I ended up staying in Busan even longer than I had planned. Wanting to go hiking in Jirisan National Park, I thought about moving to a city a little closer to the park, but the cheapest room I could find there was about double what I was paying in Busan, so I decided to stick around and just do a day trip to Jirisan. Since I made this decision at the last minute, I was going to be in Busan for another two nights. This left me with one day to kill and not a whole lot of new stuff to see. That day I just went back to the beach and took a 1 hour sightseeing cruise out around some small islands near the coast, and then didn’t do much else. There was a nice British girl staying at the guest house at the same time as me, waiting for her English teaching job to start, and it was so nice to have someone who actually speaks English well and have a normal conversation over a couple drinks that night.
The next day I got up really early as the bus ride out to Jirisan was supposed to take about 3 hours. As luck would have it, a middle-aged Korean man decked out in hiking gear (Koreans love to wear the latest trendy hiking gear it seems) sat next to me, and though he spoke very little English, we figured out that we were both doing the same hike, so he became my friend for the day. The bus ride was long and we finally arrived at the trailhead, Ssangyesa temple, which was flooded with tourists. Having seen so many temples already, and this one wasn’t much different, we made our way quickly through and began the hike. It wasn’t a very long, though pretty steep, and after about an hour we reached the desination, Buril Pokpo, a waterfall. We stopped and shared our lunches, which like the entire hike, was pretty much silent as neither of us spoke the other’s language. I think both of us had hoped to do more hiking, but there really wasn’t much further you could go on a day hike, so we turned around and headed back. It was a good thing we did too, because there was an endless train of cars and people trying to get out of the area, and the bus ride back to the intercity bus terminal, which had taken 45 minutes on the way in, took 2 and a half hours on the way out. We barely managed to catch the last bus to Busan, and I think if I hadn’t had a local with me I might not have made it at all. The guide book really suggests you do a 3 day camping trip to see a lot of Jirisan, and I think if I ever return I’ll try and do that; spending a total of nearly 8 hours on buses to do maybe 3 hours of hiking just seems silly. Never the less, a fun day.
The following day I caught an express bus back to Seoul, returning to the same guest house I had stayed at before. Didn’t do much that day, the bus ride took about 5 hours so by the time I got to Seoul it was late afternoon. I did manage book a DMZ tour for the next day, which was something I really wanted to do.
It’s hard to say whether the DMZ tour is worth it or not, which is the exact impression I got from everyone I talked to about it. It costs nearly $50 for the most basic tour, you see 3 sights pretty hurriedly, and there are no pictures allowed hardly anywhere worthwhile. The first stop upon entering the DMZ, after having your passport checked by a South Korean officer, is the 3rd tunnel. Since it was established at the cease fire agreement, the North Koreans have made several attempts to dig tunnels under the border in preparation for an invasion of the South. They seem to get found every time, however, and always try and make an excuse or blame the South for digging it. The 3rd tunnel is the closest to Seoul and one of the larger ones (large meaning about 5′ around), and when they found it in the 70s, the North Koreans quickly threw coal all over the walls and ground and said they were mining. Riiiiight. You have to take a little tram to get down to the tunnel, and then you can only walk through about 300m of it, and of course you have to leave your camera in a locker before you decend.
The second stop is an observation tower overlooking the whole DMZ. Unfortunately the day I went was fairly foggy, so the view into the North was limited at best. They said beforehand that pictures here are allowed, but only behind a yellow photography line. The line is about 20 feet back from the edge, so if you try and take a picture all you really get to see is a row of people standing looking out onto an indistinguishable landscape. And if you try and sneak one closer, there are soldiers everywhere who are highly trained at quickly erasing photos from all models of digital camera.
The last stop is the final train station in the South. The tracks continue on to the North, remnants of the time before Korea was divided, and a map shows where the station in the North is, as well as planned stations along the way, which will be built after the ‘reunification’. The whole time on the tour, our guide and all the signs talk about the ‘reunification’, the time when the North sees the light and joins with the free people in the South. They speak about it like they already know exactly when it will happen, but there’s no sign at all from the North that it ever will. Both sides seem to enjoy their propaganda in one form or another.
