Pasar 2

The next week at Pasar was blissful.  In the mornings we slept, helping Natsu bake fresh bread for breakfast, then leisurely began a few hours of work.  Since Pasar is mothballed for eight months of the year, the work mainly consisted of getting it shipshape.  We scrubbed floors, wiped down furniture, got the garden ready for planting, and washed all the dishes.  We also assisted our hosts at getting their "traditional Japanese bath" ready to use; this device, a rusty iron tub sitting atop a fire pit, brought to mind Bugs Bunny cracking jokes as he's about to be cooked, or maybe Charles Adams cartoons of pith helmeted explorers surrounded by cannibals.  Still, the bath was extremely comfortable, even if we did get eaten alive by mosquitoes.

We also declared war on the paper wasps that set up shop throughout Pasar's wooden buildings.  Having some experience with dealing with these particular beasties (a gang of them set up above our washing machine in Osaka one terrifying night), I took it upon myself to go Schwarzenegger on their thoraxes.  Step One: spray the hive with poison.  Step Two: run like hell.  If ever my resolve for destruction wavered, all I had to do was look into one of the hives, which were filled with grubs ready and eager to hatch and eat my eyeballs in revenge.

Though they may appear disgusting, these grubs
are actually completely sick and grody as well.

Thankfully, these wasps were mostly harmless, though we did occasionally hear the helicopter-hum of the dread スズメバチ, the Asian Giant Hornet (or "yak-killer hornet") that kills more people in Japan every year than bears and Godzilla combined.

Speaking of deadly flying insects and other fun things, our job hunt was in full swing by this point.  Since the internet connection of Pasar Moon took a backseat to its stunning view of the sea and unsurpassed conversation, we made many a trip to the local Lawson to check our e-mail.  Eventually, we were faced with a dilemma regarding our job prospects: we could take a high-paying job with long hours, a low-paying job with short hours, or a decidedly average-paying job with "meh" hours, all of which are located in Seoul.  Eventually, we made our choice, though not before a few dramatic bike rides across town to check our e-mail.

The menu at Pasar changed by the day; Natsu's always-excellent cooking was made up of fresh-baked bread made with natural yeast, homemade curry, and whatever seasonal ingredients could be foraged from the mountains and the sea.  One night, we ate like kings on tempura'd mountain vegetables, abalone sashimi, yuzu-marinated sea cucumber, and fried whelk, all taken for free from the area.

On another occasion, we drove up to the mountains to pick wild raspberries to make into jam.  Though it turned out to be a bit too early for raspberries yet, we brought in quite a haul of bamboo shoots and leafy greens.

Also a mushroom called a "Jew's Ear," but I don't really wanna talk about that.

While another WWOOFer and I busily scrubbed things, wiped things, and stacked things on top of other things, Jenn was tasked with designing an official Pasar Moon Flag, a task to which she brought all of her determination, as well as a pair of my ruined jeans.

And every night, the sunset grew lovelier still.

Pasar Moon: A Love Story

It wasn't immediately apparent that we had arrived at our destination.  The yellowing afternoon light was cast over a strange collection of buildings and materials, rusty iron bars, long bamboo poles, all overgrown with ivy and flowering vines.  The brightly-painted murals led us to believe that Google Maps hadn't misled us, that this was the (farm? cafe? concert venue?) whatever-it-was we were looking for, but it seemed that no one was home.  Sunburnt, dripping with sweat, almost certainly filthy from days on the road, we dismounted and wheeled our bikes around this odd place aimlessly.  "すみません！" we shouted occasionally, hoping to attract someone's attention.

We leaned our bikes against a wooden platform and entered one of the buildings.  Our eyes dazzled from the afternoon sun, we could barely see into the house.  As we walked in, we heard a soft "Hello." Removing our sunglasses, we saw a thin, dark-skinned man with shaggy gray hair sitting on a beat-up couch.

"Hello," we replied.  He looked back down at his computer and coughed quietly.  Shrugging, we took off our helmets and sat around the table, following his lead.  After a few beats we introduced ourselves.  He confirmed that this was, in fact, Pasar Moon, our WWOOF host for the next week and a half, and introduced himself as Aki.

"Would you prefer to speak in Japanese?" Jenn asked Aki.

His eyes widened.  "Can you speak Japanese?"

We nodded, and he slumped back even further.  "Whew, what a relief, that's much easier!" he sighed.

