The Disaster Tourist

by Yun Ko-Eun

  ‘I’m going to recommend Desert Sinkhole,’ the adviser said confidently. ‘The accommodation is why it’s more costly than the other trips. You’ll be staying in a newly constructed resort—it’s very clean. The trip doubles as an opportunity to relax. It’s rare, too, that you can see volcanoes, deserts and hot springs all in the same location. Desert Sinkhole may be twenty per cent more expensive than the other trips, but you’ll be twenty per cent more satisfied.’

  The adviser’s poise betrayed her ignorance. Clearly, she didn’t know that a twenty per cent decrease in revenue had put the package she was advertising at the crossroads of life and death. But since Jungle was paying, it seemed appropriate to pick the most expensive option.

  The desert sinkhole trip was a six-day package, its destination a place called Mui. Yona had to search on the internet to find where it was. Mui was an island nation about the same size as Korea’s Jeju Island. You had to cross the southern part of Vietnam to get there. First you flew to Ho Chi Minh City airport, then you rode a bus to the seaside city of Phan Thiet and finally you took a thirty-minute boat ride. Yona understood why this package wasn’t more popular. It took a day to get there and a day to get back, and the scenery upon arrival was significantly less exciting than that of other disaster packages. There was a desert sinkhole like the name suggested, and maybe it was as ‘frightening and grim’ as the promotional materials claimed, but the problem was that rain had turned the sinkhole into a lake. It didn’t really look scary any more, or like anything special at all. When people heard the word ‘sinkhole’, they at least expected something like the 2010 Guatemala City hole, a five-hundred-metre-deep tumorous pit that had demolished the city’s entire downtown. Yona was growing suspicious that Mui wouldn’t fulfil her already low expectations. She looked up the flights she would take if she went on the trip.

  Desire and interest go hand in hand. When your eyes first scan over a place name on a map, that desire is as small as a bean. But as your interest in a place grows, the bean sprouts into something much more substantial. For the first time in a very long while, Yona remembered that she’d started working at a travel company because she enjoyed travel. Yona had gone on a few international business trips with Jungle, but she primarily worked domestically. She could have taken personal trips during her days off, but whenever she had the time, she no longer wanted to go anywhere. As she thought about the prospect of leaving for another country, even for work, it was like pushing open a window that had been closed for a long time. An unfamiliar, chilly breeze blew through.

  Yona pulled out her long-untouched passport. There were actually four passports in her drawer, three expired and one valid. In the first and oldest passport, Yona’s photo was as earless as a Paul Klee self-portrait. The photos in her newer passports progressively showed more and more of Yona’s ears and eyebrows. She didn’t know if it was evolution or regression, but regardless, they showed more of Yona’s face. Yona hadn’t even decided the dates for her trip yet, but she pulled out a suitcase and pre-emptively put her passport and camera inside.

  If disaster were to break apart the Earth during Yona’s trip, her camera was the tool that would make the shattered pieces around her feel real. The moment the camera shutter clicked, the image in front of it was no longer a subject or landscape to photograph. It was a blank space in time. Sometimes short intervals of nothingness affected people more than long periods of actual life. Yona considered how trips began. Didn’t travellers begin their journeys before they’d even left? Travel was nothing more than the recognition of the path they were already on.

  Time passed slowly, and Yona dealt with things she had to do before her trip started. One of her tasks was the cancellation for the man she’d spoken with twice. She’d changed her mind again and wasn’t going to charge him for it. In order to withdraw his trip, she had to send in five whole pages of documents. She could only cancel in the first place thanks to a loophole in Jungle’s system, and the stress of the ordeal was burning a hole in Yona’s throat.

  Departure was at the beginning of July. Even though more than a week remained before she left, Yona began to place things in her bag with a sudden urgency, as if she’d forgotten about them until now. She packed mosquito repellent, emergency medicine, and pencils and candy to give to local children. Constipation and diarrhoea pills were necessities, too. As she packed, it felt like so many things were vital. Barely a day would pass after she had closed the bag before she found a new reason to open it, as she thought of something else to pack. Soon after, she would open her suitcase yet again to remove other items, like her toothbrush, that she still needed before leaving for her trip. Yona spent several days stuck between two worlds before closing the suitcase for good the morning of departure.

