Once beyond the shock of ugly pink apartment buildings that was the suburbs of Seoul, the bus drove past racing-green hills, carpets of red chilli peppers laid out to dry in the sun, flat green rice fields parted by a ramrod straight white path where a lone cyclist meandered, white egrets rising from shallow rivers. We passed dusty low farm buildings with curly roofs, apple farms. It was promising.
When I arrived in Mallipo/Manripo, it was packed with cars, people, pounding music, arcade games, greasy smells. It certainly wasn’t all bad, as seaside resorts go – there were windswept pine trees on gentle hills, soft sand and beachside shellfish restaurants – but there was barely enough space to pitch a tent on the beach. I thought it might be worth trying somewhere else close by. A nice man in the little bus station advised me how to get further down the coast, and let me use the office phone while I avoided the eyes of the naked models on his calendar on the wall. The bus was full, standing room only; as it eased into the heavy traffic, one woman kindly offered me the edge of her seat as a perch, and another gave me a stick of chewing gum. There was no getting over how kind people were.
It was dark when I arrived, and hard to see how far the campsites stretched beneath pine trees – but it looked like kilometres. On an enormous music stage, Korean teenage musicians were approximating heavy rock ballads. Mongsanpo was like a small town, with streets of restaurant tents and amusement tents and karaoke tents, even PC bang or computer gaming room tents. There were fireworks exploding all over the beach, and kids jumping up and down in trampoline tents. Finally I managed to find a space down a back-alley under my own pine tree. I laughed grimly, thinking of my mother’s email reminding me not to camp anywhere too remote. The quiet beaches I’d visited before had clearly been an out-of-season aberration. These people’s idea of fun was sharing your bit of seaside with masses of others. It wasn’t quite what I’d expected.
Dong, my new friend, who was a little overweight and dressed in casual clothes, told me he was here alone and happy to find some company since he’d been feeling very solitary. Amazed, I asked if he didn’t find it a little, um, crowded? He said this was quite peaceful compared to some places. Koreans only take five days holiday a year, he said, all at the same time. We should seize the moment and enjoy the fact we’ve found some company. ‘This time, once past,’ he reminded me, ‘will never more return!’ And he quoted something from Plato. You had to give the guy credit.
Dong was right in a way: this beach-themed extravaganza wasn’t a place to visit on your own, it was a place to come with company. For me, travelling alone had been absolutely the best way to be welcomed into Korea. But I was learning that unless you were a monk, Koreans saw it as a sad thing to be alone, honja. To be happy, you must have company. That’s why food was best when you shared it, all eating from the same dish in the middle of the table. That’s why people liked travelling in groups. I found the same thing when I lived in Greece, where my friends would always like to do things with company; in Syntagma Square one day, an older woman ignored every other empty bench in the square and sat right up next to me. Sometimes I wished I didn’t need my personal space. I’d have been having a better time in Mongsanpo.
Dong kept ordering and we sat around until after midnight. After a few more beers, he mistakenly mentioned his sister and her kids were here somewhere. I sensed he had been exaggerating the truth of his loneliness somewhat and, with some surprise, couldn’t help being flattered that in this country where I had felt so foreign and asexual for ages, someone was seriously trying to pick me up. In the end, he was quite hard to shake off, getting all romantic as he walked me back to my tent, lunging in for a kiss before I could scamper off and zip myself into safety.
Next morning was cool, cloudy and wet, and the tide out so far you could barely see the water. A loud argument seemed to be going on in the next tent. The toilets I’d found so far all smelled vile, and I queued for ten minutes only to find vomit-covered sinks and no running water. It was like being at a rock festival. I felt dirty. I wanted a swim, but tired of walking on mud through inches of water looking for the sea. The rubbish ladies hadn’t been round to clean up yet, and I was reminded of how much I hated this habit of leaving rubbish on the beach. Everyone else was out with buckets and spades, digging for crabs.
