Buddha’s Birthday Ride
I have two personal traditions. One tradition is that I stay home on Children’s Day and avoid going anywhere on the crowded roads because nothing is more frustrating than sitting in gridlocked traffic watching carload after carload of parents frustrated at the gridlock and screaming at the gaggle of children in the backseat who are crying and bored of being trapped in a car for hours going somewhere their parents think they want to go. The other tradition is that on Buddha’s Birthday, I go somewhere that I find interesting.
Last Friday, those traditions came into direct conflict. Due to a lunar/solar calendar collision, yesterday was both Children’s Day and Buddha’s Birthday. I was torn between two traditions. After much pondering, I decided that the best way to deal with the conflict was to go somewhere far out into the countryside away from the nightmare traffic in the cities and expressways and to get far away from the places where families congregate with their children.
Early Friday morning, I got up, threw on my jeans, leather, gloves, and helmet. I grabbed my brother, threw him on the back of my bike and fired up the big V-twin engine and roared off under greying skies into the Korean hinterland.
The road led through Gupo in the northwestern part of Busan and on to Hopo on the very outskirts of the city.
One left turn and two minutes later, the noisy, crowded, polluted, stinking city gave way to quietude. Highrise apartments became greenhouses. telephone poles become trees. The noise of cars became the chirping of birds and the hum of insects.
The restrained growl of the 1,500cc engine cutting a line through the scenery was the only unnatural sound to be heard. Yet the rhythmic thrumming of the bike’s power plant was, in some arcane way, in harmony with Natures’ symphony.
The big, black machine continued to prowl the road and chew up the kilometers to Keumgo Village. The Harley quickly became the center of attention as it purred to a stop in front of the grocery store at Keumgo Village’s main intersection.
After stocking up on liquid refreshment and road food, I again put the bike’s nose into the wind and left Keumgo Village behind. Moutain passes and lowland farms led the way to Wondong Village.
Unaffected by holidays, farmers continued to work the fields in the same crude but effective way they have always done. Riding an old-school Harley-Davidson stripped of flash and noticeably lacking in chrome, saddlebags, and other frills, I can appreciate the old farmers using outdated, yet tried and true, machines that have always fulfilled the farmers’ needs.
Leaving the fields to the farmers, we took to the mountains again for the final push into Wondong Village. The smell of manure,silage, and compost gave way to the vivid, earthy green smells of forrests and underbrush. Bends in the road revealed clusters of houses tucked into small valleys between the giant arms of the mountains.
Cresting the mountain pass, we parked the bike at a small turnoff. Sitting on the edge of a cliff overlooking the deep and sweeping vista of the Nakdong River valley, we snacked on the vicutals picked up in Keumgo Village.
We descended the mountain and drove along the quiet, deserted street of Wondong Village.
Jinyoung Village was the next tiny community on the road ahead. Jinyoung Village is mainly a strawberry farming community with several square kilometers of strawberry greenhouses.
We had originally intended to turn around at this point. However, the Spirit of the road had infused our souls and we decided to keep going wherever the road took us. Another spectacular mountain pass led us to Samnangjin Dam.
As late afternoon settled on the hills and the gray sky slowly began to darken further with the approach of night, we turned around in Samnangjin Village and began retracing our steps back home.
We made better time on the return trip and took a detour to a secluded temple, Cheondaesa, constructed high in a mountain ravine. Although it was Buddha’s birthday, there were only a handful of people on the grounds of this particular temple. The upper level, lined with row after row over personal memorialshrines, was completely deserted.
Night overtook us as we arrived back in Hopo. About that time, we relized that we were quite hungry and had not eaten anything since having our snack outside of Wondong Village. We discussed what we should have for dinner.
Meat.
Where?
Didn’t we pass a samgyeopsal (thick bacon) restaurant back in Wondong?
I think we did.
With a spark in my eye, I brought the steel horse around and shot off down the road back to Wondong Village to do it all over again…..
To see additional pictures of the ride, visit my Motorcycle Diaries gallery by clicking here.