My flight back to Beijing left early the following morning, so I called it a night pretty early. The flight was pretty uneventful, and yet again I made it through Chinese customs with no hassle what-so-ever. I keep reading stories of getting hassled on travel websites, and even two girls I met in Korea had their guidebook taken away because it showed Taiwan as a separate country. Not sure how they even got searched, but I really couldn’t have had less trouble. My friend Tiffany, who has been soooo kind as to put me up for my stay in Beijing, met me just outside customs, and we caught a cab to her apartment.
She has a really nice place in a good area, 14th floor of one of the many high rises, 2 bedroom, costs about $500 US per month. A US salary would go a long way here, and Beijing is probably one of the more expensive cities in China. Pretty much the first thing we did was go get a massage at her favorite spa, 30 minutes neck and shoulders, 60 minutes on your feet, and all you can eat snacks, drinks, and small meals for about $9. Gonna have to find more of these places, though I’m a little skeptical about trying to find a legitimate massage place without a local helping me. That night we met up with some of her friends and had a few drinks, but called it a night pretty early, as waking up at 5:30 am didn’t really leave me ready to hit the town.
The next day I had to go drop my passport off with the Vietnamese embassy to get a visa, and then Tiff showed me around some other parts of town. Now I’ve already though that all of China was under construction, but Beijing makes that look like nothing. Everything is being redone in preparation for the Olympics in 2008, which is bad for me as it’s all scheduled to finish maybe a month before the games start. One thing she asked me to help her with was set up a wireless router for her apartment, so we went to a Techno Mart to do some shopping, and finally found a decent looking one. We got back and it turned out it was a Chinese only model of a similar Linksys router I know, but all the configuration was in Chinese, and neither of us read the characters (Tiff speaks well but reading the characters is another story). Fortunately, being the technical genius that I am (and having set up so many people’s wireless routers before), I figured out the basic stuff that needed to be set up, and now her apartment has a secure wireless connection. Just hope no one needs to go in and change it ever.
I really wanted to do some touristy stuff the next day, and Tiff has been here so long she’s seen everything many times over, so I went off on my own to Tienanmen Square and the Forbidden City. Beijing’s subway is years behind places like Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, and even Guangzhou. It was probably the first one built in China, but the whole city only has 2 real lines, with a 3rd covering some of the western outskirts. Of course, 10 more lines are under construction right now. Eventually I made it to Tienanmen, which is impressive if for nothing else than it’s size. There’s a mausoleum for Mao smack in the middle of it, where you can go in the morning 8 to 11 to see his preserved corpse. I got there too late, but I think I might try and go back. The Square is surrounded by the various Communist headquarters buildings, and with all the soldiers marching around, it has a feeling somewhat akin to how I think Moscow may have been during the Cold War.
Across the street from the north side of Tienanmen is the entrance to the Forbidden City. It’s a huge palace, much much larger than any of the one’s I visited in Seoul, and the red walls and gold roofs were a good contrast to the blue, green, and pink of the palaces in Korea, which were starting to become repetitive. Unfortunately, the grandest hall in the center was, of course, under renovation and covered with a huge green screen. Several other buildings were closed as well. My biggest disappointment, however, was the audio tour guide I got, which according to my guidebook was supposed to be narrated by Roger Moore, and that was the only reason I got it. They must have recently changed it, as now instead of a prerecorded walk through, you get a small electronic map that gives you a narration based on your location. The voice, however, is just a Chinese woman speaking English, and I wanted to hear James Bond telling me about the Emperor’s of old!
