How to Tour Japan by Bike: Eating and Sleeping

For most of your life, eating and sleeping are fairly important.  Despite that, we don't generally spend much time thinking about either activity.  Well, except for me, anyway; I think about food basically every minute of every day.  Anyway, here's some information about where to get your eat and/or sleep on while biking in Japan.

Free Camping

This is the last-known-photoiest photo of anyone ever.

Now, since we travel with our tent and three-season sleeping bags, you'd think it would be a cinch to just set up anywhere relatively flat and catch a good few hours of Zs.  And you would be right in that assumption.

While biking across Missouri and California, we spent a few dozen nights on the road.  Of those nights, we free camped exactly once.  It was pitch-black, with pea-soup fog, no shoulder on the highway, no streetlights, and eight miles to the next town.  We happened upon a small, bizarre abandoned park on the side of the road (pictured above)  that looked like some holdover from the 60s (or perhaps Narnia).  A godsend, truly, though the absence of water and presence of human feces wrapped in a magazine brought down our Yelp rating of this park a skosh.  Also we were pretty sure we'd be murdered violently in the night, and that would unfortunately invalidate our plane tickets.

This is just one of the many, many reasons to choose Japan for your bike tour destination.  The U.S., for all its charms, also has four squintillion guns, all of which are owned by crazy people who patrol campsites looking for naive bike tourists to slay and turn into creepy furniture (it should be noted that some of these Americans are unable to fire their guns due to their scary hook hands).  Japan, on the other hand, has some pretty damn reasonable gun laws, not to mention the average Japanese person would as soon deep fry a stick of butter as they would approach a gaijin and confront them about anything ever.

That's not to say that there are no rules for free camping.  Indeed, there are several simple guidelines for free camping in Japan that I'll attempt to wrangle into an easy-to-remember acronym, NOOPS:

• Not private property: set up on public property.  Say, a park, an abandoned campsite, or a haunted amusement park.
• Only after dark: don't set up your tent until the sun goes down.
• Out of sight: don't set up anywhere you can be seen easily from a road or sidewalk.
• Pack up early: get everything on your bike before anyone might conceivably use the park.
• Seriously, clean up after yourself: don't leave trash everywhere, you animal.  C'mon already.

In general, every little town has a public park somewhere, and the smaller the town, the less crowded the park will be.  We never once had anyone bother us while camping in Japan.  The few times someone did wander by while we were set up, they made some incredulous conversation, then promptly moved on.  As long as you stay out of people's hair and try to be as unobtrusive as possible, you shouldn't have any problems free camping anywhere in Japan.

One thing to consider on the road if you have some way of accessing the Internet (more on this later?) is to check Google Maps for kouen (公園) in the area you plan on stopping.  Of course, not every park works for free camping, but it's a good place to start looking.

Hotels and Ryokans

Your broken home-away-from-home!

Of course, sometimes you don't feel up to camping.  Maybe it's raining, maybe you're exhausted, maybe the bike grime has so accumulated on your body that you can no longer move your arms (quitter).  Maybe there just aren't any places you can free camp.  Fortunately, Japan has a buttload of hotels...

Google results for ホテル or "hotel."

...And unfortunately, all of them are too expensive.  The absolute rock-bottom cheapest hotel room we ever found for two people in Japan was about ¥5500, an astounding price that was never repeated except in our wildest mountain-climbing-fueled delusions.

Typically, for two people, no matter how urban or rural your location, you can count on spending anywhere from ¥7000 to ¥12000, easy.  Now, most of these hotels will be quite comfortable by Western standards...or at the very least, most of them have more amenities than furtively camping in a public park.  Frequently, they will offer breakfast, which in our experience is fair-to-meh in quality.  However, if the breakfast is buffet-style, the often high price of the meal can be offset by walking away with several pieces of bread, hard-boiled eggs, teabags, and sausages stuffed in the wily bike tourist's pockets.

Near our old place in Osaka, the holy grail
of Japanese weirdness: panty vending machines!