  Now Yona was inside the aeroplane as she had long envisioned. She pulled a blanket up to her neck and looked through the cornerless window. Lights below her dotted the Earth like a mosaic. Looking from above, she could see that the city was at full capacity. Only inside this obese metropolis could one take the congestion for granted. As the red-eye flight cruised overhead, the urban swarm shrank into nothingness.

  2

  THE DESERT SINKHOLE

  SIX TRAVELLERS SPENT THREE HOURS rushing over Vietnam’s national highway number one. The bus they were riding had been swept up in a deluge of motorcycles. Motorcycles zipped along the road, and more waited by the kerb. The kerbside bikers were waiting for scheduled pickups, or hanging around hoping for customers. Bikes carrying up to four people at a time could be seen from the bus windows. Yona also watched the passing Vietnamese flags, stuck in the ground at equal distances, and street vendors hawking bags of bread and noodles. Two-storey houses, simple except for their beautifully decorated eaves and elaborate front gates, glided by, alongside tangles of electrical lines that resembled thick hair. The travellers recorded each moment, clicking their camera shutters as they glanced out of the windows at an outdoor wedding, and later when they drove past a cemetery busy with funeral-goers.

  Among all the views on the road, what caught Yona’s eye most was the Korean writing. She saw Korean words written on small items, like vests labelled with the phrase ‘quick delivery’ and T-shirts with unexpected slogans like ‘hazardous materials vehicle’, but she also noted Korean on buses, like those adorned with misspellings such as ‘automatic rood’ instead of ‘automatic door’.

  ‘Right now in Vietnam, we have a lot of buses covered with maps of the old Seoul transportation system,’ the guide explained. ‘People import old Korean buses to Vietnam, and buses with even a few Korean words on them sell for more. This means that a lot of people just go ahead and put Korean stickers on the vehicles they’re selling. If you look carefully, you’ll see Korean letters all over the place, even though what’s written doesn’t always make sense. Recently I rode a bus that, according to the map on the outside of the vehicle, went by Jungang Market, Gyeongbok-gung Palace and Mapo-gucheong. Of course, that wasn’t the actual route. Isn’t that funny?’

  The guide had energy suitable for a person used to long journeys. Her name, she said, was ‘Lou’, and she was Korean—even if her name wasn’t. She spent ten months each year in places like Vietnam, Mui and Cambodia, but Mui was her favourite. Accommodation there was of especially high quality, she said.

  Highway one first hit the coast at the seaside town of Phan Thiet. The town was a checkpoint you had to pass through to reach Mui. The bus stopped in front of the entrance to Phan Thiet’s largest grocery store. Lou rose from the passenger seat.

  ‘We’re going to take a break here for the next hour,’ she told the travellers. ‘There are no large supermarkets in Mui, so buy any necessary items or snacks you’ll want to bring with you.’

  An hour later, the passengers boarded carrying remarkably similar purchases: products like G7 coffee, Oral B toothbrushes and nep moi, a Vietnamese rice liquor. Everyone carried bundles of toothbrushes as well. Lou had informed the group that toothbrushes were especia
lly cheap in Vietnam, so they’d all been sure to buy a few, even though some of the travellers had initially laughed at the idea. ‘We’re on a disaster trip,’ they’d exclaimed. ‘Aren’t toothbrushes a bit too ordinary to bring on an adventure like this?’

  ‘Maybe Mui is more ordinary than we’re expecting,’ the man facing Yona said. There were two men on the trip. One was a college student who’d just been released from his compulsory military service; he’d been preparing for the trip since the beginning of his conscription. The other man looked to be around forty, but he turned out to be much younger. He was only one year older than Yona, and he told her he was a screenwriter. This was the man sitting across from Yona.

