Crossing Eurasia, 22,000 km

Part 1. The First Day Toward the Continent

From Donghae Port to Vladivostok

There is a saying: "You can buy a watch, but you cannot buy time." It means: do not put off the things you truly want to do in life. I had a wish I had dreamed of since my school days. I wanted to experience with my own body what the inner flesh of the Asian continent looks like — the Silk Road, that ancient trade route between East and West; the footsteps of the Silla monk Hyecho in his Memoir of the Pilgrimage to the Five Kingdoms of India; the Pamir Plateau, called the roof of the world. To mark our fortieth wedding anniversary and my seventieth birthday, I decided to carry out my long-held dream of a Eurasian overland crossing along the "Siberia–Silk Road."

On July 2, 2024, the plan was to load our cars onto a car ferry at Donghae Port and set out for Vladivostok in Russia. On the road to Gangneung through the monsoon rain, my wife, who was coming with me, was visibly uneasy. This trip was a long haul of roughly 22,000 kilometers westward from Vladivostok to Istanbul, rising and falling all the way — an ordeal of driving ourselves through backcountry, desert, and high mountain country.