5-Day Oita Itinerary: Beppu, Yufuin, and the Countryside

Most Kyushu itineraries give Oita two nights: one for Beppu’s steam, one for Yufuin’s shops, then it’s on to Kumamoto. This 5-day Oita itinerary does the opposite — it lands at Fukuoka Airport, unpacks once in Yufuin, and spends the week on day trips into places that rarely make an English-language list: a castle town built around cliff-carved Buddhas, a marshland plateau with a working hell in it, and a farming town where the main attraction is a mushroom forest. These are days we run for guests, so we’ll also tell you plainly which of them you can do on trains and buses, and which ones you simply can’t.

What This Itinerary Assumes

You land at Fukuoka Airport, spend the first afternoon in Beppu, and sleep four nights in Yufuin, using it as a single base. No hotel changes, no repacking — every day is a loop out and back, and the longest of them is about an hour each way. On the fifth day you finish at Beppu Station, which is a sensible place to hand the trip back to you: it’s on the direct limited express toward Hakata, and a short shuttle ride from the cruise terminal at Beppu Port.

Why Yufuin rather than Beppu as the base? Short version: it sits roughly in the middle of everything else in this plan, and the evenings are quieter. We’ve laid out the longer comparison in its own article, if you want the full case for each.

Who this trip is not for: if this is your first trip to Japan and you also want Tokyo and Kyoto, five days in a single prefecture is more than the trip can carry. This itinerary is built for travelers on a second or third visit who would rather go deep in one place than tick off three.

And the thing we’d rather say up front rather than have you discover it with a suitcase in hand: almost none of these five days work well on public transport. Beppu’s buses are fine in principle, but you’re hauling your luggage through all of Day 1 with nowhere to drop it until Yufuin, and Day 2’s train-and-bus connection to Usuki eats half the day. The only day that doesn’t need a car or a driver is the shiitake tour’s own transport on the morning of Day 4. There’s a full breakdown below, before the FAQ.

Day 1: Fukuoka to Beppu — Hells, Bamboo, and a Steam-Cooked Lunch

Getting there. Two clean options. The JR limited express *Sonic* runs from Hakata Station to Beppu with no changes in about two hours, roughly every half hour through the day, for something in the range of ¥6,400–6,900 depending on whether you reserve a seat (fares do get revised, so treat that as a ballpark). Or take the *Toyokuni-go* highway bus, which picks up at Fukuoka Airport itself and reaches Beppu in about two hours forty-five minutes for around ¥3,250. The bus is slower but saves you dragging luggage into Hakata Station; the train is faster once you’re there. With a morning landing, either leaves you a solid half day in Beppu.

The hells, honestly. Beppu’s *jigoku* (hells) are hot spring pools you look at rather than bathe in — an important distinction for anyone who assumed they were baths. There are several, and seeing all of them is a slog. The combination we use most is Chinoike Jigoku (Blood Pond Hell), then Umi Jigoku (Sea Hell) and Oniishibozu Jigoku. That’s a deliberate mix of red, cobalt blue, and bubbling grey mud rather than three variations on steam. Worth knowing: Chinoike sits in the Shibaseki district while the other two are in Kannawa, a separate part of town — plenty of write-ups imply the hells are all one walkable cluster, and they aren’t.

Lunch. In Kannawa, Jigokumushi Kobo lets you cook your own lunch in a box of natural hot spring steam — vegetables, seafood, meat, whatever you order. The practical trick is the order of operations: take a numbered ticket the moment you arrive, then walk Kannawa’s steaming back lanes while you wait for your number, rather than the other way around. It’s the closest thing Beppu has to onsen culture you can eat.

Afternoon. The Beppu City Traditional Bamboo Crafts Center (8:30–17:00, ¥390 for high school age and up, closed Mondays) is a quiet stop of twenty to forty minutes showing the craft that earned Beppu a national traditional craft designation in 1979. The weaving on display is finer than photographs suggest.

On to Yufuin. The *Yufurin* sightseeing bus links Beppu and Yufuin in about 70 minutes for ¥940; by car it’s closer to 40. Check in, and let the town go quiet around you after the last day-trippers leave — which is the part of Yufuin most visitors never see.

If you’d rather have someone drive this day for you — the hells, lunch, and the bamboo center, without working out bus transfers between them — that’s what our Beppu Guided Private City Tour is built for. And if you want a fuller version of a Beppu half day, including what to do once you’ve had enough of the hells, we wrote one here: Beppu Cruise Port: What to Do With the Rest of Your Half-Day.

