The 4 Rivers Bike Trail

Finally, after almost 3 weeks of hardly any cycling, we're in the saddle again! And yes, after weeks of little blogging, it will definitely get better again as well! Although... we'll be camping a lot from now on, and it might not be so easy to get online. We'll see...

In front of BikeLy, the great tourbike shop in Seoul

Together with Mr Lee from BikeLy, who gathered a lot of info for us, and some maps, the 4 River "passport", ... A great guy!

With Richard and Gail at Seoul Forest Guesthouse, ready to go!

This gentleman cycled a while with us to guide us to the campsite

So last Saturday we got back to Seoul from Australia, and took care of a few more preparations. Yesterday, Sunday, we eagerly started cycling again. From the guesthouse it took us only a few kms to get to the Han river, where we joined the Han River Cycling Trail again. It's part of the 4 Rivers Bicycle Trail which runs through South Korea, from Incheon to Busan, and follows mostly rivers. The majority of the trails are dedicated bike trails, and if not it's on very quiet and safe rural roads. It's a big project from a government some years ago, which received a lot of criticism because of the high cost, and some people said some corruption was involved... Whatever the case, if you see today how many people use this trail, how it helps people in this high paced, demanding society to go outdoors and be active, I really admire the result!

A good example of the 4 Rivers trail

Some remarkable architecture

The cycling is easy, very easy. To start with, there is hardly any need for navigation, it's all pretty straightforward and well signposted. But it's also very easy cycling, mostly flat with a few bumps - which can be very steep sometimes, yet real short so no problems at all. There were even quite a few tunnels on our way, more than weve had on our entire trip so far. It's funny though, you see many Koreans with good race bikes and all dressed up in fancy Lycra gear, but whenever a small bump comes up, they dismount their bicycle and walk up!...

One of the tunnels on our way, on the 4 Rivers bike trail

From Seoul we cycled 107km to Gangcheon Park, a nice day cycling, not always great but considering we were leaving a megapolis like Seoul, definitely good cycling! It was fantastic spring weather, and we heard it was really nice to camp in Gangcheon Park, an island in the Han river. It's not a real camp site, but you're allowed to camp - there is a lot of good grassy camp space to choose from - and there are toilets and some picnic tables (no other facilities). So it's "semi-wild" camping, in very beautiful, wide open, quiet, safe surroundings. You could see there had been more people during the weekend but now we were almost alone!

Our campsite in Gangcheon Park

And our camp kitchen...

From Gangcheon we continued on the bike trail for 82 very nice kms today. We had been looking for a nice place to camp for a while, but it was hard to find an adequate place (although we had seen many great ones earlier - too early - in the day). We found one eventually, a small platform near a river, and just pitched our tent there. After a quick (cold!) wash in the river we prepared our pasta pesto - perfect camp food - and are now sitting in our tent as it's too cold to stay outside... (although it has been beautiful weather again today as well!) It has been a very beautiful day today, nothing was spectacular or really remarkable, but so nice. We also met a few other tour bikers out on the trail, among others a group of 6 Singaporeans on folding bikes which we met several times. We also experienced the disadvantage of riding on the dedicated bicycle route: you don't encounter shops that easily as you don't really ride though towns... We had to do some effort to find some basic convenience stores to at least buy the essentials (well, we always have some spare food and water, but that's the very basic...) and will have to find a real supermarket tomorrow...

One of the (very) steep but short climbs on our way, this one indicated 20%!!!

We had a coffee break among wonderful blossoms

A typical view on our way today

The people we meet on our way are still soooo friendly. For instance, yesterday a guy rode about 10km with us to show us where the camp site was. We would definitely have found it ourselves as well, but he just insisted to guide us there! Today we were having a simple lunch (the only thing we could find for a long time, was some instant noodles and rice in a small shop, also with a very nice owner) and suddenly a woman came up to us and gave us a handful of tasty grapes, just like that, out of the blue. And also remarkable is, how many people do good efforts to communicate with us in English. It's often not easy, but they really try their best!