The Disaster Tourist

by Yun Ko-Eun

  ‘I have—a few times, actually. Take care getting dressed before we go out. When you’re in the desert, the sand is so fine that it sticks to bare skin and makes you feel like you’re a steak marinating in salt and pepper. That’s what you’ll feel like if you don’t cover yourself.’

  The writer polished off a second plate of omelette as he said this. He seemed to be living life in fast-forward, whether he was eating or walking or talking. The teacher and her daughter arrived as Yona and the writer stood up to leave. Lou and the college student ate last. Yona didn’t see any other guests at the resort.

  The desert was in the northern part of the island. The group of travellers divided in two, and each group boarded a different SUV. They weren’t the only ones traversing the road that circled Mui. Local children ran around in huge groups as they waved their arms, several of them chasing the cars, and a herd of cattle ambled across the road, their large bodies undulating like ridges of sand from the dunes far off in the distance. And then the desert rushed into view.

  Sunglasses came in handy with the sandstorms swirling in the air, but Yona wanted to experience the desert’s true colours, so she took hers off. The white sands and neighbouring forest, of dark blue palm trees, were as distinctly delineated as the stripes in a two-colour flag. As the azure sea rose into view, the flag became tricoloured. Soon it consisted of countless shades beyond the original three. The desert seemed to be dividing itself into innumerable patches of subtly unique hues. Yona realised for the first time how many colours were needed to describe the appearance of a desert, and how its saturation and brightness varied. As deviations appeared in the sand, the colour of the desert changed, as did the desert’s name. There was the white sand desert and the red sand desert. Even if you stood in one spot, the sand’s shade varied depending on how many clouds hung overhead, and whether or not sunlight was beating through the clouds. Yona couldn’t pull her eyes away from the sight. She wondered how a place ravaged by disaster could look so peaceful.

  ‘Right now, we’re at the white sand desert,’ the guide explained to the group. ‘It’s been the home to two Mui tribes, the Kanu people and the Unda people, for centuries, and they’ve fought frequently throughout history. In 1963, in this very desert, the Kanu used farming tools to massacre the Unda. It was revenge for the Unda taking their land. By the end of the bloodshed, it’s said there were about three hundred Unda heads scattered across the desert. Their heads were removed from their dead bodies as part of a practice called head hunting. On the first night of the massacre, an enormous rainstorm hit the area, and four days later, on Sunday morning, another incident occurred. A circle-shaped portion of the white desert collapsed, like an enormous crater had been drilled into the earth.’

  ‘At the time,’ the guide continued, ‘everyone thought it was a curse from the gods, but nowadays people know that it was a sinkhole, a natural phenomenon that can occur in deserts. Anyhow, the heads littered throughout the area rolled into the sinkhole, which was apparently one hundred and eighty metres deep. In the meantime, the Kanu started a second massacre, killing people throughout the village. Now this area is beautiful, but it’s the site of tragedy, too.’

  The teacher’s daughter listened diligently to the guide’s explanation, her eyes sparkling. To think that there had once been a hole filled with heads, right here. But the girl couldn’t actually see the hole occupying her imagination. That was because the sinkhole had filled up with water and was now a wide lake. People called this place the head lake, but now instead of heads, lotuses were floating on its surface. Even after she was told that the hole was now a body of water, the child kept asking where the cut-off heads were. The guide showed the group pictures of the 1963 tragedy, but the hazy black-and-white photos didn’t hold her interest. Other than the girl, everyone’s expressions were serious.

  ‘Isn’t this the reason we’re on this trip?’ the teacher asked. ‘To avoid repeating history?’ The writer nodded his head.

  They sat down at a rest stop with a view of the lake and cooled their sweaty bodies. Wide-eyed children approached and attempted to sell them knick-knacks: bracelets, pipes and dolls. Some of the children carried younger siblings on their backs, and others shielded the travellers from the hot sun with large parasols. A few of the vendors broke into the crowd of foreigners before almost instantly running away in surprise. The owner of the rest stop glared sternly at the children; then, even though they had run into a corner dejectedly, they returned, shouting, ‘One dollar! One dollar!’

