Queen of Tears | Guryang-ri Station Rail Bike, Mungyeong — Fifty Minutes With Nothing To Do

Episodes thirteen and fourteen send Hyun-woo and Hae-in out on a rail bike, and Mungyeong — the county standing in for Hyun-woo's home village of Yongdu-ri — got a tourism surge out of it.

Guryang-ri is a closed station on the old Gaeun line, one of the last surviving rail-bike stretches in Mungyeong. You pedal a four-seater along disused track through farmland and low hills with a river alongside; the round trip takes about fifty minutes and the pedalling is light enough that people who expected a workout are surprised. There is a drink holder, which matters over fifty minutes. Nine to five, and it is not expensive.

Now the honest part, because you will not get it from the tourism pages. Visitors who came specifically for the drama have said flatly that the station itself is just a station and there is nothing else there — one review says exactly that and does not recommend it. Others compare it unfavourably to the Gapyeong rail bike, which has rest stops and more to look at along the way.

So treat this as a ride rather than a shrine, and treat Mungyeong as the destination. Yongdu-ri's village hall was filmed at Yongyeon-ri, the boxing club and much else are in the county too, and Mungyeongsaejae is thirty minutes north.

Pedal the outbound leg without talking. The drama's central move is taking two people who own a department store and putting them somewhere with nothing to do for an hour, and fifty minutes of quiet track through fields does that to you as reliably as it did to them.

Cover photo: Mungyeong traditional market, by Toobigtokale, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. County view, not the station.