Spent a good 5 hours out there, then made my way back to the apartment. Some friends of Tiffany’s invited us to see their other friend perform at the international school at which they worked, so we decided to go, not really knowing what was in store. Turns out, the school is a high school for international kids, all in English, who’s parents live in the highly affluent suburbs of Beijing. We had just come to their annual talent show, and the friends were just doing a small skit in an intermission time. Now I knew to expect the unexpected on this trip, but sitting through a Western high school talent show was not at all something I would have though I’d be doing! At least I know now that Western kids here are just as awkward, shy, and nervous as teenagers as they are back home. After sitting through 2 hours of performances, we were all ready to have a few drinks, so we headed back to town and went out to some clubs.
I can definitely tell Beijing is a much easier place to live as a Westerner than anywhere else in China. It’s to the point that you can pretty much live in a bubble that’s mostly devoid of China, only occasionally having to deal with a cab driver or local shop owner who doesn’t speak English, but really that’s just like home too.
Yesterday we all got a pretty late start after the previous evening’s fun, so after lunch Tiff, one of her friends, and I went to a lake in the middle of town that is surrounded by a bunch of nice bars and restaurants and shops, and just walked around. We met up later with most of the same people from the previous night for a couple drinks on a rooftop bar overlooking the lake, followed by some great Indian food for dinner. The weather has been excellent here as well, though apparently it’s pretty rare for it to be so nice. For once I got lucky with weather.
I haven’t yet gotten to post my Beijing pics, but I did post some new ones from Busan, as well as the ones from Jirisan, so here’s links to those:
Busan, Korea
Jirisan National Park, Korea
Korea continues to be great. The bus I took from Seoul to Gyeong-ju was nice, each row was just 3 large, plush seats and there were only about 6 people total on the whole bus. It only took about 4 hours to get there, and it’s pretty much on the opposite side of the country.
Gyeong-ju is well known for having loads of historical sights and artifacts scattered throughout a large countryside that’s prime for hiking through. Hiking seems to be a very big part of Korean culture, and a big portion of the country is national parks and wilderness set aside for just that. I could tell I had arrived in Gyeong-ju at the perfect time of year: the cherry blossom trees are in bloom. And there are a ton of them. Every street is lined on both sides, and all the parks are covered in them, so everywhere you look it’s nothing but white flowered trees contrasting rolling green hills and fields of yellow mustard flowers.
I arrived at the guest house I was staying at, which is probably the first place I’ve been that’s been in a really traditional-style house, complete with the sliding doors and ondol heating, the Korean style of under-floor heating. There was an attached modern bathroom though, so it wasn’t exactly roughing it. By the time I was settled it was close to 3 in the afternoon, so I just went around to some of the close things to see, a couple parks and a pond. All throughout there were these little mounds of various sizes: tombs of various important people from long ago. A few of the larger ones had been excavated and you could walk around inside of them. The best part was just walking through the fields though.
The next day I spent the whole day hiking through Mt. Namsan park, a large park just south of town. I’ve noticed a lot of mountains in Korea are called “Mt. Namsan”, and the funny thing is I think Namsan just means mountain or something like that, so I don’t know what they are really called, all the stuff in English just says “Mt. Namsan”. The park is huge, and I only covered a bit of it, entering from the east side and going up and over to the mountain and out the west side, then a bit north and back up the east side, finally exiting out the north end. There were all sorts of relics to see along the way, Buddhas carved into rocks, burial mounds of various sizes, and some small temples. The weather was beautiful too, though there was a strong, icy wind blowing the “yellow sand” in which made things a little difficult.
What is the “yellow sand” you ask? Well, it’s the real reason you see the Asians wearing those masks on TV. Until I got o Korea I hadn’t seen anyone wearing it, and I had always thought they were for pollution, but the real cause is sand that blows across the ocean from the deserts of Mongolia. Up until a decade or two ago, this used to not be a problem, as there were lots of forests in northern China that stopped the wind. Now, however, China has solved that by completely destroying all remnants of forest in the north, so the winds carry the sand all the way over the ocean to Korea and Japan. Apparently some days it gets so bad that you can hardly see ten feet in front of you. Also sometimes the sand gets particularly wet on the journey over and develops mold, hence becomes a health risk, though mostly for children and (as they’re referred to in all the signs I’ve seen in Asia) the “old and weak”. All I noticed, though, was that my nose would not stop running. Also the reason I hadn’t seen people with masks before was that it’s only really a problem in the north-east part of China, which I haven’t visited yet.