  ‘What’s that?’ Yona asked, about a building in the distance.

  The guide explained that the building Yona was looking at actually stood in the red sand desert. She said that a tower was under construction there. It was supposed to house an observatory where visitors could look down at both the desert and the sea, but there was no way the tower would be finished. Yona had heard about this project: apparently, construction was suspended and the company erecting the structure had given up. In several ways, Mui was frozen like this.

  Yona’s first reaction to the desert was a sudden urge to touch. But even if she reached her arms out in the hope of grasping some scenic silhouette, the only thing that would remain in her hand afterwards was a fistful of sand. Yona climbed up on to a slope of the fine material as if trying to quench her thirst for touch. The group had followed an experienced-looking elderly woman who’d joined them at some point, and now they were all standing at the top of the sand hill. The woman stood behind Yona and held a sled out to her. It looked like a repurposed plastic board. The teacher’s daughter rode the sled down the dunes several times.

  The guide introduced the elderly woman. ‘This person is the relative of a head-hunting victim from 1963. She says that she makes a living working with tourists.’

  Yona wanted to take a picture of the wrinkled woman, with eyes too deep-set to read. As soon as Yona pointed her camera at her, the woman said, ‘One dollar.’ All of a sudden, she began to pose zealously like a model, and as a result, the picture didn’t come out well. Yona finally managed to snap a picture of the woman walking away after she’d stopped trying to entertain.

  The teacher’s daughter was squatting on the beach in front of the bungalows. After briefly fiddling with something, she ran back several metres. In the place where the child had been crouched, firecrackers resembling sticks of dynamite exploded with a lightning-like flash and a thunderous clap. Her mother ran up, pulled the girl away, and smacked her on the bottom. When asked where she’d got firecrackers, the girl answered that another child at the rest stop had given them to her.

  Yona went to the spot that the child had fled. The tips of the extinguished fireworks were blackened, and ants swarmed nearby. The explosives seemed to have been dropped on an anthill. Other beach-dwelling insects scurried around as well. Yona threw the remains into a bin and then paced around the area for a while, until the girl sprinted back over without her mother. Like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime, she was scanning the ground to find where the firecracker had detonated. But Yona had already removed it, and as the waves neared the resort in footstep-length increments, the hole where the firecracker had been lodged was also filling with water.

  ‘The ants got hurt,’ Yona admonished the girl. ‘The other bugs, too.’

  ‘Did their heads fall off?’

  Yona didn’t know how to answer the innocent-looking child. Without waiting for an answer, the girl began to frantically trample the ants over and over again.

  ‘I have to do a second massacre …’ she said.

  ‘You can’t—then the bugs will get even more hurt,’ Yona warned. ‘We all have to live together. Don’t we?’

  ‘Huh? The healthy ants are carrying away the hurt ones. Look, right there!’

  The girl poked at the bugs with a small tree branch that had been lying on the ground. The sand wasn’t firm like asphalt; it yielded under the stick’s pressure, to the dismay of the ants trying to hide under the surface. As th
e child mumbled to herself, ‘Unda ants, die,’ Yona wondered if Jungle should impose age limits on disaster trips. The girl was still ‘massacring’ the ants. Yona recalled cutting open the stomachs of crickets and grasshoppers with a box cutter when she was younger.

  ‘But why are there so many bugs?’ the girl asked Yona. ‘They all came out of the ground.’

  As soon as the girl stopped speaking, thick raindrops began to fall from the sky. Yona grabbed the girl’s hand and they ran inside the resort.

  Guests watched the streaks of rain pour down as they enjoyed afternoon tea. The manager was preparing coffee with condensed milk. Droplets of coffee made a knocking noise as they drip-drip-dripped into a cup full of ice. As Yona quietly watched, it felt like time stopped with each drop of coffee hitting its target.

