On Changes

One thing that we learned pretty well on our last trip is how little making plans actually matters. Last year I planned out a detailed route, including roads, ships, trains, and potential places to stay. In the end, we visited only 2 countries on that original plan (our start and end countries) and none of the above. Boats were cancelled, roads were not what they were marked to be, and of course there's the whole "bikes were stolen" thing. But what we leaned was that plans are overrated and, ultimately, unnecessary. They can often  interfere with an amazing opportunity, when they stop you from saying "yes" to something in the interest of staying on plan. 

This time around we specifically didn't plan too much. We researched what has been done and what hasn't, but always in our mind was that knowledge that plans are meant to change. 

And change they did. Don't worry, it's not because of hospital visits or disasters, it's because we are having too much damn fun. Will's friend Min Jae picked us up from the airport and instantly began showing us the best Korea has to offer (mostly good people and soju). Our planned one day with her turned into two, then bled into three. Will kept getting messages from old friends who wanted to hang out, and it became increasingly clear that we had two options: 1) stick with the original plan and kick our butts riding down to Busan, or 2) visit with people, enjoy the many wonders of Korea, and bike around a shorter track.

We chose number 2. Despite a couple of hangovers, we have yet to regret it.

We rode around Ansan, Will's old home, a few days ago, and ended up having dinner with his old boss and sleeping on the roof of his old school. It felt amazing to ride again, and we both are ready to ride again, but the all-or-nothing nature of our original plan just ended up not being worth it. 

So now we're in Seoul, at a giant indoor amusement park ( I'm writing this while we wait in line for the "French revolution" roller coaster) with some friends. Tomorrow we "plan" to catch a ferry down to Jeju, a beautiful island down south, where we will be able to ride and camp to our hearts' content. After that, maybe spend a day in Busan, then a final night with Min Jae before we fly home next Saturday. That's the idea at least. Well let you know when that changes.

The places we poop

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I like to think that I'm a pretty well-experienced traveler when it comes to toilets. Between Armenia, Eastern Europe and Western Europe, I feel I've experienced the range from good to bad.  But I just enjoyed the hell out of using the bathroom here in Japan (will and I are on our 1.5 hour layover in Fukuoka). Not only did the toilet have colorful picture buttons offering every service imaginable from Bidet to "flushing water" sounds, but once one sits ones behind on the seat, the sound of rushing water issues from speakers, carefully covering any embarrassing sounds that may occur. In my opinion, the fact that it was spotless and had additional cleaning materials provided should one decide that things were not quite clean enough was not important considering everything else offered. 

Will just returned from the men's room, and informed me that while he was not given the "rushing water" sounds, he did have a deodorizing option which was missing in the ladies room. From this we have decided that men do not need to worry about noises, but are expected to smell, whereas women's poop doesn't smell, but our sounds are offensive. 

Will has informed me that this is not the status quo in Korea. 

This has also been the fastest, easiest transfer I've ever had. Well done, Japan. 

TWB

Traveling By Bike is amazing, Katrina and I love it. You see parts of the place you are in that you otherwise wouldn't , you "earn it" and therefore "appreciate it" more, and of course it's a free work out. All amazing reasons but Traveling WITH Bikes is a pain in the ass, near that of TWK (traveling with kids *cue full body shiver). To travel with a bike you first have to pack it into an incredibly small box, then pay outrageous "bike fees", and lastly you get to worry for hours that some one is going to bend, break, smash, crush, breathe on wrong, or otherwise defile your pride and joy, your bicycle. This is why I said that we would never ship our bikes any where again and yet this is exactly what we did. Although this time around we were prepared and team Willina (that name needs work...) scored.
I was trying to find a way to not pay the 150$ each way each bike baggage fee when it hit me; porters! Porters will collect your bags and check you into your flight for a tip. This got me thinking, and with a well placed twenty dollar bill I was able to distract said porter from noticing the over sized nature of our baggage. We saved 280$ that we will naturally now piss away on soju and beer.
Let us all hope the rest of our trip goes as smoothly.

That Time Again

Due to incredibly cheap air travel Katrina and I are at it again. This time our destination is my old stomping grounds, South Korea here we come!

Three days until we depart on a two week trip in Korea. Have we  packed? No. Have we planned a route?  Kind of. Have we been practicing Korean?  I tought Kat how to order beer, does that count? Yes!

Our plan is to fly into Seoul,  spend a few days with friends then head out on the bikes for Busan. We hope to complete the 500km trip in about 7 days then ride the high speed train back to Seoul to sight see until we depart on the 31st.

Our last adventure will be a 14 hour layover in Japan!  I don't know what we will do in Fukuaoka for 14 hours but I can assure you it will involve lots of raw fish.

Getting excited and really nervous,
Will and Kat

Thank You

Candace, Jake, and Mila—Germany

Katia—Italy

Andre—Slovenia

Palona—Slovenia

Staff at Hostel 40—Serbia

Victoria—Romania

Olga and Theo—Moldova

Evon—Ukraine

Alyssa and family—Ukraine

Freerk and Hareld—Freighter across the Black Sea

Emzar—Georgia

For welcoming us into your homes and families.  For talking with us, even though we did not speak your language and you did not speak ours.  For feeding us and housing us.  For becoming our friends.  For supporting us when we needed it most.  For stepping forward and offering help to total strangers.  For helping us keep our sanity.  For helping us remember how good people can be, and why we wanted to travel like this in the first place.

Thank you.

To Bike or Not to Bike?

That’s not really a question. 

