Park Place

The route we chose to take on our trip across Korea follows the Four Rivers Bike Path, an expensive undertaking completed in 2011 by the Korean government to promote environmental awareness, international understanding, and tourism.  As it happens, the Four Rivers Project turned out to be a bit of a boondoggle (or, in Korean, a "kerfuffle"); the project was wildly expensive, incredibly damaging to local ecosystems, and tainted by accusations of corruption and cronyism.

We had all this in the backs of our minds from the beginning of this trip, but for the most part, we didn't pay any mind to the haters.  I mean, sure, some parts of the path are decidedly non-eco-friendly (long, freestanding platforms built right over the water, asphalt bike paths cutting through wetlands), but large sections of it consist of little more than bike logos painted on existing roads:

No, Bill, wrong way!

Once we got out of the sprawl of Seoul, though, we started stumbling across these vast, brand new yet mysteriously un-maintained parks.  And these parks are extremely well stocked.  They have elaborate maps and welcome signs that are completely covered in cobwebs.  They have excellent bathrooms (that is, they have bathrooms with toilet paper and non-squat toilets).  They have beautiful, elaborate landscaping that, except for small mowed patches, are being swallowed by weeds.  They have artsy benches and shelters, but no visitors using them.

Pictured: artsy shelters.  There were also bathrooms build to look like huge bicycles and bike racks in the shape of...bicycles.  I guess they stuck with a theme.

They were fully stocked with all of your major spiders, too.

And sure, some of them were less than perfect.  Many of the parks are badly designed, with nowhere to sit and rows of skinny trees that provide no shade.  Most of them are covered in snake-concealing tall grass or thorny plants.  For bike hobos like us, though, these parks were an amazing discovery.  Overgrown, unpopulated, and with all the resources we could want for free camping.  Our usual free camp routine is to pull in, unobtrusively cook our dinner, and set up our tent only in the most secluded corner of the park (even if that puts us on a gravel lot behind a bathroom), and only then after it has grown too dark to be spotted.  In the mornings, more often than not we were awake and had our tent away by 6:30 before we could be spotted by joggers or local busybodies.

In the vast abandoned parks of Korea, though, it's a different story.  We stake our tent in broad daylight like goddamn kings.  We sleep in until 7:00, even 8:00, sometimes not even putting up the tent until after a cup of coffee.  On rest days we simply leave the tent up, and we greet the (very) occasional dog walker or hiker with a hearty "Annyeong haseo!", knowing that even if we're somehow bothering them with our presence, there'll be another park not ten kilometers down the road.

It did occur, though, after our third or fourth day without seeing another cyclist, camper, or picnicker, that these parks could be part of the problem with the Four Rivers Project.  There were all manner of signs directing us to these parks and the Historic Views of the Han River or the Historic Cosmos Garden (currently unoccupied by cosmos), and even on the weekends they were utterly failing to bring in tourists or even members of the community.  The cost to build and maintain these parks is surely immense, and as far as we could tell, the only people making use of them are three smelly hippies.

So are these parks a good thing?  For us, certainly, but I don't think we're supposed to be the main beneficiaries of the Four Rivers Project.  I'm not particularly bothered by the thought of my tax dollars going to build such elaborate parks or bike trails; projects like these do bring people closer to nature, particularly those who live in a city and don't see much nature anyway, and it's a lot easier to care about the environment when you can point to a river or a forest as a good thing in your daily life.  But then, I don't pay that much in taxes.  Maybe I'd be more bothered by how abandoned, how clearly unnecessary these parks are if I were more invested in one of the communities that hosts them.  And I do think these parks are rather unnecessary, beautiful though they are: if on a beautiful summer day, they sit unused by either members of the community or tourists, then how necessary could they be?

The real takeaway here is that we're extremely lucky to be doing this trip when we are.  Four years ago, these paths would've still been under construction, and we would have had to fight mountains and traffic the whole 600 kilometers to Busan (whereas now we only sometimes have to).  And who knows?  Maybe four years from now the path will be swallowed up by weeds entirely or else abandoned by the taxpayers as a waste of money.  Then again, maybe in twenty years, when the urban sprawl has covered most of the country, these young trees will have grown big enough to provide some shade, and the currently unused parks will be the last bit of greenery that the citizens of Korea will have to enjoy.

I guess maintenance costs couldn't be that high, really.

PS: As a way of saving my delicate little princess skin from the ravages of sunlight, I caved and bought some ajuma arm...cover...things.  But at least mine show the other old ladies that I shanked a dude in the pen:

Also available in "regrettable band logo."