Over the next hour or so, he and his wife, Natsu, explained a little about Pasar Moon to us.  Practically, Pasar is a cafe, campground, and concert space, holding a music festival every August and opening for business whenever customers happened by from Masuda or Hiroshima.  Conceptually, it's a space for people to experience the natural beauty of the mountains and the seaside, and a place for artists to be able to produce art freely (artists and musicians stay and eat for free, Aki told us, and they take all of the earnings from the concerts).  For most of the year, the two of them live in a little house in Java, but for the summer they return to Shimane to re-open Pasar.  We had arrived just a day after they had, so there would be much work to be done to get the place customer-ready.

"Oh!" I suddenly remembered, "I have our WWOOFer permits right here."

"Nah, I don't need them," Aki told us.

Natsu-san went on to tell us about our duties: sleep until we're not tired, breakfast is whenever, usually around 10:00, and then we'd be asked to help with whatever cleaning or gardening needed to be done.  "Take a rest whenever you feel like it, and if you don't like doing a certain task, just do something else instead," she told us.

Oh yeah, we thought at each other, we're gonna fit in here just fine.  Quite a chance from our last WWOOF experience, to be sure.

The sun began to set over the coast, and the four of us walked the 20 meters to the beach to watch.  We stood in the campground (in which there was a sign, "This is everyone's park"), took pictures of it, and breathed in the early summer air.

Over Natsu-san's spectacular curry, we discussed our instruments.  It was decided after some deliberation that we would have a concert under the stars on the next full moon.  We helped with the dishes, pitched our tent on a bed of weeds, and fell fast asleep, dreaming about the old accordion propped up in a corner in the living room.

Shimane: No Rest For the Gaijin

An uneventful few days passing through Tottori and Jenn and I made it to Shimane, notable for being the second-least-populated prefecture in Japan (and if the two were combined, they'd still be the least populated).  The eastern half of Shimane is made up of a few fingerlike peninsulas that stretch across a couple of just-barely-inland lakes.  We were beginning to get pretty wiped out, but we still had a few days of pedaling until we reached our next WWOOF host, so we girded our loins and got moving (you pedal with your loins, right?).

Unfortunately, Shimane proves to be one of the least awesome places to camp that we've run across.  Our first night in the prefecture, just on the other side of the border, we came to the only park within 10 kilometers of our route.  It was a very well set-up campsite, to be sure, with water and electricity and real toilets and all that good stuff.  Best of all, it was right behind a supermarket, meaning fish and gyoza were on the menu rather than our usual banquet of non-perishables.  The office was closed by the time we arrived, so we warily circled it to find some information, eyeing the groups of rowdy twentysomethings having parties at their campsites.  Eventually we found a notice that seemed to suggest that one of the basic campsites without water or electricity cost ¥6500 a night, expensive enough that we might as well shell out for a hotel.  We considered our options, the sun nearly gone over the horizon, and finally came to the conclusion that the only moral thing to do would be either to pay the fee in the morning or leave and find a hotel room.  Then we decided to just do a sleep-and-dash, punk rock style.

The only known photo of Jenn taken at 5 a.m.

We were awake by 5, the tent was down by 5:30, and we were outta there by 6, well before any employees came to open up.  As far as I know, we're still wanted in Yonago City.

A few days later, after a thorough rest in Matsue and an utterly forgettable trip through Izumo, we were blasting along the coast on the home stretch to Hamada, our home for the next week.  Once again, we were in a bit of a jam that quickly escalated to "pickle," then to "crisis."  The first park we passed in the day, while lovely, provided little in the way of cover.  Also, having just read about Argentinian tent slashers the previous day, we had qualms about setting up anywhere visible from the road.

Dooooooooom.

Somehow we pushed another ten kilometers, until it had grown quite dark indeed.  We discovered that the next park that Google Maps had to offer us closed its gates at 6 p.m., leaving us with nothing but a tiny roadside bathroom and...war memorial?  I don't know, but it had a cannon, anyway.  We set up the tent (barely) on the ten feet of gravel behind the bathroom.  Once again, we were up at 5 a.m., just as the neighbors around the corner began to stir.

Our final night camping in Shimane was made substantially worse by our dictionary.  The park, a big, sprawling place with a forest, a campground, and a beach, was littered with notices posted on every available surface, all of which we were able to get the gist of with the help of our iPod dictionary.  "No barbeques," "no fireworks after 10 p.m.," "this water is not potable," all that good stuff.  "A bear has been sighted in the woods on May 5th."  That one we probably should have skipped.

