I was walking down the street along Gwangalli Beach in Busan, fresh from a jimjilbang session with my friend Jessica, when I ran into a tall man in flannel who looked strangely familiar.

I looked up to see the curly mophead of my friend and coworker Josh, who was motorbiking up the coast with our other friend Woody this week, when many schools including ours were on vacation.

The boys had just arrived that morning with their bikes on the car ferry from Jeju-do, and I knew they’d be coming through this southern beach town, as I had thought about joining them on their journey and knew their rough itinerary. I had decided instead to take a few more days to relax and explore on my own in Seoul before heading southward with Jess, and to let the dudes do their Easy Rider thing without a girl tagging along.

But In Yun was clearly at work here, and it had other plans.

There aren’t many gin joints in Busan, or Korea, for that matter, but there are a lot of bars, and we had to walk into theirs. Soon a round of beers was on its way, Josh and I were swapping stories about our week, and Jess and Woody were deep in conversation about the challenges of growing tomatoes in Asia.

Then suddenly, Woody turned to me and said, with a glint of mischief in his eye: “Wanna come to Sokcho with us tomorrow?”

Busan, hide your daughters.

The next day, I met them back at the beach, and hoisted myself onto the back of Woody’s bike.

Sokcho sits at the northern end of the Korean peninsula, and we began our journey at its southernmost tip. Woody warned that by the end of our ride, my behind would feel “like you were taken advantage of in a dark alley.” But as the Aussies would say, I wasn’t too fussed, especially once we headed out onto the highway, where the breeze picked up and carried us along with a cacaphony of cicadas into the country.

As one of my best friends from childhood lost her father and brother to a motorcycling accident, I’ve always feared motorcycles, and have dissuaded more than one boy from buying one. But there is something about moving away that makes you feel that the stories that once defined you have been left behind, and you must create new ones to fill the vacuum left in your personal history, stories that will help to make the new you make sense. Then you compare the elements from the new stories with the old stories, and begin to see some emerging themes. And this is how you come to know yourself once again.

Some emerging themes: fresh air, fast movement, the smell of sunscreen and manure on country roads. The rituals of packing and rigging. The uneasy dance of decision-making with friends. Talking about movies and books, favorite places, lessons learned from near-death experiences. And encountering kind strangers in strange lands.

—-

Our journey hit an early hitch when Josh ran out of gas, and we had to motor alongside him while he walked it to the nearest station, luckily only about a hundred feet away. South Korea in the summer is sweltering when you slow down, and we were all soaked in sweat by the time we reached it. The station staff rushed to meet us with icy bottles of water, and tended to us all as though the station were the Emerald City and we were going to meet the Wizard. Which in a way, I suppose we were.

While we caught our breath and fueled up Josh’s bike, a black SUV pulled into the station. Inside, a man and his daughter, the latter aged seven or eight, peered out of the window.

“Very hot!” the father said, and handed us a small tube of sunscreen, unbidden. “Too hot. Be careful.” And they rolled away again.

Despite the heat, I felt so charmed and happy — and even glamorous, as I stepped off the bike, pulled off my helmet and let my hair tumble out. A middle-aged female attendant standing near us smiled at me, revealing a mouth full of gold and silver caps. It was a lovely smile. “You are very beautiful,” she said shyly. 

I blushed. Then I thought dismissively, this is probably a translation thing. Strangely enough, mi-guk, the word for America, translates to “beautiful country,” and perhaps she was simply stating my nationality, as many Koreans confidently do when they see me here. American, they say, often giving me the thumbs up. (The boys must always be peevishly correcting: “No, Canadian.”)

She turned to Woody. “Your wife?”

I blushed again.

“No,” he said. “Chingu.” Friend.

“Ah,” she said. She looked disappointed, I’m not sure for whom, and looked down at her feet.

To change the subject, I asked her about herself, her husband. It seemed that she was from Bali in Indonesia, brought here to the countryside to be the wife of the station manager. Woody explained later that there were not enough women in the countryside, as many people were choosing to leave for the city or move out of the country, and thus this arrangement was becoming more common.

“Do you like it here?” I said.

“So-so,” she said. “Every day the same, you know?”

“But you get to meet interesting people, yes?”

She laughed. “Yes, I think so.”

“Crazy people like us, yes?”

“Yes!”

We saddled up again and headed out, waving to our new friends and laughing about the stir we had caused.

“Two white dudes on bikes in the middle of Korea, and a girl on the back who is old enough to be married, but who doesn’t belong to anyone,” Woody said over his shoulder. “They didn’t know what to make of us.”

“Yes, I know that I am an old maid in Korean terms,” I said, grinning back in the rearview mirror.

