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Daegu is fine by us

We awoke 5 or 6 miles from the city center in the inland city of Daegu, in South Korea. It was somewhat of a late rise, for asiawheeling at least, and by the time we had take a refreshing dip in the blazing Internet connection at our love hotel, it was nearly traditional lunchtime. Progress was further hampered by the fact that the internet connection here (an Ethernet cable we’d removed from the complementary in-room gaming machine) refused to be shared by two machines.

As you no doubt remember, dear reader, Scott and I had at this point in the Korea section of the trip fallen deeply in love with the prevalent and hyper-affordable automated coffee machine. They all operated in the same basic principal: put 10 or 15 american cents in and out pops a paper cup which is then robotically filled with an ebbing jet of unremarkable instant coffee/sugar/cream product. These little buggers were positively doing wonders for our lucidity in this country, and our current love hotel had taken the entire game up to the next level by installing one in the hotel lobby that was free. You heard me.

So it was well caffeinated and nearly half past that place in the morning where our bodies would run uncomplainingly on just sticky instant coffee drinks that we mounted the cycles and headed out for a meal. We selected a small restaurant not far from the hotel, overlooking a somewhat sullen concrete walled canal and were handed a totally incomprehensible menu. Lacking a common language with our server, we did the usual, which was to pantomine to the associate indicating we would like them to recommend some dishes. This maneuver appeared to work like a charm, and I sat down on the floor while Scott headed over to this cafe’s coffee machine to get us a little pick me up. Here is what they brought us.

It was a rather large plate of cold ice cold salty pork, accompanied by a rather dizzying assortment of sides. We were instructed to take pieces of the pork and mix them up with bunches of different condiments and then eat them with similarly cold sticky rice. I guess it was a cold things restaurant. The coffee was hot, though, and we left feeling energized.

Back on the streets, we were feeling good. Scott’s bike seemed back to it’s old self, and the sun was blazing.

We headed the opposite direction from downtown, and after crossing a few canals, made short work of getting into a more rural area. The cars seemed bigger here in Daegu, much like the increase in vehicle size as one experiences as they head towards the center of America. The landscape was lush, full of lakes and rivers, marshes and forests, but also engineered. Smooth new looking roads wound amidst the plants and water, and huge concrete towers were sprinkled about.

The diversity of scenery in even a small portion of the wheel was stunning. At one moment, we would be wheeling through an imposing, almost communist feeling high-rise housing block,

then on a causeway crossing over marshy rivulets


then through strange junkyards and flea markets, the sort of stuff that would not have been so out of place in Urumqi,

then into what looked sort of like Ohio or Pennsylvania farmland.

Soon stands selling vegetables and flowers began to dot the road, and one by one the lanes fell off on either side of us until there were just two rather narrow ones left. When we hit a snarl of traffic, which appeared to have been caused by a lack of parking for one of the larger vegetable selling operations (aggravated by recent lane reduction), we pulled off the road we’d been taking and started riding a smaller, single lane farm road.

We were really out there now, and began to feel it as the narrow paved rode on which we rode dissolved into gravel, and then into more of a foot path than anything else. The footpath eventually terminated at a dam crossing consisting of large cubic concrete “stepping stones”.  So we hoisted our bikes and headed across, stopping to exchange waves with an old man fishing just downstream.

We were on a new road now, bigger than our farm path, but small enough that we felt confident it lead somewhere interestingly remote. We rode on, as the narrow lane hair-pinned it’s way between two large forested hills, roughly following the same river we’d just walked across.

Sure enough, the road did lead somewhere interesting. About a half hour of riding later, we arrived in a new blocky development. The stream which we’d crossed earlier, now more of a babbling crystal clear brook, bisected the development, and we followed it’s course noodling through apartment complexes and grade schools full of screaming children.

There was a love hotel district in this town too, some of them positively dripped with character.

There was a sleeping beauty to this landscape that we just couldn’t get over. We were feeling amazing. The air was cleaner than anything we’d breathed since Siberia; the sun was blazing, and this little river just kept leading us to ever more exciting places.


We were rather sad when finally forced to abandon the stream that had taken us on such an amazing wheel, but it seemed to be heading up into giant walled military compound, into which we would almost certainly be denied access, likely with force. Ever since the AsiaWheeling Middle East Cultural Liaison and I incited the wrath of the Syrian military while wheeling, I’d felt wary of wheeling army bases.


And so we let the river go on without us. We still had one of those delightfully empty and smooth Korean country roads to ride, and it was taking us one of our favorite places, the unknown. We pedaled on, sweating and grunting our way up a seriously grueling hill, happy that the Speed TRs had so many gears. We paused at the top, drinking water and preparing of the cool thrill of decent. When a strange black sedan pulled up behind us and just idled ominously, staring at us, we thought briefly of that strange facility which had stolen our river, and decided it was time to head downhill again.It was a beautiful long downhill through thick and bright green forest. We leaned hard into the turns and savored the rush of wind against our sweaty bodies. We were spit forth at the bottom of the hill, into a large agricultural valley.

The farms down here were so orderly and mechanized, as compared to china or india, and there were so fewer people. Of course, the GDP per capita here was 4 times that of China and over 10 times that of India. Korean labor is not cheap. When we rode past Chinese farms, they would relatively packed full of people working on all kinds of things. Here we saw more dogs than people.

We spotted a particularly come hither one and hopped onto a tiny single lane farm road. We headed out at a lazy-ish pace, riding between crops, past greenhouses sheds and silos, and sleeping farm dogs. It was so beautiful out here. I was perhaps touched more than Scott, having been raised in rural Iowa. Lo and behold, not too far down the farm path we found our beloved stream again, looking gorgeous as always.

We stopped there, laying the speed TRs down in the sandy soil near the river and took a moment to just bathe in the sun soaked emptiness of the landscape. AsiaWheeling was a study of the Urban experience, and as such of course we spent most of our time in cities. Usually these were, huge smog belching, packed to the gills, filth ridden, logistically challenging cities. All that madness could not have felt more distant, just staring into this tiny bifurcating stream. Were we mad to be living in such packed clusters? Maybe all AsiaWheeling really needed was sunny days like this and a sprig of grass to clutch between our teeth. I could rock on the front porch, playing ukulele, maybe get into fixing up old pickup trucks…The feeling began to wear off, however, replaced mostly buy a hunger for pork and internet.

In surprising stroke of luck, we managed to make our trip somewhat of a loop, riding a good chunk of the way back on a packed sand road, which follow our river and continued to feel just rustic enough to scratch the aforementioned itch.

Eventually, we were forced to get back onto on a busy highway, which got our previously relaxed back of the neck hairs into city mode again. As we were riding in terrifyingly dense traffic, which whipped by menacingly at least five times our speed, we spotted a bike path below us, which followed one of Daegu’s canals. We jumped at the opportunity to get off the highway and portaged down a muddy slope to the path.

The path was such a relief from the noise and the fear associated with highway riding (outside of China that is) that we nearly missed this giant yellow and black spider, speculation as to the species of which is invited in the comments.

As we neared the city proper, Daegu continued to pull off a soothing combination of marshy river ecosystem and brutal modern city.
Our bike path grew walls and nestled itself up against a highway as we pedaled through the sun and breeze. The bike path was essentially empty, and for much of it we could ride two abreast.

That evening we ended up at – you guessed it – another Korean at-the-table BBQ restaurant.

These places just refused to quit being delicious.

A Jimjilban a Day…

We woke up feeling tremendously clean and reasonably well rested, after spending the night sleeping an unknown amount of time a darkened room at the entrance of which hung a sign displaying multiple words in Korean and a single English word “Resting.” We were of course at the Sea-Spa Theme Park Jimjilban in a resort town just north of Busan in South Korea.

Why they call it a theme park, I will never know. It was just a normal Jimjilban, no nicer or larger than the others we’d experienced, and with a slight view of the sea. We were starving, as usual, and ate a breakfast of rice and fish in the attached restaurant.We paid our bill (about $20 USD for 24 hours for two people… not bad) and headed out to the parking garage, where we had folded the Speed TRs the night before, and locked them to a fence before covering them with a number of old burlap sacks we’d nicked from the Spa’s garbage.

