Korea Grand Slam ✅

Completing all of Korea's major bike trails

Before coming to Korea, I heard about Korea’s “bike passport” system from a previous Korea Olmsted Scholar. Basically, spread throughout South Korea’s many bike trails are stamp booths, and as you fill up a passport book with stamps, you earn special stamps, stickers, and eventually, up to three coveted bike touring medals.

I love cycling and bike touring, so this seemed like a worthwhile goal to work towards while living here. After all, traveling by bike slows you down and takes you to places that you’d never visit by car or train, and I wanted to see as much of Korea as possible in my short time here. So in October of 2023, I purchased the bike passport and started with the trails in and around Seoul. Since then, whenever I had time off from classes, I’ve been traveling all around the country with my bikes to collect every stamp in Korea. This October, I finished the final trail to complete the “grand slam” and after waiting a few months for my passport stamps to be verified, I just now received my long-awaited mementos!

The map below shows most of the trails I completed. I also completed a few lesser known trails that aren’t on this map and rode the entirety of the East Coast (the pale blue line, not yet part of the official trail).

After getting my physical passport verified, my digital passport online was updated as well, showing the progress for each official trail on the right and the three ultimate goals on the left. The physical passport is the ultimate trophy though. It’s stained with coffee, raindrops, sea-splash, and occasional bike chain grease, each page signifying days of riding.

Overall, this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and a perfect way to truly see the country. I took my small folding bike on KTX trains and small planes, loaded up my bigger bike under long-distance buses, and also just rode straight from my apartment to faraway places. I rode in all seasons and in all weather, slept outside and in all sorts of crazy motels, and had so many engaging conversations in Korean along the way. When you’re stuck under a bridge waiting for an intense storm to pass with a few old Korean men on their own bike adventures or stumble upon fellow riders in a restaurant and decide to have a few beers together, you make lasting memories that would never have happened any other way.

I’m back to just riding as a form of daily transportation, but the memories from these trips will last a lifetime. As Olmsted Scholars, we have to choose how we spend our short time in our assigned countries, and I’m glad I spent so much time and effort to focus on depth within Korea instead of breadth throughout Asia. Now that I’m in another break between semesters though, I’ll visit a few more (warmer) countries to escape the worst of Korea’s winter, and knowing me, I’ll take my folding bike along or rent a bike when I get there 😉. Life is just better on two wheels.

-Sean