Now, there are such things as "Love Hotels," of course.  Many travel guides recommend using them as a cheap source of lodging, no hanky-panky required.  However, it's rather difficult to find them unless you're looking right at them (in which case you can't miss them, as they're usually huge, garish, and have "hotel" written on them in English); they don't tend to have much of a web presence, at least not in English.  This problem is compounded when you enter the love hotel, as all of their information about rates is in Japanese, and is frequently automated.  You'll see love hotels advertising rates as low as ¥3500 for a "stay" (the cheaper price displayed is for a "rest," an hourly-or-so rate), but this is usually only at certain non-peak times, and even then only with a member's card or somesuch.  A typical night at a love hotel would be around ¥6000, barely cheaper than a cheap hotel.  Plus, considering love hotels aren't really meant for bike tourists, often don't let you leave the room before checkout, and don't really have any bike parking, I think you're better off camping in the rain or springing for a real hotel room if you really must.

The other option for lodging is a ryokan (旅館), a traditional-style Japanese inn.  These places give you all the benefits and drawbacks in one go: comfortable traditional Japanese tatami rooms, but traditional Japanese insane prices; access to spectacular (if grimy) hot baths, but lack of access to the Internet.  In tourist towns, ryokan are thicker on the ground than hotels, but they also tend to be super expensive, charging ¥20000 or more for two people for a night's stay.  Sometimes this fee includes meals, which can be a pretty great experience, but considering that much coin would buy ten breakfasts at a conbini (or two snacks, if you snack like we do), we gave these places a pass.

If you do stay at a ryokan, be aware that the owners will almost definitely speak no English, may turn you away even if you speak Japanese, and may be old, senile, and/or crazy.  Be clear on the price before you unpack your stuff.  Be thee warned.

Restaurants

Sushi and tempura for two: ¥2500.  Tea: ¥0.  Taking a well needed-rest: priceless.  Jenn's expression: pricelesser.

Yes, as any decent guidebook will tell you, Japan has more Michelin stars than any other country except Shambala.  Truly, an epicurean delight.  More importantly for bike travelers, however, there is also an abundance of good cheap restaurants.  Sure, there are the big chains, Yoshinoya, Matsuya, Coco Curry House and all those other repositories of ¥300 Bowls of Something Brown, but it's not terribly difficult to find a slightly more expensive local equivalent of much better quality.

Especially if you're biking along a highway (which is pretty much going to happen), there's a lot of food meant for truckers.  Unlike in America, however, where we fuel our truckers with chicken fried steak, chicken fried fries, and chicken fried coffee, Japanese truckers tend to eat a little better.  There are a ton of restaurants marked "self" (セルフ), which are cafeteria-style restaurants where it's possible to get a giant bowl of udon, a sushi roll, and tempura for under ¥700.  Most other little cafes have a "service lunch" (サービスランチ), a large portion of whatever the specialty is, for ¥1000 or under.  Do watch out for places that are marketed more as coffee shops (喫茶店), though, as they tend to have mediocre coffee and no food except for overpriced crust-cut-off sandwiches.  And for a ready-made meal for a budget, the selection at many Japanese supermarkets is pretty amazing; you can eat a solid meal on a park bench for about ¥500.

The only real point to keep in mind when dining in Japanese restaurants on the road is that drinking is, without a doubt, the easiest way to go over budget.  It's pretty rare to find a beer for under ¥500 at any restaurant.  Do the responsible thing: take advantage of Japan's ancient culture and lack of open container laws and drink in front of the conbini (or in the park, or on the street, or on the train).

Cooking on the Road

Look to your left.  Then look to your right.  In fifteen minutes, one of these sandwiches will be devoured by crows.

While biking in Japan, I feel that I really didn't fully appreciate how amazing Japanese supermarkets can be.  In California, our food options were frequently either $15 burritos at a tourist trap or nothing at all.  In Korea, the very few general stores we passed sold nothing but crackers, canned tuna, soju, and canned silkworm larvae (just in case you craved those so bad, you couldn't wait until fresh ones were available).

By contrast, Japan is a culinary wonderland.  Sure, it may be a bit difficult to find non-white bread or fresh salsa, but heck, it's also a bit difficult to find a good lean unicorn steak.  In central and Western Honshu, at least, you can find a pretty decent supermarket at least every 50 km, and they're usually not too distant from the main road.  When you're in the remotest parts of rural Japan, you may run across one of the Supermarkets That Time Forgot; at a shop on the Shimanami Kaido, I excitedly picked up several cans of seasonal beers that I'd never seen before, only to discover that they had expired in 2004.