The next day I caught a bus to Busan, the country’s second largest city. Its a beach town, and the world’s fourth largest shipping port, though that part of things seems to be fairly well removed from the part of the city people stay in, which is nice. My accommodation couldn’t have changed more, I’m now staying in a little three-bedroom apartment on the eighteenth floor of one of the many high-rises here owned by a Korean woman who has put three bunk beds in one room and two beds in the other. It’s a nice little place though, and pretty centrally located. Busan seems to be a nice city so far, though I think I like the character of Seoul better.
The first day I didn’t do much, got in around 1 pm and needed to find a bank to get more money, which took a little while as it was hidden away a bit, and after that I just went back to relax. Hiking for close to 9 hours the previous day had left me fairly tired, plus I knew the following day I’d be doing more hiking.
So that’s just what I did, in Geumjeongsan park. I started at Beomeosa, a Buddhist temple on the north end of the park, and the northern trailhead for the park. The temple wasn’t anything particularly different than the dozens of other temples I’ve seen in the past few weeks, a little small if anything. The hike through the park was great though. It took about three hours, and ran along the wall of an ancient fortress that was built on the mountain. Not a huge wall or anything, but the gates and watchtowers along the way were all great, and the views along the top of the mountain were spectacular. At the end of the trail there is a cable car that runs up and down the mountain’s south side, so I took that down and got a great view of the city. At the foot I was near one of the city’s other big attractions, Asia’s largest spa, so I went in and had a soak in some hot tubs and a sauna in the “yellow sand purifier”, running at 94 degrees C (I think thats a little over 200 F).
Today I went to see the most popular beach here, Haeundae. The beach itself was rather small by the standards I’m used to, though the weather was great and I could tell that if there wasn’t an arctic breeze blowing, it would be a great beach to relax at. Near by was the Busan Aquarium, which I really enjoyed. They had some great stuff: penguins, otters, giant-crabs, a shark tank, and a number of other exotic fish that I hadn’t seen before. I spent a few hours there just looking around at all the animals and fish they had, it was quite large, and then had a walk through a small park on the coast near by.
Tomorrow I’ll be heading to Jinju for even more hiking in Jirisan National Park, a huge park in the southwest part of the country. I’ll just spend a couple days there so I’ll probably only see a small portion of the park, and then I have to get back to Seoul to catch my flight to Beijing.
As always lots of photos:
Gyeong-ju, Korea
Busan, Korea
The title says it all. This place is great. Expensive, but great. After being in China for a month, with the dirt, pollution, noise, constant people trying to take your money in one way or another, and just general bombardment of the senses, Korea is like a breath of fresh air. Even now, in Seoul, one of the largest and busiest cities in the world, I feel relaxed and at peace. Everything here has been great so far. The one downside is, as I mentioned, the cost. Things are about as expensive as in the States, which doesn’t help a budget traveler like me much. But I’m only going to stay here for a couple weeks so I think it won’t hurt my money situation too bad.
The ferry ride over was a final goodbye to China in a fitting way. My cabin was shared by several loud, constantly smoking businessmen who stayed up until about 3 am playing computer games of some kind, it looked kind of like Starcraft. I got as much sleep as I could, and made it to Incheon, where I caught a subway to Seoul and found the guest house I had booked.
