Boredom on the Orient Express

Hour 0: The guidebook tells us that Beijing West Railway Station is the largest train station in Asia, and it certainly seems busy enough to justify so much square footage.  Even at 9:00, when we begin lining up for our train to Kunming, Waiting Room 4 must have five hundred people crammed into it.  Families squat among islands of bags that clog up the aisles, though nobody sits on the floor but us.  When we see people hack up big wads of phlegm and spit them on the floor, we understand why.

Most of the men crouching by the walls are slurping down cups of instant noodles.  We came prepared, having stopped for a plate of the famous Peking Duck before coming to the train station.  Or at least, that was the plan, but somehow we ended up being served an entire roasted pigeon instead.  It was good, but greasy.  And gnawing on the bald head was an experience I’m not eager to repeat; made me feel like I was cannibalizing Patrick Stewart.

o_O

We’re called to line up for boarding at 8:45, and the aisle turns into a scrum.  Old men shoulder past me to squeeze ahead one place in line, young women in high heels elbow past us, dragging their children by the collars.  Gradually the space between passengers is reduced to an inch, then to nothing.  Compared to yesterday’s train to Beijing from the Great Wall, this is completely senseless; everyone in line has an assigned seat on the train, which means that getting to board three seconds sooner brings no reward but an extra three seconds of train time.

We board our train and congratulate ourselves for sending our bikes ahead instead of bringing them on board and hoping for the best: our hard sleeper car is composed of stacks of bunks and little else, with virtually no room for luggage.  We happily take the bottom bunks, which have the added luxuries of a table and storage space under the beds.  We make ourselves as comfortable as possible and settle in for the next 43 hours.

Hour 1: One of our bunkmates is a youngish guy who bellows every time he yawns.  He sticks around the whole trip, serenading us with his sleepiness.

Hours 2-17: Toss, turn, and fret about our bicycles.  The young English-speaking employee at the freight counter in Beijing assured us that everything would be fine, but images of broken spokes and missing cycles haunted my thoughts, keeping me awake even on the surprisingly comfortable bunk.

Hour 18: We’re finally on the ball enough to catch sight of a sign at one of our stops.  We’ve made it to Changsha, yet another Chinese city I’ve never heard of.  Looking at our map, it looks like we’ve been going due south since getting on the train.

Hour 20: Xiangtan.  Our previous bunkmates have all moved on, and we are joined by a couple of middle-aged ladies and a smiley 3-year-old with a long rat tail and a toy musket that he tries to jab in his mom’s eye.  He quickly becomes the star of the whole car: he’s patted and spoken kindly to by every other passenger, and Jenn and I pass an hour entertaining him (and ourselves) with hilariously inept magic tricks.  He laughs every time we speak English; for comparison, I try saying nonsense syllables for awhile, and he finds these less funny.  He then tries to force-feed me an enormous slice of grapefruit, and I completely fail to teach him the word “no.”

Hours 20-41: The boy's mom and her friend eat.  Just, like, eat and eat.  Cakes, fruits, lunch boxes, instant noodles, dumplings, candy, chicken.  In fact, it seems that nobody on this train brought anything to entertain themselves with except for food.  By the end of the trip, we're wading through plastic wrappers and crumbs.  In that time, we finished a book, knit half of a sock, played Settlers of Catan, and drew adorable pictures to help explain ourselves to people who don't speak any of the languages we speak.

Hour 22: I look up from my falling-apart copy of Tom Jones when I hear a plastic hissing noise.  The little boy, under the half-watchful eye of his mom, is peeing into a trashcan.  Jenn and I exchange shocked looks.  The toilet is just down the hall, after all.  And hey, that toilet is scary as heck, and I certainly don’t want to go in there, either, but it must be horribly unsanitary to have a puddle of pee sitting open in the train.  We try not to think about it, and are a little more careful about putting on our shoes.

Hour 25: Improbably, impossibly, the radio starts playing a song from “Pure Moods.”

Hour 28: I wake up, realizing the lights and radio were finally turned off at some point.  Jenn is still awake, tells me that she can’t stop coughing.  “I hope I didn’t catch something from that kid,” she says, and I can’t do anything but agree.