“It’s completely scandalous for a girl to be riding around on a motorcycle with a man she’s not married to here,” Woody said. “People will definitely think you’re a woman of questionable morals.”

I laughed and buttoned my flowered shirt up to the neck. “Well, you can lie next time if you’d like,” I said. “In the meantime, I’m going for an Audrey-Hepburn-in-Roman-Holiday kind of vibe. Perfectly respectable. Perfectly innocent.”

“I’ve never seen that movie.”

“It’s about a bored princess who gets kidnapped by Gregory Peck, and they have all sorts of adventures.”

“Ah, but we didn’t kidnap you. You came of your own free will.”

“Oh no, she is glad to be kidnapped, glad to be running away. In the end, she has to go back to her day job, and it’s all very sad. Though her day job is a bit more glamorous than mine.”

—-

We headed north up Highway 7 from Busan, a gravelly stretch of shoreline that reminded me of the seacoast between Salerno and Naples in southern Italy. Here, we stopped to cool off in the East Sea (known elsewhere as the Sea of Japan).

And again, the waygukin (foreigners) caused a stir, as a group of teenagers caught sight of us heading back to the parking lot, and asked if they could take a picture with us and the bikes. Our clothes and hair still damp from the ocean, we obliged. Woody even put on his helmet.

From there, we continued up the coast, stopping for steaming bowls of 감 자탕 (gamjatang) and coastal views.

As the sun went down, we realized we would not make it to Sokcho. The boys decided to try to make as much mileage towards Seoul as they could, even though this meant driving along in the dark and missing the scenery.

We drove up hills and down along the black water, sensing the change in geography mostly by the shifts in temperature. We passed through ghostly clouds of chilly air as we ascended and slid into warm pools of humidity as we descended toward the sea. To travel feeling the world on all sides was an amazing sensation.

In the mountains, we passed through a series of tunnels.

“Woody. Do you ever yell when you go through a tunnel?”

“Sometimes.”

We yelled as we went through the next tunnel.

“I feel like an American now,” he said.

Then the temperature dropped in earnest, and Woody stopped to pull some warm clothes out of his saddlebag. Wearing a hoodie destroyed the Audrey aesthetic, but I was cozy on the back of the bike and content, especially once the stars came out. We headed again into the mountains, and the lights of the city slipped behind them, allowing us to see the sky perfectly clearly. I pointed this out, and soon after, in a deep valley, Woody stopped the bike on the side of the road.

Josh pulled in behind him, and Woody motioned for him to turn off his lights. The three of us stood there in silence for a moment, faces turned upward, as though they were bowls that could collect the stars and take them with us back into the city, where the smog always obscures the view.

But we had to keep moving. We had no sleeping bags, so were limited to paid accommodations. We agreed that we wanted to stay somewhere along the beach, so Woody took us to Gyeongpodae, the largest beach town on the East Coast, hoping we’d find something cheap amid the myriad options for tourists there.

We arrived to find the waterfront mobbed with people, with foreign cars bumping Korean rap up and down the ocean road, and groups of fashionably-dressed Korean teenagers who gazed at us with distaste through their clouds of cigarette smoke. We realized only then that our faces were coated in soot from the cities, our hair dreadlocked from the wind, our warm clothing shapeless and sweat-soaked, and quickly becoming too hot for our slow crawl down the crowded street.

“I can’t wait to shower,” Josh said uneasily, watching the pretty girls pass by in their heels.

We found only one room available, a small windowless place guarded by a bulldog-like woman who told us it was 100,000 won, or about $30 per person. Woody, who once spent a year backpacking through Southeast Asia, thought we could do better. So we went door to door asking “bang, issoyo?” at all the other hotels for half an hour before sheepishly returning to the first.

Miss Bulldog eyed the three of us and our bikes suspiciously, and I could see in her eyes that our math did not add up to anything she approved of. But then she barked some unintelligible instructions to the boys about where to park, and showed me to the room. As she handed me the key, she patted me grudgingly on the shoulder and muttered something in what sounded like a reassuring tone. I patted her back.

“Gamsa hamnida,” I said with a penitent smile, and she nodded.

We showered and dressed, and headed out to the boardwalk to find some food. We settled in at a seafood joint without a menu. The only thing on offer: a massive feast of shelled animals, with endless side dishes. When the basket of raw fish arrived, I murmured, “We’re going to annihilate an entire ecosystem. “

I felt deeply sad about this all of a sudden, but ate as much as I could, and found it all delicious. Josh handled the tongs deftly, tossing clam after steaming clam onto my plate, and we piled the shells back in the basket neatly. Upon them, I placed the heads of the prawns I had eaten whole, their exoskeletons gone from gray to scarlet. I avoided looking into their beady eyes.

