Shelter from the Storm

Jenn, busy packing to get us out of Osaka.  Don't work too hard, now!

Willpower, like money and energy, is a finite resource.  It gets used up fairly steadily while bike touring, but little inconveniences and incidents eat it up faster.  The rate at which we recover willpower is still entirely unknown to us.  On the day that our ferry was due to leave Osaka port -- conveniently only a few kilometers from the friend's apartment where we were crashing, inconveniently accessible to bikes only by a bridge 20 kilometers away -- the rain was barreling down.  The weather report forecast no end to the rain, at least not anytime in the next few days.  As we had just finished a week of rest, we still had plenty of willpower, so we cheerfully strapped on our rain gear and hit the road, figuring that our new raincoats would protect us from the elements.  Five minutes later, we were thoroughly soaked.  The raincoats were excellent for keeping water in as well as out, meaning that every raindrop that rolled down our sleeves, every ounce of sweat we produced was trapped in there with us and soaked us through.  We hadn't even made it to Osaka port before we were out of willpower entirely.  We managed to roll our bikes onto the ferry without incident (though unfortunately, not without paying twenty bucks a pop), and we squished our way into our steerage-class cabin by dinnertime.  An un-fun day, to be sure, and one that used up all the willpower we'd banked during our week off, but at least we made it.

The next morning, we had just disembarked onto the sunny beaches of Kyushu when the rain hit again, harder this time.  Just the thirty meter journey from the boat to the terminal soaked through our rain gear, and it showed no sign of abating.  Ten minutes down the road and the streets were beginning to flood.  "Oh, damn!" we thought, sarcastic even to ourselves, "guess we'll have to take a rain day at this nearby hotel!"  Honestly, we could have pedaled through it: maybe found a place to wait out the storm, then hit the road after it dried out a bit.  But that would have required more willpower than just getting a hotel room, and somehow, the thing that made the most sense also happened to be the thing that we wanted to do the most.  Funny how that works.

The first rain day wasn't so bad.  We dried our clothes, then, on realizing that they smelled like butt, washed them in the hotel coin laundry.  We dried out our raincoats and panniers, draping something over every object in the room.  We blogged, we drank beers, we watched the rain until it stopped in mid-afternoon, at which point we began hoping it would start again and justify our splurging on this tiny-ass hotel room.

The next day, the rain was coming down just as hard.  We watched TV and remembered how dumb Japanese TV can be.  We tripped over our raincoats and panniers, stubbornly refusing to take them down in case we needed to leave in a hurry.  We conducted taste tests of the local convenience store's more bizarre offerings:

Because we didn't deserve happiness, that's why.

By day three, we determined that we couldn't justify spending money on another hotel room and decided to set out, rain or shine, and the weather report wasn't forecasting "shine."  The ride through the mountains to the bridge connecting Kyushu to the mainland got us thoroughly soaked once again.  It's funny how quickly our resolve drains when "a little rain" becomes "having to spend the night in a little canvas room with all of our damp, mildewy possessions."  It's even funnier that spending a couple nights in a hotel does little to recharge that elusive willpower.  Without willpower, it becomes extremely easy to find excuses to do what we already want to do.  Laziness, in short, finds a way.  Hotel time again.

The undersea bridge connecting two prefectures.  Don't let the picture fool you, it was actually kind of smelly and unimpressive.

Now we were resolved to make it all the way to Pasar, come hell or high water (to pick a foreboding image completely at random).  Last year, when we were finishing our first three-month tour in Japan, the ride from Pasar to Shimonoseki took us five days.  We were in our best fighting shape and freshly rested after two weeks on the farm, whereas now we were damp, dispirited and in poor shape after a year of sedentary living.  So surely, we decided, this time we could do it in four.  After all, two hundred kilometers...why, even at our sluggish pace, that could easily be done in four fifty-kilometer days, at least so long as there were no complications relating to weather, health, bike repairs, etc., and what were the odds of that happening?  Four incident-free days, that's all we would need!

After all, what does a Kansan have to fear from storms?

Not two blocks down the road, and it was clear that Jenn's brakes were shot.  Back to the hotel we went, this time just to use the Internet, for sure, no backsies.  By the time we discovered a sport bike shop in Shimonoseki, Jenn's chain was knocked out of alignment and, worse yet, the little plastic thingy broke off of my bell.  We laughed at the hubris we displayed that morning; there's no such thing as an incident-free day.  If there were, then we could easily go sixty, seventy kilometers every day.  But every, every day on the road, I have indigestion or our bikes are finicky or we get lost or bitten by a strange bug that we assume is poisonous so we have to make sure we're not dying oh god.  Or something.  The universe is magical in its creativity.  Whatever array of somethings happens to us, each one saps some of our tragically limited willpower, and that makes us much likelier to stop early or pay for a hotel room.  Four incident-free days?  We might as well have wished for a pair of unicorns to ride to Pasar.

