Cramping

By now, I've become something of an expert at free/wild camping, at least in Korea.  The bike path is dotted with parks and rest areas every dozen kilometers or more, and it's usually not a problem to find a relatively flat patch of land where we can set up our tent unobtrusively.  In recent weeks, we've really gotten cocky about it, too: whereas in the past we'd always try to have the tent down before anyone might wander by, now we've moved on to the "meh" method.  After months of free camping in Korea and Japan, we've been spotted dozens of times by joggers, dog walkers and cyclists, and never once have we had anyone hassle us or tell us to move on.  As long as we try to keep mostly out of the way, we get some curious looks and the rare greeting or question, but never anything more.

After 200 kilometers of (mostly) beautiful bike path, we were once again approaching Daegu.  Last time coming through Daegu, we found a free public campsite right under a highway overpass in the city.  It wasn't the best night's sleep, but it beat the alternatives, which at that point were setting up in a baseball diamond or dying on our feet from lack of sleep.  It was a relatively comfortable site, if only because I sleep better when I don't think that every rustle in the night is the Man coming to throw me in the vagrants' jail (which I assume is a thing).  Our enjoyment of the site was slightly diminished in the morning when an old lady suffering from extreme crankypantsedness confronted us, accused of littering, and told us that we had to move along and that the campsite was only open on weekends.  Then she stole the tie to our rainfly, apparently her hunger for cleaning up trash being so insatiable.

Still, since we'd be coming into Daegu on a Friday, we figured this campsite would be a good place to take a rest day for free.  Sure, we'd much rather stay in a motel, especially since our body odor had progressed from "P.U." to "biohazard," but we decided it would be best to save the money and enjoy the free campsite.  Besides, since it was mid-September by this point and the summer holiday was over, surely we'd have the place to ourselves.

Hahahaha no.  Please note our tent being ganged up on by a pack of larger tents.

Every inch of dirt in this campsite -- this cramped, smoggy, noisy campsite located right under a highway overpass -- was occupied by a tent.  But really, "tent" doesn't do it justice:

"Juggernaut," maybe, or "Colossus."  Or some other X-Man.

Our trusty tent has everything that a couple of campers could need: a place to lie down, flaps to keep out animals, a space to put our stuff to keep it dry, and vents to let out farts and such.  These monstrosities not only had the room to sleep a dozen people, but for those dozen people to dance to "Y.M.C.A."  Our fellow campers brought quite a load of stuff, too: coffee tables, bookshelves, chairs, tarps, stoves, actual literal kitchen sinks.  Many of them were engaged in what I'm told is called "day camping," meaning they packed their chandeliers etc. into their cars, drove to the campsite, set up all of their stuff, hung around awhile, then packed up again and left.  I guess I find nature hard to enjoy without my grand piano, too.

And what's camping without a complete lack of mosquitoes?

It took me several minutes to figure out what this man in the official-looking vest was doing.  He drove his motorcycle, which was rigged with some kind of pollution-spewing device, in circles along the pedestrian paths of the campsite and park.  Clouds of gray-blue smoke drifted across the trees and swallowed up children in the playground.  If he wasn't killing mosquitoes, then the only other thing I can think of is that he's a supervillain and that the secret to successful nefarious schemes is just to look like you're authorized.

I really can't stress this enough: this man was driving around a campsite full of children, spewing clouds of pure DEET everywhere he went.  It got in our tents, it got in our eyes and our lungs.  He was apparently supposed to do this.  Oh, and there were still mosquitoes.

We found a spare plot somehow, put up our tent, and tossed and turned through a night of streetlights, truck horns, and bedtimeless children holding some kind of screaming competition.  In the morning, we resolved to try to stick it out for another day, although the idea that we'd get any rest was becoming more ridiculous with each additional tent that sprouted up and surrounded us.  Any of the things that we might like to do to relax (play music, draw pictures, cook) we'd have to do under a microscope, on display for dozens of families and their pets and furniture.  When the cranky old lady from last month reappeared and started nosing around our tent, we decided to move on to a motel afterwards.  Another family claimed our spot before our tent was half down.  We left them to enjoy the mosquitoless, cramped, heavily-trafficked great outdoors.

The only bright spot is that we got to see an artist paint these murals on the overpass columns.  Though I guess he could ahve just been the world's most brazen graffiti artist.

