Lincoln Peterson

It’s been a while since I uploaded anything… Even though I have a lot to write. My personal computer broke, and shortly after WordPress was blocked at my workplace, so it’s been difficult to upload anything.

Anyways, this fall I finished biking across Korea! I learned a lot. First, if you have no car or no support person to bring you to the start of the trail, you should use a folding bicycle. The only way to get to the start point is by the bullet train, which technically doesn’t allow bicycles.

So even after taking my bicycle apart, it was still very large. I felt like I was doing something wrong. It couldn’t fit in any of the storage so we put them in the seats.

You need a folding bicycle. I was worried we were going to get kicked off the train in the middle of nowhere, but they let us go all the way to Busan.

But it was already raining like crazy when we get off the train. Actually, the week we planned was forecasted to rain the entire time…

Anyways, we stayed at a motel and started the next morning!

And the trail marked in red is our route! It can be finished in 5 days, but it’s more fun if you have some extra days for rest or poor weather.

First, some breakfast.

And let’s start! Most people start from Incheon, but we started from Busan because I don’t want to deal with transportation on the way back.

We didn’t get very far on the first day, but that’s ok. We quickly escaped the urban areas. This is what the countryside of Korea looks like!

We spent so much time trying to get out of the city that we were already delayed, so we only were able to get to a town called Susan. (Soo-San)

If you can see, the city of Busan is not where the actual start of the trail is, so we had to go from the city center, south and west to the start of the trail with stop-and-go crosswalks. It took forever. I would recommend taking the subway instead!!

Anyways, I start the next day with relatively high morale. It was forecasted to rain but there wasn’t much. Would this luck continue…?

Today there was a relatively difficult mountain that we had to go up. It was my first time going up a mountain on a bike, so it was difficult… But this is not even close to the highest point in the trail.

Anyways, I feel like we made good progress on this day.

And I made Hyeonjeong carry water like a camel, because I was jealous she had no luggage connected to her bike unlike me.

Then there was another climb, I remember that it was a little harder than the other one. The view of the river is beautiful!

But suddenly it started raining heavily, and we were made to walk in many parts of the trail because it was slippery, further slowing us down. We weren’t able to make it to our goal today either.

We only made it to Guji-Myeon, just south of Daegu.

I started off okay, because it’s not a big deal if it rains a bit, right? But on the way to Daegu, I slowly lost my sanity because the rain was so heavy. Our plan was to just get to Daegu and wait out the bad weather for a day.

I was in despair because we were making poor time and the weather was horrible. All I could focus on was getting to the destination and didn’t have the right state of mind to enjoy the scenery.

Even if I looked, it was hard to see anything due to the heavy rain and clouds.

Anyways, let’s go to Daegu and order marashango.

The next day, we went to a cafe, a place in Daegu called Spark Land, and played Taiko no Tatsujin.

We set off the next day menaced by dark clouds. It had rained all day the day before, but I had a feeling we wouldn’t be able to catch a break.

Wouldn’t this be so beautiful if the weather was better?

The dark clouds chased us and it rained on and off. As soon as you got dry from the shower before, it would start raining again.

But towards the end of the day, the weather got better.

This is the real countryside of Korea!

Anyways, some random pictures.

Our hostel name was Nakdanbo Jajeongeo Minbak. The owner was very nice and there were a lot of kittens. It came with a free dinner and breakfast and a lot of old Korean men.

We ended our day here!

Anyways, I’ll write the rest in part 2.