Weekend Ride to Namhae
In order to give the long-haul bike riding season an appropriate kick off, a group of 13 riders on 10 bikes took to the road for a two-day ride to the islands of Namhae last week. It’s not a long ride. It can be done in about three hours if you ride straight through at a good speed. However, that was not the purpose of the ride.
The night before the ride, I did something that I haven’t done in about 8 months. I washed my bike. It looks kind of pretty when it’s all nice and shiny.
The group came together at around 9:00 am on Saturday morning. We met at the McDonalds in Kimhae where the service has a reputation for being less than satisfactory. The group went in for breakfast. I was quite pleased that they managed to get the order right, but I wasn’t too happy that it took almost 30 minutes to get my fast-food order of a sausage egg McMuffin.
After everyone had eaten, maps to the location were distributed and we were off.
This group ride was unlike any other group ride I had ever been on. I am used to organized group rides where there is a pre-ride meeting where we discuss the details of the route to where we are going, ride rules, safety, etc. before mounting up and leaving as a group. This ride had more of a disorganized road race feel to it. The maps were handed out without much discussion, some people immediately jumped on their bikes and fired up their engines while others were still packing. I was still standing next to my bike with my helmet and gloves in my hand when the first riders took off. The other riders scrambled to take off. Eventually, I and another rider were the only two left where there once had been nine bikes. I grumbled something about how that was some pretty sloppy group riding. Luckily, the other rider, Iceman, and I have the largest bikes by far and caught up to the other riders easily.
It soon became clear that my original feelings were correct. This wasn’t really a group ride. It was more of a bunch of individuals heading in the same direction toward the same destination. Riders were passing each other. Riders were riding all over the road. Riders were running read lights. Riders were barely sliding between cars. Riders were not communicating with each other. Basically, it was a recipe for disaster. Not wanting to be part of any such foolishness, Iceman and I hung back quite a distance from the riders in front. There were a few riders in the “group” several kilometers behind us.
Despite several close calls, the group make the 30 minute ride from Kimhae to Changwon to meet up with the final rider.
We then went on another free-for-all ride through downtown Masan and up into the mountains toward our first gas stop. While the smaller bikes and those with bad gas mileage fueled up, the rest of us stood around and got stared at by the local for twenty minutes or so.
Then we were off on the main leg of the trip to Namhae. The road from Masan to Goseong was quite crowded with weekend traffic. However, once we arrived at Goseong and turned off the main road and headed toward the coast, traffic thinned out and the scenery was gorgeous. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of pictures from this trip. When I am riding alone, I will stop about every 5 minutes to take pictures of looking around, but when riding as a group, I don’t do that. The purpose of a group ride is to ride, not stop and take pictures. However, I did take some video of the ride.
The arrival at Namhae is always enjoyable as the road winds over a serious of bridges to the main island. The view was exceptionally spectacular this time as the fields of bright yellow spring flowers contrasted with the bright orange bridges.
After crossing over the bridges, we rode to a rest stop for a pre-lunch snack and a leg stretch.
The nice thing about this particular rest stop is the spectacular view of the ocean across the street (click the picture for a larger view).
We hit the road again for the 30 minute ride to the place where we were supposed to have lunch. On the way to the restaurant, we passed the tulip festival, the garlic festival, and some sort of fish festival.
Once we arrived at the designated lunch location, we parked our bikes on the street and looked for the parking attendant to give us our parking slips.
The parking attendant was standing across the street just looking at us. We stood on our side of the street looking expectantly at him. He appeared genuinely frightened to talk to the 13 mostly foreign bikers. There were a few Koreans in the group, so he shouldn’t have had any worries. A group of us stood around waiting for him to come over to us while the others marched off toward the restaurant. After waiting for another minute or so, we figured that if he didn’t want to talk to us, then we didn’t want to talk to him either. So we marched off to join the others.
It turned out that the restaurant was full, so we went to a Korean restaurant that serves up short-order items like noodles, soups, and sushi rolls. We took the restaurant by surprise. We invaded right at lunch time when the restaurant was handling a lot of delivery orders. It took about 45 minutes to get everyone served.
About halfway through the wait, the parking attendant guy had screwed up enough courage to approach us about the parking. A 10 minute conversation ensued wherein it was determined that we would have to pay 2,000 won ( about US$ 1.80) to park there.
After lunch we ran into another major organizational disaster. Again, some people seemed to be in too much of a hurry to wait for others. They had their bikes started and they took off before others were even close to being ready.
The end result was that the people in the “group” were scattered for 10 to 15 kilometers. The people in front were angry at those in the back for not stopping the group from leaving… The people in back were angry because the other people left without waiting. Iceman and I were just about ready to head back to look for the last part of the group, when we were told by others in the group that they had spoken with the people in back by cell phone. If people in the same group are scattered so far apart that you have to communicate by cell phone, then there are problems.
We waited a total of about 20 minutes for everyone to finally get together to begin the final leg of the ride around Namhae to the motel where we would be staying. While waiting, I snapped this picture of some farmland being prepared for Spring planting.
We wound our way around the island through tiny villages and along sheer cliffs to our destination at Songjeong Beach in Namhae. The motel was quite nice and right on the beach.Before dinner, I went to the beach to take some pictures and stretch out my legs.
(Click for larger picture)
After a short rest, we had dinner then went back to the beach to have a meeting and discuss the ride. I expressed my opinion about the poor organization and unsafe riding practices of the group. I hope it did some good. None of the riders in that group were bad riders. They just sucked as a group.
The last thing that was said by the group leader before everyone went to there separate rooms was “no calls before 9:00 am, and we will try to leave around 10:00 am.”
I watched a bit of television before going to sleep. I turned my phone off to get a good night sleep. When I awoke at 8:45 am I saw that the group leader had tried to call me twice. I called him and asked what was going on. He said that he was hungry and wanted to leave early. I asked when he planned on leaving. “In five minutes” was his reply. So much for no calls before 9:00 am…
That was impossible for me. So I told them to go on ahead and I would catch up, if I could. I packed my things and hit the road at around 10:00 am. They had only ridden about 4 kilometers up to road and were eating breakfast. There was one couple that was slower getting out than me. They were going to eat breakfast at a different restaurant and we would meet up with them somewhere up the road.
I took off and joined the others for breakfast. It turned out that some of the riders had left very early in the morning. So, after we met up with the other couple, there were a total of seven bikes heading back together. We rode back across the bridge and back up the road to Pusan. (This video includes the last part of the ride to the hotel as well as the ride off of the island in the morning.)
After about an hour of riding together, most of the people in the group decided that they were busy and needed to get back home as quickly as possible. Iceman and I had nothing to do, so we let the rest of the group take the faster way home. We went our separate way and rode along the coastline up to Gojae Island, around the island for a while before head to Masan, then Chinhae, then back to Pusan.
Although somewhat disorganized and poorly executed at times, it was generally a great bunch of people and a spectacular ride through beautiful country.