We unfolded the bikes, ditched the burlap, and strapped our things down for the ride into Busan. It was a cloudy, refreshing sort of a day, and we felt cool and collected. The Korean youth who wandered the streets outside the Spa seemed to agree as we mounted our Dahons and headed away from the Jimjilban, laden with our rather filthy baggage and sporting battle hardened Vietnamese motorcycle helmets.Our first idea was to attempt to avoid yesterday’s harrowing journey through the tunnel that separated this community from the greater Busan metropolitan cluster by skirting the coastline. At first, the scheme seemed to be working perfectly. Then the coastal road we were taking petered out into sand and then a cliffside.  So we retraced our steps all the way back to the Jimjilban and begrudgingly wheeled back onto the main road.
And so it was that we ended up headed uphill through the tunnel. I’ll be honest, dear reader, it was one of the more unpleasant moments of the trip. Cars were shrieking by us, we were fighting against gravity, everything was deafeningly loud, and the exhaust was thick, burning our lungs slightly with each breath. But there was no choice so we gritted out teeth slugged up the road.

I emerged from the tunnel relieved at having made it through, but troubled to look behind me and see Scott still deep in the tunnel, pedaling slowing and laboriously forward. When he finally arrived, he explained to me that his front wheel’s spokes had gone all to spaghetti again. So we flipped his Speed TR over right there at the mouth of the tunnel (right next to a hitherto unnoticed no bikes allowed sign), and I went to town with the Syrian adjustable wrench. As I worked, I thought about the last time we broke the rules in Korea

Back on the road, we made short work of the downhill segment which put us back into the suburban valley we’d ridden through the night before. Here too it was a slight downhill. This explained why yesterday’s ride had been so exhausting. We spotted a bizarre Paris/freedom themed coffee shop/bakery as we coasted through town, and decided to stop for a little caffeine and blogging.

We made short work of a few lattes, and did some serious feasting on the inter-webs, uploading posts and images for you, dear reader. Soon the coffee began to scratch and claw at our stomach walls and we closed our laptops, heading out in search of some shapes to eat.

We decided to stop at a sort of choose your own adventure fried foods stand. The way this particular invention works is that the customer selects from a number of once fried items, which are then re-fried while he or she mixes up a little dipping sauce from a number of condiments. It was just the thing to quiet the stomach, or so we thought.

We stood at the bar and ate a few shapes before we started to realize they were making our stomachs upset and scuttled the mission part way through.

We decided to head back to the freedom/paris cafe for a little more coffee and blogging before we hit the road again. The Internet was very fast here in Korea, and the freedom cafe was an outlier even amongst our Korean experiences. It was glorious to feast on such a waterfall of data and we lapped it up like thirsty hounds.

Eventually, as fun as it is to upload and download information, we needed to get back on the road, and so we did, completing the next 20 or so kilometers in short order, aided in large part by the fact that the ride continued to be majority downhill.

We stopped to eat a little more at another one of those Korean BBQ places that we had grown so fond of. It had been quite a while (in AsiaWheeling time at least) since we had experienced a truly filling meal, so we decided to go ahead and over-order. No regrets there.

It was night then, and the cold was setting in. It was high time to select another Jimjilban, we decided. Rather than ride the rest of the way into Busan, we decided to just search in the nearby area. The Haeundae Spa center seemed particularly large and exciting, so we headed into the skyscraper that contained it and found a nice well lit place in the parking garage for our Speed TRs.

Jim-jil-bangin’

As nice as our Busan love hotel was, complete with grouchy bicycle-sceptic staff, hallways jammed with cardboard boxes, malfunctioning coffee machines, and a “four ashtrays per room” policy, we decided not to stay another night. When we headed downstairs to check out, we found the grouchy hard to communicate woman from last night had been replaced by a younger and much more reasonable lady. She permitted us to store our baggage in her office (which was already quite cluttered with a bed, a dresser, a ton of posters of J-pop groups, and the business’s cash register) while we wheeled and charted our next steps. We thanked her heartily in both Korean and Russian (both of which we found she could understand) and headed off in search of coffee and food.
We selected a lively looking restaurant not too far from the hotel and sat down at one of the squat china-style tables. We quickly noticed that we were not alone it our table. Just behind us was a large candy apple red coffee machine. It seemed to be leering at us provocatively. You can imaging our delight when we found the price was 100 Won per paper cup of joe! This was less than ten cents for a serving of that sticky sweet heavily caffeinated instant sludge we had come however strangely to love. This was a huge boon.
The paper cups were just beginning to pile up all around us in a somewhat conspicuous manner when our server came by with our food. We looked at him sheepishly wondering if we had an obscene level of froth all over our mustaches, but he just smiled approvingly, and laid down a feast. Today was going to be great.

Our two sizzling blows of seafood stew were delightful and the proprietors really piled on the Banchan, as well as a gift-dish of scallion pancake. After we’d finished it all, we sat around for a bit, savoring another couple more paper cups of coffee and puzzling over some bugs in the interface of the wikireader which were preventing us from settling a wager as to the nature of Country Code Top-Level Domains.

Back on the cycles, we headed out to explore what Busan had to offer other than sex workers. I was glad to see that Uniqlo, asiawheeling’s preferred provider of undestressed trousers, was advertising heavily here.

The streets were wide and smooth, traffic was present but not overwhelming so, and the air smelled great. The city felt nearly as prosperous as Seoul, just a little smaller, cuter even.

Busan, as you no doubt already know, dear reader, is a port city. The urban area is spread across a number of craggy islands and rugged peninsulas, many of which have been modified to interact in some way with sea vessels, either unloading freight, building or repairing ships, or processing fish and other sea-products. This meant a few things for asiawheeling: there would be frequent elevation changes on this wheel, as well as quite a few bridges bridges; the air would alternate between refreshing sea-breeze and oceanic rot mixed with diesel fumes; and it was was likely going be totally gorgeous.

We began by taking a large bridge across to a picturesque residential area. Stately houses clung to the rocky cliffs and smooth new roads wound around the edge, sea below and lush foliage above. We rode hard, the sea to our right and the rock to our left, passing cars occasionally on the downhills, as they lazily putted along, taking in the view. Once again, Busan felt a little bit like it was on vacation, a little bit sleepier than we had expected.

The uphills were a little tougher than the downhills, for on this side of the city there were no bike lanes. Drivers seemed happy to give us space though, and at no time did I feel unsafe.
The sea was sparkling blue and filled with boats, from giant container ships, to trash barges, to fishing boats to Russian dry goods vessels. It was glorious. We stopped at a small park by the cliff-side to rest for a moment and take in the splendor. It was truly a new environment for us, and we were drinking it up.
As you can tell from our expressions, we were totally unable to contain ourselves.
When we next stopped it was for water, at a place which advertised a Brown University Kids English program. Your humble correspondents, being graduates of an American school by the same name, were interested to learn if it was indeed a program associated with our alma mater. We are still a bit in the dark in that regard. Speculation is welcome of course in the comments.
With a couple fatty 2 liter waters strapped onto each bike, we headed uphill towards the top of this island. From the top we had a great view of a strange manufactured driving range that was nestled between condominiums and port facilities.

We idled there, at the top of the hill for a while speculating about the size and importance of this port to Korea and global shipping in general before heading back downhill.

We were somewhere around a giant dry dock facility in the port of Pusan that Scott’s bike began acting up again. It was his front wheel of course, the only thing that ever gave us trouble. The spokes had gone spaghetti again, and to make matters worse, tightening them up with the Syrian wrench didn’t seem to help. We pulled over to the side of the road and began inspecting the wheel. The longer we inspected it the more our stomachs sank. It looked like the collection of bearings that we had used as spacers in the wheel to fill up the space left by the abscent dynamo apparatus that we’d removed in Uzbekistan had begun to rub on each other and generate heat. The heat had not only deformed the stack of washers and caused them to rub against the wheel producing even more friction, but it seemed to have compromised the plastic and metal plate that covered the compartment where the dynamo used to be and which held the axle into the wheel. In short, Scott’s wheel was in bad shape. I was not even sure whether given new washers and plenty of lube the wheel would spin straight enough to not rub against the brakes.

Just then a character emerged from one of the factories down the street from us, presumably to smoke a cigarette. When he spotted us, he placed his cigarette back into its package and, looking interested, came over to see what the trouble was. He was a man of few words, but, seeing our predicament, beckoned us into his machine shop. We then watched, struck with awe and gratitude, as he flipped the bike over and began to take measurements.

He measurements taken, he proceeded over to a large pile of metal chunks that looked like scraps from a larger machining project, and selected one which appeared to be the right size. He blew on it a few times to remove the many small flakes of metal that clung to everything in this machine shop, then put it on the lathe.

We struggled to believe our good fortune as he carefully and expertly shaped the metal on the lathe into a new part for Scott’s wheel. He moved deliberately, but removed the piece often to test it’s fit over the hub. Once it fit perfectly snugly, he presented it to us.

We couldn’t have been more grateful, but the man refused to accept any payment from us. He insisted only that we all take a picture together to commemorate the day. We were happy to oblige.