Naturally, you'll be wanting to buy some fresh food for that day as well as nonperishables for later.  I imagine this isn't really news to any bike tourists out there, but some things keep really well while bouncing around in a pannier all day, other things not so much.  Fish would keep for an afternoon, but not more than three or four hours.  Same for any kind of fresh meat.  Nonperishables are pretty easy to find, from dry pasta to canned tomatoes and fresh vegetables.  Some things such as canned beans or our specialty, couscous (seriously, it requires little water, little fuel, and not much time to cook), we had to find in a specialty store in a big city.

EDIT: Oh man, one more big, big point I forgot!  We traveled with a camp stove, the MSR Whisperlite, which runs on every kind of fuel except perhaps Unobtanium.  In Japan, we managed to find fuel specifically for camp stoves (white gas, referred to as ガス on the big, squarish cans), but it was a little hard to dig up; the rooster-sigil コメリ home goods stores that dot Honshu and Shikoku never, ever had it, but the much less-common Daiki (ダイキ) was a good source.  We never ended up actually running out of fuel, though we did come closer to it than we'd like, so much so that we've got a pretty big stockpile of fuel taking up room in our closet to this day.

Conbinis

Conbinis, as we've already discussed, are an invaluable resource: a place to refill water bottles from the tap (yes, it's potable, despite the looks or outright warnings you may get from employees), to check your e-mail, to sit and drink a beer or a coffee or another beer.  But believe it or not, they actually sell food at these places, too.

Sort of.

Conbinis are everywhere; even in the most remote parts of Japan, you can usually count on passing at least one a day (or every other day, anyway).  They're open 24 hours every day of the year, they offer a pretty wide array of ready-cooked food, groceries, and various toiletries and hardware.

The two main problems with eating at conbinis are the cost and the super-processed nature of most of the food.  Sure, a meat bun, some chicken nuggets, and a plate of spaghetti with meat sauce may sound like exactly what you want when you've been biking for six hours, and it'll fill you up, but it'll give you a stomachache and take ¥1500 out of your wallet.  Two conbini stops in a day, and there goes a whole day's budget.

Whenever possible, we'd get our breakfast at conbinis.  The most nutritious, real-foodiest breakfast we could find was a large cup of plain yogurt, a couple bananas, a bag of mixed nuts, two hard-boiled eggs, and a couple of fresh-brewed coffees (a new item that seemed to be slowly working its way around the Lawsons and 7-11s around the country) would come to a little over ¥1000 and would give us the nutrients and energy we needed to go for the whole morning.  Or at least until snack time, half an hour later.


So yeah, in short: Japan offers a million conveniences for the cycle tourists, most of which you must avoid like the plague if you don't want to blow through your savings in a week.  If you can resist spending a fortune on junk food and hotel rooms when you're exhausted and starving, then you've got what it takes to bike to kingdom come.  And if you can't, well...they're always looking for teachers in Korea.

How to Tour Japan By Bicycle: Where to Do It

"Nope, I can't find this breathtaking scenery anywhere on Google Maps.  Weird."

Japanese people will often point out to foreigners that Japan is a very small country.  Miniscule.  Itsy-bitsy, even.  In a word: wee.  For the three years we lived in Osaka, we had a rather difficult time understanding this apparent self-consciousness.  I mean, Japan is roughly the size of England or California (which is not known as "The Tiny State").  Also, while you're on a bike, distances become much, much more relative; a country that you can drive across in a day will still require a good month or five to cycle across.

Yes, of course you can bike across the entire length of Japan, or along its circumference.  We've met several people who've done just that.  The funny thing, though, is that we've met just as many people who've biked across the U.S..  I guess if you have enough crazy to pack up your tent and pedal across a country, that crazy doesn't care too much about numbers of miles.

To get down to brass tacks: Japan is some islands with lots of mountains.  If climbing mountains happens to be your bag, then boy-oh-(non-gender-specific)-boy, will you be pleased as punch with Japan.  It's just mountains all day long.