Hour 35: Wake up in a city somewhere in Yunnan province, I think.  Sharp, tooth-like mountains jab up from the earth, breaking up the roads and bridges of an otherwise unremarkable, new-looking city like all the ones we’ve passed so far.  The smog seems to have returned, though that could be...just fog?

Hour 37: The endless fields and rivers have turned to dramatic rocky mountains sprinkled with distant rice paddies.  When the train veers closer, they turn out not to be rice paddies at all, but stairs of narrow paths cut into the red earth.  Too small to be rice paddies, or really anything agricultural.  What are they?

Where the cliffs are too steep for these paths they are covered in wild grass or impenetrable woods.  We’ve come a long way from the bamboo forests and gray stone of Japan.  The mountains grow higher and higher around us and my heart sinks in proportion.  Did we make a huge mistake in deciding to ride our bikes here?  Sixteen hundred kilometers from Kunming to Laos.  If all of it looks like this...

Jenn points out that it looks like Tuscany, but with more mountains.  And more dengue fever.

Hour 38: An old man in the next berth beckons me over and asks me something in Chinese.  I follow my usual M.O. and smile, shrug, and say, “Sorry.”  He repeats his question, and I go with my buest guess and answer, “Kunming.”  This seems to satisfy him, so I clarify: “Beijing to Kunming.”  Then he asks something else, and I try, “USA?”  He laughs.  Apparently I guessed wrong.  Somehow he’s able to ask me how I’m planning to travel in China without speaking Chinese.  Mister, I couldn’t answer that even if the two of us shared a language.

Hour 39: I finally break down and order a lunch box from one of the vendors that wheel up and down the aisle.  I take a picture, then judge it immediately too gross-looking to share with the world.  Tasted OK, although I question the wisdom of giving cabbage and kidney beans to people who have to share an enclosed space (and a severely nasty toilet) with one another for 43 hours.

Hour 42.5: We pull into Kunming a good 20 minutes early.  We are stunned that, 3000 kilometers later, this is the same country as Beijing: the smog has all but disappeared, replaced by the hawkers, colorful ethnic dress, and zillions of scooters that scream "Southeast Asia."  Our stomachs tighten as we eventually zero in on the freight office, but all the worry turns out to be for naught.  Our bikes and panniers are fine if slightly dirtier than we remember.  We reassemble Sally and Jenn's bike (which remains unnamed, even though I proposed the name "Bike Tyson" that Jenn dismissed with, "Why, because it's black?").  The crowd of movers and customers stop what they're doing to gawk at our routine and say what I hope are encouraging words and not, y'know, bitter curses.

Jenn and I frantically try to remember which side goes down.

Altogether this voyage cost us about 200 bucks and 43 hours of our lives.  Beats flying any day of the week.  Though next time we'll probably pack more food.  Incidentally, Jenn did catch something from that kid and spent the next 24 hours coughing.

You Ate WHAT? Championship Edition

By now, I think it’s safe that we don’t have anything to prove when it comes to being adventurous eaters.  Every time we get the opportunity to put some kind of unfamiliar critter in our belly, we jump at the chance: we chow down on chicken hearts, blood sausage, sheep testicles, live octopus, whale brains, and silkworm larvae.  And (except for the larvae), they’re all pretty damn good.  In our experience, people typically don’t bother eating stuff that doesn’t taste at least pretty okay, and we’ve armed ourselves with that knowledge in our quest to eat our way across the world.

With varying results.

Now, China has a bit of a reputation as far as food goes.  Actually, from what we’ve heard, it has two entirely different reputations: in the popular imagination, China does not consume what we consider “Chinese food” in the West, but rather heaping bowlfuls of sheep eyeballs and cat brains, fried mantises and pickled anus.  And of course, depending on whom you’re talking to and how potentially racist they are, dog.  According to the people we’ve met who have actually been to China, however, Chinese people are bigger fans of less intimidating cuisine like fried noodles and dumplings.  This was a dispute that we had to settle for ourselves.

On the recommendation of Wikitravel, we made our way to Beijing’s Donghuamen Night Market, a site we were told featured traditional Chinese street food, and also snakes and scorpions.  Truly a challenge that we couldn’t pass up.