And then we were back on our bikes. Not even an hour had gone by and we were riding smoothly again, sporting a brand new custom machined part on Scott’s Speed TR.

We worked our way out of the dockyards slowly, enjoying the rusting majesty of the many vessels moored there.

We crossed a different bridge than the one that had brought us here and found ourselves back in the more cosmopolitan neighborhoods of Busan. We wheeled right through the red light district where we had been staying and were getting into a more china-esque section of the city, dotted with electronics shops and indoor flea markets when we realized it was well past time for us to have eaten. It didn’t take us long to select a pork soup restaurant, lock the bikes outside and stroll in. The place had only one thing on the menu, so it was not difficult ordering. And, as an added bonus the food came out almost instantly. Each of us was given a frothing bowl of milky looking soup filled with all manner of unidentifiable pork parts. We were also each given a tray of condiments and ingredients to use in the spicing and doctoring the soup to our satisfaction. It was a delicious meal, even if it wasn’t quite as filling as we’d hoped.

Back on the streets, we felt that wonderful rush that accompanies a resumption of blood sugar. And so we put foot to pedal, stabbing further westward, hoping to gain a better understanding of Pusan.

Unfortunately, our ride was once again cut short as Scott’s spokes grew wobbly and his wheel went out of alignment again, rubbing against his brake.

We pulled off the large road we had been riding on and into a back alley, stopping across from a mattress emporium.  I proceeded to give Scott’s Dahon a little more love with the Syrian adjustable wrench.  I tightened the spokes as heavily as I dared, and then re-aligned the wheel.

Meanwhile Scott examined a nearby fresh orange juice vending machine.

Doing all this the the adjustable wrench took quite a while and by the time we returned to the road, we realized that we were running low on remaining sunlight. There was plenty more riding ahead of us before we would sleep that night, so we high tailed it back to our love hotel in the brothel district to pick up our luggage.

Now fully loaded, we headed off north, crossing our fingers that Scott’s front wheel would hold up until we reached our destination, some 35 km away.

We were heading for what was rumored on the inter-webs to be a magnificent Jimjilban facing the sea in one of the suburbs to the north of Pusan. It was high time we stayed at another spa, we figured, since it had been days since our relaxing stay at the Siloam, and Jimjilban visits had been a distinct goal of our time in Korea.

The sun sank low as we continued to ride north. About twenty kilometers into the ride, we found ourselves siphoned into a kind of marina, wherein we stopped, confused about the correct way forward. As best we could tell, we had misguided ourselves a few kilometers off track. The sun was sinking low now, but there was still time left. The temperature, at least, would stay warm enough to ride comfortably for a few more hours. We scrutinized the poorly drawn tourist map and struggled to make a decision as to how to get back on track.

It was then that we realized we had not eaten for way too long again. Depleted of sugars, our brains were hampered and fuzzy. To make matters worse, our last meal had been the less than filling pig soup, so we decided to just throw the brick more or less randomly at a northward route, and kept pushing on in search of a good looking restaurant, and signs that we were back on the path towards this spa of ours.

The city around us was indeed growing ever more suburban, and with it ever more wealthy and western. There were a lot of lit signs on huge steel pylons, reminiscent of rest stops of US I-80. Feeling somewhat out of place, we rode by just about every American fast food chain restaurant you’ve heard of, forsaking them in search of something a little more authentic. When we finally spotted a somewhat down-to-earth looking fish restaurant clinging to a the side of a cliff overlooking the sea, we decided we had better eat there, before we found ourselves forced to dine at the Pizza Hut.

We ordered a few squid dishes, which seemed to be the specialty of this place. Our wait-person proceeded to remove a number of squids from a nearby tank and fillet them live. It was all very dramatic. The squid were delicious, if not super filling, and we did our best to fill up the rest of the way on our rather small bowls of rice and the assorted side dishes, one one on which was some heavily salted, deep fried beetles, which were quite delicious on rice at first but hard to finish later on.

It was dark when we left, and we were still a bit hungry. As you can imagine, dear reader, the next few miles began to feel a bit raw. The temperature was dropping and a cool wet sea breeze turned our sweat soaked shirts to ice. As we rode our internal body heat eventually won the battle, and we pulled up and out the the suburban valley that we had just ridden through and began to climb a forested hill. We were feeling warmer and energized by the calories we had eaten. Part way up the hill we got confirmation that we were on the right road.

We were forced to enter a rather long and deafeningly loud tunnel, the use of which was plainly denied to cyclists via signage. There seemed no other choice however, so we rode on, using the slight downhill grade in the tunnel to achieve a high enough speed that we felt comfortable taking up the entire lane. The drivers behind us refrained from too much honking.

Needless to say, we were happy to finally emerge into a seaside resort town and make our way to the Sea Spa Theme Park, a large Jimjilban, and our final destination. We were still slightly unsure if this was the same place we’d read about online, but decided we did not care. We ate another meal of grilled skewered meats from a street vendor across from the spa, and washed it down with a cold bottle of Cass beer. What a day it had been!

There seemed, at that point, nothing more appropriate on earth than soaking and sauna-ing for the next three hours before collapsing into a dead slumber in a huge tatami mat filled room packed with sleeping Koreans.


[P|B]usan Ho

Is it Busan or Pusan? The answer is it’s both. You see in Korean there is no real distinction between the “p” noise and the “b” noise, at least as far as romanization goes, and particularly true in the pronunciation of this city. Go ahead; try for yourself. They are pretty similar.  Coincidentally, [P|B]usan was where we were headed that day. So we relished our last fried eggs and toast breakfast at the Bebop house, before bidding our friends there farewell, and strapping our belongings onto the Speed TRs for the ride to the airport.

The sky was bright blue and speckled with fluffy white clouds as we headed towards the Seoul’s central railway station. Even the giant pollution monitoring units broadcasted that it was going to be a beautiful day.

The ride to the train station was just long enough to really get the blood flowing, and burn up whatever was left of the eggs and toast. When we arrived, we noticed quite instantly that the station was huge. There was a decent amount of time spent searching for the hall in which we could buy tickets for the trans-Korea trains, but with only some minor scolding from security and a few mistaken rides in glass elevators, we found our selves in a huge shiny hall, filled with flat panel displays and orderly lines of Korean people.

Our beloved Schwalbe big apples squeaked comfortingly against the waxed floor as we wheeled our fully loaded cycles into line. In spite of some rather disparaging looks from a few of our fellow passengers, we deftly purchased two tickets on the next slow train to Pusan.

With that out of the way, it was time to eat a little more. We selected a crowded and efficient looking restaurant across the hall from the ticket counters, and made a huge pile out of our bags and folded bicycles, which angered the staff just slightly less than the amount which would have prevented them from serving us.

We ended up ordering a couple of soba meals, which were delicious, and came complete with a couple rolls of sushi (suspiciously similar to kim bab), some tempura, and some random Korean salads. We never quite deturmined if this was a Japanese or a Korean restaurant. We know there is some overlap. But the food was tasty enough, I guess. Ok, to be honest it was not great. But AsiaWheeling can’t bat grand slams every meal.  In our defense, we were in the train station. I dare you to get soba in an Amtrak station.

The next task was to acquire snacks to fuel us during the train ride, which would take most of the remainder of the day. Luckily Korea is a great place to buy interestingly packaged products.

Laden with snacks (well, to be honest, mostly laden with cans and paper cartons and little bottles of coffee drinks), we made our way to the platform.

When the train came, it was time for the old how-will-AsiaWheeling-fit-all-its-stuff-on-the-train hustle. Lucky for us, we had the rearmost seats in our car, which gave us just enough space to cram the bikes in. Inevitably, we would eventually get seats in the middle of the car, but we’d cross that bridge when we came to it. We’d managed to get the bikes on board in Uzbekistan after all.

The subsequent ride gave us some much needed time to catch up on correspondence for you, dear reader, a task which we relish. We took breaks from writing and sorting through photos to do shtick with the Wikireader, speculating about all manner of things (not least among them the White Stripes) and reading about Pusan in the lonely planet PDFs.

It was night when we finally arrived in Busan. It felt good to get off of the train and unfold our bikes. It was a warm night, and there were plenty of people out for a гулять. Not only was it nice outside but this was a tourist-town of sorts and we were fresh with energy from being cooped up on the train ride (the canned coffee helped too). We could afford to be picky with hotels, we thought, and so we started riding around, ducking in and out of inns, and comparing relatives prices/amenities.