After our bikes were stolen, Will and I were in a bit of a quandary:  What do we do next?  We decided to buy packs and hike/walk/train/bus/whatever-it-took to get us across the continent. 

Now, we both agree that we probably should have just bought cheap bikes and kept on riding.  But, with the wounds the theft caused still fresh, buying a new bike felt like replacing a dead relative. 

What we didn’t realize at the time was how much our identities were tied to our bicycles.  We loved being bicycle tourists.  We loved that it set us apart from the hoards of backpackers who were limited to trains and buses; who stayed in cities and slept in hostels and almost never actually met “the people.”  As terrible as it sounds, we loved the fact that our bikes clearly, and from a long way off, marked us as different.  We loved that our bikes gave us the freedom to leave a place we didn’t like, to keep searching for a better camping spot, to get out of town and into the countryside and away.  We loved that we saw the county and not the city, met the people who didn’t speak English and hadn’t seen an American in who knew how long. 

I’ll admit that bikes also made some things more complicated.  I’ll be very happy if I never get shaken down for a bribe by another train conductor.  Trains and traveling with bikes, but not by bike, was a bigger pain in the ass than I ever imagined.  More than once I promised myself that, on my next bike tour, it will be solely by bike—just to avoid the hassle and cost of transporting the thing.  But, by and large, I still think traveling by bicycle is the best way to travel.

After the bikes were stolen, we had to come to grips with the fact that we were no longer bicycle tourists.  Our adventure was over; from here on out, we were just travelers—backpackers, even.  After weeks of seeing ourselves as better than them, we were them. 

We could no longer escape the towns.  While we probably could have gotten away with bandit camping (just camping anywhere out of sight) despite being in the European Union, we were no longer able to get far enough out of town to feel comfortable doing so.  We were weighed down by forty pounds of pack, which kept us chained to the towns, cities, and trains that we most wanted to avoid.

Once we came to grips with the fact that our identities had been stolen along with our bikes, we were able to work on a new way of seeing ourselves.  We ended up having a good time.  We ended up seeing amazing places and meeting amazing people that we would not have seen or met by bicycle.  We ended up learning more about traveling in Europe and deciphering train codes and freeway signs and languages that, by bicycle, we didn’t need to know.  We ended up swimming in seas and lakes, hiking in mountains, and riding through countrysides we would never have seen because we would not have been there in the first place.  There were even a couple of times where, seeing a biker work his way up a mountain in the rain, or maneuvering through insane traffic, we would realize that we were happy not to be in the same situation.

But.  We would often say, “This road would be so fun to ride down.”  Meeting bicycle tourists at campgrounds, it was painful—physically painful—to hear them talk about routes; to watch them pack up and head out in the morning.  When we saw a bike tourist, we both would follow them with our eyes until they were out of sight, longing clearly visible in both of us.  The most common phrases we said in the second part of the trip, as sad as it is? “I miss the bikes” and “I wish we had the bikes.”

The trip was not the trip that we wanted.  But it was the trip that we got.  Half of me wishes the bikes were not stolen—both because it made what was supposed to be a bad-ass bike trip into a… well, just a trip, and because having something taken like that just hurts.  But the other half of me knows that the trip we had was worth it.  The trip we had taught us things that the trip we wanted would not have.  Maybe the most important lesson in that is your trip is what you make it… no matter what happens to you, it’s all in how you react.  I don’t think we were wrong to be sad, or confused, or lost, after the bikes were taken.  I think we managed to make do with what was handed to us, salvage what we could, and still have an amazing time… albeit with moments of (sometimes extreme) sadding. 

We did what we could.  We enjoyed what we could.  We learned what we could, and as much as possible we tried to laugh when we knew it was all we could do. 

East to West

We started in Armenia, and slowly made our way west.  For me, this trip acted as a slow re-integration back into western society—a way of easing the transition after being abroad in a very different culture for two years. 

First we saw more supermarkets—no longer were they only to be found in capital cities.  Our first visit to a real supermarket (I believe it was in Romania) was unreal for me.  Will had to keep saying “no” as I pointed to things I hadn’t seen in two years.  While I didn’t get lost, it was kind of a close call—so many isles, so many foods… Sadly, peanut butter continued to be an elusive product.

People riding bikes—both for practicality and for fun.  Once we hit Ukraine, bikes were no longer in the sole possession of children.

Women drivers.  And, more than that, women drivers who had men riding in the backseat. 

Women drinking at cafés.  In Romania we saw a woman with a young girl.  While the girl played in the little sandbox, her mother sat, drank a beer, and smoked a cigarette.  And no one thought it was weird.

Well maintained roads—even small ones with few cars.

More travelers—backpackers on trains, mostly.  Less curiosity about us, even when we were in small towns.

Stricter and stricter rules on camping, that were more and more enforced, the further west we got.

More English. More Americans.

The changes were sometimes subtle, but definitely there.  Now that we’ve been back in the States for almost a month, there are things that still trip me up—shopping in stores, for example.  Even though we did this throughout Europe, for some reason here it’s just different, and occasionally a cause for some anxiety.  After peeing on the side of roads for two months, and in squatty-potties for two years, I don’t understand the complaints I hear about the public bathrooms here.  At first I felt so uncomfortable here—like everyone else had gotten a memo on how to behave and how to act and I was out of the loop.  I, quite honestly, couldn’t wait to get back away to where I at least knew things would be weird and strange.  But now that I’ve had some time to adjust, the great things about being home are coming out.  All the friends and family stuff, for sure—but I’m talking more the endless supplies of peanut butter.