We took in the sights and the smells, which were spicy enough to cut through the ever-present layer of smog.  There seemed to be a thousand dishes for sale, most of them on sticks, all of them distressingly familiar.  Grilled squid tentacles, meat dumplings, noodles with cabbage, roast chicken.  Vendors shouted in Chinese and in English, and we tuned them out as we had done with touts all day.  One voice, however, cut through:

“Hello!  Hello!  Snake!”

We did a double-take.  The vendor brandished a skewer of diamond-painted skin and smiled.  We ordered two, with chili.

Honestly, snake is the least intimidating weird food we’ve tried.  The taste and shape were so similar to a garden-variety squid tentacle (that’s what we keep in our garden, anyway) that we half-thought we’d been ripped off.  Still, if you can’t trust a complete stranger selling snake on a stick, who can you trust?  Snake is chewy, savory, and all in all more food-like than half the stuff they sell at KFC.  The scariest thing about this experience was the price tag: 60 yuan for two, amounting to about $10, a hefty sum that would buy four much more filling meals elsewhere.

Worried that we wouldn’t be able to fill our bellies for less than a hundred bucks, we wolfed down some safer offerings, which tended to be much cheaper than the exotic stuff: grilled corn, fried dumplings, and a big bowl of stewed tripe.  Our hunger thus sated, it was time to get serious.

The friendly-looking young vendor called to us as we walked past.  He gestured to his many-legged wares.  “Hello!” he said.  “Hello!”

“How much?” I asked, suspicious.  He told me that each stick of fried locusts was 30 yuan, and I waved him off, assuming we could get a better deal at a different stall.  “But!” he yelled, then abandoned his English, made antennae with his fingers, and began making cricket noises.  We thanked him and moved on.

Sadly, there seemed to be some kind of agreement or syndicate at work at Donghuamen Night Market, as all the prices were the same down the line of food stalls.  We returned to Bug Man, deciding that if 10 bucks was too much to eat bugs, then dammit, we were just going to have to spend too much.  We gave the man a fistful of cash and ordered one stick of crickets and one of miniature scorpions.

This is when it first hit me that we were doing something crazy.  Somehow it had never entered into my head that there’s a reason most people don’t eat scorpions on a daily basis.  They're pretty poisonous, right?  Or venomous?  Is there a difference?  The Fear started to kick in.  Were we about to spend the next week laid up with food poisoning?

Well, if we were, we resolved with a sigh, then at least we’d be the coolest kids in Intensive Care.  We took the plunge.

Cricket is, I’m sorry to say, not a taste sensation.  My worries disappeared with the first bite, which reminded me more than anything of the tiny shrimp that are such a popular snack in Japanese izakayas.  The main taste was of frying medium, unfortunately.  Though the feeling of having legs stick out your mouth as you chew is delightfully bizarre.

Round two: Jenn and Harry vs. scorpions!

Note: we made a delightfully witty video of Jenn eating scorpions and declaring them delicious.  Unfortunately, we can't post it due to technical something-something.  Anyway, little bitty fried scorpions became our new favorite food.

Scorpions were clearly where it was at.  Not wanting to pass up an opportunity to explore this new world of deliciousness, we headed back to Bug Man to try a more intimidating specimen.  This one was a whopping 60 yuan for a single nighmare-creature-on-a-stick, but we were in too deep to back out now.  Also it's possible that the venom was affecting our brains.  We scoffed at the startled-looking foreigners who were tentatively nibbling on chicken wings; we were obviously so, so much cooler than punks like them.  Who would bother to travel thousands of miles just to eat something they could get at home?  We chuckled, then dug into our bug.

And the reviews are in!

Yeah, we clearly flew too close to the sun on this one.  There was some sort of meat inside them claws, but they were protected by a thick layer of inedible chitin.  It tasted like a mouthful of fingernails, something I've finally learned not to eat.  It...wasn't food, really.  Gnawing on a mouthful of shards of black armor did nothing but cut up the insides of our mouths.  Discreetly, we tossed the thorax and tail in the trash, flushed with anger over wasting $10 on something that wasn't even food.  The little scorpions on sticks were a harmless delicacy, something that anyone could giggle over and praise themselves for being adventurous.  This big one?  This was sold only for ego purposes.

