Over the years of traveling hitchhiking has always been something I wanted to try and I finally gave it a shot and hitched hiked the full length of Korea from Seoul to Busan. Hitchhiking Korea is extremely safe in my opinion and it is probably just as safe or safer than any other country I could think of. The crime rates are extremely low in South Korea and there is hardly any violent crime. This all made me feel comfortable to try hitchhiking for my first time.
Seoul to Busan is a somewhat far journey of about 200 Miles (325 Km) and takes around 4 hours to drive. My roommate spray paints and painted me a nice sign in Hangul (The Korean language). Once I had my sign, I took a metro out to the main road leading to Busan. I was standing in a pretty safe on ramp with a good amount of traffic. However, hitchhiking is not very common in Korea so many people were looking at me with a bit of confusion. Two cars stopped and offered to take me to the bus terminal, since they thought I wanted to catch a bus to Busan. In addition, I got a lot of waves, smiles and of a few cars taking photos of me. After about 30 minutes I decided to move up the off ramp to the main part of the highway, this was a bit more dangerous since the cars didn’t have a great spot to pull over from the main highway. Luckily, after my first hour of waiting, nice businesswomen picked me up and took me 20 minutes south to a rest stop. This was ideally, where I would have started in the first place since practically everyone leaving here is heading south to Busan. After 30 minutes of waiting (1.5 hours total) I finally got a ride to Busan.
The nice guys that picked me up did not have a spare seat, but they had the back trunk of their SUV. The seats were removed so I had a nice area to spread my legs out and relax. It was actually really comfortable. The two Korean men that picked me up were super friendly, but only one of them could speak English. Regardless, we still had some pretty great conversations. They both worked for the same manufacturing company, one guy was the CEO and the other was a marketing manager.
The trip went really well and drivers even treated me to some snacks and drinks along the way. This came to no surprise, since Koreans have always been extremely hospitable in my opinion!
After about 4 hours we finally made it to Busan and they dropped me off at the metro and I met up with the Canadian/English friend I was staying with. Overall, it was a great experience! The only things I would have done differently is put on some sunscreen and go directly to the rest stop, but that wasn’t really an option since public transport doesn’t stop there!