A few things began to become obvious to us as we rode conducted this research: price fluctuation in lodging was high, fluctuation in amenities less so; our blood sugar levels were plummeting, and this was unlike any tourist town we’d ever been to. It was much more like a border town and though I might have been mistaken, I think I even detected a hint of Hekou, mostly in the concentration of brothels and strip joints. While the less than savory establishments of Hekou had catered mostly to the traders who crossed between Vietnam and China with goods on everything from semi-trucks to wheel barrows, Pusan seemed to cater to sailors on shore leave, a fair number of which were probably Russian, for we saw more Cyrillic writing here than we had in Harbin, a place much closer geographically to the federation.

Eventually, we found a place to stay. It was a “love hotel,” which I think technically means a place designed for a customer of one of the brothels to bring his …er… service person. The room reeked like smoke, and the woman who ran the front desk was almost certainly a demon, but it seemed clean enough for AsiaWheeling, and the price was right, so we threw our things down.

Without any more dilly dally, we headed out in search of food. We were hungry enough that we just ate at the first restaurant we saw, which was literally two buildings downhill from the hotel. It served over-priced and under-portioned fish and, much like the soba place earlier this day, was underwhelming. We vowed to get back on the  epic-feast-train the next day, but for now just felt good about being full. We even indulged in a quick after dinner stroll, which was effective in solidifying our suspicion that we were staying right in the heart of Pusan’s sex industry district.  Someone had even slipped literature featuring lewd portraiture with corresponding phone numbers under our door.  We could have been missionaries!  Shrugging it off, we rested for another day of a different type of godswork.


Spokes like Spaghetti

We woke up the next morning to the smell of bread toasting at the Bebop house. It had been some time indeed since this smell had permeated our worlds. Certainly not in Bandung. Now there was a seemingly infinite supply of toast and eggs, and we relished the long forgotten ritual of dipping toast in wet yolk.

 

We were coming to like the other travelers who occupied the guest-house with us, but we declined invitations to join them for some more traditional Seoul tourist activities. We might have been lounging and speaking English in the lap of College-style luxury, but this was still AsiaWheeling and your humble correspondents felt an obligation to seek out the hidden treasures that lie in wait for the urban cyclist.

And so, with bellies full of toast, eggs, and coffee, we hit the road. The sun was finally out in Seoul and was pouring over everything that had been washed clean by days of arin. This day had a certain refreshing beauty which propelled us forward along Seoul’s smooth pavement. Everything seemed to have an orderly gleam to it. We were well caffeinated, fueled with comfort food and riding quite fast, not to mention the city smelled great.

We spent the next hours or two noodling in and out of the tiny back streets of Seoul, which seemed to contain a mind blowing number of good looking restaurants, which even this early in the mornig were eminating complicated and come hither scents.

So you’ll forgive us for being plenty happy when our hunger flared up again. We chose a restaurant at random. The place had only one dish, a kind of fried-rice-hotpot. The entire meals was cooked at your table in a large ceramic pot, which was operated (for us at least) by a moderately grumpy waitperson. The first phase was a heap of beautiful looking fresh vegetables submerged in boiling fish broth and doused in a spicy red sauce made from something fermented… soybeans perhaps?

This hot pot phase was boiled slowly, and twice we were reprimanded for jumping the gun and sneaking a bite. Eventually, the wait-person informed, sounding somewhat relieved, that we could finally eat. In no time, most of the vegetables had been eaten from the soup, the second phase began. Sticky rice and a couple of eggs were added to the bowl along with herbs, a giant pile of dried seaweed, and some mushrooms. The contents were then stirred in front of us by one of the restaurant employees until a sticky and intensely flavorful fried rice was rendered. The meal was great, but we never felt quite welcome in the restaurant.

Back on the street, we stopped in at one of the many eyeglasses shops. It is important to relates that Korea is a country that takes its eyeglasses incredibly seriously. Even before I had traveled to this fascinating place, I had encountered a number of Koreans in America, and had consistently been impressed by their eyeglasses. In fact, I had come to use the glasses as a kind of rule of thumb for making guesses as to the nationality of an Asian American. Amazing glasses pointed to Korea 9 times out of 10. At once retro and hip, but intelligent and thoughtful. Take it from us, dear reader, if ever in Korea, consider purchasing frames.

Neither of your humble correspondents, unfortunately, is lucky enough to wear corrective spectacles. Furthermore, our friends at Maui Jim had so majestically outfitted us with superior sunglasses that our interest in the frames was more anthropological than anything else.

So on we rode, out of the winding back streets of our current neighborhood. When we spotted a smaller river, with a bike path running alongside it. We figured the river must be a tributary of the great Han, so we followed it back towards the river. The closer we got, the more flood damage based hazards we encountered.

As we had suspected, this river was a tributary of the Han, and the bike path we rode on a tributary of the great Han bike-path, which we had been thilled to discover the day before. We pulled back onto the Han path, which was now bathed in sunshine, starkly well kept, and smooth as a baby’s bottom. We rode by families picnicking and old men meditating in the shade.

We continued down the path, this time much beyond where we had turned back the day before. Eventually, we decided to leave the bike path and make our way deeper into this side of the city for a little exploring. It was an absolutely perfect day, and we couldn’t help but lay hard onto the speed TRs whishing around cars and flying ever further into this section of the city. The place seemed to consist mostly of office parks, laundromats, and corporate coffee shops, all of which felt quite exotic.

Then, suddenly, Scott’s bike took a turn for the worse. He noticed it was becoming increasingly hard to pedal. On closer inspection, we discovered that the spokes on his from wheel had gone loose as spaghetti and the wheel was deforming such that it rubbed against the breaks. We attempted to tighten them in the field with our Syrian adjustable wrench, but it seemed to barely be helping. Soon, we were forced to simply disengage the front brake and head in search of a bike shop, pedaling at very low speeds. Eventually we were forced to walk the iron steeds. By the time we found a shop, Scott’s wheel was rubbing badly against the fork of the bike and making a terrible sound.

The shop we found was very posh, full of expensive and high tech cycling gear. The folks there were more than happy to help us. Long gone, however, were the days of 50 cent wheel truing jobs in Laos. This was every bit as expensive as getting the job done in America, and with a fair bit more attitiude.

The gentleman at the shop were also very shifty characters. They were happy to show us around, but, for instance, when we asked to borrow a wrench so that I could tighten some of the joints on my bike, they sternly refused. Part of it was certainly the language barrier. The men spoke barely any English and we not a lick of Korean, but none the less it was very clearly communicated that such repairs could be made, but we would not be trusted with the wrench. This meant that in the meantime, while Scott’s wheel was being trued, we entered the hair pulling process of trying to communicate how to tighten all the joints on a folding touring bike to someone who has never done it before, is uninterested in communication, and is convinced that they know better than you how to do the task in the first place.

We eventually got through it however, and even got a free bit of power washing out of the deal (whether this left our Speed TRs in better or worse shape remains unclear).

Then we noticed that the staff had begun putting the wheel back on Scott’s bike. We rushed over, breathless, and struggled to stay calm while stressing to the mechanics not to over tighten the bolts on Scott’s bike. As you no doubt remember, dear reader, Scott’s bike had developed a nasty habit of chewing through bearings not long after his collision with Stig Motta and the resulting inexpensive re-truing of the front wheel in Laos. His wheel had continued to misbehave through Cambodia and eventually calmed down somewhere around southern Vietnam (right around when we were becoming experts at replacing the busted bearings). It was not until Uzbekistan that it began giving us trouble again, and we were lucky then to have access to the extensive collection of well made Soviet tools which belonged to our dear Uzbek Bureau chief’s grandfather, Nazarkulov. That time, we had decided to remove the entire Dynamo assembly, which we found to be totally destroyed, the magnet inside shattered into 5 pieces.

All this is to strengthen our case whe we ask you to forgive us for being a little intense with these Korean mechanics. We pleaded with them to let us tighten it ourselves, and tried with all our might to communicate the fragility of the situation. In the end we just watched with clenched sphincters as they overtightened the bolt, and then loosened it with our Syrian adjustable wrench as soon as we we out of sight.

Luckily, it seemed we’d done ok, because Scott was back in action, the bike seemed solid and obedient. We were coming to find that Seoul is absolutely packed with bike paths, for it was no more than 5 or 6 blocks later that we found a new one. Suspecting this might also be a tributary to that great Han bike path, we exited the city streets and started riding.

Sure enough, the trick worked again.
When the hunger returned, we decided to nip into one of the posh coffee shop/bakeries which were were so ubiquitous in this part of town. We decided to split a flaky almond filled pastry and a slice of pecan pie. The search for pastry had sent us into another giant office park, and we took a short stroll to digest the butter and judge the architecture of the office buildings (and give our rear ends a little rest before continuing on the ride). Soon the shadows began to grow long and we climbed back on that great Han bike-path pedaling back towards the Bebop.