Now, as dedicated slackers who just happen to be taking a long sabbatical from slacking, we are pretty mountain-averse.  Little-known fact: violas become exponentially heavier with each hundred meters of altitude.  So if you're looking for information about which mountains have particularly good trails for mountain biking, I recommend you consult the experts.

As it happens, even if you take the presumably least mountainy route in Japan (following the coastline), you'll still end up crossing a fair number of mountains.  So, y'know.  Hooray.

Planning a Route:

We started our touring days in Japan by purchasing two large-scale, good-quality road maps from a local bookstore, then studiously packing them away in our panniers and never opening them again.  They weren't a complete waste of money, of course; now we have them tacked up on the walls of our apartment, a wonderful reminder of all the places we've been and all the planning we didn't do.

These, too, make for some great wall decorations.

This isn't to say that paper maps are worthless for cycle tourists.  However, the maps that we actually ended up using were the free maps given away at the 道の駅 (michi no eki or "road station") that dot the scenic highways of Japan.  These maps cover a relatively small area, but they contain vital information that more professional (expensive) maps lack, including the locations of campgrounds, parks, historic points of interest, and most importantly, other 道の駅, where you can find some extremely necessary soft-serve ice cream.

Of course, being tech-savvy 21st-century cycle tourists, you will most likely do your research on the internet beforehand, right?  We sure did.  And we found a bunch of self-congratulatory blogs by people who'd biked across Japan and just couldn't wait to brag about it to the whole dang world (pssh, losers, amirite?).  So if you're interested in retracing someone else's tire tracks, you can go from Nagoya to Kagoshima and back, from Fukuoka to Hokkaido, from Fukuoka to Tokyo, or from Osaka to Shimonoseki.  If you're more into planning your own route, though, whether out of practicality or sheer pig-headedness, information on the practicality of individual roads is pretty scant (incidentally, we chose our route out of the former, having the non-biking-related goals of visiting a farm in Shimane and making it to a port before our visas expired).

Naturally, if you're tech-savvy enough to scope out some information online, you'll probably have a bike computer, too, right?  We sure do!  They even play music!  And Angry Birds!  We call them "iPods," or to be more specific, "iPod Touches" (that can't be right..."iPods Touch," maybe?).  As we've documented previously, our method of navigation is to use Google Maps' directions feature, telling it to avoid tolls or highways, then writing down that route and following it as best as possible.  WiFi has not yet penetrated the far reaches of rural Japan (hell, it's barely made it to Osaka), but the iPod's Google Maps app can (usually) hold a fair amount of cached data for several days, making it an ideal traveling companion.  Stopping at conbinis for a coffee, we would browse the next few days' route on our iPods, allowing us to check this map again from the road if need be.  This gave us a good amount of freedom for each day's riding, giving us several options for camping depending on how we were feeling.

The one thing you do have to know about using Google Maps to navigate is that you are smarter than Google Maps.  There will be times where the info that Google gives you about your route is directly contradicted by evidence right in front of you, such as road signs.  Occasionally Google will steer you towards "bypasses," as they're called on the road signs.  Do not, under any circumstances, enter a bypass.  There are usually some signs warning cyclists away from these elevated, shoulderless death traps, so keep an eye out for those.  Whenever there is a bypass, usually on approaching a town or small city, that means you're in for some mountain-climbing, city biking, or both.  It also means that you'll be traveling more kilometers than Google predicts, sometimes having to go five or ten km out of your way to avoid the bypass.

Other than bypasses, Japan has many names for its various roads, none of which make any sense.  You'll typically be rolling on the 山登路 or Mountain-Climbing Road, some of which have no mountains at all.  Sometimes, when heading towards (for instance) Yonago, you'll want to be on the 山登路 and avoid the Yonago Highway.  Other times, there will be two or three highways, all or none of which might be called 山登路.  Having proved ourselves thoroughly unable to determine the presence or absence of mountains on a given road, the only real advice I have for these instances is to guess and to be extremely lucky.  Just remember to avoid bypasses and expressways and you'll get where you're going, if not in the time you have planned.