Tottori 2: People Who Get Ice Cream From Other People (Are the Luckiest People in the World)

Now I understand why Japan is considered to be some of the best bike touring out there.  Once you get past the mountains, it's nothing but beautiful coastline, cool breezes, and fresh seafood for days.

And the occasional winged harbinger of death.

Another unexpected discovery about Japan's least populated prefecture: the people are amazingly friendly.  From the day we crossed the state line, car windows were rolled down and arms outstretched with vitamin drinks, miniature cakes, or cans of coffee.  "がんばれ！" the people would urge us, or "ファイト！", literally "fight," meaning something like "gofightwin!"  While crouching outside yet another conbini, a man pulled up in a car, studied us sidelong, then entered the store.  He came back out in ten minutes with two ice cream cups, which he offered to us shyly, then drove away.

The greatest love of all is our love for ice cream.

Needless to say, nothing of the sort ever happened to us in the States.  We would occasionally get a friendly wave from a car window or a honk that we chose to interpret as encouraging, and at times passersby would stop to advise us how crazy we are (if you are tempted to advise us the same, please know that we already know), but not once were we given a present by California or Missouri townspeople.  Once in Shimane we were approached by a skinny older man who wanted us to flip through his folder of sheet music; as we read the titles appreciatively ("Light My Fire," "In the Jungle," "Me and Bobby McGee"), he sang a few bars of each song before taking the folder back, bowing, and returning to his car.  We've said before that Japanese people want foreigners to visit their country and then leave promptly, but damn, do they ever turn it out for visitors.

Tottori: Blame it on the Rain

When we biked across Missouri (more on this later), we kicked it in a primarily old-school fashion: though we carry iPod touches with us in case of an Angry Birds-related emergency, they were largely unneeded on the Katy Trail, which is exceedingly difficult to get lost on.

Missouri's Katy Trail, a.k.a. "Ol' No-Turns."

Likewise, our trip down the California coast (more on this, too) was relatively straightforward.  We did bring a couple of paper maps put out by Adventure Cycling, and these came in very handy: with a single glance at the elevation profile, we could be fully prepared for the climbs ahead by despairing for days in advance.

Not so with Japan.  The route we'd planned to take us to our WWOOF host's and then to a ferry port takes us through five prefectures and two major regions of Japan.  Short of carrying an atlas with us, there was no map that would show us the way, and certainly none that would point out the 7-11s and city parks.  So, iPods.

Between the Google Maps app and an array of online weather reports, we did it like true Millenials and used technology to keep ourselves informed on the road.  Each conbini we would pass on the road -- in the cities, they are thick on the ground, with three Family Marts within sight of each other, but in the hinterlands of Tottori they are precious indeed -- was an exercise in information-gathering.  We crouch on the concrete in front of the glass showing the porn mags, surreptitiously charging our electronics while we slurp down canned coffee and eat hard-boiled egg after hard-boiled egg, and we research.  How far until the next campsite, how likely is it we would have a mountain pass today, where's the nearest supermarket, what are the chances of rain?  Once we finish with our research, we pack up once more and hit the road, unless of course someone has written something somewhere on the internet, in which case we have another coffee.

There is no accurate way to measure how many hours we've spent right here or at one of a hundred identical conbinis, so I'll just conservatively estimate "a buhdillion."

After resting for a day in Tottori, a city known for its pears and its sand, we edged along the coast of the Sea of Japan (or as we would begin to refer to it after reaching Korea, "the Sea of Korea"), happy to be finished with mountains for awhile.  On the second day on the road, while stopping at a Lawson for our usual breakfast of yogurt, dried fruit, eggs, and coffee, we noticed that Yahoo weather predicted a 60% chance of rain for the following day.  The Japan Meteorological Association, usually a considerably more optimistic source, pegged it at 100%, but rated the accuracy of that prediction only a "B," meaning it had a 75% chance of being correct.  Both of these predicted the rain only growing heavier from the afternoon.  Weather.com predicted no rain at all.

Not to get too Andy Rooneyish (-esque?), but I've always found weather reports to be completely mystifying.  If a 50% chance of rain is predicted, then surely the meteorologists are right in either outcome, right?  I tend to assume that a 60% chance of rain means that it is certainly, 100% raining somewhere, just not necessarily where I'm standing at any particular time.