  ‘I’ve been taking my daughter everywhere with me since she was one,’ the teacher declared at a nearby table. ‘People always tell me that kids won’t remember travel from when they’re babies, but whenever we return from a trip, I can see with my own eyes that she’s grown. She tries foods that she wouldn’t have eaten before, she’s not afraid to use tools and gadgets like an adult, she can independently do things that she used to need help with—seeing all that, I try to visit somewhere new every school holiday, for her as much as for me.’

  After saying this, the teacher saw her daughter come in soaking wet and hurried out of her seat. She left the table, explaining that she’d have the child change and then both of them would come back. The writer continued the conversation. He said that he’d originally planned on taking a trip to Centralia, but then he’d changed his mind and come here instead. Centralia was a town in the United States that had been on fire for the past fifty years. Embers had set the town’s vein of underground coal ablaze, and the asphalt above it was now completely melted. Most residents had left.

  ‘Isn’t the movie Silent Hill about that town?’ Yona asked. ‘I was curious about the place, too, but apparently it’ll take two and hundred fifty more years for the coal to completely burn up, so I figured I still have time to go.’

  ‘You know a lot about holiday spots,’ the writer replied, impressed. He said that he’d put off the trip for the same reason, and excitedly shared more of his travel knowledge with Yona. The college student occupied himself with the Wi-Fi available only at the resort. He was reading news articles on his phone.

  ‘Apparently a basketball was discovered off the coast of Japan,’ he said.

  ‘A basketball?’ Yona asked.

  ‘It’s wreckage from the Jinhae tsunami. The story says that a basketball, with the name of some kid from Jinhae written on it, was discovered near the shoreline. I guess it was heading towards Japan.’

  ‘Well, you don’t need to go somewhere that far away to find relics of disaster,’ Yona replied. ‘It’s not just Japan now; our country’s not exactly safe from tsunamis either, any more.’

  ‘All of the southern coast was ruined in the Jinhae tsunami,’ someone at the table said.

  ‘Then why did we come all the way here?’ the teacher asked. She was already back from sorting out her daughter.

  ‘It’s too scary to visit disaster destinations close to home,’ Yona explained. ‘Don’t we need to be distanced somewhat from our ordinary lives—from the blankets we sleep under, and the bowls we eat from every day—in order to see the situation more objectively?’

  People seemed to agree with Yona. The discussion went on for a while. Participants unleashed their vast disaster trip expertise—and their appreciation for them, too—until eventually the guide spoke up, reminding them that the very trip they were on was a disaster trip.

  ‘Tomorrow we’re going on a volcano tour,’ she informed them. ‘Be done with breakfast and ready in the lobby by 10 a.m.’

  The travellers were in high spirits after returning from the desert, but it seemed like they’d seen Mui’s highlights too early. When Yona glanced at the itinerary, everything looked dull. Who had come up with such a poorly organised schedule? Yona understood why this trip was targeted for cancellation.

  ‘Imagine the mixture I mentioned earlier plunging deep into the earth,’ the guide said the next day as they made their way to Mui’s volcano. She wasn’t done talking about the sinkholes, even if they were no longer in the desert. ‘It’s a particularly unusual geological cocktail that leads to disasters like the holes we saw yesterday. Okay, everyone, we’ve reached the entrance to the volcano. You remember the safety precautions, right? You can’t walk on top of the lava. Even if it looks hard on the outside, the inside is still boiling. An American tourist died here in 1903, and five others were injured. Clouds of volcanic ash can travel down the side of this volcano at speeds of one hundred kilometres per hour. The internal temperature of the clouds reaches several hundred degrees. If you fall into one of them, you’ll probably be burned alive. Within five minutes, juices from your flesh will be dripping out of your body. And volcanic rock is sharp as razors, so don’t just carelessly sit down on the ground.’