The first day out of Shimonoseki, the first day where we didn't have to fight the weather, and already we were frustrated with our bikes, exhausted from fighting to make them rideable, and hungry. Plus, by the time we'd gotten them fixed, it was 3 p.m. and we were only five kilometers from where we started.  And yet another strike against us: after a week-long hiatus, on the first day back on the road every muscle and joint complains as though it were day one all over again.  "What, this again?" they cry.  "I thought we were done with this!"  Willpower was running at a deficit right out of the gate.

On our fifth day since Osaka and our third day of actual cycling, we were stopped outside a little country store for a light second breakfast when the proprietress, over the course of a pleasant conversation, let slip that a big ol' typhoon was bearing down on us.  Sometime, anyway, Friday, Saturday, she wasn't sure.  At the next convenience store, we double-checked with the Japan Meteorological Agency.  Sure enough, half the map of Japan was lit up bright red with typhoon, heavy rain, thunderstorm, and flood warnings.  Weather.com kept mum about typhoons, but did predict at least an 80% chance of thunderstorms for the foreseeable future.  News outlets around the world popped up in Google: one site let us know 6 Reasons We Should Be Excited About This Year's Pacific Storm Season.  Another site reassured us that the typhoon we were about to experience was recently downgraded from a "Super-Typhoon" to just a...regular...typhoon.

Fun fact: did you know that typhoons are the same as hurricanes, with the key difference that hurricanes happen in the Atlantic and typhoons in the Pacific?  Neither did I!  In fact, I never quite bothered to look that up for sure.  But it sounds right, doesn't it?  Anyway, um, AAAAAAAAAAHH-

A brief poetic respite from our troubles.

We pedaled like mad to Nagato City, a crummy little truck stop of a town.  All we needed was a bed and an Internet connection to plan our strategy for the next few days.  The first hotel we tried, sadly, had twin beds and no Internet, and also dorm-style bathrooms containing cockroaches the size of college students.  The next was the same story, except it also had no beds.  We did at last locate a business hotel with all of the amenities we required, but it was 95 bucks a night and run by three-time Grumpiest Man of the Year award winner.  When we were about to cave and pay for a steak dinner for Grumps (as we affectionately called him), he began to suggest other hotels in town where we might be more comfortable. The rain clouds gathering once more, we tried Nagato's last hotel, Taishokan, which turned out to be a shiny new place that featured a gourmet restaurant, elegantly decorated rooms, and copious internet. Naturally, it cost $Too Much (though only 5 bucks more than Grumpy Inn), but walking in, dripping wet with rain or sweat or both and seeing the smile of the face of the friendly, welcoming receptionist, we knew we'd just have to grit our teeth and get through this ordeal somehow.

This one was decorated in the rugged Shotgun Shack Style, unlike the usual hotels where we stay, which are decorated in the Good Enough Style.

It was time to plan our strategy.  We were still 100 kilometers from Pasar, a distance that could be covered in two days, but not two days of fighting mountains (which we vaguely remembered were ahead) and typhoons.  There was little ahead of us save the occasional beachside campsite, and neither of us particularly wanted our last words to be, "Aw, c'mon, I'm sure it'll be fine."

The forecast was alarmingly vague about when, precisely, the typhoon was due to hit.  The Internet gave us nothing but strangely gleeful posts about the damage and flooding throughout Japan, and that was just the rainstorm that we had just biked through.  The TV news was far, far worse: images of cars washed away in roads-become-rivers, families huddled in temporary housing, trees swallowed up by floods.  Worse, our literacy is at the level where we just understand enough to be really scared, words and phrases like "14 dead," "10,000 families," "20 million yen."  Our paranoia filled in the rest.

Searching "camping in a typhoon" yielded similarly grim warnings.  "Our children were looking forward to the trip, and I took days off from work … nothing’s going to happen anyway…" some official-looking Japanese website began (it's like they know us!).  "Nature is full of unimaginable hazards during bad weather. Please have the courage to cancel your trip and prevent your sweet memories from turning sour."  Hard to argue with that.

The next morning, the weather report had gotten darker.  In a rare moment of agreement, every forecast we could find predicted nothing but rain and lightning until Monday.  All the willpower in the world wouldn't keep us safe in the middle of a typhoon, Super or not.  With such ill omens and in such a comfortable hotel room, it was easy to decide that we would just stay in Nagato until Monday morning, when the typhoon had safely passed, then ride like hell to Pasar and arrive at the music festival a couple of days late.  A bit of a disappointment, we agreed, but better to spend too much money in a hotel than wind up dead in a typhoon.  We let our host, Aki, know about our delay, then settled into another long, boring day.