We woke up in the city park where we had camped at 5, and had everything packed by 7:30.  We were determined to make it to shelter before the rain started, or at least make it to another conbini in time for second breakfast.  The sky had grown gray and threatening by midday, but Providence led us to yet another Lawson for another cup of coffee and another bout of Interneting.  We had scarcely made it under the awning when the sky began to fall.  "Adequate rain gear" not having been on our packing list, we've been making do by wrapping ponchos around our loads and hoping for the best, a technique that works fine in light rain and gets our bodies and our stuff completely drenched in heavy rain.  This was heavy, too.

Another check of the weather reports.  Yahoo was pretty sure that it wasn't raining at the moment, but that it was due to pick up and fall through the afternoon.  The JMA concurred, as did Weather.com, a unique convergence of three darts on three separate dartboards.  Google Maps indicated a campground just a kilometer ahead of us, and considering the odds that the rain would keep up for the rest of the day and night, it seemed prudent to push through the rain and set up camp as quickly as possible.  Dripping wet, our glasses fogged and streaked, we arrived at the empty campsite and began hanging all of our possessions to dry under the shelter.  A shame that we couldn't make much progress on this day, we said, but at least we made it to cover before the rain got much heavier.




Before we could even break out our knitting, the rain had stopped.  "I'm sure it'll pick up again any minute," I said, keeping a smile of relief clamped on.  "It sure is a good thing we made it here, though it's a shame we missed this brief break in the rain!"

Needless to say, the rain had finished.  By 2 p.m., the sun had come out, leaving us to sit in our pajamas and mournfully watch our clothes and sleeping bags dry on the clothesline.  If we had waited at the Lawson for another cup of coffee, we would have missed the rain entirely, and could be halfway to Shimane already.

お台場公園キャンプ場, just across from the Daiei Road Station.  The first and only time we've been approached for a fee in an abandoned campsite, and at 1000 yen, completely reasonable.

The mysterious poor posture of the trees of the Tottori coast.

We learned what we had already known, the hard lesson we had learned a dozen times over: don't trust information you get from the Internet.

Hyogo to Tottori in Photos

The top of a hill, where we found an abandoned park that served us well for free camping and badly for the health of our shins.

This is the face that just climbed an 8% grade.  Not with her face, of course, but yeah.

This is the face of a guy holding a bike for a lady who had to pee.  Gentlemanly!

The sea would be just down this hill, with any luck.
SPOILER ALERT: IT WAS, AND THERE WERE NO MORE MOUNTAINS ANYWHERE EVER.

Hyogo 2: Move Along

It had only been five days on the road, but we were beginning to get worn down.  We'd gone a wildly unimpressive number of kilometers so far, having met difficulties in the forms of hills, mountains, slopes, climbs, and rain.  Typically, after three days of biking, no matter how short the distance covered, our bodies start to complain more loudly than usual.  After four, important organs start shutting down.  After five, our morale dropped to zombie-like levels.  It was time for a rest.

This stuff will wear you out.

The day before had been particularly hard on us.  The nearest park was still many kilometers ahead over uncertain terrain, and the sun was starting to set.  The rain clouds started to gather above the sleepy town of Tamba, which lessened our resolve even further.  Surely we couldn't pay for a hotel room just four short days into our trip?  How would we afford to continue our travels until a job came through for us in August or September?  Gritting our teeth and trying to ignore the raindrops that fogged up our glasses, we made it to a conbini at the edge of town, a Lawson that offers the blessed tonic that is Free WiFi.  In my e-mail inbox, we discovered an urgent missive from one of the many stinging jellyfish job recruiters (I always get those confused somehow) that we'd gotten to help in our job hunt in Korea.  The e-mail explained that we'd landed a Skype interview with a prestigious academy in Seoul, but the only time it could be conducted was the following morning at 10 a.m..  Which meant that we had three options: we could ask to reschedule the interview for a later date, we could free camp nearby and conduct our interview in a conbini parking lot over a questionable internet connection...or we could pass a restful evening in a local hotel room and be showered and dressed for our interview.  The course seemed clear.  We fired off an enthusiastic confirmation to the jellyfish, then happily turned around and pedaled back into town in search of a hotel.  The Travel Gods seemed to be giving us the go-ahead, paving the way back to downtown Tamba with rainbows.

We paid the shockingly high hotel bill (about $130), then tried to console ourselves by catching up on our Game of Thrones and beer drinking.  The next morning, we were showered, polished, caffeinated, and prepped for our interview.