As we continued down the bike path for the next few weeks, we found another increasingly popular twist on camping known as "glamping."  We spotted multiple signs for "Glamping Korea," more than we saw even two months before, and eventually we sighted a few...glampsites?

All the beauty of a cult compound in the great outdoors!

Essentially, glamping (which apparently does exist outside of Buzzfeed, and also is not a real word) seems to consist of renting cabins for the night.  Except these cabins are made of fabric.  Shiny new fabric, sure, with pretty new electric light fixtures, but fabric that will start to show its age considerably faster than more old-fashioned cabin construction materials (like, say, wood).  Presumably inside of these tents there's some sort of glamorous setup, like...a disco ball?  Bearskin rug?  Man, I have no idea.  And neither, presumably, does anyone else in Korea: every glampsite we saw was utterly vacant.  No glampers looking for a glamp-out at the moment (ugh).

We decided that we pitied the poor souls who so thoroughly populated that awful campsite.  Why would anyone choose to camp in conditions that so little resemble actual camping?  If they're going to bring their air conditioners and beds, why not just stay home, where all those things already exist?  And why would someone drive all the way to somewhere outside just to spend the day sitting in a tent and then go home before dark?  Jenn eventually hit on a more compassionate explanation than I could muster: they most likely came from elsewhere in the city of Daegu, and this must be the closest any of them can get to having a backyard.  Apartment life doesn't lend itself to neighborhood barbecues or kids running around freely.  Even if this campsite has none of the benefits of camping that we enjoy every night, it's not a solitary encounter with nature that these people are looking for, but just a little bit of sunshine, even if it's filtered through smog and thousand-dollar tents.

Return to Hell Mountain

This time, we were stronger than before.  The days since Busan were much faster, more productive (though inexplicably, the weeks passed just as quickly as last time, back when it seemed every other day was a rest day or sick day).  We could do more miles with fewer problems, we were smarter about staying out of the rain.  We picked only the best campsites, got more sleep, spent less money, shopped more efficiently, ate better, were better prepared.

Somehow that didn’t make Hell Mountain any different from last time.  The giraffe-print sidewalk was still impossibly steep and coming apart in pieces.  There were still cyclists pedaling up this monster that we could only push up: young college kids, middle-aged moms, grandparents even (though it’s worth pointing out that none of them were carrying violas).  The grade was still a laughable 13%, which probably would have meant something if we hadn't seen gentle slopes marked as a 15% grade and sheer cliffs marked as 5%.  The manure factory was still doing brisk business, seasoning our bitter curses and buckets of sweat with an otherworldly stink.

"I hate this," I said after thirty minutes of pushing.

"Blarrrgh," Jenn agreed.

"At least this time I didn't forget my ukulele."

"Blarrrgh."

At the top of the mountain, there was a congregation of old men and ladies, all clad in flashy new lycra cycling clothes, all of whom had evidently pedaled up the whole mountain.  They laughed as they read our sign while we politely tried not to die of heart failure right in front of them.  One gruff old brute beckoned for us to come over for a photo with him.  We obliged, and after the photo was snapped he started explaining something to his friends; all we could understand was "Foreigners."  He talked about us for a few minutes, and we heard the word, waegukin (gaijin in Korean, essentially) tossed around several more times by the curly-headed ladies.  No one deigned to ask us any questions, though one of the ajumas did give us a big bag of homemade banana chips.  After we had rested sufficiently, we were down the mountain again, our brakes squealing our departure into the cliffs and pines, a solitary voice from behind shouting, "Fighting!"

Before long it had grown dark again.  Hell Mountain was exactly as terrible as we remembered, but it did seem to take up less of our day this time.  Just as it was getting too dark to safely continue, the Travel Gods dropped a beautiful roadside park in front of us.  We proceeded with our usual routine: we played a little music on the ukulele and viola, then set up our stove to cook some dinner.

Yes, it's supposed to do that.  Sort of.

It bears mentioning that in addition to being a proficient world traveler, a proud amateur blues musician, and an all-around scruffy-looking nerf herder, I'm also a damn fine cook.  While it's been tough having to do all our cooking on our one lonely little stove (man, do I miss fresh bread), I've still been able to whip up some excellent dinners from time to time.  Pasta with red sauce and anchovies, vegetable curry, ramen, Chinese noodles, yakisoba, tuna salad, pasta with white sauce, kimchi quesadillas, pasta with sauce of an indeterminate color: I can do it all.  Well, all of the major noodle-based dishes, anyway.

