Cycling Japan and Korea: Bears, Hiroshima and a Solo Round the World Bike Tour

Ever camped in bear country in Japan? Brian Sampson has. This is his second update from his mission to cycle every destination in 1000 Places to See Before You Die.

In this episode Brian shares stories from cycling through Japan, including encounters with bears and wild boars. He also shares his experiences exploring the Hiroshima Peace Museum.  From Japan Brian crossed into South Korea, where herides the famous Four Rivers trail and shares the buzz of cycling in the huge city of Seoul.

Brian is now heading into China. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss what happens next. You can follow his journey on Instagram at @brian.sampson4 and his blog.

If Japan or Korea are on your cycling bucket list, you might also love Terri Jockerst's book Biking to Busan, her nine-month solo ride through Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.

And if you haven't seen it yet, come ride with me, Claire Wyatt and Marta Ballús in the Pyrenees over on the Seek Travel Ride YouTube channel. 

Head over to Old Man Mountain and checkout the Manzanita Cradle 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Hello everybody, Bella Malloy here, host of Seek Travel Ride. Welcome back to another midweek episode where I am stoking your fuel and wanderlust for bike adventures and travel all over the world. I'm super pumped for this episode because we've got another update coming to you from our intrepid adventurer Brian Sampson. I shared the first of many updates to come just a few weeks ago. And for those who don't know, Brian is currently on a huge monumental journey. He's cycling to a thousand places to see before you die. His adventure was inspired from a book that he was given when he was a teenager. Now in his 30s, he has, for the last, I think it was seven years if I'm correct, Brian has been slowly ticking the list off. Uh-huh. And he's got updates coming to us from Japan and Korea. But before we get into that, I wanted to have a quick, awesome shout out to so many of our previous guests. Two days ago was International Women's Day. I've personally, as a woman, got a lot of thoughts on this day. Sometimes I I don't know, sometimes I get a bit upset about the day because I feel like uh a lot of the people and companies get on board and show boat and have this aspirational message about women and inclusivity that they seem to forget about for the rest of the year. But also, to be fair, there's lots of people and places that are doing incredible things for women and hell yeah, we do deserve a day to highlight that. It's had me reflecting on it quite a lot because as a host of this podcast, my own little side quest passion project has always been to highlight the stories of women and those imaginalized genters and promote them as much as possible. It's prompted me to have a look at my podcast guest statistic list. It's a a little boring spreadsheet that I keep and I don't like putting people into categories and boxes, but what I do with that list is I do have, you know, who's the guest and stuff about them. So, you know, are they bikepacking, cycle touring, ultra cycling, are they setting world records? Uh what sort of adventures do they take? Blah blah blah. So I had a quick look at that list and it's let me realize that eighty-eight of my episodes in this huge podcast catalogue, and when I talk about these episodes, I mean long form episodes, not these midweek ones, but eighty-eight episodes have featured women on the pod. And I'm super proud of that because it's more than the men that I featured, and I know that we do not make 50% of the bike adventure space as much as I would like that to be the case. So I want to have a shout out to all the fantastic women out there. Thank you for letting me share your stories because I know as a fact, through all of the people who have reached out to me, that your stories on this pod has inspired other women to go and do their own adventures. So I've always thought if you can see it, you can do it. In this case, if you can hear it, you can do it. And I just want to say a huge shout out to you, your legends. On that note, I recently, while I was down with COVID, had the chance to edit up a whole heap of video footage which I took uh on an adventure of my own last year. It was just a mini adventure, a three-day break. But the special thing about that was that I got to have time with two previous podcast guests. They are Claire White and Marta Bayouz. Both of them happened to be in my neck of the woods in the French Pyrenees around the same time, and I took a ride which involved being able to meet up with both of them. I've edited all together and put it up on the YouTube channel. So for those of you who want to see what my adventures are like and also see a couple of the previous guests there on screen as well, I've got a link to the YouTube video in the show notes, or just search for it on our YouTube channel, which is Seek Travel Ride. Alright, that all said and done, it's now time to get into the update. So as I mentioned, Brian is going to take us through his insights from both Japan and Korea. I'm going to play the insights from Japan first, and then I'm going to come in halfway, give you my thoughts on that, then we're going to hear Brian talk about Korea, and I'll do the same afterwards. So here's insights number one from Japan. Take it away, Brian.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