Then we went to explore the beach. It was almost midnight, and drunken teenagers covered the sand like flies on a compost heap. Golf-cart-sized police vehicles pushed their way through the crowd, regulating nothing. (Drinking outside is legal here.)

We paused on the edge of the boardwalk, feeling as though we were not intoxicated enough, or perhaps simply not Korean enough, to be permitted entry.

Then we plunged into the crowd, and made our way to the water. There, a group of girls in dresses played in the waves, squealing when one of their hems brushed against the water’s surface.

We watched them for a while, then went to bed.

The next day, we awoke in the pitch-black room in what felt like the predawn hours — only to realize that it was eleven o’clock. We had planned to be on the road by eight AM.

“Oh no,” Woody moaned, still half-asleep. “I really wanted to go to Sokcho.”

“Let’s go,” Josh said, grabbing his battered canvas bag. “At this point, we should just head back. We’ll be lucky to get home in time for school tomorrow.”

We folded up our sleeping mats, packed our things and quickly rigged the bikes, waving off the angry Korean ajashis (middle-aged men) who had gathered around them, complaining about where the boys had parked them.

“Mulayo, mulayo,” Woody told them. Roughly translated: I don’t know what you’re saying. It was only half true, but it served to clear the way, as the ajashis threw up their hands in frustration and stormed off.

Soon we were headed off into the countryside, with dirty hair and empty stomachs. We sped inland, through rice paddies and peaceful farms, towards the round, green peaks of the Odaesan mountains.

Josh raced ahead, eager to get home, while Woody’s bike chugged along with the weight of the two of us, up and up through the foothills. The engine grumbled, our stomachs grumbled, but we enjoyed the view.

We caught up with Josh at a mountaintop rest stop, where I wolfed down three steamed rice buns — sweet potato, green tea and red bean — while staring out over the landscape that lay before us. The boys joined me and we sipped our drinks in silence.

Miles to go…

And of course, heading out into the parking lot, we were accosted by still more teenagers asking to be photographed with the boys and their bikes. It helped that everyone looked the part: greasy, unshowered, barely held together with bandannas and bungee cords.

From here to Seoul, we drove along Highway 7, through highlands and lowlands, signs for ski resorts and clusters of humble blue-roofed concrete buildngs huddled together in rural river valleys. Woody explained that blue roofs, ubiquitous in Korea, are a holdover from the imperial days, when South Korea was a center for ceramics and nobles were known for building their homes with azure-blue tiles. The irony is that the roofs you can see here today are often plastic or metal, and look anything but regal.

Other cultural artifacts caught my eye along the road, and at this point, I had become so comfortable on the bike that I could snap photos as Woody drove. For example:

Not sure if these are shamanistic totems or simply silly lawn decorations. Such is the ex-pat experience.

At other times, it was easy to forget you were in Korea and not in Kansas … until suddenly out of the blue, you’d see a billboard featuring an ad for Korean cattle — or Kim Yu-Na, arguably the most beloved athlete in South Korea next to Park Ji-Sung.

As we crested one mountain, a happy harbinger of South Korea’s potentially bright future as a green energy leader loomed on the horizon:

Windmills, spinning away as a storm approaches…

Once again, the extra weight I had added Woody’s bike slowed our ascent to a crawl as we climbed up a particularly steep stretch.

Drops of rain from the clouds crowding around us at the peak began to pelt us, somewhat painfully, before they passed on and we headed down the mountain again. Woody told me about the last time he crossed over these mountains in the pouring rain, when his brakes gave out at the top. He coasted down around the switchbacks until finally, somehow, an ambulance full of helpful men came to his aid. They pulled his bike into a bus stop, would not leave until it was fixed, and refused payment.

“That’s Korea for you,” he said, as we passed by the bus stop in question.

Us being individualistic North Americans, we somehow lost Josh again as we took our time cruising through a small village. So we stopped to wait for him and to look at the map, near a bend in the river that coursed along the road.

No matter what country, city or state I’m in, I always love to look at maps. Especially atlases. iPhones and GPS’s are great, but they’re useless if you’re trying to stay off the highways. In his 1962 travelogue Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck predicted that in the future, it would be possible “to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.” To actually see something, you need atlases that show all the possible routes. And ideally, venerable fellow travelers who know what lies along the back roads.

Looking over Woody’s multicolored map, I saw Sokcho, saw Seoul, saw the massive puzzle of hangul characters in between, shrugged.

“It all looks good to me. I just don’t want to go home.”

“Neither do I.”

We took our shoes off.