Just as I switched off the stove and we began wolfing down our chanko nabe, we heard a metallic ting come from somewhere in the dark woods around us.  We put down our chopsticks and listened: there was singing as well.

"I don't think I like the movie we're in," Jenn said, laughing nervously.

"It's probably...uh...maybe a temple somewhere in the woods down there?" I suggested, and we slurped our soup and tried to believe it.  The woods echoed with chanting now, whistly voices carried on the woods and filtered through innumerable spiderwebs.  Gongs, maybe, cymbals or bells and a steady thump that we hoped was our heartbeats.

When we finished the last of our dinner and set up the tent in the shadow of the roadside pavilion, I caught sight of something across the river: though it was almost too distant to see, especially viewed through the pine boughs, it appeared that there were figures dancing in a circle and beating drums on the unlit grass.  The singing must be coming from there, we decided, and relaxed slightly.  If it was indeed some manner of religious ritual, at least we were probably too far away to be in danger of human sacrifice (or worse, being asked to dance with them).  The voices and drums dropped away not long after we zipped our tent and instantly fell into sleep, though the forest seemed to sing and chime long into the night.

Can you spot our tent in this picture?  Oh man, you can?  Crap, start packing up, we gotta get outta here!

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."

The Strangeness of Kindness

We’d always talked about sticking a sign somewhere on the backs of our bikes.  Nothing fancy, maybe just some cardboard covered in packing tape, explaining who we are and what we’re up to in the native language.  Somehow we never quite got around to it the last time around (living in a tent and biking all day tends to eat up your free time).  This time, though, we were ready.  With the help of our Korean teacher, we made up a laminated sign designed to spark conversations with curious passersby and also reassure them that we are neither hobos nor circus performers, no matter how funny we look:

Translation: We are traveling the world by bicycle!  Let’s share together (conversation/stories, music, food...)!  We speak a little Korean!  Thank you!

By day two of the trip, we were in need of a little tender kindness.  We made it out of Seoul considerably later than we’d planned, and come nightfall we found ourselves with nowhere convenient for camping.  At last, in the middle of a crowded park, we discovered that there was a small, sheltered patch of grass behind a stage.  Not perfect, but we thought it’d do in a pinch.  Not ten minutes after we’d zipped ourselves into the tent, at 10:30 on Saturday night, who should wander by but a practicing saxophonist.  Pleasure at such gentle music to serenade us to sleep quickly shifted into horror as he went on to play “My Way,” no joke, seven or eight times consecutively.  Then, when he finally stopped and we relaxed once more, he began to play again, this time right next to our tent.  He could’ve been inside the tent, for all I know; I refused to open my eyes.  It was a rough night, is what I’m saying.

The next day, we hit the trail early, but four hours of sleep really took their toll.  By midday we were wilting under the hot July sun, and by three o’clock we had to stop for a nap by the roadside.  We were passed, as usual, by a parade of lycra-clad cyclists zipping down the path.  Some of them stopped to read our sign; many of them laughed, and a couple gave us candy to cheer us up.

Just as we were getting ready to saddle up again, a nice-looking middle-aged man pulled up, read our sign, and began to ask us questions about our trip.

“I was hoping to meet someone who could come give a talk about biking at my children’s school,” he told us, and in an instant, Jenn was fully awake.

“We’d love to!” she said.  “But we need a place to camp.  Could we camp at your school?”

“Oh, I’m not a teacher there, but you can camp at my house, no problem.”  He told us to call him Lee, and asked us to follow him to his house, about half an hour down the road.

Lee’s house is a little patch of heaven right next to the bike path, overlooking the sunset over the mountains and the river.  He asked us to set up in a patch of weeds, then suggested we shower before joining the family for dinner.  Reeling at this kindness, we did as he asked (covered in two days of sweat and road grit, the shower was more a courtesy for them than for us).

Between our showers, Lee showed us photos from his family's trip to Death Valley.  When we expressed surprise that someone would choose Death Valley as their vacation destination, he told us it was a Creationism-themed tour, and that Death Valley was a place of note in the Noah's Ark myth (and thus, evidence against the existence of evolution).  I politely asked no follow-up questions.