Hi Bella. Another update from my tour to see other places from the book, A Thousand Places to See Before You Die. I'm currently in Busan, South Korea. Yesterday I took the ferry over from Fukuoka, Japan. I checked off all the places in Japan except for the Sapporo Snow Festival up in Hokkaido. I had no plan to spend any time in the middle of winter biking around Hokkaido. A little too cold, a little too much snow. But as I mentioned in the last update, I will allow substitutions for some of the places, especially if it's not really a place and it's just a festival. So the book is very westernized. Not too many places in East Asia. There is nothing in Japan west of Kyoto, and there are zero entries for the entire country of South Korea. So I had a list of things I wanted to see. So that should be enough to check off the snow festival in Sapporo. First place on my list west of Kyoto that I had marked off was Himiji Castle. Probably the highest anticipated spot I had for all of Japan. And it was as awesome as I imagined. Got maybe a little too excited exploring, spent a little too much time, lost track of time, and had to settle for camping in bear country again. And sure enough, 2-3 in the morning, up on the ridge from where I'm camped, there's something knocking over rocks. And I know from Natcheo channel, this is what bears like to do in the winter, knock over rocks and look for worms and bugs and whatnot. But the thing kind of started to go further away. So I just went back to sleep. Woke up a little later. The rocks are now being knocked over right outside my tent. So I made some noise to let whatever it was know that I was there and just hear the just like okay. But he just kept on moving the rocks, didn't really care that I was there. My food was hung up. But I thought, I'll just I'll leave this thing alone. Packed up, moved on down the road. The very next day, I was like, okay, do not camp in bear territory. This isn't that hard. So I find a Shinto shrine at the top of this hill in Okiyama, surrounded by forest. It's gonna be quiet up on top of a hill. No way a bear is living in this little patch of forest. I'm pushing the bike up the hill, and I start seeing signs beware of wild boar. I'm like, oh, here we go. So I've dealt with these things in the past in South Carolina, in southern Texas, the uh Havelina were such a nuisance at night. It's making so much noise, crashing into the tent. It's the dumbest animals. So I find the nightly track that they go along, made sure to set the tent up away from that, but still at midnight, just absolute mayhem outside my tent, oinking and the old bamboo forests with all the bamboo trees, they are very crunchy. So it's very hard to be stealth walking through an old bamboo forest. There's just so much noise. And most of them, when I shook the tent, ran away, but one kind of stuck around, was bluff charging, making all sorts of grunts, but eventually just ran away. But this was the first of many nights I dealt with these wild boar in Japan. Never in another country have I had so much trouble with animals at night. It's like the second the sun goes down, things just start moving around all over the place. I don't know if they're deer, wild boar, raccoons. Next on my list was the 88 Buddhist temple pilgrimage on Shikoku Island, which I think is pretty popular. But it's 88 Buddhist temples on the island, and some guy 400 years ago linked them all together in a pilgrimage tour, and I thought it would be cool to hit not all of them, but maybe half, or at least check out a few of them. So I took the ferry over to Takamatsu. The first two that I visited were on top of steep hills. One was a good mile hike to get up to it, and there's nothing I love more than a long staircase up to a temple on top of a hill. Went to the next cluster of them, and they were just all kind of the same. It got a bit repetitive pretty quick. I think I got to 14 of them, and I was just over it. So it's time to move on to the Shimonami Kaido cycleway. A number of people recommended that the best thing to do in Japan is cycle on this track that connects Shikoku Island back to the main island. You go over a series of bridges and island hop. It was really cool. Really good views. I love going over a tall bridge with the wind whipping, just looking down off the side. Awesome experience. That got me close to Hiroshima, which was another place in Japan I was really excited to visit. Because in America, you learn about, you probably learn this everywhere, about the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan. There's one building left standing from the explosion because the detonation happened right directly above it, so it didn't impact just the building that was directly below it. So I had to go see that. And then just next door is Hiroshima Atomic Peace Museum, which I didn't really have much expectation for. Walk inside, and you start by going down this long corridor with life-size images of Hiroshima before the bomb, and then it just breaks. You go down a corridor with the image of the city after the bomb, and I got this chill down my back, and then there's this display board of the whole city. They show the whole city laid out, it's all virtual. It just became the most intense museum experience of my life. The place was packed, no one was saying a single word. It was just image after image of burn victims, the clothes, the just artifacts left behind. I saw people wiping away tears. Whoever designed that museum, A. I had one last place to visit before I could move on from Japan to South Korea, and that was Kumamoto Castle. The last of the big three castles of Japan, Osaka, Himiji, and Kumamoto. When I got to Kyushu Island, I don't know, someone in Hiroshima at the hostel or maybe the museum gave me the flu. So the 50-mile climb over Kyushu Island was rough. But in Kumamoto, the castle was cool, the sun finally came out after a few cold, cloudy days, felt a lot better and was back to normal by the time I got to Fukuoka and the ferry to South Korea. I really enjoyed my time in Japan. The people were really friendly, very patient with the fact that I don't speak a word of Japanese. I thought I would meet more English speakers, but just a lot of Google Translate. Which is a bit frustrating because I really enjoy the side-of-the-road conversations I have in, say, Australia or New Zealand. I do speak a little bit of Spanish, so all through Latin America, I was able to have quite a few conversations, but in Asia it's just tough. The lack of public trash cans was really annoying. It's just all recycling. I guess the people just they finish all the food they eat, so they just have their little packaging and they recycle it. But for me, with all my banana peels and pistachio shells, I never knew what to do with all my trash. And then another gripe is the music. The high-pitched Japanese pop music is pr was pretty painful to listen to. The cycling was pretty good. Roads are pretty narrow, but the cars are tiny. So the roads are actually way wider than they look. And the drivers are excellent. I had no close calls at all with the drivers. They gave plenty of room. There's lots of other cyclists riding around. It was actually really nice. On the ferry from Fukuoka to Busan, South Korea, I met a guy from France who's a cyclist who's working in Busan for the oil company or gas company and was just riding around for a few days in Japan and was heading back. So I was able to get my social battery recharged and I was ready to go for South Korea.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