By late afternoon, after a few beers and several more episodes of "Law & Order," we received an unexpected missive from Aki.  "You cannot change schedule of events," he told us.  "Move to Pasar is good today, it is to come by JR (Japan Rail)."  Our hearts sank.  Checking the festival's information once again, it seemed that yes, we were scheduled to perform on Monday evening.  With heavy rain coming and a long way to go, it looked like we would have no choice but to attempt the impossible: try to bring our bicycles on a train.  As we'd already paid for the night, we stayed in the hotel, but our festivities took on a somber tone.

Somehow we made it through the hardship.

Yes, the legends speak of "bringing a bicycle on a train in Japan."  Everyone I've spoken to seems to know a guy who's done it. Sometimes it seems to require an official bicycle bag, which retail for 60 bucks or more. Sometimes it needs to be a folding bike, which kind of seems like cheating. A few sites swear up and down that, if you're lucky and the conductor isn't paying attention, you can just carry your bike right on the train. In the end, we decided to go with the most common prescription: take the wheels off, wrap the whole thing in a blue plastic sheet (known as, no kidding, buruu sheeto in Japanese) and carry the bikes through the gate, whistling nonchalantly.

Of course, carrying our bikes left us with no available arms to lug our many, many bags, so the next morning, as ominous clouds swirled in the sky, we sent our bags ahead by Japan's omnipresent Kuroneko Yamato delivery service. The clerks assured us that the bags would arrive the next day for sure, unless of course they were destroyed in the typhoon, in which case it might take two days.

Nailed it!

Then it was on to the train station to begin our grand plot. Dear reader, I wish you could have been there to see it. The ingenuity we displayed when we removed the wheels from our bikes, wrapped the frame in a cheap plastic sheet, and duct-taped the whole mess together just as the rain began to fall...truly, it was a sight to behold.

Awkwardly, I hefted the first of the enormous blue parcels and lumbered to the ticket window. "Two for Mihomisumi," I said, smiling. The ticket clerk looked over my shoulder at the huge, awkward, man-sized bundle in the middle of the train station: spiky metal pieces were poking out all sides, and the handlebars peeked out the top, indecent.

"Is that a bike?" he asked, and I thought very hard about saying "no." I nodded, my honest nature betraying me, and he emphatically told me that bikes were not allowed on JR trains under any circumstances. One of the wheels clunked to the ground, the bungees failing, and my heart sank. 

I pled my case, first with him, then the other employee of this simple country station.  I'm sure my poor Japanese made for quite a convincing case. "But it's important!" I protested. "I heard it's okay!" I told him, to which he (maybe) replied that only folding bikes were acceptable. "It's dangerous, there's a typhoon coming!"  He explained that the typhoon was going to miss Yamaguchi prefecture entirely. Behind him, the TV was now forecasting buckets of blood pouring from the sky.

Nearing tears, with visions of drowning dancing before our eyes, we tore apart the blue sheets and reassembled the bikes.  Desperate, we called Aki from a pay phone (yes, they still have those, apparently), and he pled our case with the station staff.  When I called him back in 15 minutes, he told me that he worked something out, and that I should go and speak with the station manager.  Now, I listened patiently to the manager explain the situation, and I'm at least 80% sure that he was saying that, yes, non-folding bicycles are allowed on JR trains, but only if they're in an actual bicycle bag.  Since we were obviously transporting our bikes in crappy, thrown-together plastic sheets, he said, that didn't count.

Now it was beyond a doubt that we were stuck in this awful little town.  We had no gear, having sent it all by Kuroneko, no way of getting our bikes on the train, and no way of getting to Pasar before the typhoon.  We would have to either risk death and the electric hands of a typhoon or spend a fortune on hotel rooms to wait out the storm and miss our performance at Pasar, the main reason we'd come back to Japan in the first place.  The station manager helpfully directed me to a nearby bike shop, where they did indeed carry bicycle bags, but only for 80 bucks apiece.  Also, they only had one in stock, and it was most likely far too small.  Also the bike shop guy called me a smelly hippie and took my lunch money.  Mneh.

Come on, universe, you don't have to be a dick about it.

We spent our last 100 yen calling Aki and lamenting our poor luck, hoping he might offer some kind of solution (all I could come up with by this point was "complain a lot and maybe drink a beer").  Sure enough, when he had it all explained to him, he immediately told us to stay where we were, and that someone from Pasar's staff named Shio would be coming with a truck.  The last train to Mihomisumi was at 7:19; Shio would arrive before that, we would load the bikes in his truck, then take the train the rest of the way.  We thanked him profusely -- a two-day ride for us was a two-hour ride in a car, surely not a small thing for a stranger to do for you.  Having already exhausted the station's potential for entertainment, we went around the corner for a quick bite of yakitori.  Please direct your attention to the television in the corner: it didn't really come out, but it was showing that the rain had now turned to boiling pitch.  Every minute of weather reportage we watched, we were more sure that we made the right decision (if you ignored the fact that it was sunny and warm in Nagato at the moment).