As we conducted our walk of shame back to the subway, our reputation had apparently already made it down the line of vendors.  "Hey," one vendor whispered to the next, probably, "here come a couple of foreigners who think they have something to prove.  Bring out the weird stuff!"  "Let's see if they'll eat raw starfish or something!"  "I bet I can get them to eat a hammer!"

"Hello!  Spiders!" called one man, holding up enormous tarantulas on sticks.  "Dog!  Dog!" shouted another, brandishing some unidentifiable cut of meat.  We had been branded as rubes.

"What did we do wrong?" we asked ourselves on the subway ride back to the hotel.  We had wanted nothing more than to eat what few dared to put in their mouths...and therein is the lesson.  There's two kinds of weird food in the world: stuff that people in other cultures really do eat, and that's scary purely for cultural reasons (balut, beonddegi, most state fair offerings); and then there's stuff that was never meant to be eaten, but enterprising cooks know that they can pass off as delicacies to gullible tourists or anyone who wants to show off their fearlessness.  The big scorpion belongs in the latter category along with those hot sauces that make you cry and throw up.  We had proven ourselves adventurous, even fearless.  What comes next for us is to pursue the wisdom that most people learn at a much younger age: don't put stuff in your mouth that isn't food.

You Ate WHAT? Mystery Edition

I still have no goddamn idea what this stuff was.

People Persons

The next morning, we were relieved to be finished with our hardest task at Pasar, though that relief was tempered slightly by our disappointment at the disappearing audience.

“A lot of our friends spent 10, 12 hours driving here yesterday from Wakayama or further,” Natsu explained.  “They all fell asleep early.”

“But you can perform again on Friday if you want to,” said Aki in a rare show of energy.  We agreed, excited, and, figuring we’d practiced enough by that point, threw ourselves into enjoying the festival.  Over the next week, we overcame our shyness enough to become quite close to some of the Pasar family and friends:

There was Mayumi, proprietress of "Mayumi's Miracle Cafe," with an unbelievable laugh and a cigarettey voice.  The rumors said she had worked in the fashion industry for 30 years before quitting to run a vegan cafe.  When we parted ways, we wondered if we would meet again, and she told us, "Maybe we will.  Every minute, every second...is a miracle!" and roared with laughter.

Shuuichi.  Tatted up, giant holes in his ears that he would sometimes use to transport cigarettes, carrying around a hollowed-out gourd full of alcohol, he would frequently just bend over or list to one side for a few minutes.  I thought he might be narcoleptic, but then I saw him driving a car.  He did talk to me at length about his life -- I caught very little of it, but it seems he was a hikkikomori, a shut-in, for twelve years.  Now he spends his time trying to experience as much as he can of life.  Rumor has it he did some of his tattoos himself while locked away in his house.

This dude came by himself and danced like nobody has danced before, usually while wearing outrageous masks or swinging around kites that he made out of cut-up magazines.  Oh, and he's just as blurry in real life.

Yoko and little Haru-kun, sporting the official festival garb.

Our worries about filling our idle time fizzled quickly: from our first cup of coffee at 8 a.m., we were put to work kneading pizza dough, lighting the fire for the brick oven, baking and selling pizzas, helping Maya in the communal kitchen, carrying heavy objects to the stage and back.  When we had a moment to breathe, we were asked to give the other WWOOFers a break and work the bar.

“Hey, you can’t come back here,” the Austrian told us when we first fetched someone a beer.

“What?” I asked, certain that I had just misheard over the band.  But no, he explained, the bar area was only for staff, and Jenn and I weren’t allowed back there.  In an uncharacteristic disregard for confrontation, I explained to him in small words that we were part of the staff, that we were here to help at Pasar, and Natsu herself told us to take over the bar.  He spent the next few hours offering elaborate apologies and bowing in what sure looked like a patronizing manner.

In truth, I liked being a bartender.  It was one of the few tasks that needed doing that didn’t require a higher level of Japanese or knowledge of the inner workings of Pasar Moon.  I got to be right at the heart of the party -- hell, after a couple of Pasar mojitos, I fancied myself the most indispensable part of the party -- and I had an excuse to interact with all of the merrymakers.  Plus, at the bar, we had the best seat in the house:

“That’s now how you make a mojito,” the Austrian told me, his lip curled in a sneer, his eyes rolling like pinballs.  I pretended not to hear him, but at last I thanked him for the help and got him to teach me how to properly pour one.