Thank you so much, Brian. Oh wow, that is absolutely an incredible update. There are so many parts of your Japanese experiences which I want to get into. The first is like the bear encounters. How are they still happening, Brian? I every time you talk about this, I put myself in your tent thinking, holy crap, there is a bear outside. What would I do? It sounds like you're really calm. And I don't know if that's just in the voice update or if that's just your demeanour. Oh, bears. And then, you know, hearing you say you're telling yourself, it's not that hard. Don't camp in bear territory. So next night, it's like Japan says, Hold my beer, Brian. Yesterday you had bears. Today, here's some wild boars for you. So I actually didn't know there were wild boars in Japan. To be honest, it's not something I've ever thought about, but it is actually something that I have experienced before. Uh both here in Australia and also in France. So in Australia, on my own high country trips, I remember vividly riding on an adventure with my husband and my two uh best riding buddies here in Australia. And the four of us were were going up into the high country, and then we actually saw uh wild boar, we would call them wild pigs in Australia, just run across. And I think from memory it was a boar with a baby, and we were like, oh i you know, if they want to come at you, they can get really, really dangerous. Thankfully, we stood still like stunned mullets and on the road there, and they just ran away. And the other time was actually in France and I was camping with another friend, and we had an absolute chaotic time. We we camped and pitched, and the cows came across our tent site and uh nearly ripped our tents to shreds. So we had to pack up like you did with the bear situation. But thankfully there was like a teeny teeny teeny tiny refuge hut, a total ramshackle of a place, and I was able to pitch my inner of the tent inside so we could sleep inside the hut, sort of safe from any cows trampling us. But then in the night, all I could hear, apart from the cow horns or dunking on the top of the roof, were the rutting of wild pigs or songliers as they're called in the Pyrenees, and they were just rutting right outside, and I was just terrified. I knew I was safe, but I was just like, This is meant to be in a great adventure, and here I am inside, terrified about this wild boar. So I can totally put myself in there and anyway, off from the animal type side tangents there. And I actually wanted to hit onto something really powerful you spoke about, which was your experience there in the Hiroshima Museum. When I actually heard you uh talk about that during the audio edit, Brian, oh my gosh, I I got goosebumps and I've literally just got goosebumps now. When you said no one in that museum said a single word, it just really transported me to the solemnity of that place. Just that solemn feeling sorry, is solemnity a word? Anyway, you you get what I mean, like just how solemn and somber it must have been to stand there, to try and take in an absolutely horrific event in to actually see the images from it. The no one said a word, you saw some people in tears. Yeah, I've got goosebumps, and it really transported me to that place. And I I guess you know, moving away from that to the realities of being a bike traveller in a country where you can't speak the language. Like sometimes the body language gets us through and sign language, and we're so thankful to have Google translate. But I do understand what you mean. Almost as someone who's learning French in a country, and I I do have a bit of a grasp of the French language now, but and listeners, I don't know if you can relate to this, but what I get frustrated with is I don't understand the language enough to be able to have conversations at a super in-depth level. And so I get stuck and after the fact I go, gosh, I wish I could have spoken about this, but I just don't have the vocab on a quick recall in my mind to do that. And I imagine you're sort of talking a little bit the same where the interactions you're having with people are almost at like a really light touch of vanilla level, and you'd really love for them to be a little bit a bit more than that. Japan's also a country which has fascinated me, Brian, because I think it's just got you know stuff at a different end of the spectrum, and you sort of hinted about it there. You've got this huge history and cultural richness about the country. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you've got you know, neon big cities with you know J Pop earworms in your head constantly. So it it's like you know, peak modernity and history all existing in the same place. I absolutely loved your updates. Japan is a country that is very, very high on my list to go bikepacking in. So I was stoked to receive this. Alright, listeners, now let's go to part two and hear all about Korea.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