We still call a way-point, of course, whenever we see a particularly interesting bike, especially if we have suspicion that it folds.

That evening, we couldn’t resist heading to another of those Korean BBQ on the table restaurants.

This one was almost certainly even better than the place we’d attended the night before.

We spent the rest of that evening wandering the city on foot, speculating as to the reasoning behind the prevalent local advertising strategies.

Bi Bim Boppin’

It was not easy to leave the comfort of the Siloam sauna.

But the rain had stopped for the time being, and we were beginning to feel a little stir crazy in the mostly windowless and anecdote ridden confines of the bathhouse, so leave we did. Outside, the streets were dry and the city felt strangely ghost-like as we road out into the early morning light.

We were fully loaded, but happy to allow our path to meander across town. Our eventual destination was a place called the Bebop  guesthouse. One thing we had realized while in the Siloam was that the Jimjilbang can be somewhat of a temporal and spatial vortex… it’s very hard to come and go from it as you would a normal hotel, since the check in process involves removing your clothes and locking your shoes in a difficult to access locker behind the front desk. To make matters worse, windows are very rare, and all your needs are more or less satisfied inside. These spas were great, but if we were going to get some good wheeling in, it might be useful to do base ourselves at a guesthouse, at least until we had perfected our Jimjilbanging methodology.

As we rode on smooth new Korean pavement, we quickly noticed both bikes were making a terrible squealing racket. It was easy to locate the source of the distressing sound. Our bikes had after all been parked for about 24 hours, outdoors, in monsoon rains. Last time we’d done that was on the island of Java and we had encountered the same issue: the rain had washed all lubrication from the chains, and left them a rusting mess. A quick trip to one of Seoul’s ubiquitous convenience stores solved that problem.

Back on the road again, running smooth and silent, I began to allow myself to enjoy the comforting sensation of wheeling through a wealthy country again. Thanks in part to the good people of Seoul, and in part to the torrential downpours of the day before, the city had a rather freshly scrubbed gleam to it.

We continued our rambling approach to the Bebop guesthouse, wheeling through giant five or six way empty intersections. We were later to learn it was a bit of a holiday weekend in Seoul, but at the time it felt unsettlingly similar to the early scenes of a zombie film. When we spotted one, we decided to take a detour through a street market. I pulled my fully loaded speed TR over to examine a large pile of roasted pork knuckles, and struck up a kind of language-less conversation with the vendor. He insisted we sample some of his home-made rice liquor. It was interesting, but incredibly boozy not to mention a little sweet for my taste. We thanked him using the only Korean words we possessed and moved on.

In a very Kuala-Lumpur-esque series of events, we found ourselves unwittingly siphoned onto a startlingly busy highway. This was reassuring from the standpoint that we were finally witnessing evidence of human life here in Seoul, but quickly lost its charm as we were forced to endure a mile or two of dense traffic before we could find an exit. The highway ejected your humble correspondents into a new neighborhood, this one with much wider streets and a more corporate feel traffic was slightly more active here as well. The extended highway speeds while fully loaded had awakened the hunger that had not quite yet risen during the earlier pork knuckle incident, and we decided to choose a restaurant at random.

It seemed the neighborhood had only rather fancy places (not to mention that half of the restaurants were closed). So after very atypical exchange of logistical banter, we decided to splurge. The trip was, after all, nearing it’s end. This was a fact that had not seemed real to me, something which I had not even considered thinking about previously. But something about the departure from China and the entry into Korea had removed a mental block. Just perhaps, it seemed, we might be deserving of some celebration having made it to this clean and comfortable land.

And so we sat down and ordered a feast: a Sausage platter, a sizzling beef innards soup, a bowl of Kimchee noodles, all with plenty of Banchan. Korea, we decided, will be a good place for feasting.

The restaurant also had a very interesting free coffee machine, presumably for patrons to self-caffeinate after feasting. To our subsequently great delight, we were to find these machines to be actually quite common in Korea, but at the time it seemed an impossible blessing from the gods of lucidity.
Thus it was refueled and refreshed that we pedaled the last few miles to the Bebop house, which was a thoroughly westernized place and not at all within AsiaWheeling’s usual hotel profile. After the hardscrabble accommodations from Uzbekistan through Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, and provincial China, a guesthouse like this seemed like opting for naptime bedding at a nursery school.  But today was a day for bucking tradition, we figured, so we entered to find a room full of Americans and Europeans speaking English and languishing on gmail. To make matters even more out of the ordinary, we were about to launch into haggling when the proprietor remembered that she had long ago instantiated a 50% discount for guests arriving via bicycle. An ace.
We did what might be considered the requisite amount of schmoozing and soon found ourselves itching for a wheel, and, excusing ourselves, took to the streets.As a first way-point, we decided to head over to giant gleaming tower that was the Seoul Citibank building and attempt to do some complicated transactions (among them the cashing of cheques). This turned out to be massively impossible, and despite the abundance of free coffee and biscuits inside the bank, and the precisely painted tellers with hard lipped smiles, we eventually left with our checks uncashed. The ATM worked at least.
Laden with a fresh cash injection, and a minor bit of grumpy energy, we decided to up the speed of the wheeling, and really cover some ground. Under the unchanging gray sky, we wheeled on, laying into our freshly oiled and newly unencumbered Speed TRs, enjoying the comfortable orderliness of Seoul as it slowly morphed from one neighborhood to another.

Spotting a great red bridge, we decided to brave the bike-lane-less traffic and head over the the other side of the Han river. The other side was a grassier place than we had hitherto seen in Seoul, and we spotted a large and crowded bike path below us. Scott called it as the next way-point and we headed down.

I had better get it off my chest now so that we can move forward. Koreans love wheeling. And it was amazing to see so many people out cycling, on everything from tandem cruisers to folding bikes. We fell in with the traffic and indulged in some people watching.

Soon we came up upon a giant system of fountains and cubist stepping stone walkways. People were nipping in and out of the water on bikes and wandering around the fountains generally enjoying themselves. We’d thought Koreans were work-aholics, but this Seoul seemed to be full of people adhering to a strict regiment of leisure activity.

After a few moments of taking in the fountain and the nearby municipal bicycle rental station, we headed back down the path. We stopped next when we stumbled upon a group of young Korean men playing with their motorcycles. We paused straddling our Speed TRs and watched the men whip around the parking lot pulling wheelies and doing other tricks the names of which I do not care to research.

With our dose of Seoul motor-sports freshly crossed off the list, we hit the path again, wheeling on past crowds of people, from amateur riders to seriously outfitted racers. Our surrondings began to slowly transition into a more wooded suburban area as we continued to follow the river, which we began to notice was very high. And it had been ever higher in the recent past as well, as evidenced by huge sections of the train that were covered with river plants and mud from flooding.

After riding for some time upstream, we spotted an elevator designed to bring pedestrians up to one of the many bridges spanning the mighty Han river, and decided to take it up and back to the other side. From atop the bridge, we had a serious view of the extent of the flood damage.

Across the bridge, again we found ourselves unable to keep from being siphoned onto another busy highway. To make matters worse, the artery was flowing the opposite direction from our new favorite westerner ridden Seoul guest-house, the Bebop. So we called a subversive garede aus (which is the maneuver our dear Stew Motta liked to refer to as Salmoning) and rode against the flow of traffic until we spotted an exit point which involved only some minor hoisting of the Speed TRs over a concrete embankment.

We carried our bikes down a crumbling set of stairs and over a few more embankments before emerging on a very strange space travel themed playground.

As interesting as the playground was, we decided that night was fast approaching and we had better return to our guest house before we got siphoned onto another giant highway this time at night with no signals on our bikes. Luckily, not far from the bizarre playground, we found a parallel bike path on this side of the river, and we began to really lay into the bikes, pushing the concrete of the path underneath and past us, launching over speed bumps, potholes, and the occasional flood related mud-slick.

Plenty hungry, and back in our neighborhood, we parked the bikes outside the Bebop guest-house, and headed out on foot in search of a Korean BBQ pork restaurant. These grill your own meat places are a favorite with AsiaWheeling, and we’d been looking forward to them ever since our interest was peaked eating the Lao combination BBQ and hot pot.

We consumed grilled meat wrapped in lettuce, sweet onion relish, kimchee, and a kind of cold seaweed salad until we could not fit another bite. Feasting was going to be a favorite theme here. And as we strolled happily, bellies full, back towards the Bebop, a feeling of great contentedness and warm excitement about our coming adventures in Korea befell us. We took in the brightly lit city, speculating actively about the quirks of Korean branding strategy.

