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.