It grew darker and the sky grew clearer.  Now that we looking at the sky and not the weather report, we were increasingly certain that we had wasted our money on that hotel room, and that if we had just pedaled through it, we could be at Pasar by our own power by now.  We wondered what the folks at Pasar must think of us, a couple of lost little foreigners stranded by our own fear of the weather, unable to muster the willpower to make the last little distance to our destination because of something as unreliable as the weather forecast.  We hoped that Shio was an understanding sort, and that he wouldn't meet a couple of bike bums with scorn, especially for making him drive all day to help us out.

We gave Shio a call at 7:10, and a polite-sounding young man answered the phone.  He told us he wouldn't be arriving in time, and that we'd have to spend the night in Nagato again, most likely.  When he arrived, we saw that we shouldn't have worried, as he was clearly one of our people: a handmade rasta hat cocked to one side, little round Lennon glasses and a stringy Lenin beard.  We lifted our bikes into the back of Shio's little truck and he secured them with an impressive variety of knots and fasteners, and like that, he was gone.  We had nothing to worry about; all our gear was heading to Pasar, and in the morning we'd hop the first train to our destination.  Sure, we didn't make it all the way by pedal power, but we were going to get there safely, and that was the important thing.

Now we just had to spend yet another goddamn night in goddamn Nagato.

Afterword: the typhoon missed Pasar entirely.  Willpower, in this instance, had nothing to do with it; we had more than enough to get us there, but what we lacked this time was good judgement.  When we complained to one of our friends about spending all of that money and time, they explained that the media is just like that in Japan: they always sensationalize storms, trying to drive up ratings with scary footage from other, unrelated storms.  The lesson of this ordeal is, to be sure, "better safe than sorry," but just as important is the lesson, "don't believe everything you see on TV."

Wanna Take You to a Snack Bar

The City That Sleeps on the Subway.

While we waited for our Chinese visas to process, we went to go see a performance by our old friend and bandmate, Satino Satio.  Since we'd left town and Raku 3 was no more, he had since formed a new band with another friend of ours, and since they were unfortunately unable to join us at the Pasar Music Festival (our next stop), we were thrilled at the chance to see Sa-chan in action.

Sa-chan is one of our oldest friends in Japan.  He's an excellent guitarist, the most ripped vegan I've ever met, and a stone classic Japanese hippie (our favorite kind of person!).  We met him through a couple of vegan friends of ours -- he happened to run a vegan cafe, and he was just so darn charming that we kept going back, week after week.  One day, out of the blue, he sent us a text message saying that he wanted to perform a show with the two of us; I hadn't performed a thing since band class in 7th grade, but having fooled around a little on the ukulele, we took him up on his offer.  We called ourselves Raku 3, after Sa-chan's (ultimately doomed) cafe, and playing with Raku 3 opened the door to countless unforgettable experiences.  Sa-chan took us to places in Osaka that we would never have found (let alone visited) as a couple of clueless honkies, and he introduced us to dozens of people who had lived fascinating lives.  In short, Sa-chan is probably the main reason we have such strong ties to Japan.

"Where is your performance?" we asked him via Facebook.

"I don't know yet, I haven't been there.  Just meet me at the south entrance of Daimaru Department Store at 6:50 and we'll go together."

We had no idea what to expect from this turn of events.  Sa-chan had taken us to perform at numerous venues throughout Osaka, and all of these fell into two distinct categories: hippie cafes, featuring all the standard accoutrements (incense, organic Fair Trade coffee, handmade jewelry, drum circles); or dive bars packed with day laborers drinking cheap beer.  Daimaru, on the other hand, is right in the middle of one of Osaka's more upscale shopping districts, flanked by Louis Vuitton and Coach stores that seem to contain very little merchandise in a shockingly large space (which, as in the rest of Japan, is prohibitively expensive in Osaka).  What strange new experience were we in for?

We turned up outside Daimaru at 6:55 (early for us, really), where we shared a warm reunion with Sa-chan.  His companion, the owner of the venue ("manajaa," he corrected us with a laugh) led us through Shinsaibashi's warren of side streets and alleys while Sa-chan caught us up on his life.  It seems he had decided to leave his current job, the fifth or sixth job he's had since we've known him; apparently the boss wouldn't stop pressuring him to eat meat despite his strict vegan diet (it should be mentioned that this was a job working as a chef at a barbecue restaurant).

Before we knew it, we were outside one of Shinsaibashi's thousand identical buildings, strung up in neon signs advertising food, drink, karaoke, and other services unknowable to the illiterate foreigner.  We chained up our bikes and followed the party into a tiny room on the third floor.  It was decorated like a reasonably cheap hotel room but windowless, airless.  We were greeted by a scarecrow-thin woman with a great deal of plastic surgery and the make-up and clothes of a much younger woman.  "Please, come in!" she beckoned to us in a cigarettey voice.  An enormous cockroach scuttled up the wall and behind a came-with-the-frame painting.  After some initial introductions, the hostess and another woman called Mama began to pour glasses of whiskey from a variety of expensive-looking bottles while the boss ("manajaa," he insisted with a laugh once again) sat and traded unintelligible jibes with the women.  There were no other customers yet.

