![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cerealjoeThis was my ride yesterday. As I said it was quite a change from my Helkama from the9 80s.  I have to admit I'm not used to riding bikes like this anymore. I used to (well technically it's still somewhere in my parents' garage) own a bike almost like that and ride it every day to school... but it's been years. Now I'm used to road bikes, it's weird the feeling you have on larger tires. The other thing that was hard was the fact that you have pretty much only one option on how to hold the handlebar. On my bike I have three so that if my wrists start to hurt I can always switch to another position. As I wrote yesterday, I didn't take many photos because I didn't want to stop and get my camera out of my bag all the time. I just feel I need to describe what's this "shore road" all about. Basically throughout the island there are stretches of well made cycling road (it's actually for pedestrians too). Then every once in a while that cycling road stops with no signs as to where you're supposed to continue. Most likely it's because you're supposed to go along the highway. Yep, you're supposed to ride along the highway. If you're lucky the sidewalk is large enough and without too many holes for you to ride on. If you're not so lucky, you have a mini-lane marked off by a yellow line where cars usually don't go. If you're really unlucky, that band is about 3 inches wide and the cars just ride really next to you as it seems that the notion of sharing the road is not common knowledge. In any case, at first I was a tad scared because when you see how they drive around here, drivers in Marseille seem sane... but strangely enough, like in China, the number of accidents seems low. Basically the conclusion to all this is that if you're going to rent a bike on Jeju, be prepared that you will have to ride in not so pretty conditions at certain points so it's better to be a rather good cyclists and a careful one. Alrighty, now some illustrations of where I started, the mid-way point where I turned back and the beach where I hung out.   This is the closest beach to Jeju-si. It seems that it is completely cleaned by hand. Even though it was a warm day and rather sunny, it was empty.  I made it to this other beach... and right now I can't remember the name. It'a some odd 20-30km from Jeju-si. It was also empty.  Something that surprises me/boggles my mind is that you have shrines and what appears to be tomb stones right in the middle of the city, right next to the beach, everywhere. Alas the text is only in Korean so I don't know what these are.  Every kilometer or so there are places where to stop and take photos. Once again, I don't know what everyone sees in these but peeps really do stop everywhere.  The flora really depends on the location. Somewhere about 6km from Iho beach there are some lovely flowers.  I believe these markers are put up by the Juju-Olle association which takes care of providing nature trail maps on the island.  This is one of the nicest streches of the shore road, alas the cycling path is only on one side and not large enough for cyclists to go both ways. Also cars and mopeds often stop on it :(   Iho beach in the afternoon. I really thought it was going to rain but in the end it ended up being just dark and humid till nightfall.  I have no idea what these statues represent but they somehow creeped me out. BTW, the first batch of postcards will be sent from Jeju today or tomorrow. If you want a postcard it's still possible to sign up, please see this post and leave a comment/send me an email. And the South Korean football team made it in the last 16! Yay! The next match is at around 11pm local time... hopefully Busan will be as crazy as Seoul on game night. |
Nice!
Date: 2010-06-23 02:10 pm (UTC)Re: Nice!
Date: 2010-06-26 09:37 am (UTC)