As we were packing up this morning, a man arrived and in a conversation involving little mutually understood language we discovered that we should have paid to stay at the campsite last night. Logical when you consider the amenities we enjoyed but not when you realise that the “office” is a pre-fabricated building a kilometer or so away from the cycle track. Anyway, I cycled up there before we left and paid the 2000 Won the man wanted from me and we carried on up the trail.

After that it was into town to pick up bread at the grocery store but it was closed. Not a problem, we would find something in the next town. We wandered up the trail in a similar way to yesterday fitting in some birding along the way. The next town ended up being nearly forty kilometers away and by that stage I was ready to eat a rotting horse carcass. Within the first hundred meters we found a restaurant and despite it being about ten thirty in the morning we had an enormous meal of Kentucky Fried Pork (well, it was crumbed and fried) with a fishcake (in a similar style), cabbage salad, kimchi, rice and a bowl of thick soup, all this four 8000 Won after ordering “pork and rice”.

We waddled out of the restaurant and went off in search of an ATM and a convenience store. We found them both at a CU about five hundred meters away. ATM’s that accept foreign cards have been a bit hard to find to it was reassuring that the ones at CU seem to work OK. By now it was approaching midday and we really should have been looking for a cool spot to see out the hot hours of the day.

The route (marked by a blue line and regular signs) suddenly doubled back into the outskirts of the town and then on to a farm road. After a short climb we got to a T-junction. A signboard suggested that there were two routes available for cyclists. The one to the left was about seven kilometers long and that to the right just over nine. Of course we took the one to the left. Son we were climbing steeply up to almost 200m in not much more than one and a half kilometers. It felt even steeper going down the other side.

The trail crossed onto the west bank of the river (it crosses back and forth every few kilometers) and on the bridge we met two Swiss cyclists who were on their way down from Seoul. We warned them of the steep hill ahead and they told us we would have a 13% climb up to almost two hundred meters soon as well. This second climb in the heat of the day with a tummy full of pork and accompaniments was a bit of a struggle but we got there in the end.

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By now we were getting concerned that the toilets we were expecting along the route were few and far between and that those that we had passed did not seem to have basins and water where we could wash. In the end we decided to push on to a motel we had read about in other trip reports and spend the night there. It pretty basic but at 30000 Won it does the job.