Wandering this vast beach-metropolis once more, I saw that everyone else was having a great old time. Seoul had come to the beach, and while Seoul-on-sea was a hoot for these folk, I was floundering in its indifference. While I wanted to connect with Koreans, going on holiday with thousands of them didn’t seem to be the best way. I’d reached a dead end. I packed up to move on.
I stopped for pork dumplings that tasted of the plastic packaging they were microwaved and served in. I started walking to the next beach but saw more mud and a discouraging sign saying ‘Experiment Station’. So instead I stood at the bus stop with three ancient crones. Eventually a bus came along and I noted with glee that the driver was nattily sporting white cotton gloves, sandals and socks with individual toe-pockets; I felt better already. We made our way into the traffic jam that was the road back towards town. It started to rain lightly. The farmland was lovely and green, pines dripping with water. I could come back here another time.
I rang Gav from the Taean bus station, while the rain poured down outside. ‘I know a place in Seoul you can stay,’ he said. We spent a happy, lazy afternoon at home, Gav strumming a guitar he’d borrowed and singing to me.
In Seoul, the workers at the Lotte Hotel were demanding a pay increase, and beside their peaceful demonstration we saw hundreds of black-uniformed riot police with helmets, shields and batons.
It was an eerie reminder of the kind of fascist regime that existed here before democracy arrived. Kim Dae-jung’s was the first administration to be liberal about ideological matters. The first strikes by workers demanding better wages from the giant corporations, which took place in the late eighties, turned into riots. When students, office workers and Buddhist monks demonstrated against the undemocratic elections of 1988, the authorities met them with riot police, tear gas and mass arrests. It was, therefore, extremely discomforting to see so many riot police today.
I saw them again another day: more ranks of police, lines and lines of them, filing down into the tunnels of the subway. The expressionless faces of young men with guns and batons were frightening. I discovered that the biggest anti-US demonstrations since President Kim Dae-jung took office had been happening. Thousands of protesters had accused the government of kow-towing to Washington, allowing US troops to pollute their land and opening up the country to cheap agricultural imports.
Trainee doctors were also on strike across the country, protesting a medical reform programme. Interns and residents were dissatisfied with their working conditions and salaries, so the government was threatening to fire them and send them of to do their military service, which they were excused during training. A rally had been suppressed, the leaders arrested.
What was so hard to understand was that all this was going on while such a poignant moment was happening in Korea: the family reunions between North and South.
For fifty years after the country was divided, there was absolutely no contact between families separated by the division of the country – no telephone calls, no letters – except in 1985, when fifty people from each side were allowed to visit Seoul and Pyongyang. An estimated ten million people are members of divided families, and many don’t even know if their relatives are alive. The Asian Bureau chief for the Boston Globe, Indira Lakshmanan, compared it to the division between East and West Germany, saying that at least families were allowed to write letters, make calls and send packages across the Berlin Wall, all of which has been forbidden in Korea. In House of the Winds, a novel by Korean-American Mia Yun set in the sixties, an old woman tells how she spends her days waiting and hoping that one day she will be able to go back home to the North. ‘I’m afraid I’ll die without ever seeing my family and home again... The river,
the hill and the village: I remember everything...’
For four days in August 2000, in Seoul and Pyongyang, people were being reunited briefly with loved ones from whom they had been separated for half a century, with no way of knowing if they’d ever meet again.
The newspapers were full of heart-rending photographs and stories of mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters reunited. A man in his sixties met his mother who was in her eighties. ‘I feel sadder than when we first met,’ he said. One hundred North Koreans – a drama writer for the North Korean Central Broadcasting Station, a painter – were in Seoul. And from 76,000 people who applied, one hundred South Koreans were selected for the reunion in Pyongyang. These were tearful, painful reunions, and they were taking place under strict rules, highly controlled formal meetings within big hotels, with no one allowed to visit their home town. The hundred individuals from North Korea who came to the South were only allowed to meet five of their family members. One lady who was the sixth stood by the hotel where her brother was; when he was escorted out, she screamed, ‘Older brother!’ But he wasn’t allowed to step out of line to greet his youngest sister.
The thawing of relations between the two Koreas brought hope. The South agreed to repatriate sixty former communists who served prison sentences here, and the two Koreas planned to hold Red Cross talks about the separated families.