Then it was, “You have to tip the glass when you pour the beer.”  And, still later, “You opened the valve on the keg too much, let me fix it for you.”  When he disappeared after pouring three cups of pure foam, I adjusted it back.

Of course, if we were part of the Pasar staff, we may not have acted like it the whole time.  After Aki told us that, despite his earlier offer, Dragon Room presenters wouldn’t be receiving envelopes full of dead presidents to perform, we were informed that we would still be getting free admission to the festival and free food.  Unfortunately, meals at Pasar, especially during festival time, are a very sporadic thing.  Often we would be so busy at the pizza oven that we wouldn't think to eat anything until two or three in the afternoon.  With no staff meal obviously forthcoming, we would buy some food from one of the many food stalls, only to be told half an hour later that the staff's free lunch was ready.

Still, there are fates worse than a piping-hot Pasar Burger.

At least the music was great.  The live performances spanned from trippy looped acoustic guitars to reggae to punk to things we’d never heard before.  One of Pasar’s regulars, supposedly the 40th generation priest at the local Shinto shrine, took the stage to play something extremely trippy that he called “space rock.”  The DJs killed it, too, playing a great deal of Afrobeat and funk and generally keeping the crowd in a dancing mood: one proud dad bounced his little daughter on his shoulders to the sounds of “Rapper’s Delight,” big old grins on both their faces.  We bopped our heads and danced in place by the pizza oven or at the bar while the Austrian sulked or bored the other WWOOFer to tears.

Taka watched a kid use a piece of bamboo as a guitar to play along with the band.  He drilled a couple of holes in it and attached a shoulder strap.  The kid proceeded to completely shred on his new instrument.

On Friday night, before performing at the acoustic showcase that would close out the evening, we were treated to a burst of traditional Japanese culture.  First, a duo dressed in kimonos took the outdoor stage and led the crowd in bon-odori, the standard Japanese festival dance.  There’s really no analogue for it in America; it’s a seasonal activity that everyone in the country is very familiar with, so maybe the best comparison would be like singing Christmas carols.  But, y'know, dancing.  The crowd went nuts, every man, woman, child and dog gleefully performing the dance moves that are so remedial they’re almost offensive.

Then, the central courtyard of Pasar was transformed into a stage for the kagura, a traditional Japanese performance art.  It was described to me as a “snake dance” or “warrior dance,” but what it turned out to be was an elaborately staged pantomime.  The first act had a masked figure engage in a fishing exhibition that had him flinging hard candy to the crowd and snookering volunteers to come and help him catch papier-mache fish.  He brought our young American friend up, and she performed her duties admirably (though she did break his fishing pole), apparently oblivious to the fact that the young, blonde American invited to participate in an ancient ritual under the full moon is pretty much doomed.

The second act brought the promised snakes, which were actually dragons for some reason.  The protagonist, whose words were muffled through his mask and who gasped for air in between lines, was evidently some sort of mustachioed dragon-slayer, much like Super Mario.  The three dragons were rendered with terrifying detail, and I gasped with the rest of the audience when they had the protagonist tangled in their deadly coils.  The story ended on a happy note, though, with the dragons’ heads chopped off and tossed into the crowd.

Luckily, we didn’t have to follow the dramatized execution: before we took the stage again in the Dragon Room, there was a long performance by a very diverse group of musicians, including hula dancers and a bongo player who was the spitting image of Snoop Dogg (but, y’know, Japanese).  The house was still fairly full when Jenny Dreadful (that’s us) started to perform, and with only fifteen or so minutes to play, we did some of our old favorites: “You Made the Night Too Long,” “Bei Mir Bist du Schoen,” “Feelin’ Good,” and “I Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl.”  The audience loved it, and we felt immediately vindicated.  We came to Japan to do exactly this, and how ‘bout that, we killed it!  The final performance by a tall, mohawked didgeridoo player brought a satisfying end to the evening.  Jenny Dreadful received about 1000 yen in tips, 500 of which we gave to the didgeridooist.