The plan for crossing Korea to get to Seoul or Incheon and the ferry to China was not going to include the Four Rivers Trail. Because for me, there's something about following the established route that kind of sours the adventure. I like looking up the places that I want to see and connecting the dots and try not to be influenced by any of the outside route planners. So I left Busan, went up the east coast, visited Haidong Temple right on the water, which is pretty cool, super crowded. Then went up north to Gyeongsu, the ancient capital of Korea, and then I was gonna continue north to the Andong folk village, but with a major snowstorm incoming, I wasn't gonna get there in time. So I decided to find a hotel in Daegu City. And by the time I got to Daegu City, the roads were just mental. Six-lane highways, people driving super fast, not giving any space, especially the buses. I got nearly clipped by so many buses. So I re-evaluated and thought maybe I will just give this Four Rivers trail a shot. But before leaving Daegu City, I had to get a haircut, and in a big city like that, I love to just walk around, look for a hole in the wall barbershop, walk in, see the reaction of the people in there. Like, what in the world is this? Because I I didn't see any other Westerners in Daegu, a city of two and a half million, I think, and just 100% Korean. Another thing I like to do when I visit these big cities is go to the big open-air market. And Daegu is known for its herbal medicine market, so it was just shop after shop of mushrooms and tree bark and different roots. I didn't know what anything was used to cure for, but it was interesting. From Daegu I set out on the Four Rivers Trail, and I'm thinking it's gonna be like the rail trails in the eastern US, just a tunnel of trees going through people's backyards, really monotonous, bypassing anything interesting. But that was not the case at all. Pretty open landscape, follow the river, go through farms, different towns and cities. I only met a few Westerners on the trail, actually, only three. Two guys from the UK on BMX bikes, and one guy from Germany who was packed more than any other cyclist I've ever met. But lots of local cyclists. Everyone waved and said hi. Along the river, people are playing this hybrid croquet golf game that looked pretty fun. Yeah, so what is it? Happiness is reality minus expectations. And the reality of the Four River Trail was way higher than my expectation. Bella, you've asked some of your past guests what landscape made them feel small like an ant. Well, for me, it's riding into a mega city like Seoul, 26 million. With a big city like Seoul, I like to look up the tallest building, which in Seoul is the Lot World Tower, ride up to the edge of it and look straight up. I just bounced around from one attraction to the next, went to multiple temples, went to the royal palace, and in a big city I always head to the main square. I'll just sit in the square for a while, read the Wikipedia pages of the national heroes, and just people watch. I had pretty low expectations for Korea, and I thought it was great. The people are way more. Extroverted than the people in Japan. Because the people in Japan, I catch people staring at me, I look back to say hi, and they just quickly look away and put their head down. The people staring at me in Korea, I look over, wave, smile, they get a big wave and smile back, and they shout something that I didn't understand. Korean had to have been the hardest language I've tried to learn. Hello, thank you, water, goodbye, toilet. It's about as far as I got. So now I'm two days away from my ferry to Wii China. And getting mentally prepared for that crazy place.

