by boat, tell the city's other story. Allow two days, the local dish being champon.

Mount Aso holds one of the largest active calderas in the world, 25 km across, with villages and rice fields inside. You can approach the smoking Nakadake crater when the alert level allows, otherwise walk the Kusasenri grasslands. Kumamoto Castle, damaged by the 2016 earthquake, has partly reopened. A day for the caldera, one for the city and the Suizenji garden, laid out as a miniature of the old Tokaido road with a small Mount Fuji.

Beppu produces more steam than any other Japanese town. The eight hells circuit gathers coloured 90-degree pools, to look at rather than use; the real baths, including hot sand baths, are elsewhere in town. Yufuin, 25 minutes away, is more refined, below Mount Yufu, with private-bath ryokan. The two combine over two nights, and the Kunisaki peninsula nearby adds Buddhist rock carvings and old temples.

Kagoshima lives under the ash of Sakurajima, an active volcano crossed by a 15-minute ferry. To the north, the basalt gorge of Takachiho, where you row beneath a 17 m waterfall, is the cradle of Japan's founding myths. Offshore, the island of Yakushima and its ancient cedar forest, a UNESCO site, needs two days and good fitness for the Jomon Sugi trail.