“My wife will be back from church around 8 o’clock, but until then, let’s start cooking,” he said, and put me to work grilling meat over the fire his kids had built.  We were supervised by the family dogs, who made sure we didn’t waste a single drop of grease.

"You're gonna get an immersive English lesson!" Lee told his kids.  They seemed unimpressed.

The dish I was asked to help cook is one of Korea's specialties, samgyeopsal, sometimes translated in English as "bacon steak."

Just when the meat was all finished, three people walked up to the house and were introduced to us as their priest, his wife, and Lee’s wife, Ji-young.  They explained that they had already eaten after church, and just watched as the rest of us went to town on a pile of meat.  Then, when the meat pile was reduced to rubble, the dinner turned to drinks and the priest and his wife excused themselves.

Over a glass of homemade makgeolli, Lee asked us, "Are you Christian?"  Bill and I stalled out, but Jenn charged in with "I mean, we're American, so..."  Ji-young laughed and slapped the table.  "Of course they're Christian," she chided her husband.  "They're American, everybody in America is Christian."

I kept my damn mouth shut.  If I were to pretend to be any religion, I'd prefer to be Fake Jewish to Fake Christian.  That said, questions like "Are you a Christian?" make me naturally nervous.  Six years living in rural Missouri has taught me that those most prone to asking questions like that are the ones who care pretty hard about what answer you give.

When asked, I wanted to say, "No, absolutely not, and it's downright offensive to say that there are no non-Christian Americans!"  But I didn't want to offend our hosts by starting a screaming match.  Especially when they had shown us such kindness and hospitality.  That is the side of Christianity that six years in Kirksville had not prepared me for: Christianity not as political position or a club with which to menace college students on the quad, but as a philosophy of kindness.  Even the same brand of Christianity that spends thousands on vacations that celebrate the non-existence of basic scientific principles, even this kind can be held by these kind, lovely people who would invite strangers into their home.

“Hey, didn’t you want us to speak at your school?” Jenn asked when the makgeolli had run out and a bottle of tequila opened.

“Oh, my teacher friend didn’t answer his phone,” Lee said.  “Just come back here when you’re coming back to Seoul from Busan.”  We promised we would.

After friending each other on Facebook, of course.

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.

Off Road and Off Track

When we reached Daegu, about 200 kilometers from our departure in Busan, our route took a turn.  The bike path had carried us along the river reliably to this point (except for the mountains), but now we had to find another path; the Nakdonggang wound another 200 kilometers north to Andong dam.  Fortunately, the city of Daegu is well-suited for biking as well, provided of course you don't need to actually go anywhere in the city itself: the river that forms its border on three sides has a very familiar-looking bike path running along familiar-looking tennis courts and abandoned public toilets.  We took a well-deserved break in Daegu for a day, then hit the road again, having to backtrack a few kilometers just to get to the bike path.

Not to get off on too much of a tangent, but such is really the problem with bike paths.  Sure, not having to compete with cars is pretty pimpin', but the fact of the matter is that a bike path can take you to a very limited set of destinations (Point A, Point B, or riding around in circles (not recommended)).  For we who are trying to make actual distance across a country, this means we often have the choice of going wildly out of our way to get on a dedicated bike path or taking a more direct route that could be unsafe for cyclists.  As a touring cyclist, it's pretty maddening that the people who plan these bike paths don't seem to understand that anyone will use their roads for actual transportation rather than weekend recreation.  Hence the Four Major Rivers Project's tendency to have 50 kilometers of beautiful, well-maintained bike path bordered by 30 kilometers of nigh-impassable mountains and forest.  "Surely," these architects declare, their feet up on mahogany tables, "anyone who wants to ride our bike path can ride the good parts, then when they're finished, they can turn around and ride back to their car, which they'll use to actually get around."  Bastards.

Anyway, we skirted Daegu, spending six hours or so dodging lycra-clad racing cyclists and ajimas in visors, masks, and arm covers shuffling down the road.  The old ladies in East Asia sure are careful not to get a single second of sun while they're outside.