It was finally time for Gav and me to visit the most amusingly named Irish pub in the world, O’Kim’s. Alas, it was a big room of tables, nobody making friends, nothing like an Irish pub. Craving Guinness, we instead visited the plush bar at the Hilton and paid an outrageous sum for a couple of pints served with olives. Having had enough of its pesky zzz, ZZZ, ZZZZZ – heh heh heh, Gav killed the wind-up bug on the screen window, having the last laugh.
On the Sunday we spent an afternoon at the lively and completely western Gecko Lounge in Itaewon, spending another small fortune on pitchers of beer and dancing to ‘Home for a Rest’ by Spirit of the West, funnily enough. Somewhere into our second pitcher of beer they played ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’ by Meatloaf and I expounded a lengthy thesis on what a brilliant song it was and how much it said about being a teenager... Gav listened and nodded, grinning, as I’d probably have forgotten it all by the next day. When we first met, he refused to let me have an opinion on music, saying he was a musician and knew better. All because I didn’t like The Police. He talked about songs in terms of chord progressions and notes, while for me it was all about the lyrics, the words, and he now at least let me have my say.
The American editor of the Weekender section of the Korea Herald said he was definitely interested in pieces I wrote on the fortress at Suwon and on hiking in the mountains and national parks. I was thrilled. They needed photos for both.
I could get to Suwon in an afternoon by train. I left Seoul so late that by the time I arrived I only had a couple of hours before dusk, but was happy to stop and talk with a young man who worked as a part-time tour guide, though he was actually a criminology and jurisprudence student. He gave me a book about Suwon and a cold drink of water, and told me how the city walls were constructed with both bricks and stones for strength, and about the advanced use of cranes and pulleys. As he answered a couple of questions for me, we sat in his hut where he was playing a tape of Korean classical singing on the stereo. It was beautiful music, and I asked about the name of the artist. He took out the tape and I started to copy down the name, until I realised he was insisting I take it.
As I rushed around the walls, everyone was out enjoying the evening, sitting in the park or by the river, playing chess or napping. In the setting sun, I watched a white crane fly overhead with outstretched wings, feet straight out behind him. An old man stopped to shake hands with me.
I hurriedly developed the film and dropped it off at the newspaper offices so they could run the story that week, but I still needed some photos to accompany my story on hiking for the following week. They wanted some pictures of Korean walkers. So, armed with a camera, I headed out of town to find some.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:
KOREAN MEN BEHAVING BADLY
Popchusa, founded in 553 as a sanctuary to pray for the unification of the three kingdoms that divided the peninsula then, once had seventy hermitages and a gilt bronze Maitreya Buddha where people could pray for national harmony. The temple was burned down during the Hideyoshi invasions and then rebuilt. The bronze Buddha was melted down in the late nineteenth century to mint coins so the prince regent could raise money to construct Kyungbokkung, the palace in Seoul. A cement replacement was begun in 1939 but ‘after interruption due to social instability’, a nice euphemism for the Korean War on the sign outside, it was completed only in 1964, when it began to erode and crack. The casting of the new figure that stands there today took six years and 160 tons of bronze. Which only goes to show again the importance of symbols of unification and harmony in Korea.
The temple is set in Songnisan, a national park in the Sobaek Mountains, the highest peak of which is just over 1,000 metres high. It was known from ancient times as one of the eight scenic wonders of Korea, and made into a national park in 1970.
I took the bus to Songnisan from the Nambu bus station, where they confusingly spelled it ‘Sokrisan’. A girl of about nineteen sitting across the aisle from me in gigantically pointed shoes with high stiletto heels spent fifteen minutes looking into a hand mirror, touching up her face powder and lip gloss. Mostly everyone else got off the bus at a place called Cheongju – confusingly, there was also a town called Chungju close by – which was surrounded by modern hotels in a fantasy-castle style with Disneyland turrets. While we were stopped, a woman with cotton gloves and a bucket boarded the bus to pick up the rubbish and mop the floor. After Mongsanpo, it was a relief to be heading where everyone else wasn’t.