"Oh my god," Jenn whispered to me, smiling, eyes agog, "this is a snack.  We're in a snack."

Snack bars (スナク) enjoy a great amount of mystery in gaijin circles.  No westerner we've known has ever been into one, and no local friend of ours has confessed to going, but they're everywhere in Japanese cities big and small.  We've always been a little unclear as to their exact purpose.  Maybe they're the same as a hostess bar, where customers pay obscene hourly rates just to flirt with the waitresses?  Or are they closer to soaplands and other almost-prostitution services you can find throughout Japan?  Late, late at night on the streets of Shinsaibashi, we've seen teams of kimono-wearing ladies bid farewell to very drunk salarymen and assumed this had something to do with snack bars.  As it happens, they are closest to hostesses: the proprietors keep your glass full, keep you talking, flirt with you, then slip you the bill when it's time to go home.  The whole institution hearkens back to the geisha tradition of paying for someone to keep you company and entertain you for an evening, at least as I understand it.

This, then, was a snack bar.  Eventually more customers filed in.  Each of them looked to us first with surprise, then a weird embarrassed smile.  The ladies found some way to shove a few of the velour-lined chairs into the far corner to make room for the performers, who rifled through their sheet music and talked quietly, clearly as surprised to be in such a place as we were.  The other customers occasionally tried to make conversation with us...or rather, each of them attempted the same conversation with us in turn (where we're from, how long we've been in Japan, and so on, petering out as our Japanese eventually fails us).

Meanwhile, the proprietors continued to make jokes at one another's expense and pour glass after glass of whiskey.  Except for Scarecrow Woman, who just kept adding ice to everyone's glasses.  The customers made conversation with one another and with the hostesses; maybe they were flirting, which I'm increasingly convinced is the actual nature of snack bars.  I guess I did expect that the hostesses of snack bars would be...well, younger?  The hostesses were all at least in their fifties, heavily made up and wearing the clothes of twenty-somethings.  The "manager," too, a man at least in his sixties, kept pawing at his employees good-naturedly while they batted his hand away and berated him.  I got the feeling that this team had been going through this same schtick for the last twenty years at least.

Then it was time for the show!  Sachimisachi took the stage (or...corner of the table) and played a lovely set of jazz standards and oldies.  They even played a few of Raku 3's old songs!  By which I mean, jazz standards and oldies that Raku 3 also covered.

Sadly, the audience was less than reverent during the show.  Sachimisachi's singer, Misa, has a lovely voice, but in the absence of a mic stand, it got rather lost among the conversation.  Most of the patrons seemed more interested in talking with one another than with listening to the show.

When the band took a break between sets, Sa-chan invited us to play a song with him for old time's sake.  We tried to see what songs we still remembered, then settled on "Chocolate Jesus" by Tom Waits.  We launched into it and the crowd went silent.  This could be because Jenn has a voice so powerful that it can knock over small children, but whatever it was, the audience was extremely appreciative.

After Sachimisachi's next set began, the trouble started.  A mustache and glasses in a white shirt, at the end of the first number, loudly demanded to know when Jenn was going to sing again.  Before the applause had ended after the second song, once again he let the room know that he had a request for Jenn.  We sank into our stained, overstuffed chairs and tried to politely turn the attention back to the featured artist, but that did little to pacify Jenn's newest fan.

We did take the stage after Sachimisachi's first encore (save for us, there was precious little enthusiasm for a second one), and, naturally, we turned it out, but it was a very sheepish triumph.  Afterwards, during karaoke time, we apologized profusely to Misa for showing her up, but she wouldn't hear of it.

"Hey, we should all play together sometime, the five of us," I suggested.

"That's a great idea!" Misa said.  Sa-chan and their flutist agreed, excited.  "So when you come back to live in Osaka, we can play shows together!"

Jenn and I exchanged a look.  God, it would be so easy to do that, wouldn't it?  Just come back to Osaka, play more shows, study more Japanese, see all of our friends whenever we wanted (the ones who haven't left, anyway).  We really were happy in Osaka.  Why the hell did we leave in the first place?

We pushed the thoughts out of our minds and tried to focus on the most important things: first, that Sa-chan had once again introduced us to a facet of Japanese culture that we would never have discovered on our own...

...And second, the rising suspicion that we were most certainly going to be hit with an enormous bill for the privilege.

Return to Japan

By the end of our trip in Korea, things were looking rather grim.  We'd run into bike trouble, weather trouble, illness, bad directions, and gross bugs.  At one point, we pushed up a 20%-grade mountain road for half an hour only to find a 25% grade on the other side.  With bad brakes, traveler's diarrhea, and ominous buzzing noises filling the air.  Our nerves were getting a bit frayed by this point.  We began to indulge in hotel rooms...