Welcome to Korea (again)

We woke aboard the Weidong ferry as it’s giant diesel engines propelled the grouchy hunk of metal towards Incheon, South Korea. The sun had come back, at least for the time being, and made wise by our misadventures in dining the night before, we made sure to calculate our morning so as to just hit the window for the breakfast buffet.

The work paid off as we feasted hard on smoked fish, eggs, delightfully rank kimchee, seaweed heavy miso-esque soups, and sticky rice. There was hot water to make instant coffee with, and plastic bowls to drink from. They even had some of those sickeningly sweet probiotic micro-yogurt drinks that Scott likes. Needless to say, we were quite happy to be eating something that was not packaged in 2-6 layers of cartoon emblazoned plastic wrap, let alone this decadent spread.

The fog rolled in thick again as we made our way towards the coast of South Korea. Soon we began to spot islands in the distance, some of them with giant mansions and manicured estates on them. As we barralled on, pushing plumes of water out of the way, the fog turned to mist, which then turned to light rain. As the downpour continued, our stubborn Weidong Ferry was approached by a small craft, dispatched no doubt by one of the islands. It pulled up next to us and to my great surprise emitted a stocky Korean gentleman who sprung onto the side of our ship and scrambled aboard. Well done, sir.

We had a great pleasure of passing under the same monstrous bridge which we had seen under construction years ago when AsiaWheeling had first taken a ferry from China to Korea. The bridge was now finished and extremely impressive. It loomed way above our giant ferry and dripped the occasional stream of brown water down onto us as we made our way through the rain-free zone underneath.

As usual, Korean customs were delightful, and the people in line were excited to interact with us. We were made to feel very welcome by the officials, and our bicycles were a source of much interest for all involved. We secured a number of tourist maps from a Kiosk just beyond customs, which we began to pour over in order to make a preliminary plan for gaining access to Seoul.

First thing was first, however. We purchased a few paper cups of sticky coffee from a very cheerful vending machine. More properly caffeinated, we set out to change our remaining Renminbi into Korean Won and hop a train into Seoul. It was still misting lightly outside the ferry terminal in Incheon. The water clung to everything in big drop, which flattered the brand new bitumen and reflective paint on the Korean streets with a certain Hollywood noir flourish. It was wet but not cold, and the rain felt refreshing, so given that both of our fenders were still more or less operational (Scott’s slightly less than mine do to his accident on his birthday in Ulaan Baatar), so we used our Chinese motorcycle ponchos to cover the asiawheeling technology bags, and pedaled into the Korean suburbs.

We spotted a currency exchange that looked oddly familiar and pulled to the side of the narrow road we were wheeling. We realized it was none other than the one that we had used years ago on our first trip to Korea. The nostalgic value of using the same establishment again overtook our better judgment, and we simple changed all our Renminbi there, not really caring to inspect the rates.  Two years prior, we were wandering into supermarkets with Chinese currency in our hands, raving and jabbering to helpless staff members.  Now we were rolling up to this shack on a sidestreet and transacting with a smile, a nod, and a quick kam sam ham ni da.

It felt good to ride after being cooped up on the Weidong ferry for 30 hours, so we forsook the first few metro stations, where we could have caught a commuter train into Seoul, and rode on towards the heart of the Korean peninsula. Then suddenly, as if to object to our selection of freedom, the skies opened, and the refreshing mist became a thundering downpour. We hustled through sheets of rain, and river streets to the next metro station, arriving at the ticket machine soaking wet, but still in good spirits.


We were planning to spend as much time as possible in Korea staying in Jimjilbangs. The Jimjilbang is the Korean bathhouse. I was introduced to them originally when I was living in DC working as a management consultant. Not far outside the district was one of the largest Jimjilbangs in the US, a place called Spa World. I had managed to fall into a crowd that frequented that bathhouse. And, being already in possession of a penchant for group bathing engendered during my time in St. Petersburg, I took to the pools of hot and cold water, the baths full of jets and bubbles, and the strange rooms where the spa-goer can commune with the elemental forces of different stones, metals, or earthy substances like a fish to water.
But before we could get to one of the many Jimjilbangs that we had been researching via the AsiaWheeling Lonely Planet PDF database, we needed to figure out the metro system, which is only initially daunting.

The metro was quiet and comfortable, and there was plenty of room to store the Speed TRs in what we later learned was the section reserved for those in wheelchairs.

Our train hammered through the downpour, which washed down the windows so hard and fast that it was nearly impossible to even make out the scenery going by. We were thus forced to consume the transition from coastal suburbs into the urban monstrosity of Seoul in snapshots glimpsed through the opening of the train doors.

The rain was falling harder than ever when we finally reached Seoul. Rather than strike out blindly into the downpour, we decided to consult the inter-tron as to the best reasonably proximate Jimjilbang. We decided on Angel in-us Coffee shop as an internet source, because the name made us feel sort of uncomfortable, which is how we like to feel here at AsiaWheeling, and because they served coffee which might be good and it had been quite some time since we’d had decent coffee.

The good people at the Angel in-us did their best to get us on their network, since after all we had purchased very expensive cups of coffee from them, but in the end, we all gave up just sapped connection from the Dunkin Donuts next door.  Korea was turning out to be just as fabulous as we had left it, and we were thrilled to be at just the onset of our time here.

We selected the Siloam, a Jimjilbang, which it seemed we could get to reasonably easily by wheeling our bike across the sprawling Seoul railway station and taking an underground tunnel to a distant entrance point. When we reached the exit, it was still raining like mad, small rivers of water were rolling down the steps and collecting in a drainage grating at the base of the stairs. As we stood there staring up into the storm, and preparing for a very wet ride, we were approached by an Evangelist. I had forgotten until then that Korea is a very Christian country, but quickly remembered as we did our best to politely decline salvation.

The ride was every bit as sopping and stressful as we had feared. There are so many bathhouses in Seoul, all emblazoned with the ubiquitous neon icon of a steaming pool. So miserable was the rain that I was ready to just check into a random one. Scott was more steadfast. We were both soaked to the bone and huddling in a tiny dripping doorway, trying to make sense of our navigational blunders, and sopping wet tourist maps in the deafening rain. Scott was staring into an image of the map that he had taken with his camera when he came to a conclusion about our location. He dabbed a wet finger against the LCD screen and explained his plan.

So we piled or things in a doorway, hoping no tennant of this building would hope to enter or exit, and Scott headed out to do some unencumbered reconnaissance on his Speed TR. I huddled and shivered in the doorway, awaiting his return and watching water pour off of every surface. It was not long before I heard woops and shouts of delight and saw Scott’s sopping mustache curled up in a smile.

“Got it.” he said, splashing towards me, and we piled our things back onto the Speed TRs for a final push. Then we were there. The fine people at Siloam showed us there to park our bikes, issued us keys and lockers and handed over neatly folded color coded outfits (white for men; orange for women).   They were thrilled to see us, as if awaiting our arrival since we departed from Chinese shores on the ferry.  They even took our sopping clothes and washed and dried them for free – “service,” they said.

We

We spent the next twenty hours, scrubbing, soaking, baking, ruminating, stewing, pickling, and plunging in pools of ice water. Once we were seriously clean and had been sufficiently relaxed in that way that only extreme temperature changes can relax a human, we headed to the in-house restaurant to sit on the floor and eat some Korean food. We were plenty ready to dig in to a big bowl of cold noodles with seaweed and lettuce, a sizzling bibimbap (the famous Korean meat and rice dish) and a somewhat marrowy tasting seafood and dumpling soup. As usual, the dishes came with a few of the traditional Korean side salads called “Banchan”.

There was no free Internet connections at the Saloam, only some interesting coin operated computers in the “Business Room,” but we were able to use our Shenzhen hacker’s external USB wifi card and antenna to nab some free network through the window, and share them between our two computers via Ethernet cable. Meanwhile, the sky continued to douse the already sopping capital of South Korea.

Leaving Us Wanting More

Reunited with Scott, I found China quite a bit easier to navigate. It was empowering to have wheeled such a vast distance and overcome such a potentially breakdown inducing experience all alone in this chaotic and mysterious place they call China, but I was happy to relax into the comfort of Scott handling the communications department again, and even more so a bed at the maze-like Qingdao hotel that Scott had arranged for us.  The civil engineering of Qingdao had been masterminded by the Germans, who slipped in a number of gothic cathedrals and narrow zig-zagging streets.  The Germans controlled Qingdao from the late 1800s until the English and the Japanese ganged up during World War I and kicked them out, giving it an uncanny european feel.  Our  hotel had taken a cue from this design, requiring numerous staircases and rounded corners reminiscent of an M.C. Escher painting drenched in pastels to reach our room.  Where they found the artworks on the wall and the chartreuse wallpaper was anyone’s guess.