  But the guide’s words seemed empty. The warning sign posted at the entrance to the volcano tried hard to re-enact the horrors of the past, but the atmosphere didn’t live up to such sombre descriptions. On one side of the group, local children were rolling around on the ground playing. Korean-style street stalls by the volcano’s entrance stood ready to alleviate hunger. The available snacks included ramen and bowls of rice. Since Yona and the others were the only tourists, they felt a touch of guilt and decided to purchase some of the foods. Children hawked flowers and woodcrafts they’d carved themselves. Sometimes they showed off their business acumen by including a free postcard or two with the wooden carvings. They also sold picture postcards separately, but the scenery depicted in the cards wasn’t from here. Yona saw a postcard featuring Indonesia’s Mount Merapi, brazenly being sold here in Mui. She was again reminded why Jungle wanted to cancel this trip.

  The guide stood tiredly in front of this sparse display of wares, like she had to promote the spread herself. She was describing the volcano’s most recent eruption, which had happened years ago. But it seemed like she hadn’t witnessed it first hand, based on her lacklustre retelling.

  ‘I wish she’d just be quiet. What she’s saying is all talk, and this is, well …’ Yona trailed off.

  The writer looked disappointed, too.

  ‘If we hadn’t been expressly told, would we even know this was a volcano?’ Yona asked. ‘It’s not obvious at all.’

  ‘And doesn’t this geyser just seem like a neighbourhood well?’ the teacher added, describing a source of water bubbling in front of them.

  The group stood by the so-called geyser and flipped coins into it. The gurgling fountain taking their money wasn’t even hot; its water had long cooled. Local children helped the tourists on their trek to the volcano’s peak. The youngsters skilfully set the travellers on horses, some by themselves and others with a partner. They guided Yona and the others to the summit, after slipping a flower into each of their hands. The horse’s hooves tick-tocked rhythmically, like a metronome. The college student accidentally dropped his flower. It hit the ground, and a flower-sized cloud of dust spouted into the air. Soon the gift was buried beneath a horse’s footprint.

  Standing in front of the volcano’s crater, the group took pictures, made wishes and threw their flowers like they were bouquets. The bouquets drew an arc as they fell into the crater. To Yona, the whole action felt like neatly placing rubbish into its specific waste receptacle. Watching the flowers fall was less than thrilling. She just wanted white-grey volcanic ash to flutter down the mountain, like a cannon salute from some unknown army.

  The teacher had brought two sketchbooks. She’d hoped her daughter’s passion for art would help transfer events from the trip on to the books’ pages, like ink-covered print blocks pressed on to blank sheets of paper. But her daughter didn’t make an effort to draw, and only after her mother smacked her bottom a few times did she open up one of the sketchbooks
. Her drawings didn’t live up to her mother’s expectations. The first of the five or so images she quickly scribbled down was of the Brazilian barbecue she’d eaten at the resort, and the last depicted heads, scattered about a crater. The meat didn’t at all fit with the purpose of this trip, and the heads were just unpleasant. The bodiless faces in the girl’s drawing were all laughing. And they looked familiar, too. Not to mention that there were precisely six of them.

  ‘It’s us, Mum!’ the girl explained, unnecessarily.

  The teacher looked embarrassed, worried that the drawing would cause the group distress. While she was drawing, her daughter hadn’t been asking pointless questions like she usually did, which was nice, but if the pictures were going to turn out like this, it seemed preferable for her to be asking questions. Whether they were riding in the car or walking along a Mui road, the girl’s infantile questions were ceaseless. At first, her inquisitiveness lightened the mood, but it was gradually starting to arouse irritation among the travellers. The girl asked about almost everything, like she was always trying to get in the last word, and at some point, not just her mum, but also the guide, started answering half-heartedly.

  Nowadays, disaster trips didn’t stop at the disaster zone; most of them boasted other features as well. There were packages that combined tourism with volunteering, packages that mixed tourism and survival challenges, and packages that offered both tourism and education, with classes in history or science. The teacher kept complaining that she should have picked one of the educational trips.

  ‘Kids nowadays—they grab a snow crab, pull off the legs, and expect there to be cooked meat inside,’ she complained. ‘If you cut a fish in half, they think that the inside will already be roasted. Making kids learn from nature is the best way to give them real experiences, but the theme here is too vague to actually learn anything.’

  ‘Mum, what’s that over there?’