First of all , thanks to the many blogs I read online for making this trip possible and also to many help received from Trip Advisor 's Forum members.
While i was doing my planning aka " homework" which i usually refer as , I realised that there are many blogs on trips to Kyushu … but mostly in Chinese. As most were posted by visitors from HK/TW. That is why I hope to put my trip in English , hoping that it will help others who are planning for a trip to Kyushu.
The main agenda for this trip is Koyo , aka Autumn Leaves or Red Foliage as We had covered all 3 other seasons in different part of Japan , Summer + Winter in Hokkaido , Spring in Tokyo/Osaka/Kyoto and so the only missing season to complete my circle is Autumn.
As most people said , Koyo is easier to "chase" then Sakura , as Sakura usually blossom and fade in 1 week , very much dependable on weather. But as with my this trip , I realised that Koyo is not exactly as easy as I was told. Cos when we were that , most of the leaves have dropped and had turned to brown ( all botak ) , some reasons is that there was a huge typhoon in August 2015 and some of the trees were affected , making this one of the not so great autumn foliage in Kyushu this year.
The Trip -
We had planned for a 9 days trip initially and only planned to cover the top part of Kyushu , mainly Fukuoka , Saga , Nagasaki , Kumamoto , part of Miyazaki and Oita. about 6 out of the 7 prefectures. Direct flight from Singapore is only done by JetStar and SQ and there hasn't really been any promo on JetStar whereby SQ was having a promo when we were doing the planning. BUT the dates that was on promo ( at time of booking ) was only for 13 days or 16 days. So we end up choosing 16 days instead and decided to include Kagoshima in this trip , covering all 7 prefectures of Kyushu.
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Map of route covered in our 16 days Self drive Trip , covering more then 1000 km of driving.
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| Main Itinerary |
Good thing about SQ flight to Fukuoka is that it reach there early morning at 8.20 am Japan time BUT coming back also early flight at 9.50am japan time. But lucky that it was an early flight back also , as the Duty free for snacks is a very small scale shop , when we check in at 8 am , the store just open so most of the snacks are still full in stocks. Cos a fellow TA member who took a later afternoon flight said that most of the popular items were so out and was not top up when they were there.
Next I will write about the trip by Days and will try to write details of where we went , did , and missed. Also will try to include some "tips" if any to make yours a better trip then mine :)