If you do happen to be looking for some suggested routes, here's a couple we can speak to:

Shikoku and the Shimanami Kaido:

A good beginner's route: free camping is both legal and easily accessible, and there are plenty of clearly-marked cycle paths.  Incredible views, no sprawling metropoles, few trucks, and friendly locals.  What's not to love?  Besides the mountains, of course.

View Larger Map

If you were to start in Onomichi, near Hiroshima, then you could start biking on the Shimanami Kaido to get warmed up, then continue to a loop around Shikoku, ending up in Imabari, where there are plenty of ferries to take you anywhere else in Japan.  Our trip in Shikoku started here, and this was the best thing we encountered on the way.

Distance: about 800 kilometers.

Time: Man, I dunno.  You're probably way faster than us, so...two weeks?  If you want to really enjoy it and take your time, I'd recommend a month.  That gives plenty of rest days and bad weather days, plus you can afford to take some time to stop for temples and onsen (highly recommended).

Along the Sea of Japan:

Not quite as cycle-friendly, this route took us through Japan's least-populated prefectures, meaning we didn't always have several conbinis to choose from for a rest stop.  Still, the landscape is rural and scenic, and there's less of a chance of being eaten by inoshishi than most other parts of Japan.  Plus, the southern end of Honshu is wall-to-wall cities, which means a lot more trucks and stops for traffic.

View Larger Map

Distance: 450 kilometers.

Time: Eh, we did it in 15 days, but then again, we be slow.  You could probably do it in half that time, especially if you don't have a ton of stuff.

Other Destinations:

Beats me.  I've heard good stuff about Hokkaido!

Pluggy Plug

For those of you who like reading compelling stories about worlds about which you know nothing at all, I totally recommend skipping over to Frustrated Martial Artist, a blog run by our old co-worker and fellow teacher-of-English-to-Korean-tykes.  This article in particular is pretty great, though really, they're all good.

Her accounts of abuse and mistreatment at the hands of her old Taekwondo instructor are some interesting reading, if a little less violent than the first half of this sentence suggests.  I find it fascinating that some of the most deadly hand-to-hand combatants in the world can be such complete passive-aggressive dicks to their peers.

How to Tour Japan By Bicycle: When to Do It

I don't know you.  Maybe you're a veteran cycle tourist looking for a new country to conquer, or maybe you're a longtime Japanophile who's eagerly planning that first trip to Japan.  Maybe, like us, you're an English teacher with all too little vacation time to visit the country that you're calling home for awhile.  It doesn't really matter.

The Internet is awash in journals about those who have biked their way across Japan, some of which are pretty good reads (hint hint).  But if you're looking for information about planning your own trip, actual information is a little hard to come by.  Even in Japanese, it's pretty scarce, as bike-camping doesn't seem to be that popular a hobby in Japan.  You'll pass plenty of sport cyclists on the road, to be sure, but only day trippers, and only on roads that are known among hobbyists and appear in all of the relevant (hobbyist) literature in Japan.

This post, and the posts to follow (tagged "How To") are intended as a low-bullshit informational resource for people who don't know much about Japan written by people who don't know much about cycle touring.  We're still laughably noob -- I'd have to run outside and look at my ride to tell you what kind of cartridge or tubes it has -- but we know from Japan, if only because we slogged through it and made lots of mistakes to learn what the Internet wouldn't teach us.  We'll tell you how we did it, and I promise the following cliched terms will never appear in any post to come: "enchanting,""spiritual," "mysterious," "Land of the Rising Sun," "rewarding," "Pocari Sweat," "gangbusters."

When to Do It:

It stands to reason that you need to pick the dates of your trip carefully, no matter your destination; anywhere is paradise or completely inhospitable depending on the season (except maybe San Diego or the cold, lifeless vacuum of space, neither of which is particularly recommended).  We've toured in Japan from March to June, and a little in the dead of summer, and let me tell you, there's a huge variation in temperature in those few months, especially from Kansai to the west.  In mid-March, it was definitely warm enough to bike comfortably during the day, but at night we were frequently shivering too hard to fall asleep, even with our warm three-season sleeping bags and winter coats.  By May, the sleeping bags, coats, long underwear, scarves, and mittens were little more than dead weight, and we rued only bringing a few pairs of underwear each.  Packing is not easy, is what I'm saying.