Which do lift the burden a lil'.

Even when the decor leaves something (sanity) to be desired.

And while we didn't ever get down to the eating-our-shoes phase of hunger, we did fall upon some fairly desperate measures, such as the fated Peanut Butter and Ham Sandwich.

The poor man, he's dying.

It hardly needs saying at this point, but bike touring is hella hard.  Even though we'd rather be doing this than anything else in the world (anything you can accomplish with English teacher money, anyway), there are lots of times when days of rain and stomachaches can weaken your willpower and make you willing to do anything in exchange for a cold beer and a hot shower.  Yes, those were dark days there, when we were almost ready to give up entirely and just go back to work for the Man, trading in our freedom for a relatively clean apartment and not having to push ourselves another inch down the road.

Fortunately, by this point we had arrived at Busan.  There, we were able to catch a much faster mode of travel: big ol' boat!

Now, you might wonder why we choose to travel by ferry so much rather than by airplane like normal people (even if you are entirely uncurious, just play along).  The simple answer is that traveling by plane involves many extra, extremely expensive steps if you have bicycles, most of which are unnecessary when going by ferry.  The complicated answer is exactly the same but involves several largely irrelevant opinions about chemtrails and the Kennedy assassination.

Unfortunately, taking the ferry isn't always a barrel of roses (or whatever you use to transport multiple roses).  Different ferry companies have different regulations for taking loaded touring bikes, and these are frequently much more obnoxious when traveling internationally.  The easiest time we've had with a ferry, we just wheeled our bikes right into the car-carrying location (or "stern"), where several able-bodied sailors tied them to big, sturdy metal girders.  The hardest was going from Japan to Korea, where we were made to partially disassemble our bikes, then strap our unwieldy panniers and sleeping bags together with bungees into large, even unwieldier mega-bags.

This time, leaving Busan was a particularly frustrating affair.  The check-in window was mobbed by a crew of 30 or so exchange students from somewhere European, none of whom were sure if they needed their passports to check in.  By the time we paid for our tickets, the person at the ticket window had moved on to the next passenger without telling us what to do with our extremely cumbersome bicycles.  The information window was staffed by a pair as entertaining as they were unhelpful: a chipper, very confused older man and his stern, no-nonsense partner.  This duo managed to tell us to take our bikes upstairs to the departure lounge in between guessing if we were Australian and answering the telephone in English.  Now that the stress of the moment has worn off, I kind of love those guys.

By the time we got to the departure lounge, roughly two hours before the boat was scheduled to leave, we realized just how much we still had to get done.  What were we going to eat during the 18-hour voyage?  Where should we take our bikes?  Could we buy souvenirs for our friends in Osaka?  Should we?  And for god's sake, where could we get a drink around here?

We did manage to get all of these problems sorted out in an extremely boring, non-stress-worthy manner, and just in time to line up for departure, too!  My mind drifted back to the last time we went through customs in Korea.  When Jenn set off the metal detector, she indicated that it was her belt, which she began to unfasten to cooperate with security as is the American fashion.  The response of the security team was lightning-quick: they all ran the hell away, leaving us to stroll through the door, apparently cleared for entry.

I was yanked back to reality by a frantic-looking young man in glasses wielding a walkie-talkie, who gestured to our bikes, explained something in Korean, and indicated that we needed to follow him with head-on-fire urgency.  We were treated to a race through the ferry terminal that would have been downright hilarious if scored with "Yakkity Sax" (through really, what wouldn't be?), culminating in taking all of our possessions off our bikes, running them through a metal detector, then immediately strapping them back on.  Sadly, we were not congratulated with this last-second success with a vigorous high-five, but rather a big fat cargo bill, which we glumly paid.

"OK, come on, you have to hurry upstairs to customs," the terminal employee admonished us.  We looked back at our bikes, where an elderly cargo handler was still squinting and shaking his head at them.  I shrugged and headed back to the elevator.

"Hey, H," Jenn called to me, and I stopped to look back.  "We have to make sure they have our bikes."

"I'm sure it's fine," I told her, and gestured toward the baffled-looking gentleman in a vest.  Look at this crack team they've got working on our problem, I told her with my gesture.

"They already messed up once," she snapped at me.

Bill and I exchanged a look.  "Thank you very much," he said to the clerk who had just billed the crap out of us.  I jerked a thumb towards the employee who shepherded us down to the loading area, who was sweating bullets and beckoning us to hustle onto the boat.

Jenn glared at the lot of us.  "We can't expect other people to give a shit about our stuff, Harry."  I realized she was right.  "These bikes are very expensive," she told the clerk, who nodded absently.  The glasses-wearing employee grew increasingly elaborate with his pacing and foot-tapping, trying in English and Korean alternately to explain to us that the boat had almost certainly left by now.  Finally, excruciatingly, the lone, infirm cargo handler began wheeling our bikes out of sight, and we took off running (well, almost) to the departure gate.

