Turkish Delight

We haven't actually had any Turkish Delight yet, although we do hear very good things about it, but it was some delight crossing over the border from Iran and shedding that headscarf let me tell you.  There was a bin right next to the X-Ray machine that our bikes and bags had to go through which I gladly dumped my scarf into and had a little celebratory chuckle to myself.  I waited until I was outside and away from the border guards to shed the rest.  What a welcome to Turkey it was!

Our first view of Turkey, and where I took off my long legs and sleeves and felt pure freedom after the confines of the Iranian dress code

We've been here almost two weeks now and although the weather here is cooler, and significantly less humid, than in Iran, the cycling has been tougher than anticipated.  I suppose a quick glance at the topography of the country would have had me a bit more prepared for the mountainous terrain, but we don't usually do much of that, preferring to just get up and go and take it as it comes.

Where Are We Now!

To keep you all up to date on our whereabouts, I've created a new map under the "Our Route" tab that has the locations of where we've stopped each night so far.  It won't be possible to update this everyday, but we'll do our best to keep it as up to date as possible.

4 Days to Go and the Excitement is Palpable!

I got a text from the Korean Association for Children with Leukemia and Cancer (KACLC) the other day.  KACLC is the charity that I sent my hair too after it got chopped off in the pub on January 30th.  The text message was in Korean so I translated it.  Google translate is notorious for its dubious Korean-English translations and I think my text message may have suffered!  It translated the message as follows: "Guardian cherub! Thank you! Your hair has been well received in the Association."  I was pretty chuffed to be called a guardian cherub mind you!

Text Message from KACLC

The text came on the same day we went to Seoul to collect out passports from the Chinese Visa Agency.  We had everything crossed we'd be given the 90 days we'd asked for, and secretly pretty hopeful not having heard anything from them since the day we applied.  We had prepared ourselves for a long day of queuing and waiting but when we got there, there was no one else waiting so we were seen immediately.  Without any fuss the girl handed over our two passports and asked us to check them. 90 Days. Bingo! We handed over 55,000won each (about €40) for the privilege and went on our merry way! Delighted!  

Wohoo! Chinese Visa's are Go!

To celebrate the first real step towards hitting the road we decided to go for lunch and a few beers!  Before lunch I popped into Innisfree (a Korean cosmetics chain, similar to The Body Shop) to buy a few things and while I was in there I bumped into a guy, Sam, that we'd worked with in our first year here in Daejeon.  Given that we were in Seoul, a city with over 15 million people in it, and that we were over 140km away from where we'd met originally, it only added to the excitement of the day, feeling very much as if our time here in Korea has come full circle and that the timing to head off couldn't be more perfect.

The two of us and Sam after our random meeting in Gangnam!

As well as going to Seoul to collect our passports, this week has been spent furiously packing up our apartment.  Separating things into different groups: stuff to be given away; stuff to ship home; stuff to pack onto our bikes; stuff to sell and various miscellaneous piles when we just weren't sure what category to fit it into! The place looks like a bomb went off but it's pretty organised chaos, at least to our eyes it is!  We are planning on meeting a few friends tonight for some farewell drinks and general banter and we're hoping to have everything more or less done by then.

Just some of the clothes, shoes and household items that we've donated over the last few days!

We spent the guts of yesterday afternoon in the post office, sending things back home (thanks Mum for providing the storage space!).  A friend with a car very kindly offered us a lift down, and thank god he did because I really don't know how we would've done it without him.

2 bikes, 4 boxes of 'stuff', one box of spare tyres (!) and a poster tube!

Nick's in the middle of plotting our route up to Incheon now as I type, and then after a bit of lunch, we'll hopefully get the last few things packed into our panniers.  Then we can switch off and enjoy the last couple of days without rushing around like mad lunatics.  Now that our departure date is so close, it's very hard to describe how we're feeling.  We're oscillation between disbelief and excitement  for the most part, with the odd moment of panic on my behalf when the thoughts of cycling up those Pamir mountains come to mind.  They are months off though, and I'll be fitter then and more able for them.  That's what I'm telling myself anyway!

Fundraiser

Howdy folks!

This is just a quick review of the weekend and the fundraiser that we held in Travelers Bar in Daejeon. We raised roughly ₩1,300,000 or around €980, which includes a very generous commitment of ₩500,000 won from the lovely people at the Irish Association of Korea. 

We are now over one tenth of the way to our goal of €30,000 thanks to the enormous generosity of all you lovely folks out there. We've been truly overwhelmed with the support that we've received so far in undertaking this adventure and charity fundraiser. Now, there are only 21 days to go before we take off. We still have lots of organising and planning to do but it's all exciting and the support we are getting is only turbo charging that excitement!

Cheers everyone :)
P.S. Pictures of Stef's head to come!

One gigantic list, slowly getting smaller!

This week has been spent in a contact state of motion.  We have lists coming out our ears of things to do so we've been steadily working through them before I head off to the Philippines on Monday, leaving poor ol Nick here to hold the fort!

We have lists of things to buy, things to organise for our fundraiser in Daejeon tomorrow, things to check on the bikes, things to ship home, things to sell, vaccinations to get, visas to organise, people to contact...and god knows what else.