After a while, we heard the sound of a motor growling down the road above. Josh had found us. Woody was neck-deep in the river, treading water in a swirling green pool. I was standing at the water’s edge, watching my feet sink slowly into the sand.

“Don’t know how I lost you,” he said curtly. “Tried to call you. Let’s go.”

After dozens of mounts and dismounts, I was finally learning to swing my legs over the seat without rocking the whole outfit or burning my shins on the fuel pipe. Soon we were on the road again.

But the next stalling tactic presented itself easily enough: we needed food. A series of vetoes — no convenience store food for Woody, no piles of grilled meat for me and Josh — brought us to the edge of crankiness, but just in time, we settled on one last perfect meal. Woody spotted what appeared to be an old cabin, built at the mouth of a valley, with old wooden booths. We might have been sitting in a hokey roadside diner in Vermont or New Hampshire except for the television in the corner broadcasting Korean dramas, a common fixture in restaurants that often double as the family living room.

As usual, a smorgasbord of side dishes appeared at our elbows, unbidden: sweet green peppers, lotus roots soaked in Korean rice syrup, rice with black beans, wilted seaweed in sesame oil, two kinds of kimchi.

The thing to order seemed to be naengmyeon, a staple of Korean summer cuisine: cold buckwheat noodles served in icy beef broth, garnished with sesame seeds and a hardboiled egg.

I didn’t know yet that you are supposed to douse the stuff with red pepper paste or vinegared mustard, both delicious combinations that add flavor to this otherwise simple dish, but I was too hungry to stop. The portion sizes here are all meant for sharing, but again, our individualism and exhaustion won out, and we hovered over our own huge bowls like a pack of hungry dogs. The only sound in the restaurant was the two delicately-featured Koreans in the soap opera blaring behind us, tearfully confessing their love.

We dragged our feet on the way out the door, making sure to stop for a tiny cup of chemical-tasting coffee from the machines that sit at the exit of nearly every traditional Korean restaurant. Woody lingered in the courtyard out front, examining a bag of freshly-steamed corn that someone at the restaurant had handed him.

“Korea,” he said.

“Yup,” I said with a tired smile.

We found a place for the corn in my bag, next to the melting chocolates, and I swung my leg over the seat once again.

The road home now lay unbroken before us. The fresh air was finite and quickly ran out. The quiet lines of cars waiting to return to Seoul from all points south began hours before we saw the city limits. If we had been in a car, we might still be waiting there. But the boys sidled alongside the traffic on the shoulder of the road, deftly swerving around cars and stands selling steamed corn and ice cream in the breakdown lane. I held tightly to the handle on the back seat as we bumped over the potholes and idled behind bicyclists.

Soon we saw the peaks that surround Seoul like a crown in the distance, rising up in the light of the sunset and reflected in the muddy waters of the Han.

“You know, Woody, we never made it to Sokcho,” I said.

“I know.”

“It’s okay. It was just something to point the bikes toward.”

I thought of the last lines from the poem Ithaca:

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

As we cruised into the city, Woody pointed out the sights, perhaps to cheer us both up at the prospect of returning. Here a glittering building facade, there a sculpture, markets piled on top of one another, presided over by skyscrapers. A week ago I had been slack-jawed in the face of it all, thrilled at the prospect of getting lost in such a city. And of course, I still was. Still am. But now that I’d smelled the air outside it, the part of myself that had been raised in dry riverbeds and on mountaintops had been awakened as well.

Once again, I felt the despair unique to my kind of emerging 21st century schizophrenic: unable to live and think outside cities, unable to breathe and feel inside them. Every time I return to my life in the city, I feel like I’m letting old Edward Abbey down.

One moment truly did cheer me, however. As we broke all traffic rules by cruising into a bus lane, I saw on the opposite side of the road the first twentysomething girl on a motorbike I’d seen all weekend. A Korean girl, sitting atop a stylish scooter, with her hair pulled back in a slick ponytail, wearing a skirt and a pair of tall boots. Her expression was unreadable, her eyes inscrutable through her sunglasses as she waited for the stoplight. Then the light turned green and she sped away.

From Busan to the East Coast to the countryside, we had terrorized the populace for hundreds of miles with my presence on the back of the bike, and I had felt no kinship for our fellow two-wheeled travelers along the way. All Harley dudes and Asian crotch rocket riders, staring straight ahead. But here in Seoul, a glimpse of independent female life. Of other women of questionable morals. Suddenly, I felt at home.

I am still questioning my morals. I still miss the smell of the mountains. I still want to do and be everything. I walked through my neighborhood the night after Woody dropped us off, and bought a pineapple on the way home. I cut it up the next morning and ate it dripping in the sunlight.