At last, we made it onto the ship, the Panstar Dream, the same ferry that ushered us into Korea for the first time way back in 2012 (which happened to be staffed by the same largely-ignored foreign musicians playing electric cello in the lobby).  We celebrated our departure from Korea in the style of our people, American 20-somethings:

Half a bottle of soju, and you'd be king of the world, too.

It bears mentioning that Jenn's message, the moral of this whole episode, was borne out: when we retrieved our bikes from the cargo hold in Japan, two of Bill's spokes were broken, and one of Jenn's fender was badly bent.  True enough, you can't expect others to give a shit about what's important to you.

And with that somewhat somber lesson, we bid farewell to Korea.  Like all our farewells, this one came from a place of deepest sentiment, as well as a place of knowing that we'd be back in a few months.  Time to get back to our first love:

That's right: stuffing our faces in front of Japanese convenience stores.

The Story

This cute little guy was living in a soju box outside of a country store.  We kept each other company for an hour, I took a photo, and I decided to share that photo with you.  Because the Internet needs another cat picture.

Something funny happens over the course of a bike tour.  Each day we wake up in a different park, bike as far as we can, eat our (six or seven) meals, and set up somewhere new when the sun goes down.  We make our progress inch by inch and mountain by mountain, and we get where we're going in the end.  Whenever we speak to another human being about our trip, though, the story that we tell changes.

Two weeks?  No, no, we've only been on the road for one.  Where did we start today?  Surely it was Yangpyeong, an impressive distance to cover in a few hours (and considerably more impressive than the day and a half we've actually taken to get here from there).  And of course, the answer to "Are you camping here?" is always a resounding "No!" followed by a laugh of disbelief.  (Even with our near-perfect record of never being shooed away from an impromptu campsite, we are still leery of being discovered in our probably-illegal but entirely harmless antics.)

So we engage in vigorous exercise to pass the time until the sun goes down.

Far and away, the most onerous question came after we told people that we started in Seoul.  About half the time we told people this, they followed up with, "Today?"  This happened a hundred kilometers, two hundred kilometers from Seoul or more.  To make the kind of time these people were thinking, we would have had to ride our bikes at least fifty kilometers an hour.  Clearly we had no problem correcting these peoples' misconceptions -- two hundred kilometers takes us over a week, even over flat terrain with no setbacks -- but the fact that these people thinks that a cyclist could cover 200 kilometers in a morning means that they don't know from cycling (and also, that our honest numbers can only fail to impress by comparison).

This editing of our timeline is not the result of a coordinated attempt to deceive; we don't put together fake itineraries to give to curious passersby, nor do we particularly care if anyone does know that we generally only go forty or fifty kilometers a day.  Still, all the same, it comes out.  We're called on to account for our distance, and without thinking, we omit two nights' sleep from our recollection and call it honest enough.  I don't think there's anything particularly malevolent about it; in the end, we come off as slightly more fit than we are to someone who, typically, has no idea what bike touring entails.  Of course, we are really just encouraging this kind of ignorance when we exaggerate our numbers, and that leads to some pretty bum directions, such as "Oh yeah, there's a campground real close, it's just over those mountains and go straight for sixty or so kilometers, you should be there in an hour."

The point, such as it is, is that it's awfully hard to describe exactly what it is we're doing, even under the best of circumstances.  To those who've never toured by bicycle, our fifty kilometers per day seems like either an impossibly high or pitifully low number.  We go slower than other cyclists, too, but we try not to let that get to us (one guide to the Four Rivers Project suggested that tourists try not to go more than a hundred kilometers per day, y'know, so they don't miss too much of the scenery).

The twisted, disturbing scenery.

Sometimes, of course, we get an entirely different reaction from passersby.  Sometimes, as in Japan, they give us encouragement.  And presents!  Horrible, inedible presents!

"It stinks!"

This gentleman watched us cook our lunch in a public gazebo, interrupting with an occasional question and to show us that he was documenting our meeting on Facebook.  When we were finished with lunch and ready to leave (so, say, two hours), he produced a dozen sealed packets of mysterious brown liquid from somewhere and presented them to us with a smile.  There were few clues to the contents on the package; there was a picture of a log, but that couldn't be right, could it?

To make sure we weren't being (intentionally) poisoned, we politely waited for the guy to crack open one of the packets and take a sip.  He downed his in a few seconds and smacked his lips, then gestured to us with an open hand.  Satisfied that the packet must contain something delicious and refreshing, Bill opened it, took a drink, and with a petrified smile, passed it to Jenn.  "Oh wow, it's so good," he said through his teeth.  "Mmm!" agreed Jenn, before giving it to me.  I didn't give much though to their crocodilian smiles and took a hearty swig.  The taste is difficult to describe, but it's somewhere between mothballs and sawdust, with a healthy chemical aftertaste.  We posed for a photo with our friend, who insisted (I think) that we take the rest of the liquid with us for the road.  I finally got around to throwing it away last week, 400 kilometers down the road.