I guess this advice may not be too revolutionary, but if you're going to do a long tour in Japan, choose your season and pack for weather that's both hotter and colder than you'd expect.  If you're planning on a summer tour, pack a light coat and long pants.  August is beastly hot and humid, enough to soak everything you're wearing in sweat but not enough to be hazardous to your health.

This picture was taken at the end of March, up in
the mountains around Beppu.  We were unprepared
for snow, and ended up buying scarves and hats
in the mountain's gift shop for too much money.

If you do insist on biking during the winter...well, I guess I'm not physically able to stop you, but I can tell you that winter in Japan is generally gray, windy, rainy, and miserable, but not particularly icy outside of the mountains, which tend to get snow as late as March.  In our experience, biking when it's super cold means our willpower to keep things cheap starts to wear away faster, which means we're a lot more likely to spring for a room in a hotel or 旅館 (ryokan), which can be more expensive than you'd imagine, which is why we're stuck teaching English in Seoul now instead of biking our way across the world.  =( indeed.

Something you'll want to keep in mind besides the Four Distinct Seasons that Japan enjoys (and all Japanese talk about) (at great length) (to every single foreigner) (as though it were something as unique and special as unicorns) is the wide array of additional mini-seasons, including Rainy Season, Hanami Season, Camping Season, Leaf-Viewing Season, and Typhoon Season.

Rainy Season: June-August

Protip: I already tried a "raining Hello Kitties and dogs or something" joke.  Nothing doing.

If you're planning to be cycling in Japan in June, pack some damn good rain gear or else find somewhere dry to wait out the rainy season.  Global warming being a fickle mistress, some years the rains start early, during the first week of June, some years they continue until the middle of August, and some years they don't come at all.  The typical pattern for a day in rainy season is a heavy shower in the morning followed by an afternoon of sunshine.  If the morning is clear, then it's due to rain in the afternoon, unless of course it doesn't rain at all.  Or it rains all day.  Mysterious Enigmatic, that Japan.

If you are planning to tour in Japan during June, keep an eye on the weather report, then immediately disregard whatever you read.  If it looks like rain, it may rain in the next five minutes or it may not rain a drop all day.  The best recourse, really, is to have your rain gear ready at all times and plan to seek shelter only once it's actually begun to rain.  Then stay in that shelter until the rain stops or it's too dark not to seek a camping spot or hotel.  I can't tell you all the times we've wasted a sunny day at camp waiting for the rain to come and go, not to mention the times we've plowed through a rainstorm only to wind up drenched and miserable in the sunshine that followed the deceptively brief storm (just kidding, yes I can).

Hanami Season (also known as "spring"): March-April

Yep, those flowers sure are something, all right.  For a couple months of the year, the scenery lights up with pale pink cherry blossoms, magenta plum blossoms, and the evocative brown of sarariiman barf.  It should be no problem determining when the flowers will be blooming, as 30% of the Japanese media is dedicated to tracking just that.  Do note that the start of flower-viewing season is in the bitter cold of early March, however, and despite what you may hope, a few tallboys of Asahi aren't enough to keep out the chill at night.

One complication of hanami season is that public parks, which were our go-to campground during our tour (more on this later), will be crammed full of revelers on the weekends.  Odds are every park you'll come across will be either a city park or a traditional hanami destination for city dwellers, so on weekends in the peak of hanami season (late March through mid-April), you may have to shell out for a hotel.

Another point to keep in mind is that the flowers stay in bloom much later up in the mountains, so if your tour takes you through one of Japan's many many many many many mountain ranges, you should be able to enjoy the scenery through your oxygen deprivation as late as the end of May.  Of course, since the official season ends in April, there aren't really any picnickers that late; once again, the Japanese stay true to the calendar over the actual presence of flowers to appreciate and drink under.

Camping Season: July 7th-August 31st

Japan has oodles of campgrounds (metric oodles, not Imperial, mind you)!  And they are open for every day in which anyone would ever want to go camping, provided of course that those days fall within the official Camping Season.  Otherwise, if you're camping...why on earth would you be camping?  Weirdo.

