Theft in Busan: How South Korean Police Got Our Cycling Gear Back

At the end of our two-month stint cycling around South Korea, we returned to Busan, excited to revisit the city. The city was bustling and lively, and every street and alley in our neighborhood of Nampo uncovered new sights, sounds, and tastes to explore. We booked a hotel for a few days to decompress and enjoy our final week in Korea. 

But Busan had an unpleasant surprise in store.

Someone came by our hotel, where our bikes were locked in the garage, and indiscriminately emptied several of our bags. Since we set off five months ago, it was our first experience with crime.

I found out when I passed by my bike the next day. One of my bags was unzipped, with my red camping utensils sticking out. That’s weird, I thought. I always close that.

When I went to close it properly, I saw my bag was bare. Then my fork pack. Wide open… and empty. I saw bag after bag in slow motion. Frame bag... empty. Feed bag… empty. Three of Daniel’s bags… also empty. My brain couldn’t understand what I was seeing.

Reeling, I called Daniel. He picked up. 

“Did you take anything off of our bikes this morning?”
“I grabbed my bag. Why?”
"But did you take, like, everything?"
"No..."
"… I think someone stole our stuff.” 

The hotel owner was as shocked as we were. She immediately called the police for us.

The Police Get Involved

When the police arrived, we were still trying to mentally process what had happened. I’d already started typing a list on my phone of everything we’d lost.

As one of the cops reviewed CCTV footage with the hotel owner, the other asked us about missing items. We were communicating almost entirely in translation apps, typing back and forth into our phones. It was time-consuming and slow, but they were patient and kind. 

At one point, they asked how much longer we were staying in Korea. “This might take some time to investigate,” one of them wrote. 

When we told them we’d need a report for insurance, they nodded. “Please come to the station.” 

So we got into the back of their squad car.

At the Precinct

We sat in the lobby while Daniel filled out paperwork. Suddenly, I felt the energy in the small station pick up. There was a flurry of activity as several officers left quickly. We looked around, wondering what was going. 

The chief of the substation wandered out after the other officers. He stopped to address us and tapped his wrists together, miming handcuffs:

“You wait here. Your things are coming.” 

Daniel and I looked at each other in disbelief. We’d barely been at the station for 30 minutes, and the thief had a four-hour head start on us. 

Christmas in the Interrogation Room

We were asked to move into a small office. Until this point, Daniel and I had been discussing how unlikely it would be that we'd ever recover our things. In San Francisco where we lived, thieves will frequently dump unwanted stolen items nearby. Therefore, our only plan was to walk around the neighborhood looking in trashcans and trying to recover any potential niche cycling items that the thief had discarded.

Then, one of the policemen appears, with a yellow bag we didn’t recognize. I think I actually said, “This isn’t ours,” but he gestured us to look. 

Inside: our Garmin InReach Minis, Daniel’s Shokz headphones, our first-aid kit, drone batteries, bike tools. We couldn’t believe it. 

The experience became almost surreal. They’d ask us what we were still missing. We’d list an item and show a picture on our phones. They’d leave. A while later, they’d return holding that thing. This happened over and over for about an hour. 

During one of the interludes, I asked the officer that stayed with us where they were finding our things. He hesitated, thought for a minute, then typed into the translation app: “I can’t tell you everything. But we are still looking.”

In the end, we recovered nearly everything, including the most valuable and hardest to replace items. Only my cycling sunglasses, a water bladder, and a menstrual cup were gone for good (and honestly, I wouldn’t want that last one back at this point). 

When we finally left, to our surprise, the suspect was actually sitting in the lobby, where we'd been filling out paperwork just a few hours earlier. He was middle-aged and thin. I'm used to seeing South Koreans look extremely polished—appearance matters here—but his clothes were unkempt, dirty, and torn.

As we walked by, he jumped to his feet and started speaking quickly in Korean. I’ll never know what he said. As we were preparing to walk away outside, an office ran after us with two more items. The entire situation felt surreal.

Lessons Learned

South Korea has one of the lowest crime rates in the world, which made this all the most surprising. 

A few takeaways:

• Don’t leave bikes in view of the street, even if locked and under CCTV.
  • The ideal situation is always bikes inside; preferably in our room, but a hotel lobby also works. When that’s not possible, we’ve locked our bikes in a hotel garage before, but they’ve always been out of public view… until now.
• Always use my bike alarm when I can’t see the bike.
• A big city (like Busan) carries more risk than the small towns we grew accustomed to riding through on Jeju Island. We should have been more cautious.

Given how quickly everything was recovered, I also wondered if the police already knew the thief. When we shared what had happened in a "Korea Cycling Community" Facebook group, one of the local admins replied: 

Cops know the area, hear that something's been stolen, immediately know the only guy dumb enough to steal all that stuff, go see him and solve the problem.

Besides that, CCTV is ubiquitous in South Korea. The cops could have easily traced his steps until they caught up with him.

In San Francisco, the chance of seeing any of this gear again would have been near zero. Here, almost everything came back within hours. 

As bicycle travelers, we’re guests in other countries and cultures, which requires compromise. In South Korea and Japan, space is tight and bikes are often banned indoors. As much as I’d love to keep them in sight, that isn’t always possible in hotels or hostels. If we insisted on it 100% of the time, we’d make things very difficult for ourselves and those around us. So I’m focusing more on what I can control: stripping off more bags at night and setting my bike alarm.

The whole ordeal left me a little shaken, but also very grateful: for the Korean police and their efficiency, and for Daniel and his calm. It’s a reminder to not take safety for granted anywhere, but also that traveling by bike means accepting risk. Most of our interactions on the road have been positive ones. And so, I will still choose trust.