SPEAKER_01 24:14

Brian, oh, I love this update again. I don't want to sound too repetitive, but I love insights I get from bike travellers telling me about countries I've never been to. Now I have to say this first and foremost, because I think what your expectations of Korea were going into it are exactly what my expectations would be. And that's just because every guest I've interviewed, bar one, who is Laura Willton, has sort of talked about it, Korea having it's sort of like the adventure on easy mode. Everything's easy, everything's high tech, everything is sanitized and clean. And so when you were talking about that and you were talking about the Four Rivers Trail, I'm right there with you in how you would describe it because I would envisage it to be very much like the rail trail, or like you know, sometimes here the canal trails in France, we call them the tunnel of green. Like it's just you don't have to think about navigation, but it's also not the most invigorating sometimes either. And I imagine that is what you're talking about there in South Korea. But that line that you had that happiness equals reality minus expectations, it's an absolute gem. And I think, as you said, if you take away the expectations totally away from it, and then just feel the happiness of the reality in that moment, it it sounds like it exceeded your expectations, which is great. I also found it really interesting when you were talking about the cultural contrast between Korea and Japan. And I've often thought this when people are traveling between countries is what happens when you go from one to the next, and what are the key differences you noticed? It reminded me of a previous podcast guest that I've had the pleasure to meet and share her story, Terry Jockhurst. And she actually wrote an awesome book called Biking to Busan because Terry took an extensive trip through those three countries, and during the pod interview, and also in the book, she says about these cultural differences, and if my memory serves me correctly, she says in Korea it was really easy to talk to people, but what she found was they had their list of questions they wanted to know from you, and then that was it. Whereas in Japan it was really, really reserved. And if you could break through that sort of reserved cultural respect, I'll leave you to be persona of the Japanese people, if they got past that, the conversations were so much richer. So it sort of reminded me of that in a different way. And wow, Brian, I'm so looking forward to hear what you're going to tell us about China. It's got me building a lot of anticipation for the experiences that lay ahead of you. I'm also fascinated to see what's in the book to see in China, and also what you're going to see yourself. And of course, Brian, you know you're a listener of the pod, so you know that I live and breathe for food. And uh I can't wait to hear about the Chinese food as well. Listeners, I've got links to Brian's social accounts in the show notes. Give him a follow there on Instagram and also check out his blog. And yeah, I'm excited for the updates to come. Thank you so much, Brian. Alright, listeners, my favourite part of the podcast where I get to shout out a big heartfelt thank you to you super fans who've been Dead Set Legends and bought me some virtual coffees. These coffees go towards the administrative cost of putting this podcast together and keeping it rolling out with episodes each and every week. The first one goes to Nolan Rogers. And Nolan, you have said hi Bella. I remember your amazing photos from the Cycling Tips days, and I enjoy listening to your podcast. Congrats on three years. Oh Nolan, I remember you from Cycling Tips as well. It was like the bestest online community. We had the best Slack channel group there as well. And uh yeah, that that was actually my first sort of feeling of being part of a cycling community. So thanks for reaching out. I'm so stoked that you listen to the pod. And thanks for being a super fan, and I hope that you're continuing to take brilliant adventures. I'm definitely still behind a camera taking photos. And thanks for supporting me and the pod. And the next one is a previous podcast guest, Isa Murta. Isa, you are a Dead Set legend, extraordinaire Audax rider there in Scotland. And you've said, well done on the three-year anniversary, Bella. It's amazing what you have created. Thank you for entertaining me on my daily commutes, all the best. Well, you are Scotland's super commuter, Isa, and I'm so happy that I virtually get to join you each and every day on those. Thanks for being a super fan and supporting the pod. And listeners, if you too would like to show that you're a super fan of Seek Travel Ride, simply head to buymeacoffee.com forward slash seek travel ride. Buy me some virtual coffees, but let me know what is it that you love about this podcast and where is your next bike adventure going to take you. And until the next episode, I'm Bella Malloy. Thanks for listening.