  None of his works had been turned into movies yet, but he had sold more than ten screenplays to production companies, and he supported himself with a variety of side jobs. The other two female travellers, besides Lou, were a mother and child. The woman was an elementary school teacher who’d brought along her five-year-old daughter. Yona’s fellow adventurers began to ask her questions.

  ‘Are you married yet?’ one person asked.

  ‘How old are you?’ demanded another.

  ‘What kind of work do you do?’

  She couldn’t say that she was on a business trip, or that the person who’d created this package was a co-worker. She wondered if their guide, sitting in front of them, was aware of the personal details of her clients. Thankfully, all Lou seemed to know was the contents of everyone’s passports. Yona tried to come up with an appropriate fake job for herself. She decided she’d be a thirty-three-year-old independent café owner: a life Yona had daydreamed about. If she ever quit her job at Jungle, Yona really did want to open a store that sold coffee and pie.

  ‘The truth is, I paid for this trip with my student loans,’ the college student told the others. ‘Trips like this aren’t usually expensive, so I figured it wouldn’t be too hard on my finances. And the insurance that comes with the package is pretty generous, too: if anything happens to me on this trip, the massive payout Jungle will send my parents is going to pay back the debt I owe them for raising me!’

  It seemed like the college student had said this as a joke, but the guide wore a serious look on her face. ‘As long as you pay attention to your surroundings, you’ll be fine. Accidents that occur because of broken rules aren’t covered.’

  ‘Oh, I know, I know,’ the boy replied. ‘Honestly, I’ve always had a lot of interest in trips like this, trips that do good for the local community. My friends all want to go see museums or castles, but I don’t care about those things. By the time our trip ends, I want to be inspired to live dynamically. Of course, if I die, I’ll be helping out my parents financially, at least.’

  As soon as the student repeated his joke, Lou clarified once more.

  ‘There’s no chance you’ll die,’ she asserted. ‘Our Jungle system isn’t something haphazardly cobbled together.’

  The college student shook his head in annoyance and turned his gaze to the view outside the window. Yona had discovered two potential problems during the conversation. One was that the trip probably wasn’t going to live up to the student’s expectation of ethical and locally engaged travel. The other was that Jungle’s system didn’t actually guarantee safety one hundred per cent. Yona thought of several safety incidents Jungle had dealt with. The causes of death were drowning, car accident and feverish illness; floods, crashes and fevers were not, of course, the disasters the travellers had chosen when planning their trips. The deaths were unadvertised disasters, unexpected by the travellers. From what Yona knew, Lou may have thought her assurances reflected the truth, but that didn’t mean there were no accidents. It was just that news didn’t spread, or it did so slowly.

  They’d begun to pick up the fishy smell of anchovies in Phan Thiet harbour, and it had continued to waft into their nostrils throughout the crossing to Mui island. Yona breathed in deeply. This smell was probably nuoc mam. It was an odour she knew only by sight, a word she’d read in guidebooks. Nuoc mam, a kind of fermented anchovies, changed the flavour of any other ingredient it touched. In this part of the world, it was the conqueror of mealtimes. Mui lived by its nuoc mam. ‘Mui’s mornings are filled with the hubbub of fishing, and its nights with the smell of fresh catches fermenting in salt.’ That was the first sentence of a book she had read about Mui. But the statement could no longer be written in the present tense, as most of Mui’s labour force had left for nearby Vietnam and nuoc mam was now made in Phan Thiet. Even so, you could certainly still smell in it Mui.

  Yona didn’t mind the fishiness. Like the stimulating odour that hit your nose when entering a musty house, or a new place, it lasted only a moment. Most people grew used to the smell of their new surroundings, and never again experienced the exciting initial pungency.

  The bus drove down a road lined with gingko trees. Mui was already dark. It wasn’t easy to see what lay at the end of the road. Once Mui had drifted into night, you couldn’t see a single thing on the island, not even neon signs from a red light district. The total blackness made the entrance to their lodgings seem even brighter. The bus stopped in front of a resort called ‘Belle Époque’, whose sign stated that it was a ‘Gift From Nature: Private Beach Resort; All Rooms With Ocean Views’.