The shower was probably a good idea.

The recruiter sent us a confirmation early in the morning, and when 10:00 rolled around, we were signed into Skype and ready to kiss some ass.  By 10:30, we had started to grow restless, especially since we were already half an hour late for the hotel's check-out time.  We e-mailed our jellyfish and the school, explaining that we were ready to begin whenever they were.  More coffee cups were filled and emptied.  By 10:45, there was still no answer from anybody.  A few more desperate messages explaining the need for haste.

Harry started to get this expression again.

At 11:10, we could wait no longer, and frantically tore off our work clothes, packed our bags, and fled before we could be charged more money by the hotel.  We cursed the unprofessionalism of all parties involved and wondered how we could have so misinterpreted the universe's premonitions.  By the time we got back to the same fateful Lawson where all this had started, we had received an e-mail from the jellyfish.  He explained that he had set up our interview time without actually getting word from the school that the time he proposed would work for them in any way; he apologized, and asked if we could be ready the next morning at the same time.

This was the spirit that we carried with us as we pushed through the mountains of Hyogo.  Unrested, uneasy (but not unwashed, for a change), we made our way to an athletic park for a long lunch and a nap.

Thoroughly discouraged at how the day had gone, we decided to camp at a campground that Google promised us was just a few kilometers further, a place called 丹波少年自然の家.  We found the place with no problems, and we were ready for a good rest there.  It was a forest that had been converted into a campground and family recreation area, the kind of place where a school might take its students on an overnight trip.  There were rivers, fire pits, cabins, and extremely well-maintained kitchen areas and toilets.  Best of all, it was completely devoid of other customers.  Perhaps we could take a rest day here on the following day, even!

I made a good faith effort to register us at the camp office, but found all of the buildings suspiciously dark.  There did seem to be one office that was in business, with office ladies typing away at something, but considering how closed-looking everything was, I figured it would be best to make as little noise as possible, figuring that it was better to ask forgiveness than permission.  As I hiked back to the tent sites where Jenn was watching our bikes, I watched in horror as a gang of ducks pursued and apparently raped a female duck that was waddling away from them as quick as she could, quacking in terror.  Ominous portents, to be sure, but I tried to pay them no mind.

By the time we had gotten our bags off of the bikes, a light truck pulled up and two Japanese men with clipboards approached us.  We smiled and greeted them even as our stomachs sank.

"Why didn't you come to the office and register?" one of the men asked.

Against my better judgment, my temper flared.  "I did, but nobody was there," I half-lied.

"Not the office right here, the one by the river."

"I did go there, but I didn't see anybody."  My mind flew back to the previous day, when a hotel clerk had fallen all over himself explaining how his hotel really wasn't suitable for us, that the other hotel in town was much better and we'd be much happier there.  I thought of all of the officials who'd just made the "no" sign rather than try speaking to me.  I got my gaijin up, in short.

"You can't camp here," one of them explained.

"What, really?"

"Yes.  We're closed, you can't camp here."

"Why was the gate open?  Why isn't it posted anywhere that you're not open?" I protested.  Jenn urged me to leave it alone, but I persisted, pigheadedly.  "There's all of this space, why can't we just set up here?  We'd pay, of course."

They both shook their heads.  I huffed and puffed, then petulantly asked if they knew of any other campgrounds in the area where our money would be more welcome.  They both pretended to think just long enough for us to give up and start packing up again.

Anger fueled us for another fifteen kilometers.  We railed against the stupidity of spending a fortune converting perfectly good forest into a campground, paying a staff of dozens to maintain it and keep the electricity running, then keeping away paying customers.  We could come up with few explanations other than out-and-out racism, figuring that a young Japanese couple would probably not be turned away so roughly (but then, a young Japanese couple probably wouldn't try it in the first place, nor would they act so belligerent when confronted).  Clearly it was a mistake to try to camp at an officially-sanctioned site in Japan; it was much better to break the law and camp in a city park.  Even if a campsite would lose money by turning us away, a much greater infraction would be asking one of the staff to overlook the rules by allowing us to stay.

We did find another park to camp, one much farther up the road.  It, too, was clearly closed for business, but it seemed much more abandoned than the last, the weeds grown over its benches and gazebos.  We set up in a gravel lot as the sun went down, hoping that the glowing eyes we saw in the woods were not bears but tanooki, and well-fed ones at that.