So yeah, of all of these beautiful, manicured campgrounds you'll see throughout Japan, about 90% will be closed for most of the year.  Not entirely a bad thing, of course, as when they're open, these campgrounds tend to fill to maximum occupancy with Japanese people, who tend to go camping with four tents, eight pavilions, and a washing machine each (no joke on that washing machine).  Also, campgrounds are frequently are-you-kidding-me levels of expensive, comparable to car campsites on the California coast ($50 or so per night), and for those prices, you may as well stay in a hotel and get a shower in the process.

Most of the campsites that are closed from August through June aren't fenced off (not well, anyway), which means there's some beautiful, developed, campworthy ground just being wasted.  More tips on free camping in later posts, but for now, know that you're really doing Mother Earth a favor by putting some of that clear-cut-and-bulldozed land to use.

Leaf-Viewing Season: September-November

Well, you can see some pretty great leaves in this photo (taken May 5th, 2013).  We don't have any experience touring during Leafmas, but I would conjecture from my intimate knowledge of Japanese culture that it's pretty similar to Hanami season, but in the fall.

Typhoon Season: September to October, and sometimes October through August

This is the main reason to check the weather reports.  You don't really wanna mess with typhoons.  The place to check for this (and earthquake info) is the JMA.

And that's about it for our wisdom about the timing of bike tours in Japan.  Feel free to ask any questions in the comments and we'll get back to you like gangbusters totally like gangbusters (changed my mind, this word is awesome, and will be worked into every post from now on) (like gangbusters).

Turnaround

And with that, we found ourselves back in Seoul again.  After a week-long visa run in Osaka, we were back in the working world, wearing ties and showering every day (sometimes, anyway).  As of press time, we have been teaching at Yum Kwang Continuing Education Center, the after-school academy (hagwon) arm of the enormous Yum Kwang Christian School, for one month.

The job has been refreshingly laid-back: the hours are short, the lesson planning is minimal, and best of all, no one is expected to hang around out of politeness once the day is over.  Our last classes finish at 6:55, and by 7:00, the lights are out and all of the teachers have already left to head home.  Japan, this ain't.

So buckle in, blog fans, because for the next year, Rubber Side Down will be back in Expat Teacher Mode.  Expect some factual tips for bike touring in Japan, flashbacks to some of our untold adventures in Missouri and California, and more expat living wackiness, including...

More kid art (by Harry)!

More food with eyes on it!

More cute kid writing/nationalistic propaganda!

More comically large instruments!

More obscure crafts!

More karaoke (of course)!

More horrific vegetable-themed children's books!

And more charmingly quirky student papers!

Dori Village in Photos (And Videos)

Our first day, we were put to work weeding one of the gardens, a task that would acquaint us very well with a particularly vicious local weed that left long, nasty scratches on our arms.  Ass kicked by a plant...not my proudest moment, perhaps.

This was meant to be the "before" picture, with the "after" picture being one of me smiling in front of a fully-weeded garden.  I was going to take it when we finished.  Oh, what a fool I was (am).

We took a break from weeding for watering and an activity known as "weeding, but with a stick."

Aaaand there were goats.  Baby goats!  Baby goats with a taste for sweaty T-shirts!

Even on the ancient rice paddies of Gyeongju, multitasking is king.

While bonding with some of the kids who stay at the farm (some sort of farmstay/homeschool arrangement, as far as we could tell), we pulled out our iPods and decided to test everyone's Battle Power with our official Battle Power Checker App.  Nobody cross Gi-ha, or he will end you.

Part of our duties at Dori Village involved helping everyone set up for a busfull of kindergarteners who would be coming to learn about green energy.  We scrubbed the bathrooms in that disused elementary school until...well, until we were done scrubbing them.

Part of the eco-friendly fun: cotton candy!  We were going to hook the machine up to a solar panel, but...eh.

The main attraction of the field trip was demonstrating how a bicycle could be hooked up to a dynamo to power a blender, which we used to make tomato juice in front of the kids.  The only downside was that I kinda don't like tomato juice, but we must all do our part for the earth.

A poster that was put up all over the school.  Eww.

