Place · May 18, 2026
Beppu Tourist Information Centre
Practical notes on buying Beppu bus passes, reading local timetables, and following the staff-marked routes to the Beppu Hells.
You can buy a one-day bus pass directly from the staff. They will ask which day you want to use it.
There is also a two-day pass, which saves a few hundred yen. If you are spending several days in Beppu, I genuinely recommend it.
Using the pass is simple: show it to the driver when you get off the bus.
After I bought the pass, the staff patiently asked where we planned to go. I said we would visit the Beppu Hells first and see other places if time allowed.
Here are the information sheets they gave us.
This first image shows the outbound and return timetable for bus number 36, marked in purple.
This is the weekday timetable. Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays use a different schedule, so make sure you do not read the wrong one.
The second sheet is especially useful because the staff marked which buses to take.
They repeatedly recommended Jizoyu-mae to me, although I am still not sure why.
Their suggested route started at Umi Jigoku and finished at Chinoike Jigoku, following the orange line.
From the west exit, all the marked buses go there, and the journey takes around 20 minutes.
If I had enough time to visit Jizoyu-mae and then work my way through the sights, I would follow the yellow line and take bus number 5 or 41 from the west exit.
If travelling in the opposite direction, visiting Chinoike Jigoku before Umi Jigoku, the blue route uses bus 26 or 26A and takes around 30 minutes.
The red route covers buses 16, 16A and 29, which run between Kannawa Onsen and Chinoike Jigoku.
The red box at the bottom right shows the timetable for those three buses. The circled number 2 corresponds to the Kannawa stop for buses travelling to Chinoike Jigoku.
The timetable is read by combining the hour and minute columns.
The separate columns on the far left, such as 6, 17, 19 and 22, are the hours. They mean 6:00 a.m., 5:00 p.m., 7:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.
The figures beneath bus numbers 16/16A and 29 are the minutes, such as 21, 51, 13 and 43.
Put them together to get the departure time: 6 | 21 means 6:21 a.m., while 16 | 13 means 4:13 p.m.
These last two images are general maps and information sheets.