Once I get back from the Philippines we'll have to go straight to the Chinese Embassy and apply for our visa.  With over 4000km to cover in China alone we want to get as long a visa as possible, preferably 90 days.  The embassy here is renowned for only issuing 30 day visas but another couple of cycle tourists, The Twisting Spokes, managed to secure themselves a three month visa so we're hopeful!

To apply, you have to have proof of entering and exiting the country (i.e. flight tickets), a detailed itinerary of where you intend on going, accommodation bookings for several of your destinations, as well as the usual application form and copies of your passport!  That's all grand except that we don't have flights, we plan on camping and therefore don't have accommodation booked and our route isn't one the Chinese authorities are mad about tourists taking!  So we've faked it.  All of it.  We have written out a detailed, but untrue, 85 day itinerary, we've booked accommodation along the way (that can be cancelled once we get the visa!) and we are looking into travel agents that will provisionally book us flights that can then be cancelled once the application has been completed!  All a bit of a rigmarole, but with the help of the Twisting Spokes - how they went about it, the itinerary they used etc - we're pretty hopeful that we'll get a 90 day visa.  Even a 60 day one would be grand because it's pretty easy to extend it once you're in the country.

The next hurdle then is figuring out how to ship home our road bikes.  After hours and hours of enquiring with various shipping and courier companies, it now looks like we can just take them to a normal post office and as long as the box they are in is less than 20kg it should be fine.  The girl Nick was talking to said it would cost ₩60,000 (about €45), which if it's true seems like a really good deal.  Now all we have to do is dissemble them, box them up and get them to the post office.

For now though, I'm off to wash, dry and de-tangle my hair one last time before it gets the chop tomorrow!  I have an envelope addressed and ready to go to a Cancer Charity here that I'll pop my pony tail into before the rest all gets buzzed off, turning me into a human tennis ball!  Photo's and hopefully a small snippet of video footage will be up here early next week.  I'm just glad I'll be on a beach somewhere and won't have to see them!

The Geumganag River Trail

Like a ton of extra well cooked roast duck confit, an extra-long weekend hit us here in the humorously unhinged hamlet of Hongseong. A combination of our University's music festival on Thursday and Friday, and Buddha’s Birthday that Monday gave us a nice stretch of a few days for an adventure. So, despite feeling a little tired and emotional on Thursday morning after festival mania, we geared up our bikes and away we went for 4 days of river and coast cycling and camping.

At the bus station in Hongseong

We got a bus from Hongseong to Daejeon. From there, the cycle track starting along the Gapcheon river, and changing to the the Geumgang river cycle path, took us continuously for 170km to the coast at Gunsan. From just East of Gunsan we had about 145km of beautiful country road and coastal cycle lanes that took us all the way back to Hongseong via Daecheon beach, where we camped for a night. Here are a few photos of our journey...

MTB trails in Hongseong

Some fun on the trails by our apartment in Hongseong, Chungnam.

Three Weeks in Hokkaido, Japan

After a few, short multi-day trips on our bikes in May and June last year, we were ready for more!  We decided we'd head to Japan and once we looked into it properly, the northern island of Hokkaido seemed to make the most sense.  It's the most rural part of Japan so it's well suited for cycle tourists with spectacular scenery, quiet roads, and tonnes of camp sites (most of which were free).

Disassembling the bikes and them packing them into boxes for the plane was a fairly steep learning curve, for me (Stef) at least.  It took the better part of the afternoon to get the job done.  Then, the next problem, how on earth are we supposed to carry these boxes, and all our panniers, to the airport?  Luckily the bus passes right outside our apartment and goes to the terminal where you can change onto an airport bus.  I remember thinking that there was no way it was all going to be that seamless on the other end but there wasn't much I could do about it so I pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind and listened to Nick when he said 'we'll figure it out' - Nick's default response to me when I over-plan and worrying unduly about things!

Disassembling the Bikes in our Apartment

The Journey from Casual Cyclists to Fully Fledged Cycle Tourists

After our trip in Jeju we knew we wanted to do more cycle touring.  We also new we needed some better equipment, sturdier bikes and panniers at the very least, especially if we really were going to cycle from South Korea all the way to Ireland when our contract expires.

Life on the Road Before we had Touring Bikes!

We started looking into bikes and all things touring related.  There is such a wealth of information available and we found websites like The Travelling Two, Cycling About and Going Slowly to be massively useful in our hunt for the perfect set up.  Living in South Korea, and not speaking much Korean, meant we were slightly limited, options-wise.  It was about this time last year (April 2014) that we started making decisions and buying the gear that will (hopefully!) get us back to Ireland, when we set off from here next March.

Our Surly LHT's make their Debut!

I've written a post about it on my other blog, and you can read it here if you're interested: we are now officially cycle tourists!

Our First Taste of Cycle Touring

The first time we ever went on a cycling holiday was way back in the summer of 2012.  We didn't have any fancy equipment and our bikes were not specific touring bikes.  We had a week off work though and wanted to do something fun, go somewhere new and spend as little money as possible.  We decided to cycle around the Korean Island of Jeju so we packed what we thought we might need into our rucksacks and off we went!

I've written a blog post about it on my other blog, so if you'd like to have a read, here's the link: Around Jeju with a Bike