Saturday came, the penultimate day of the festival.  Everything had settled into a nice, comfortable groove: coffee, kitchen duties, making pizza, breakfast at 2 p.m.  In the evening, when Jenn went to lie down on the tent for awhile, I went to the bar to offer the WWOOFers a break.

“Hey, Harry!” the Austrian greeted me.  “Tequila?”  He produced the bottle and poured a couple of shots, plus one for Mayumi.

“Hey, thanks,” I said cautiously.  “You buying?”

“Nah, I don’t have any money,” he replied.

Mayumi and I exchanged a look.  “I can keep a secret,” she said, then burst into laughter.

The Austrian produced the salt and announced in a bizarre fake accent even more affected than his own, “Hai, Pablo Escobar especial...co-caine!”  He looked at us expectantly.  Mayumi and I laughed, though I think hers may have been genuine.  We downed our shots, regretting that the limes had sold out the night before, and all high-fived.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” said the other WWOOFer in a low voice.  Before I could get a chance to ask her any questions, I heard a booming “Tequila!” followed by a raucous cheer.  Behind me, the Austrian was pouring another round of gratis tequila shots.

“Yeah, he’s been doing that for awhile now,” she told me, rubbing her eyes.  I eyed the Austrian, who cheersed with a half dozen roaring drunk musicians (including last night's didgeridooist) and offered them "Pablo Escobar especial...co-caine" to a barrage of laughter.

"Don't worry," I told her with the false bravado of speaking to a 17-year-old, "I've got this."

Dutifully, I took the bar next to the Austrian and slapped him on the back.  "Hey," I began.  "Hey," this time in a friendly manner, as one would address his best buddy who also happens to be haplessly drunk.  "I've got it, man, you can take a break."

"No, no, it's good, I...I work."  His English was worse than I remembered, and if he was this out of it, I doubted my ability to peacefully convince him to leave.  We worked side by side, though hardly together, through the final band of the evening.  I poured a few more rounds of tequila for some of the musicians -- apparently he had given them a taste for the stuff.  Eventually he wandered off once he realized he wouldn't be getting any more free drinks, and I kept to my work cheerfully.

Around eleven o'clock, when the last band had wrapped up, the didgeridooist assembled his friends to do another shot of tequila.  I poured four, then five, then eventually seven as more friends wandered up.  I hadn't congratulated the tall man for his excellent performance on the didgeridoo the night before, but I held my tongue when I saw how much he was listing from side to side.  He met my eyes and gave me some sour look I couldn't read, so I went back to my work.  When I passed out the shots and the salt, the musicians raised their cups, cheersed, and downed their tequila with gusto.  Except for the didgeridooist, who pointed at my chest, slurred something beyond my Japanese ability, then reached his long arm across the bar and poured his tequila all down the front of my shirt.  Pinned by the bar as I was, I had no room to do anything but take it, the cold liquor wetting my clothes.

I lacked the vocabulary to take any action.  "Why did you do that," for instance, or "what the hell did you do that for?"  What I did manage was a polite, "Oh, no, you spilled your drink!"  The didgeridooist reeled back a bit, not averting his dark eyes from mine.  His friends started to disappear, though one or two of them said something quiet to him.

"You say somethin'?" he barked at me, or at least that's how I understood it.  I denied saying anything, collected the empty shot glasses, and turned my back to him, trying to keep tears from welling up.  He wandered off at some point, and I held it together long enough to close the bar promptly at midnight and collapse in the tent.  I heard later that Taka reopened the bar not long after and the party, including the Austrian and the didgeridooist, kept the fun going until five in the morning.

I wish I understood what was going through the didgeridooist's head (or, y'know, coming out of his mouth).  I've never had the experience of esteem and admiration for someone turning to a feeling of betrayal.  At least, not so quickly.  Or wetly.  Maybe I somehow gave offense without realizing it.  Maybe he was just a mean drunk.  Probably that one.  He evaded my eyes for the rest of the festival, either because he felt shame about what he did or, not remembering, he disliked me enough to avoid me.

Whatever the reason, I tried not to think anything bad about Pasar, even as I saw Pasar's friends and staff hang out with this guy into the wee hours.  This may have been an ugly incident, but peace and love were still the words at Pasar, and 99% of the people at the festival immediately became my favorite people in the world.

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."