On the Road to Taegu
If you sit in your airconditioned cage and drive on the expressway while playing chicken with the other cars on the road, you can drive from Pusan to Taegu in about 45 minutes. However, motorcycles are not allowed on the expressways in Korea. Travel is limited to regular highways and local roads. The downside of this is that the drive from Pusan to Taegu takes about 3 hours. The upside of this that you get to see things that you can’t see from the expressway.
The first hour of the trip is spent driving through Pusan city traffic, past the airport, and down the highway to Kimhae. Once you get through Kimhae, the countryside opens up and you are free from the noise, smell and dust of the city and into a state of quietude and the natural smells of water, dirt, dung, and vegetation.
Gone are the block after block of highrise apartments and buildings. They are replaced by paddy after paddy of rice and other crops.
Crowded, tight, asphalt alleys give way to empty, wide open dirt roads.
Five minutes outside of Kimhae and you are utterly alone. Occasionally, you will pass an old man or old woman working the rice paddies in the distance.
Another 15 minutes and the road leads to a one-lane, steel bridge across the river. There should be someone at both ends of the bridge controlling traffic to make sure that the scattered traffic is flowing in only one direction at a time across the bridge. However, this is the contryside, and things don’t always work out that way.
The next quarter of an hour is spent driving through Samnangjin village and up into the mountains. Upon reaching the top of the mountain pass, the gorgeous vista of Miryang valley stretches out below you.
The ten-minute decent into Miryang City is breathtakingly beautiful. This stretch of road is one of the most perfect roads I have ever ridden. It is the reason that motorcycles were invented.
Coming down out of the mountains, the road runs along the tracks marshland into Miryang City.
After passing through Miryang City, and starting the final leg of the journey to Taegu, the road levels out for a while and runs through more rice paddies and on into the village of Chungdo. Shortly before reaching Chungdo, the road passes over a bridge overlooking children and adults playing in the river, fishing, swimming, and picnicing.
The road between Chungdo village and Taegu is lined for kilometers on both sides of the road with fragrant yellow flowers.
It takes longer than the expressway to get where you are going, but you are going to see a lot more on the slow ride through the contryside.
Click here to see more pictures from the ride.