The next morning, we packed up our belongings and strapped them to the Speed TRs for the last time on the Chinese mainland. As we road through the winding European style roads of Qingdao towards the ferry terminal, I felt a tinge of regret at not having enough time to properly wheel this town (together at least). I imagined this city must look somewhat like Communist Germany did during the cold war, with it’s blend of soviet blocky buildings, and ornate turn of the century European ones. There were big clock towers, and even a steeple or two. This made sense, in a way, given Qingdao’s teutonic heritage.

Perhaps due to the German influence, Qingdao had a little of that beloved Bia Hoi culture that we’d so enjoyed in North Vietnam. Most restaurants proudly displayed a number of empty beer kegs outside their buildings, as if advertising how crazy things could get inside, and luring customers in with a 30 cent lukewarm draft.  Of course, the eponymous Qingdao (or Tsingtao) beer, China’s most popular, is brewed in the area.  Needless to say, the citizens are proud.

It was barely noon by the time we arrived at the ferry terminal, sweating in the growing heat and the oceanside humidity, and we were thrilled to roll our bikes into an air conditioned terminal, filled with well to do Chinese and Korean nationals, preparing for the Karaoke and Soju filled journey across the sea to the Korean port of Incheon. The not-to-scale map hanging above the officer’s resting quarters confirmed we were in the right place.

We picked over the heaps of checked luggage (cervical vertebrae retractors are predicted to be huge this year) and searched for the correct counter from which to extract our paper tickets.   As we produced them, we flashed back quickly to those morning sessions in Mongolia spent speaking broken chinese over Skype to the ticket booking office, and the relief of receiving email confirmation that tickets were indeed booked.

This we did with minimal stress, interfacing with a woman in a luminous blue uniform, and an impossibly tight bun of hair. After confirming that we could indeed take our cycles onto the boat and legally store them in our 50 person communal bunk area, we headed out to buy snacks and eat a quick meal before settling into life on the open sea.

We got a couple of draft beers (when else is Qingdao a local brew?) and some rice noodle soup from one of the aformentioned vendors, located down the street from the ferry terminal. By this point the humidity was quite high, and the day was looking to be a stifling one. We had lost some of our heat endurance, spending the last 4 months traipsing the fridged north of Asia, and found ourselves positively soaked in sweat as we waited for our food to arrive.  It was glorious.

The soup was excellent and quite cheap, full of kelp, big chunks of pork and a soft tofu. We had definitely entered a new culinary micro-climate here in Qingdao, which I would have liked very much to better explore, but AsiaWheeling waits for no man.

Our departure from China was smooth, enjoyable even, and we stocked up on a few extra snacks in the duty free zone, rendering us so laden with items that claiming the gangway with our many shopping bags, packs, and fully loaded Speed TRs was a source of entertainment for all around us.

As we settled into our quarters, a mischievous fog closed in around the boat, and with it a pensive melancholy befell its passengers.

Scott and I chatted about the shipping industry and the enormous Chinese demand for all manner of things as the fog swallowed the port of Qingdao behind us.

This, we would come to find, was not the Karaoke and booze filled cruise that we had experienced when we had taken an analogous ride on AsiaWheeling 1.0.

Coming across the main stairwell full of clocks, we fastidiously set our timepieces to match our destination.

A storm whipped up around us and rain and wind hammered our fair ship and she struggled her way across the yellow sea. Passengers were grumpy and vomited frequently into the specialized vomit receptacles in the on board bathroom.

We wandered the ship, attempting to join wireless networks, and plugging cat 5 cables into dubious Ethernet jacks. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that there was no internet to be had on this vessel. To make matters worse, though some error in our calculations, we managed to miss the small window of dinner service on the boat, and found ourselves forced to subsist on the many salted and fishy snacks we had brought from Chinese duty free, supplemented of course by some Korean treats from the on-board 7-Eleven.

California Beef Noodle King USA

Our train to Harbin arrived plenty early in the morning, and we attracted quite the crowd as we unfolded our bikes on the platform, strapping bags down, and generally preparing to wheel.  It was a big station, this one, built in part by the Russians. Harbin is the terminus of another one of the three trans-eurasian trains. The Trans-Mongolian (which we rode) terminates in Ulaanbaatar, the trans-Manchurian terminates here in Harbin, and the famed trans-Siberian terminates in far eastern Vladivostok. So it was out into a giant open Soviet-style parade ground that wheeled after being released from the immense building. We spotted a place called “California Beef Noodle King USA” and decided that we might as well stop in there.
It seemed no meal during AsiaWheeling’s northern China chapter would be complete without the ubiquitous cucumber dish, so we ordered that and a couple of bowls of the house noodles.We also noticed that they had Pabst Blue Ribbon beer on tap… that must have been the “USA” part of the place.

With noodles in our stomachs now to fuel us, we headed back into the city, and began wheeling in search of a hotel. Hotels were abundant, but for one reason or another, it took us quite a few tries to hit one that satisfied all our criteria: cheap, in-room Ethernet, and a window. While they did not end up being places for us to stay, the initial hotels that we stopped into were certainly quite interesting. If there was any Russian influence left in this city (and we hadn’t seen much so far) it might have been detectable in Harbin’s “concept first” approach to hotels and restaurants, most of which were quite grand and strange.

 We finally did find a place, of course… and what a place it was! The establishment was called the “Elephant Motel” and it was a very 1970s, with angular plastic shapes, and colored in the orange, cream, and dark brown of yesteryear. It even sported included breakfast, which was not common at all in China.

We threw our things down, and headed downstairs to hop on the cycles. We wheeled away from the hotel, over a bridge underneath which a large canal ran. Not long after the canal, we spotted a Baozi (steamed pork-bun) joint, and decided we might run in and eat a quick few of whatever was hot. It was definitely the right choice, for they ended up being the tastiest of the entire trip.

From there, we wheeled on, out of the urban center and into a district of brand new, modern high rise apartment buildings. There was another canal running through this section of apartment blocks, except that this one was mostly dried up, and there seemed to be people working or harvesting something out of it. It seemed interesting enough to warrant lugging the Speed TRs down into the canal and wheeling it. We rode for a while, and the further we went, the larger the puddles of water became. Eventually we ran into a few people who were harvesting some kind of lifeform from the muck. We did our best to question them as to a more in-depth explanation of their work, but they were busy, and Scott’s Chinese was not quite good enough to collect the rushed full explanation of what they were doing. So I guess this encounter must be placed firmly in the “speculation is invited in the comments” section.

So we wheeled on, using the canal as a kind of bumpy puddle riddled highway. Eventually, the puddles began to converge and then it was suddenly no longer a dry canal, but one filled wall to wall with water, so we hauled the bikes back up onto a pathway that ran alongside the canal. The path was nice, and nearly completely empty for the kilometers that we rode on it.

It dumped us out into a kind of pedestrian square, with a large statue showing the globe being pierced by some kind of a savage halberd. You guess is as good as ours, and most welcome in the comments, as to what’s being communicated by this one.

From the park, we headed back onto a larger road. It felt good to be wheeling in real China again. Beijing had been like an price-inflated, calmed down, slightly neutered version of the China that we’d come to know and love in Cities like JianShui, Urumqi, and Hohhot. Now we were wheeling with the people again, like this lady, transporting a giant load of flattened out cardboard boxes.

We were up north again and was starting to get cold, but also we were up north again so there was plenty more light left in the day. This could mean only one thing: leather jackets wheeling. So we stopped back by the Elephant Motel to pick up our leather jackets, and headed back out into the fray of the extended northern sunset.

We passed a huge ferris wheel and continued to pedal on into new parts of the city. As we pedaled, we began to realize: this place was big. It was not quite as densely populated as some of the other Chinese cities that we’d visited, but it certainly managed to make up for it in terms of being vast, confusing, and spread out.  Unlike most chinese cities, it was neither gridlike nor structured with ring-roads. We continued to wheel through a pollutant-scattered sunshine haze, into one neighborhood, then through it and into the next.

We stopped to snack a little when we spotted a woman grilling up skewered sausages, and painting them with spicy sauce. She would grill the sausages, which honestly seemed pretty much impervious to the little charcoal fire that she had, then scrape them off the of the spit, and stab them with a chopstick, to be served up lollypop-style.

Now that we’d started eating, we realized we were a little hungrier than just one sausage lollipop could fix, so we purchased a few other things: a meat filled Chinese pastry, and a kind of egg roti that was being cooked up by a particularly grizzled fellow on the street.

We strolled around munching hungrily on what we’d gotten, and poking around in amongst all the goods that were being sold curbside.

Once we’d finished the food, we climbed back on the cycles, and continued in the same direction, passing some fellow wheelers who were really putting the “full” in “fully loaded”.