Oh, and the dictionary did yield some end to this mystery: it was arrowroot stock.  Or poison.

Park Place

The route we chose to take on our trip across Korea follows the Four Rivers Bike Path, an expensive undertaking completed in 2011 by the Korean government to promote environmental awareness, international understanding, and tourism.  As it happens, the Four Rivers Project turned out to be a bit of a boondoggle (or, in Korean, a "kerfuffle"); the project was wildly expensive, incredibly damaging to local ecosystems, and tainted by accusations of corruption and cronyism.

We had all this in the backs of our minds from the beginning of this trip, but for the most part, we didn't pay any mind to the haters.  I mean, sure, some parts of the path are decidedly non-eco-friendly (long, freestanding platforms built right over the water, asphalt bike paths cutting through wetlands), but large sections of it consist of little more than bike logos painted on existing roads:

No, Bill, wrong way!

Once we got out of the sprawl of Seoul, though, we started stumbling across these vast, brand new yet mysteriously un-maintained parks.  And these parks are extremely well stocked.  They have elaborate maps and welcome signs that are completely covered in cobwebs.  They have excellent bathrooms (that is, they have bathrooms with toilet paper and non-squat toilets).  They have beautiful, elaborate landscaping that, except for small mowed patches, are being swallowed by weeds.  They have artsy benches and shelters, but no visitors using them.

Pictured: artsy shelters.  There were also bathrooms build to look like huge bicycles and bike racks in the shape of...bicycles.  I guess they stuck with a theme.

They were fully stocked with all of your major spiders, too.

And sure, some of them were less than perfect.  Many of the parks are badly designed, with nowhere to sit and rows of skinny trees that provide no shade.  Most of them are covered in snake-concealing tall grass or thorny plants.  For bike hobos like us, though, these parks were an amazing discovery.  Overgrown, unpopulated, and with all the resources we could want for free camping.  Our usual free camp routine is to pull in, unobtrusively cook our dinner, and set up our tent only in the most secluded corner of the park (even if that puts us on a gravel lot behind a bathroom), and only then after it has grown too dark to be spotted.  In the mornings, more often than not we were awake and had our tent away by 6:30 before we could be spotted by joggers or local busybodies.

In the vast abandoned parks of Korea, though, it's a different story.  We stake our tent in broad daylight like goddamn kings.  We sleep in until 7:00, even 8:00, sometimes not even putting up the tent until after a cup of coffee.  On rest days we simply leave the tent up, and we greet the (very) occasional dog walker or hiker with a hearty "Annyeong haseo!", knowing that even if we're somehow bothering them with our presence, there'll be another park not ten kilometers down the road.

It did occur, though, after our third or fourth day without seeing another cyclist, camper, or picnicker, that these parks could be part of the problem with the Four Rivers Project.  There were all manner of signs directing us to these parks and the Historic Views of the Han River or the Historic Cosmos Garden (currently unoccupied by cosmos), and even on the weekends they were utterly failing to bring in tourists or even members of the community.  The cost to build and maintain these parks is surely immense, and as far as we could tell, the only people making use of them are three smelly hippies.

So are these parks a good thing?  For us, certainly, but I don't think we're supposed to be the main beneficiaries of the Four Rivers Project.  I'm not particularly bothered by the thought of my tax dollars going to build such elaborate parks or bike trails; projects like these do bring people closer to nature, particularly those who live in a city and don't see much nature anyway, and it's a lot easier to care about the environment when you can point to a river or a forest as a good thing in your daily life.  But then, I don't pay that much in taxes.  Maybe I'd be more bothered by how abandoned, how clearly unnecessary these parks are if I were more invested in one of the communities that hosts them.  And I do think these parks are rather unnecessary, beautiful though they are: if on a beautiful summer day, they sit unused by either members of the community or tourists, then how necessary could they be?

The real takeaway here is that we're extremely lucky to be doing this trip when we are.  Four years ago, these paths would've still been under construction, and we would have had to fight mountains and traffic the whole 600 kilometers to Busan (whereas now we only sometimes have to).  And who knows?  Maybe four years from now the path will be swallowed up by weeds entirely or else abandoned by the taxpayers as a waste of money.  Then again, maybe in twenty years, when the urban sprawl has covered most of the country, these young trees will have grown big enough to provide some shade, and the currently unused parks will be the last bit of greenery that the citizens of Korea will have to enjoy.

I guess maintenance costs couldn't be that high, really.

PS: As a way of saving my delicate little princess skin from the ravages of sunlight, I caved and bought some ajuma arm...cover...things.  But at least mine show the other old ladies that I shanked a dude in the pen:

Also available in "regrettable band logo."