After a week of labor and fun, it was time to get on the bus to Seoul.  Employment beckoned.

Yongjae very kindly drove us to the bus terminal with our bikes, bags, tent, and brick collection.  We hoped our bikes would make it through the bus ride intact.

See you again, Yongjae and Songdam!  Hopefully before our WWOOF membership expires!

Meanwhile, Back on the Farm

"I'm absolutely, 100% certain that we're going the right way," I announced.  "90%, at least."

The afternoon sun beat down hard on our sun-browned skin.  The day had grown quite lovely as the road grew less hospitable: we had had to abandon the nice riverside bike path when the river had stubbornly refused to go right to our destination, leaving us no choice but to get on the road with the monster trucks, tanks, taun tauns, etc.  My head was still reeling from having to switch my glasses-mounted mirror to the other side, but we pressed onward, hoping to make it to our WWOOF host before sundown.  Google still threw up its hands and suggested taking a bus when we asked it for directions, so we had to go to Navigation Plan B: we actually cracked open the atlas we bought in Busan.  Discovering that its maps were far too zoomed out to be of much use (and also that the farm appeared to be located in an geologically unique zone located in the crease between pages), we went to Plan C: Google Maps again.

The expressway turned to a rural byway, which turned into a country road as it wound its way into a valley in a mountain range we had been studiously avoiding for several kilometers.  Now, when the road shrank still further to the width of a single car or one of our bikes (but not both), Jenn was losing faith in my (Google's) navigational skills.  The addresses climbed slowly as we pedaled further into the valley, the mountains looming closer ahead of us.  Do-ri 34, 36, 38...

"What's the address, again?"

"...1006," I said.  The sun grew even hotter, our shirts sizzling as sweat sublimated right out of our pores.  We pedaled harder, praying that some trick of advanced mathematics would put 1006 right after 40.

At last, somewhere around 88, our already threadbare confidence in Google Maps gave up entirely.  I turned back to ask a trio of ajima for directions as Jenn pushed on a bit farther.  By the time I caught up to Jenn (having learned from each lady that Dori Village was in front of us, behind us, and did not exist at all), she had bumped into our host who happened to be passing by in a truck.  He directed us to the farm, which turned out to be still further into the valley, to the veritable cranny (or possibly nook) of the mountains.  Jenn relayed to me as we grunted our bikes back into motion that we were told to bring our bags inside and introduce ourselves to our host's parents.  And me without my tie...

We were greeted warmly by a charming old couple, and after establishing that we spoke no Korean at all, they ushered us upstairs to rest.  The house, one of several on the grounds, was vast, with numerous living rooms, lounges, rec rooms, and countless bedrooms.  We hauled all of our panniers, sleeping bags, and musical instruments to the second floor of the house and dropped them in an empty bedroom.  I immediately tramped back downstairs to see how we could go about earning our keep, only to be told, "Rest, rest."  Somewhat at a loss, I returned to the bedroom, where Jenn and I proceeded to sit around for a few hours.  Every so often, one of us would go downstairs to try to volunteer once again, only to be told to "rest."  Figuring it was possible that our body odor posed a danger to their houseplants, we showered.  By the time we had finished, we were being called downstairs to dinner by our hostess.

Seated at the long table were the couple who had welcomed us, another older lady, a 30ish athletic-looking man, and a skinny, glasses-wearing teenager.  Our host, Yongjae, was nowhere to be seen.  Set on the table was a feast: brown rice, fried potatoes, spicy chicken stew, salty-sweet fried seaweed, and, yes, homemade kimchi.  Somewhat sheepishly, we sat at two empty places and were welcomed warmly by everyone at the table.  After a moment, they all bowed their head and began praying together in Korean.  "What sort of place have we come to?" Jenn and I asked each other with a glance.

As we helped wash the dishes (finally being given something to do), a freshly showered, mild-mannered young man walked in and introduced himself as Yongjae, our host.  He explained that we would have plenty of work to do the next day, but for the rest of the evening, we should just recover from our long ride.  We turned in late for us, about 9:00, and wondered what this "Dori Village" with its large, vaguely-defined family, would have in store for us.  At least, we wondered that for the 15 seconds it took us to fall asleep.

Later...