As we approached the outskirts of town, we began to notice things getting decidedly more raw, and the general level of filth began to spike upwards. Soon the tall buildings of the city were replaced with squat little shops and sprawling outdoor markets. We stopped at one of the larger intersections to catch our breath, which was none too easy so thick was the air with industrial pollutants and truck exhaust. While we were doing so, we spotted a road heading off to our right that appeared to be closed down for construction. But there were certainly people walking and wheeling the thing, so we decided it might be interesting to join them.

We hoisted our bikes over the barriers, and past a giant semi carrying metal piping parked right next to a huge pile of plastic sacks filled with chili peppers. There were stray dogs poking and scratching at the sacks of chillies, which I found particularly impressive since even from a distance the scent of chillies was very strong, even tearing the eyes a little. Were these dogs, then, also immune to pepper spray? Speculation is invited in the comments.

The street we wheeled along was fantastic. It turned out to be the connector between that part of Harbin and a small nearby town, which seemed to have sprung up as a home for workers in the nearby agricultural and industrial operations. We had no problem weaseling the speed TRs through the construction zone, once we hit it, and right on the other side we were awarded by discovering the factory that produces that same Chinese Kvas that we had decided not to purchase in Beijing. The smell of yeast and grain was very strong as we rode by, which an almost soy sauce like tartness to it.

The sun was beginning to set as we rolled by lush farmlands and crumbling villages, but the dusk light hung around for a while, making it easier to navigate our way back towards the city center. When we passed a giant metal piping and rebar sales yard, we couldn’t resist heading in to investigate.

The yard was huge, and filled to the brim with every kind of steel piping or bar that anyone could ever want, and we took great pleasure in piloting the speed TRs around it.  For a split second, we reflected how there were such few industrial yards  in the developed world that would be open enough for two curious mustachioed young men to investigate freely on bicycle.

Back on the road into Harbin, we were becoming increasingly unsure of our location and how to get home from there. We’d made it back into the city, but the city was gigantic, and it always felt like we were just a block or two away from somewhere that we’d recognize. We stopped multiple times to ask for directions, but the pedestrians were not very helpful, pointing us only vaguely onwards.

We stopped when we rode past a grocery store which which had hired a rapper spitting freestyle Mandarin to help coax customers in.

As the last bits of daylight finally fled the sky, we were still nowhere near our hotel. And so we wheeled on, asking for directions from time to time, and doubling back on ourselves plenty. The people of Harbin were very kind, and more than happy to give us their best idea of how to get back to the hotel, but we had learned now to trust only in the Indian system of polling many people and making a decision based on the group consensus.

In the meantime, the temperature was perfect for the leather jackets, and the wheeling was still feeling good as we paused at a stoplight next to this fellow wheeler who was transporting large metal frames. Wheel safe brother.

We finally got back to the hotel ravenously hungry. the small snacks that we’d eated had long since been turned into tire and break-pad wear, and we were excited to head out in search of more food. We headed onto a street that had no pavement, just a large wash of sand near our hotel, and soon found a restaurant, right across from where a family was burning their garbage in the street.

The food was, of course, amazing, and we stayed until it was only us and the staff chatting about what a fascinating city we were in.

Glimpses of Beijing

We were in luck the next day, for that international chiller, Mr. Stewart “Stigg” Motta, was in Beijing as well, preparing some fresh greenhorns to be taken out on wild adventure through Inner Mongolia and Qinghai. We were able to meet up with him for brunch at a fantastic Beijing-style restaurant where we ate under the watchful eye of Chairman Mao.

We ordered more of that fresh cucumber dish, which Motta was quick to point out to us is not as good here in the north as it is in Yunnan, for they they dilute the purity of the dish by adding hot peppers. I’ve never been one to complain of excess hot peppers, but I had to agree that there was something not quite perfect about this iteration of the dish.

In addition to that, we ate a large messy dish of cabbage with bean sauce, a mixed mushrooms and broccoli dish, and a dried mushrooms and bok choy dish. It was a very vegetable heavy breakfast, which was exactly what we needed having traveled for so long in lands where green vegetables were few and far between. We were sorry to not get to spend more time with the man, and embraced warmly before wheeling off.

We spent the rest of that day, wheeling around Beijing, comparing potential venues for our upcoming talk, which we had tentatively entitled “Choosing Freedom”.  MCK met us and guided us around to the possible locations of our presentation which he had in mind, starting in the posh San Li Tun district.

Our tour of potential venues certainly cemented one thing in our minds, Beijing was doing just fine , packed with expensive and posh places to bring a bunch of people together to discuss issues of Honesty, Freedom, and of course, Wheeling.

This city was also positively flooded with foreigners. As we wandered through modern-art-strewn, high concept bars and hotels, we could not help but find ourselves mildly disappointed, having for so long enjoyed the spotlight of being an uncommon sighting.  In Buryatia, people raised an eyebrow at us – we were just two more gweilos.

That night, we ate with MCK at a DongBei Restaurant.

MCK had been living in China for a number of years by this point, and his Chinese was top notch. During the ordering process, he began doing shtick with the waitress, refusing to tell her where we were all from, and asking her to guess. She first guessed France, but then hit America. I can see where she was coming from with the French I guess though.

It was another greens-heavy meal, with a garlicky squid and greens dish, a large plate of pickled bamboo, and some small, deep-fried fish, which we dipped in a kind of plum salt.

We realized as we were eating that we could have instantly solved any misconceptions about our nationality by just keeping the Maui Jims on throughout the meal. MCK in particular seemed now just one leather jacket short of being a serious chiller.

We spent a fair amount of our days in Beijing working on correspondence for you, dear reader, and preparing our talk on choosing freedom.

But we were able to get a little wheeling in each day, and to eat some fantastic food. So forgive me if I only relate some of the highlights:

Take for instance this, the symbol for Yong Jin bicycle company. If only one day we could have a company with a symbol that savage.

We ate a meal of Guangxi food, which delicious, including these fried rolls of pork fat, fried eggplant slices which we dipped in vinegary, chutney-like sauce, and some very loud and tasty dandelion greens.

We had a wonderful evening with a Grinnellian who we were introduced to through the Taiwan bureau. When I was first met Maggie, she spoke to me like we knew each other, and indeed her face looked familiar but I couldn’t remember from where. Then it all came rushing back to me, once she mentioned that she had built a dress out of feminine waste disposal sleeves and my mother had purchased it to hand in our living room in Iowa.

Along that same dresses-made-of-unconventional-materials vein, we also encountered this dress made of broken pottery near Mesh, the wine bar where we decided to give the presentation.

We were also able to do our first “dinking” of the trip on the Speed TRs. “Dinking” is, of course, a technical term for when you transport an extra person on the back of your cycle. Now in all technicality, some dinking had happened in Uzbekistan, but that had been during a time when the bike had been commandeered by a rogue pottery saleswoman.

We also went to the Russian district of Beijing, where they have a giant embassy and a few Produktis and Traktirs. We even considered for a moment buying some of this Chinese made Kvas, but it was the color of Urine, so we purchased Baltika beer instead.

We ate at the “White Nights” restaurant in Beijing which served up some very interesting interpretations of Russian food.

We also stopped in to Beijing Sidecar, the business run by Nils, the Danish fellow we met in a Hutong when we were last in Beijing.

His shop was quite amazing, and we ran into his associate, who we were not surprised at all to find was riding a Dahon to work. We even got to witness the proud new owner of a giant sidecar motorcycle come it to give it a first ride. We were sorry, however, to learn that Nils had had an accident and was actually back in Europe recovering in a hospital. We send our best wishes, brother.

The morning before we left for Harbin, we went strolling through a kind of hutong turned posh shopping neighborhood, where advertisements like this one for a laptop pretty well sum up the vibe.

We had one last meal in Beijing at a popular looking Sichuan restaurant. We made some mistakes in ordering, and ended up buying a giant and expensive fish, which was brought out to us flopping and live, in order to prove how fresh it was.

But perhaps the mistake was in our favor, for it was strikingly tasty, and served up in a huge chafing dish, just sizzling in oil and nestled in chili peppers.

And then we were off, racing through the steamy night, rolling fully loaded towards the train station. As we were rode, we were becoming decreasing startled by the presence of Brooklyn hipster-types on fixed gear cycles, riding amidst the traffic. Beijing was a shockingly globalized city.

During our time in Beijing, the crystal clear air that we’d wheeled through the first day, had steadily degraded the longer we spent, and as we rode now, sweating, and whipping along, the Beijing pollutant haze that we’d experienced our first time in the city had returned, giving the city a hazy and mystical feeling to it.

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