Day 2: Usuki — Stone Buddhas, a Rice Cracker Workshop, and Fugu

Usuki is about an hour from Yufuin by car, on the coast southeast of Oita city. By train and bus it’s closer to two hours each way, which is the difference between a full day in a small town and a rushed visit bookended by connections.

The Usuki Stone Buddhas (9:00–17:00, last entry 16:30; ¥550 adults, ¥270 children) are the reason to come: sixty-one figures carved into tuff cliff faces in four clusters between the Heian and Kamakura periods, all of them designated National Treasures. What makes them land is less the scale than the faces — carved deep enough to hold their own shadows, so the expressions shift with the light and the hour.

A short walk away, off the same car park, Goto Seika runs free tours of its usuki senbei (rice cracker) workshop on weekdays between 9:00 and 15:00 — no reservation needed, and you eat one warm off the line. Hand-painting your own with ginger syrup does need booking ahead (¥880 for junior high school age and up). Note the weekday-only window: if your Day 2 falls on a weekend, you get the shop but not the workshop.

Lunch is fugu (pufferfish). Usuki has built a genuine reputation on it — the town was the second place in Japan admitted to UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network for gastronomy — and the fish here comes out of the fast water of the Bungo Channel. We don’t book the same restaurant every time; we choose on the day based on who’s open and what’s good, rather than locking a group into one named spot regardless of the day. If you’re going independently, the town’s tourism association lists its established fugu houses. Fugu has a reputation as a cold-season dish elsewhere in Japan, but in Usuki it’s served year-round, so this works whichever month you visit.

The afternoon is the old castle town: white-walled merchant buildings and storehouses around Hatcho Oji, the main street, on a scale you can walk in an hour without hurrying. This is also where a guided day earns its keep. Hoon-ji, a temple that isn’t on the standard sightseeing circuit, will let visitors inside to see its Buddhist art, architecture, and statuary when there’s no funeral or memorial service underway — and if timing allows, a member of the temple staff (not necessarily the head priest) walks you through it. It’s the kind of access that’s hard to get at a place like Kyoto or Nara, where a temple sees thousands of visitors a day; here, at a temple that still functions as a local community’s spiritual home rather than a tourist stop, that same staff has time for a small group and a real conversation.

Finish at the Inaba Family Villa (9:00–17:00, last entry 16:30; ¥320 adults, ¥160 children; open daily), built in 1902 as the Usuki residence of the former lords of the domain after they had moved to Tokyo. It’s a house in samurai style, with the adjoining Hirai residence from 1859 next door, about a ten-minute walk from JR Usuki Station.

If you’d rather have someone handle the drive, the timing, and getting you inside Hoon-ji when it’s actually open — rather than working the trains and buses yourself — that’s what our Usuki Private Tour is built for.

Day 3: The Kuju Highlands — Wetlands, a Real Hell, and a Suspension Bridge

About 40 minutes from Yufuin, the land opens out into the Kuju highlands: grassland, volcanic steam, and Kyushu’s highest peaks on the skyline. We run this day as a set tour Kuju Highlands: A Journey of Nature & Steam, and the order matters more than the list does.

Start at Tadewara Marsh in Chojabaru, a Ramsar-listed wetland with a boardwalk loop and free parking at the visitor center (9:00–17:00, closing at 16:00 from November through April). Half an hour here resets the pace of the trip.

Then Komatsu Jigoku. This is the hell Beppu isn’t: no gates, no gift shop, open sunrise to sunset, free with a donation box, and only reopened in July 2025 after five years closed from flood damage. It feels rawer and more authentic than the polished hells of Day 1, and the reason we bring people is the eggs — you carry your own in, lower them into the naturally boiling water, and eat them on the spot. No reservation, no equipment. One safety point that goes unmentioned nearly everywhere in English: cook nothing but eggs in the shell. The water is geothermal and isn’t managed to food-safety standards, and the shell is what keeps it off your food. We have watched someone try to cook a sweet potato in it.

Yogurt, and an honest caveat. Fifteen minutes’ drive on, NU:KUJU (the renewed former Kuju Yamanami Farm, reopened July 2025) sells what may be the best yogurt in the prefecture, plus souvenirs you won’t find elsewhere. Expectation management: it is not a petting zoo. The animals are a handful of sheep, goats, ducks, horses and rabbits, and the point is strolling a very large, very open property with a soft-serve in your hand. We’ve been many times on our own days off rather than with guests — so take that as a personal recommendation, not a guided one. Open 9:00–17:00, closed Wednesdays (outside Golden Week and the summer holidays), ¥1,000 for adults, and closed for the season from early December to mid-March.