  ‘It’s nice to meet you all. Welcome to Mui.’

  The manager, a local, greeted them in fluent Korean. Yona crossed the lobby and looked at the far-off ocean. The resort’s rooms consisted of individual bungalows that stood above the ocean on stilts; a twenty-metre wooden bridge connected the cabins to the beachfront. Yona’s bungalow was right on the beach. An employee opened the door to her room and began to show Yona around. Her accommodation featured curtains that opened and closed automatically, a TV and speakers, a minibar, a safe and customisable lighting: nothing out of the ordinary for a luxury resort. Next, the employee pressed a button on the remote control in his hand as he introduced one of the resort’s ‘unique features’. The button turned on two enormous lights, shaped like a pair of eyes, which hung next to the front door on the outside of the cabin.

  ‘You can use these eyes to express your wishes,’ the employee explained. ‘If you close both, it means “do not disturb”, and if you open them, it means “please clean”.’

  The night was deep, and inside their bungalows, the travellers adjusted to unfamiliar darkness. Most of the rooms were set to ‘do not disturb’, but the eyes on the teacher’s bungalow opened and closed repeatedly. Yona could see the woman’s daughter leaning against their window as she pressed buttons on the remote over and over again.

  Yona sunk into her sofa. The white linens on her bed looked clean enough to wrap her body in them without worry. On one side of the tub, there was a bag filled with rose petals, and the ocean dozed a few metres below. Yona hadn’t had a break like this in a long time. This might be a better trip than I expected, she thought. It was an unfamiliar feeling, thinking that she could miss this place after she left. She mused about the expectations that travellers carried: the expectation of the unexpected, and of freedom from the weight of the everyday. She considered the possibilities that travel presented as the night went on.

  The morning sea was black, and silence permeated the air. Nothing dampened Yona’s cheerful mood as she went to breakfast. Waves lapped against each other melodiously, and the sunshine beat down gently. It was early, but several people who looked to be locals were tidying the garden. They said hello to Yona.

  Yona seemed to be the first guest in the dining hall. The host directed her to the seat with the best view of the ocean. She was offered coffee and black tea, and chose coffee. She decided to eat a fried egg instead of an omelette or scrambled eggs. The cook asked her if she’d like both sides of her egg fried or just one, and she chose the latter.

  The writer suddenly approached Yona’s table and sat down across from her. ‘They’re asking us how well they should fry our eggs! Such a light-hearted thing to worry about, isn’t it? If I have
to choose between an egg fried on one side and an egg fried on both sides, I’ll eat anything they give me. Normally, I’m happy as long as I don’t burn the egg. Right?’

  His coffee and omelette soon arrived. After taking a sip of coffee, he continued.

  ‘I’ve heard that there are two hundred people working here.’

  ‘Really?’ Yona replied. ‘I didn’t realise it was so many. Are they all hiding?’

  The writer didn’t answer her question. ‘None of the people I’ve seen really seem to be trying very hard at their jobs. It’s like they’re weirdly optimistic about whatever menial labour they’re doing. Our guide told me that the resort’s hardest-working employees make ten times more money than everyone else. Of course, she also told me that the best employees work ten times more than the others.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Yona. ‘I guess the manager we met yesterday is a high earner, then.’

  ‘Lou told me that the manager earns more than three million won per month. If you think about the cost of living here, it’s a really powerful salary. But it looks like the resort hasn’t had many customers recently. We’re the only guests right now. I don’t mind, cause it makes it feel like we’ve rented out the entire place, but the overstock of food inventory must be a headache for them.’

  He ate his omelette, shaped like a half moon, in three bites. The garden visible outside was still in the midst of landscaping.

  ‘You should eat a lot,’ the writer urged Yona. ‘Our schedule today is really full.’

  ‘Have you ever been to a desert like the one we’re going to?’ Yona asked him.