It was a beautiful morning on our private beach after another nice night of camping. What a life: wake up with nature (more or less), crawl out of your tent, to find yourself on a nice beach, with a warming morning sun. It makes the breakfast and the coffee taste twice as good! Cycling was so-so however, the first kms were still fine but after a while we came close to Pohang, and it was urban riding. In fact, we rode for a long time along a huge factory; apparently this is the Posco steel factory, an enormous facility. Once we were well beyond Pohang, the cycling became nicer and nicer, with also increasingly hilly (steep hills!) but that was fine.
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The view in the morning, literally straight from the tent
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| A short part of the ride went through loose sand, and then steep up a bridge, not cyclable with a heavily loaded tour bike! |
It's a beautiful rugged coastline, rocks in the ocean, waves crashing onto them - and I'm sure the waves are very gentle currently. In many places people are drying products from the sea: a lot of seaweed, all kinds of fish, squid and cuttlefish, and other unidentifiable stuff. It's a bit tough to notice, that this work is being done exclusively by old people. It's like in the rural areas, also there you see almost uniquely old people. We were told by a Korean that it's a real problem, the younger generations go to the cities to work, and only the older generation stays in the villages and takes care of the agricultural work; seemingly also similar for fishery... These older people can often hardly walk anymore, yet they take care of this hard work... When you observe them, they often look tired, confused, depressed. They've had a hard life, and probably can't stop working...
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| Drying seaweed |
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| Home for the night |
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| We pitched our tent on a beach near a small fishing harbour |
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| I see a ship in the harbour |
We finished the day after 90km of cycling, and a long search for a place to camp - the usual scenario. But we found a nice spot again, and had a great night. Then today was a great day of cycling, really wonderful. The coast is more beautiful than before, with rugged rocky parts and with white sandy beaches. It's comfortable cycling, mostly flat (although we certainly had some very steep climbs again) on good cycle lanes. It was a day to remember however, if not for the cycling part, then for a different reason: my chain broke (!!!) AND I had a flat tyre. Keeping in mind that all we've had in 7500km of cycling, are 2 flat tyres, this was a "disastrous" day. But never mind, it both got solved, and we still did 101km easily (yeah, the tailwind helped).
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| Drying cuttlefish |
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| Close up |
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| Cycling along the East Sea |
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| More East Sea |
It was also the day of the friendly Koreans. Besides many friendly hellos and nice chats on the way, we had 2 fantastic experiences today. The first one was when we went for lunch. Ellen asked someone how to pronounce the dish we wanted to order; next thing we know, he ordered
and paid for us! I was talking a while with this gentleman while waiting for our food to arrive, he was a professor in Busan, and had cycled all the Korean dedicated bike routes! Later on, when I started to repair my broken chain (this happened just before we reached the restaurant), he pulled over, gave me his spare chain link, and helped me repair the chain! We saw him once again, on the trail later on. Great guy! Then, we arrived at our campsite, and really really wanted to have a shower (after 4 days of washing with cold or at best lukewarm water, in the sink or so - a hash shower is 100 times more comfortable!). I just went to a dive centre nearby (note: it's surprising how many - active - dive centres we've already seen along the East Sea, considering the cold ocean water) to ask where we could take a shower and yes: he offered us to take a shower at the dive centre. So nice! This must have been the best shower of my life (oh well).
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| Beach camp (near Bungmyeon), good night! |