From Cheongju the now quiet bus drove past forest-covered mountains as we meandered into the heart of the country. The dark pines were tinged by a sunset that was yellow and then pink, reflected in the flat and gleaming river with its egrets and herons. Our route wound past villages and farms, apple trees and red pepper bushes and crops wrapped in bunches and stacked to dry in the fields. Finally, as it grew dark, the road zigzagged up a steep hill, and I was half frozen from the air conditioning by the time we reached Songnisan. As I emerged gratefully into the warm evening, a woman offered me a cheap minbak room, but I decided to camp. The campground when I found it was in complete darkness and I could see only one other tent. I set up mine quickly, hoping I wasn’t being bitten by mosquitoes.
The tourist village of restaurants, minbak and souvenir shops was strangely deserted. It was only the middle of August, but already the holidays seemed to be over. Dong must have been right about everyone taking a week’s holiday at the same time. Avoiding the fancier restaurants, I found a nice traditional sort of place off the main street, where I sat on a wooden mat at a low table. On one side of me, a silent couple picked at their food very slowly; on the other was a bigger group, among whom a man with a very loud voice was holding court with a monologue punctuated with ‘kurigo... kurigo...’, roughly translating as ‘And another thing...’. I ate a ‘mountain bibimbap’, sanche pibimbap, with mushrooms and beansprouts, served with a cold cucumber and carrot soup and a side dish of peanuts in a sweet soy sauce. Back to lovely country food.
It was cool and pitch black except for a few stars. A large, bright moon rose in the clear sky, so I could see the shape of the mountains all around. I strolled by the river in the moonlight, under big old trees with bent trunks, until I was tired enough to sleep.
It was lovely waking up to a cold dawn in the woods to the sound of only the birds and the bugs. There was a wind-up bug somewhere nearby, going nuts: zwiw, zwiiw, ZWIW, ZWIIIIIW, heh heh heh heh... But it didn’t sound bad here. I wasn’t sure if I had camped in the proper campground, but I’d had this place virtually to myself. I consulted the information map, jotting down notes about peaks or waterfalls to head for, and set out al
ong a clear river with a sandy bottom and little fish swimming in it, bordered by Buddhist piles of pinkish stones.
Instead of wandering aimlessly as usual, this time I had a purpose: to reach a mountain peak to take photographs of walkers in a dramatic setting for the Herald. Songnisan had clear streams and mushrooms growing, huge stone statues of turtles hewn out of pinkish boulders overgrown with bright green moss – but also, at this time of year, excessive humidity, a profusion of mosquitoes, slippery rocks and cloudy weather. I spent many hours walking up damp paths covered with lush greenery, trying to reach a high peak. But after carrying my heavy backpack in the humid day, my legs were so tired that I couldn’t tread carefully and worried I might slip and break my ankle. I really should have been properly organised, taken a room and left my bag in it for the day. The path was overgrown, and I wondered if I’d missed a sign saying the trail was currently closed, as there were no other walkers. I had to turn back defeated, and tried to reach a lower peak, but it was an unrewarding slog through endless trees and rocks, rocks and trees, with no photogenic views to be had. The rain began to come down, making the path even more treacherous, just as my legs were ready to give up. I started back down the hill.
In a little hut, a young man gave me a drink of some spicy cold tea. I bathed my feet in a cold stream, and decided to go back to the start of the trail and visit the temple instead.
Wow, that’s a big Buddha, I thought as I rounded the corner. Thirty-three metres tall, to be precise. In the museum that was underneath the platform of the extremely big Buddha, I found delicate and beautiful paintings of kings with long Fu Manchu moustaches and smiling pursed lips, carrying fans in their manicured hands. I noticed the monks and nuns kept their rubber slippers for wet weather in numbered shelves at the entrance to the temple. A prayer session seemed to be beginning, as the monks in grey robes and brown shawls all scurried off to their halls carrying Buddhist objects, to chant and hit their wooden gongs.
Meeting Mr Kim Page 16