By sunset, we were, as usual, not where we expected we would be.  The path stretched for miles in either direction, propped up on a steep green hill with no shoulder on either side.  Below us, along the river, there was a broad, dusty flood plain spotted with ancient, ruined concrete and determined verdant shoots.  Our visibility would be high for this, our last night camping on this adventure, but there seemed to be little alternative, as another city (and thus, even less cover) seemed to be ahead of us.  We decided to take our chances at being spotted from the bike path, banking yet again on the sympathy or apathy of our fellow cyclists.  Laboriously, we rolled our bikes down the hill, crushing meter-high yellow flowers and collecting spiderwebs on our panniers, then sat to drink the beers we'd saved from the last convenience store.

As we waited for the sun to finish coming down, a soft whirring noise in the distance grew louder.  We spotted a colorful shape in the distance, and it headed towards us at a pace almost as lazy as our own.  Eventually we figured out what we were looking at: a man suspended from a parachute with an enormous fan strapped to his back.  I mean, obviously, right?  Man, I dunno how we didn't guess that immediately.  Duh.

The man passed over our heads, then circled around and passed again, waving to us and smiling the smile of a man who's realizing his childhood fantasy (indeed, every boy's childhood fantasy).  We waved back, happy for the man's gleeful greeting, though a bit dismayed that bike touring was clearly not the best way to travel anymore.

Korea: A Whole New World (Please Don't Sue Us, Disney)

Fresh (on) the boat.

We'd been off the boat for five days now.  Busan was...well, we hadn't gotten out much in those five days, really.  After a laborious trip across the city with all of our gear to get to our Couchhost's place, we didn't feel up to much in the way of exploration.  Nor did we feel particularly game for planning out our next three weeks before we had to report to our employer in Seoul.  Let's just say we were...biding our time.

We were studying the effects of whitewashing on bike travel.

Though three weeks was far too short a time to bike the whole of Korea (for us, anyway), after a few weeks of struggle with WWOOF Korea, we found a WWOOF host in the nearby city of Gyeongju.  Incredibly, Google Maps refuses to give any walking, biking, or driving directions in Korea (I blame tachyon interference), but as near as we could deduce, Gyeongju was just two cities away, maybe a hundred kilometers at most.  So, naturally, we decided to go through Daegu, a route that would be about three hundred kilometers.

The reason for our detour was Korea's "Four Major Rivers Project" (not to be confused with the other Four Major Rivers: Cuomo, Phoenix, Joan, and Tam).  The project is a recently-completed multi-trillion-won series of bike and walking trails that follows all of the major rivers in South Korea.  It's possible to travel directly from Busan to Seoul via these paths; according to some internet guides, it's even possible to do so in about 10 days, presumably if you're a mad, sleepless robot who's not carrying any camping gear or musical instruments.  Three hundred kilometers along bike paths sounded considerably better than a hundred kilometers of schlepping our bikes across sidewalks and busy city streets, that was for sure.  Plus, as the Katy Trail taught us, it's pretty hard to get lost on a bike path (though we did make some valiant efforts).

When at last, we had done the bare minimum of preparations (buying groceries and a road atlas that we would never open), we bid farewell to our spectacularly generous host and hit the road.  After an hour of dodging potholes and pedestrians, I had the feeling that something was wrong.  It was hard to identify just what it was, but it was as though I were missing something, like some vital part of bike travel was...

"Shit!" I exclaimed.  "I forgot my uke at Anne's!"

In this instance, our usual one-legged-tortoise pace did us some good: after all of our riding, we were still in Busan proper, and only seven subway stops away from our host's place.  I ran back, picked up my uke using the magical reality of Korea that is keypad locks, and made it back to the bikes.

Finally, we made it to the bike path, an elevated, tree-lined road that stretched far off into the distance, past the cloned, Inception-like apartment blocks that make up every horizon in Korea.  The bike path ran along the Nakdonggang River (and occasionally right on top of it) through endless unused parks and wildlife areas, affording us ample opportunities for free camping.

At the end of the first day, we made camp in a small park somewhere an unknown distance from Busan (no Google, remember?).  We scarfed down our dinner of pan-fried noodles with tuna, careful to conserve as much of our water as possible, then set up behind a copse of trees to shield ourselves from passersby and the nearby love hotels.  We could have camped in one of the parks with water and without any people, but that's just how we roll.

Also, there were dragons (left).