Korea: A Whole New World (Please Don't Sue Us, Disney)

Fresh (on) the boat.

We'd been off the boat for five days now.  Busan was...well, we hadn't gotten out much in those five days, really.  After a laborious trip across the city with all of our gear to get to our Couchhost's place, we didn't feel up to much in the way of exploration.  Nor did we feel particularly game for planning out our next three weeks before we had to report to our employer in Seoul.  Let's just say we were...biding our time.

We were studying the effects of whitewashing on bike travel.

Though three weeks was far too short a time to bike the whole of Korea (for us, anyway), after a few weeks of struggle with WWOOF Korea, we found a WWOOF host in the nearby city of Gyeongju.  Incredibly, Google Maps refuses to give any walking, biking, or driving directions in Korea (I blame tachyon interference), but as near as we could deduce, Gyeongju was just two cities away, maybe a hundred kilometers at most.  So, naturally, we decided to go through Daegu, a route that would be about three hundred kilometers.

The reason for our detour was Korea's "Four Major Rivers Project" (not to be confused with the other Four Major Rivers: Cuomo, Phoenix, Joan, and Tam).  The project is a recently-completed multi-trillion-won series of bike and walking trails that follows all of the major rivers in South Korea.  It's possible to travel directly from Busan to Seoul via these paths; according to some internet guides, it's even possible to do so in about 10 days, presumably if you're a mad, sleepless robot who's not carrying any camping gear or musical instruments.  Three hundred kilometers along bike paths sounded considerably better than a hundred kilometers of schlepping our bikes across sidewalks and busy city streets, that was for sure.  Plus, as the Katy Trail taught us, it's pretty hard to get lost on a bike path (though we did make some valiant efforts).

When at last, we had done the bare minimum of preparations (buying groceries and a road atlas that we would never open), we bid farewell to our spectacularly generous host and hit the road.  After an hour of dodging potholes and pedestrians, I had the feeling that something was wrong.  It was hard to identify just what it was, but it was as though I were missing something, like some vital part of bike travel was...

"Shit!" I exclaimed.  "I forgot my uke at Anne's!"

In this instance, our usual one-legged-tortoise pace did us some good: after all of our riding, we were still in Busan proper, and only seven subway stops away from our host's place.  I ran back, picked up my uke using the magical reality of Korea that is keypad locks, and made it back to the bikes.

Finally, we made it to the bike path, an elevated, tree-lined road that stretched far off into the distance, past the cloned, Inception-like apartment blocks that make up every horizon in Korea.  The bike path ran along the Nakdonggang River (and occasionally right on top of it) through endless unused parks and wildlife areas, affording us ample opportunities for free camping.

At the end of the first day, we made camp in a small park somewhere an unknown distance from Busan (no Google, remember?).  We scarfed down our dinner of pan-fried noodles with tuna, careful to conserve as much of our water as possible, then set up behind a copse of trees to shield ourselves from passersby and the nearby love hotels.  We could have camped in one of the parks with water and without any people, but that's just how we roll.

Also, there were dragons (left).