September in Korea brings many wonderful things. The weather has started to turn cooler, the humidity and rain are gone, and best of all September is Korea’s Thanksgiving, or Chuseok. For Koreans, it means time spent with family, a lot of cooking, and perhaps visits to the tombs of those who have passed away. For foreigners, it means a long weekend. This year, we had a four day weekend and since traveling by car or plane during Chuseok is either too expensive or a complete pain in the butt, we decided to do a 4-day bike trip starting and ending at our doorstep.
I had the great pleasure of mapping this trip. On all the trips we go on, day rides or long weekend rides, Jared is always the one making the map. He has taught me how to make the maps so this ride, I wanted to do the whole thing, well most of it, on my own.
We started off bright and early on Saturday morning. Katie, one of Jared’s good friends and cycling mates from his 6 month trip, joined us on our trip. Katie came back to Korea last year and is just as nuts, probably more nuts actually, as Jared and I when it comes to cycling. She was more than excited to be riding for 4 days with us and we were more than excited to have her along.
Saturday was planned to be a relatively easy day. Most of it was spent riding on the bike paths up and out of Seoul and to the city Uijeongbu, which is where Jared started his adventures in Korea way back in 2004. After the trip down memory lane in Uijeongbu, we were finally leaving the cities and heading to the countryside and mountains of Korea. Since I was the one who planned the route, I threw in a few back/country roads into our route. These roads are my favorite kind of roads in Korea. We ride through small farms and houses and usually get pretty funny looks from the locals. But these roads are great to stay off busy roads and get to see real rural life in Korea.
Before we knew it, we had already done 80k’s and were well on our way to our destination for the night. Our route kept us off busy roads and gave us great scenery during the day. As the afternoon grew on, we knew we had to think about dinner that night and what we were going to eat. Since we were camping and cooking we didn’t have a lot of choices. One easy thing make on the road is eggs and vegetables. Jared and Katie had plenty of practice wild cooking on their 6 month trip across Asia and Europe so I just went with what they thought would be good. We stopped at a mart and bought bread, eggs, cheese, and vegetables. We were planning on having vegetable omelet sandwiches for dinner. One of the great and horrible things of cycling is the amount of food you get/have to eat. Since we cycle for close to 7 hour every day, we need a lot of calories and energy to keep us going. We are constantly snacking and eat big dinners at the end of the day to refuel. Many days I get to the point that I don’t want to eat anymore gummy bears or pretzels. Putting food in your mouth gets old after 7 hours of doing it.
After we picked up dinner, we soldiered on. The afternoon was growing late and we were getting close to the area we had picked out to camp for the night. We had reached a small mart, which we thought would be our last mart before camping for the night. But in true cycle touring fashion, when we got to the mart, we looked at the roads and found a new place to go and a new place to camp. It was about 5pm when we decided to change routes and by looking at the map, we had just added a 600meter climb and about an hour to the end of our day. I was hurting pretty bad and I had started shaking because I was getting tired and really hungry, but I didn’t want to be the one to icksnay the idea of going longer and harder so I just put my head down and powered on. Once we started the climb, I had to gobble up a power shot just to make it up the climb and get to the campsite. Jared stayed with me for the entire climb since he knew I was struggling and he really helped me through it. We made it to the top and stopped real quick at the top to get some Gatorade but didn’t want to be up there too long as we were getting cold and just wanted to be done riding.
Our campsite was just about half way down the mountain. Once we got going off the top, it was only about a 5 minute ride down to the site and it was a glorious site to see. By this time it was about 7pm, we had been riding for about 8 hours and had covered 151k’s. We quickly set up our tents and got dinner going. By this time, we had to use our high power lights to be able to see what we were doing. We were in a nice quiet parking lot right next to a river on a pretty deserted mountain. We were actually in a resort area but since it was past peak season, there was no one around. Dinner that night had never tasted so good. We stir fried some veggies, mixed them with eggs and plopped all that on bread with cheese for some delightful sandwiches.
After filling our stomachs, we quickly cleaned up and got ready for bed. Wild camping has quickly become one of my favorite things to do. There is just something so liberating about being out in the open, eating huddled around a small burner, cleaning yourself in a river, and just being one with the world around you.
As we were just about to get in our tents and call it a night, Jared had left to go to the bathroom and discovered two gazebos on the other side of the parking lot. Gazebos are great when you are camping because it gives you shelter from rain, not only keeping your tent dry, but gives you a dry place to get packed up in the morning. After a quick discussion about the pros and cons of moving all our stuff into a dry area, we decided to quickly pick it all up and move under the gazebos. It only took us 10 minutes to move it all and we were thankful the next morning when we woke up and it was raining.
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