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.