Finish at Kokonoe “Yume” Suspension Bridge, Japan’s highest pedestrian suspension bridge and about a quarter of an hour back down the road (8:30–17:00, until 18:00 in September and October; ¥500 for ages 13 and up). We put it last on purpose — it’s the day’s exclamation mark, and it lands better after the quiet. Full detail on the bridge and the rest of the plateau is in our [Kokonoe Yume Otsurihashi guide].

Day 4: Kusu — Shiitake Foraging and Japan’s Working Countryside

Kusu is about 30 minutes from Yufuin by car and on almost nobody’s Kyushu itinerary. That’s the point of putting it here: it’s ordinary rural Oita, still farming, still going about its business, and the day is built around one experience that doesn’t exist as a package anywhere else we know of.

Morning: shiitake mushroom foraging. Our Shiitake Mushroom Farm Tour & Tasting meets at 10:00 at JR Bungomori Station (pickup from Yufuin can be arranged on request), runs about three hours for a group of up to eight. On the way out you stop at a supermarket to see what Japanese households actually buy and how many mushroom varieties they choose from, then it’s on to one of the larger shiitake farms in Oita Prefecture. The sight that gets people is the *hodaba* — a field stacked with hundreds of thousands of felled oak logs, each one inoculated and left to do its slow work. The farmer explains how it’s done: the oak is cut, seeded with spawn, and then left for two years before the first mushrooms appear, and that number alone usually catches guests off guard. After the explanation, you head into the forest and pick your own from the logs. Lunch is a barbecue with the farmer, on the farm.

Early afternoon: Jion Falls. A two-tiered waterfall — roughly 20 meters, then another 10 — one or two minutes’ walk from the *michi-no-eki* (roadside station) built beside it, with parking at both. It takes fifteen minutes, and it’s the sort of stop that’s worth exactly that.

Then: fried chicken and sweets. Oita takes its karaage (Japanese fried chicken) seriously enough to argue about it. We don’t stick to one fixed shop for this — we pick up karaage and wagashi (traditional sweets) from whichever local places are open and looking good that day, rather than driving past a better shop to reach a named favorite. If you’re on your own, the roadside stations along this route sell freshly fried karaage and local sweets and won’t disappoint. One practical note: if you did the shiitake tour in the morning, you’ve already eaten, so treat this as buying dinner rather than lunch.

Late afternoon: Mt. Kirikabu. A 685-meter flat-topped mesa — the summit is a broad grassy plateau, not a peak — looking out over the Kusu basin toward the Yabakei mountains. KIRIKABU HOUSE, the glass-walled shelter at the top, was designed by Eiji Mitooka, the man behind JR Kyushu’s best-known trains, and opens March through November (8:00–18:00, closing at 17:00 in November, and shut in bad weather). The much-photographed swing at the edge of the plateau is outdoors and accessible year-round — but the access road ices over on cold days in winter, and that’s a real constraint, not a formality.

Last stop: Bungomori Roundhouse. The only surviving fan-shaped steam locomotive roundhouse in Kyushu, built in 1934 when the Kyudai line opened end to end, and now a registered tangible cultural property. It was strafed by US fighter aircraft during the Pacific War, and the marks are still in the concrete. The adjoining museum (10:00–16:00, ¥100, closed Mondays) is small; the roundhouse itself, roofless and open to the sky, is the thing. It’s a five-minute walk from Bungomori Station — the same platform the morning started on, which gives the day a neat shape.

Day 5: Kinrinko, Yufuin’s Rice Fields, and Out via Beppu

The last morning stays local. Lake Kinrin (“golden scale lake”) sits at the far end of Yufuin’s main street, about a twenty-minute walk from the station, free and open at any hour. Hot spring water flows into it alongside cold spring water, so the lake runs warm — and on cold mornings from late autumn through winter, mist rises off the surface. It has been drawing people since a Meiji-era scholar watched the fish scales turn gold in the evening light and gave the lake its name. Most guests see it around midday, simply because that’s where it falls in the day — but if your schedule allows it, early morning (6–8 a.m., before the day-trippers arrive from Beppu and Fukuoka) or after 4 p.m. is when it’s worth going out of your way for.

Then trade the town for the fields around it. Yufuin sits in a basin, and ten minutes out of the center the souvenir shops give way to rice paddies with Mt. Yufu standing over them — flooded and mirror-flat in early summer, gold in September, stubbled and frost-white in winter. Step just a few minutes off the main tourist street and this is the view waiting for you. This is the part of the day that needs a car; no bus does it, and it isn’t a walk.

