Nichinan Coast

Route 220 runs south from Miyazaki city along the Pacific for about sixty kilometres, and the road is the attraction. Cliffs on one side, ocean on the other, Phoenix palms planted along the verges in the 1960s when the prefecture was marketing itself as Japan's tropical honeymoon coast. Buses exist but they are infrequent. Rent a car, or the day turns into a lot of waiting at roadside shelters.

The rock formations around Aoshima are the first stop. Wave erosion cut the tilted sandstone and mudstone beds into parallel ridges that look like laundry boards, which is where the name Oni no Sentakuita, the devil's washboard, comes from. The layers formed on the seafloor several million years ago and were pushed up and planed off by the surf. At low tide you can walk out onto them. Aoshima itself is a small island ringed by those ridges, joined to the shore by a footbridge, with a shrine in the middle of a stand of subtropical palms and about 200 other plant species that have no business growing this far north.

Horikiri Pass, ten minutes further south, is the view everyone photographs. There is a roadside station at the top with mango soft serve and a terrace over the palms. Keep going and you reach Udo Shrine, built inside a sea cave on the cliff face, where the tradition is to buy five clay balls and throw them left-handed at a rope-marked target on a rock below. Hit it and your wish is granted. Most people miss.

Sun Messe Nichinan has seven moai statues that are not knock-offs; the Rapa Nui elders authorised them after Japanese engineers helped restore Ahu Tongariki following the 1960 tsunami. Furthest south, Cape Toi has around 100 wild horses grazing loose on the headland, protected as a natural monument since 1953. They ignore cars. Do not feed them, and give the stallions room.

The coast takes a full day at a comfortable pace. Doing it as a return trip from Miyazaki in an afternoon means skipping most of it.