The first thing I needed to do was load up on Korean money (won). Fortunately, South Korea and Seoul are packed with Citibanks, so I can take out money with no fees. If you are ever traveling, at least in Asia, get a Citibank account. The ATMs are all the big cities, and when you make withdrawals there are no fees, you just take money out at the median conversion rate, which is even better than if you changed money at a bank, where they would give you the sell price (which is a little less). The problem with Korean money is, 1000 won equals a little more than a dollar, and the highest note they have is 10,000 won. You end up with a ton of bills if you take out enough money to last you a couple weeks like I usually do. The economic development of South Korea is fairly recent, so they probably haven’t had a change to update their money accordingly. One local told me not even ten years ago, one dollar equalled 50,000 won!
By the time I was all settled the first day, it was well into the evening, so I grabbed some food with a couple Canadian (well one Egyptian who lives now in Canada) guys who were staying at the guest house. Another great thing in Korea is the food. So much better than Chinese. You can get good food in China, but it’s expensive. The only cheap thing here is the little bar-b-que places, where you can get a full meal for 5000 won. At that price in China, your options are salty/oily fried rice, salty/oily noodles, or salty/oily soup. I used to not be a huge fan of Korean food (lots of pickled stuff) but it’s definitely grown on me a lot.
The next day I visited the most well known of the palaces in Seoul (the city is covered in them, at least 7 or 8), Gyeongbokgung. It’s a very impressive sight, huge and ornately painted in every little nook of the roof, and they even have guards standing in full costume and do a big formal changing of the guard every hour, which I happened to arrive right as it was beginning. The whole experience was really cool, and it gives you a sense of how much pride the Koreans have in their heritage, which is something I noticed in difference with China. The Chinese make a lot of noise about pride in their culture, but it seems to be just a lot of talk. Case in point, almost all the palaces were completely destroyed when the Japanese occupied Korea about 150 years ago, and after they left, the Koreans took the time to rebuild every one of them in the exact same way, well before their economy was in any sort of good shape. China was also occupied by Japan and had many cultural relics destroyed in that time, but at the end of it the Chinese just built high-rises on the sites to make money.
After the palace I went to one of the markets, Insadong. Markets are the other big thing to see in Seoul, and while the prices are much too high for me (especially knowing that elsewhere in Asia the same stuff is 1/10th the price), it was interesting to see. The one unique thing they have here is pottery, which is much different than the pottery and ceramics you see in China.
The following day the weather was pretty bad, raining and cold, so I went to the other markets since they are a combination of shopping malls and covered stalls. I hit Itaewan, Myeong-Dong, and Dongdaemun, where I bought my first DVDs in Asia, 5 for $10 and all movies that are in the theaters in the States right now. Itaewan is called the Foreigner’s Market, and it’s covered in western restaurants and clothing shops catering to people taller than 5′8″. Myeong-Dong is the fashion market, and you’d be hard pressed to find a higher concentration of name brand shops from the west; I’d say it even gives Hong Kong a run for its money. Dongdaemun is a combination of outdoor stalls and malls filled with little shop/stalls selling “designer” clothes, 90% made for Korean girls.
Yesterday I was hoping the weather would clear up a bit so I could do some more sight-seeing, and while it stopped raining and warmed up a bit, the sky was still very overcast. Oh well, my last full day in Seoul and still lots to see. In the morning I walked through Namsan Park and climbed up the mountain to Seoul Observation Tower, though the clouds covered most of the view. After that I went briefly to Namdaemun market, and then two more palaces. Deoksugung was similar, but smaller, to Gyeongbukgung, but also included a couple more modern looking buildings, built of stone with columns resembling the White House or a state capitol, that had been added in the past century. Changdeokgung is a huge palace including a large garden, but unfortunately you are forced to see it on a guided tour which skips over a lot of areas. Only certain days of the year are people allowed in to walk about freely, and yesterday was not one of those days.
Today I am going to catch an express bus down to Gyeong-ju, a small town in the south-east part of the peninsula that is supposed to have some good hiking and parks. Going to have to see how the rest of Korea I’m visiting holds up, but I have faith.
I’ve divided my Seoul pictures into two sets:
Seoul, South Korea
Seoul, South Korea - Palaces