From Yufuin to Beppu Station is about 40 minutes by car, or roughly 70 minutes on the *Yufurin* bus for ¥940. From there, the *Sonic* limited express runs back toward Hakata — or stay on it only as far as Kokura, about 70 minutes from Beppu, and change there for the Sanyo Shinkansen if you’re heading on into Honshu rather than doubling back through Fukuoka.

You don’t have to route through Beppu at all, either. Yufuin Station has its own direct limited express service to Hakata — the *Yufu* and the more scenic *Yufuin no Mori* — in a little over two hours, for somewhere in the range of ¥4,700–5,200 depending on the train and seat (treat that as a ballpark; fares get revised). If Hakata is where you’re headed next and Beppu isn’t otherwise on your way, this is the more direct exit.

Do You Need a Car for This Itinerary?

Honestly: it depends on the day, and it’s worth knowing which before you land. Some days run fine on your own two feet, on a bus, or in a taxi. Others really do need a car — or a guide with one. Here’s the breakdown, day by day.

Day 1 (Beppu): no. Beppu’s own transit handles this day just fine. Buses reach the hells, and both Uber and GO work here — worth installing before you land — so you’re not working out bus transfers between stops. The suitcase problem has an easy fix, too: Beppu Station’s tourist information counter and coin lockers hold your bag for the day, so you sightsee empty-handed and collect it on your way to Yufuin.

Day 2 (Usuki): no. Trains and buses take roughly two hours each way from Yufuin, and the connections aren’t straightforward — that’s four hours of the day gone before you’ve seen a Buddha. By car it’s about an hour each way, and the day actually works.

Day 3 (Kuju): no. Tadewara, Komatsu Jigoku, NU:KUJU, and the bridge are spread across a rural plateau with sparse, seasonal bus service. Assembling them into one day without a vehicle isn’t realistic.

Day 4 (Kusu): partly. The shiitake tour solves its own transport — it meets at Bungomori Station and includes the driving. Everything after it (the falls, the mesa, the roundhouse) does not connect on foot or by bus in an afternoon.

Day 5 (rice fields): no. The countryside drive is the activity.

So the real choice is between renting a car — straightforward, cheap enough, and fine if you’re comfortable driving on the left on narrow rural roads — and having someone else drive, which is what we do. Neither is the right answer for everyone. But planning to “sort out the buses when we get there” isn’t a real third option on Days 2, 3, or 5 — Day 1 (with a locker and a taxi app) and the Day 4 shiitake tour are the exceptions — and we’d rather you knew that while you can still change the plan.

Adjusting the Itinerary: Shorter, Longer, or a Different Season

If you only have three days, keep Day 1 (Beppu), Day 3 (Kuju), and Day 4 (Kusu). Those three are the ones that feel least like anywhere else. Fold Day 5 into your departure morning, and save Usuki for a future trip — it’s worth an unhurried day of its own rather than a rushed one wedged into a shorter itinerary.

If you have more time, two easy additions from the same base: Yabakei Gorge, a valley of carved rock spires about an hour out and at its best in late November, and Hita’s Mamedamachi, an Edo-period merchant quarter with a working sake brewery in it.

Outside shiitake season (so, roughly June to September and December to February), Day 4 loses its morning. Kusu still holds up as a half day — the falls, the mesa, and the roundhouse — so pair it with a slower start in Yufuin, or move Yabakei into that slot instead.

Watch the days of the week. Beppu’s Bamboo Crafts Center and the Bungomori Roundhouse museum both close on Mondays. NU:KUJU closes on Wednesdays. And Usuki’s senbei workshop tours only run on weekdays. Set Day 2 on a weekday, and try not to start the trip on a Monday.

Winter (December to mid-March) closes NU:KUJU and KIRIKABU HOUSE, and can ice the road up Kirikabu-yama. Everything else on this itinerary runs — and the highlands in cold weather are worth seeing — but check current hours before you commit a day to them.

Want These Five Days Built Around You?

This is one version of a five-day Oita trip, not the version — it’s the sequence we’d choose ourselves, with each day ordered so its strongest stop comes last. Two pieces of it are bookable as they stand: the Kuju Highlands day and the shiitake mushroom foraging morning in Kusu. The rest we build to order, including the three days that don’t work without a vehicle. Tell us when you’re coming, what you’d happily skip, and what you’d rather not miss, and we’ll shape the week around it — a private, unhurried immersion in one corner of Kyushu instead of a highlights reel of five.

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