Hong Kong

Microblog for today:
Three nights, Hong Kong island, Yes Inn, very hot, humid, and raining every day. Went for a hike yesterday to Shek-O, just came down off the hills to the village as torrential rains started, very lucky, watching the news later on and many parts of Hong Kong were flooded. Hopefully picking up my Chinese visa today and getting to the mainland.

Weirdest thing I've seen so far: Live toads for sale in a supermarket:

Seoul

I had a couple of ideas for the title: Seoul man, Seoul music, Heart and Seoul, Lemon Seoul... But all a bit corny hey? I've had a bit of a cold for the last few days, so sorry if this is a bit unhinged.

I've been in the South Korean capital for four days now, and I haven't really done much to be honest. The place I'm staying, Lee and Nos guest house, is really relaxing. There is a free breakfast of eggs, toast, cereal and fruit juice, free internet (actually I've had that in all the places in South Korea - unlike in Japan, Australia and NZ), and even free use of the washing machine. I've ben doing yoga on the patio every morning before the other guests get up, and the rest of the time mostly chatting or reading a book (I picked up Iain M Banks' Matter of the shelf here, its a weighty tome).

Speaking of books I read two great ones recently: Hokkaido Road Blues by Will Ferguson, about the Canadian authors hitchhiking journey across Japan, and Last Seen in Lhasa by Clare Scrobie, another travel book, this time about the authors various trips to Tibet and the people she meets, including an amazingly hard sounding female monk.

So far in Seoul I've been for food in the local area, the university district. There are loads of cafes with twee-sounding names and even twee-er decor. I went to meet my mate Rob in Myeongdong before he jetted back to the UK, he was with some ex-students of his, a Korean man and woman. Plenty of drink went down, including a crazy cocktail called Hwajinkamnehsu (that's spelled from memory), loosely translated means "happy ending", consisting of a shot of Soju (rice whiskey) in a shot glass on top of another shot of something sweet (we used this weird Korean raspberry wine), in a half pint glass full of lager, that then had to be chugged. We ended up in a cool bar (LP music bar), where the walls were lined with LPs and requests could be made (I got the Doors, Riders on the Storm). I also had a look at some of the districts in the day, mostly malls, shops and restaurants. At least I got some tacky fridge magnets for my collection.

The monsoon rain I was experiencing in Japan has finally caught up with me, its been pouring down all day. It eased off earlier on and I went for a walk in the Bukhansen national park. It is very pretty there, with lots of exposed granite outcrops sticking out over the misty forests. I had to do a bit of rock climbing to get onto a ridge section, which made for an interesting change as a lot of the walks I've done recently (both here and in Japan) have been so well-maintained as to be almost dull (nicely formed paths, staircases going up hills etc., probably really good for limiting erosion I suppose but it takes the wildness factor out). It wasn't so interesting to be lost in the park in a thunderstorm, but I made for the nearest place that looked on the map like a main road and managed to get a bus. Ended up totally drenched, including my so called waterproof hiking boots, not sure if I want to carry them on the plane with me to Hong Kong, I might as well just have a pair of sandals.

A bit of a frustrating day but at least I got out of the hostel. Its Friday night and I know I should party, but can I be arsed?

Gyeongju

After an easy 1 hour bus ride (and cheap - 4000 won or about 2pound50) I was in Gyeongju. First impressions were of a run-down little town, and I think that was about right. Its a lot more basic than Busan, lets put it that way. The main reason for coming here was so I could learn a bit about Korean history and have a hike up a hill. There are various tombs dotted around (big hills covered in grass, we have the same in England), and thats about it for the central part of the city. Today I walked to Namsan, which is a mountainous, forested area known as an "open air museum" apparently. The hike was nice, especially after all the boozing I'd done on the weekend. There are various things dotted around the forest like carvings of Buddha in the cliff-faces and a couple of pagodas. There were a lot of dragonfly, and I saw a cool frog, brown with bright green patches on its back (I was to slow to get a photo before he disappeared).

Might go to visit another site tomorrow, or just get on the bus to Seoul.

Busan hellraisers

After a couple of days of relative inaction, just doing yoga and going out for food, I just had the messiest weekend I've had for ages.

On friday night I met up with a friend I'd made on tuesday, my namesake from London. We went for food in a place recommended by the hostel owner, Jin, and I'd invited a couple of people from the hostel along with me (all French!). The food was great, can't remember the place name but it was very cheap for rice and lots of side dishes and home made Maekjoli, a kind of fermented rice wine that was much nicer than soju. My buddy went off to meet his girlfriend at the train station and I went back to the backpackers.

Things were fairly sensible up to that point, but we had arranged to meet up later on. I got a phone call from him at 3AM, asking me to come to the beach to set off some fireworks and have a drink. I naively thought that asking a taxi driver for Gwangali beach, the second most popular beach in this city, would be enough to get me there. After two drivers indicated that they didn't know it, I took my map to a convenience store and asked the man working there to write the name of the place down in Korean. I didn't know the Korean for "beach"*, so I just ponted at the nearest subway station to Gwangali on the map (all the trains had stopped by then). Third time lucky and I made it to the beach and found my friends.

It was nice to just sit out watching the sun come up with a few beers and a bit of a picnic (instant noodles, tangerines and bananas). We set off fireworks and it was very relaxing. Later on we went to Hyundae beach, which was empty when we arrived but got very busy later on. Lots of Koreans floating around in rubber rings, apparently not many Korean people can swim. We went in the water quite a few times, it was cold but not too bad. Some more people showed up (everyone was teaching English here except me) and we had more drinks. There was talk of going to an Indian restaurant, which I was excited by, but we ended up going for Korean again, near where Rob was staying in Hyundae, and had the most disappointing meal I've had here. No vege options, no tofu or egg and the kimchi was horible. I basically just had rice with a bit of seaweed mixed in. Some one spilt a drink and we left pretty soon afterwards.

It was dark by then, and Rob, his girlfriend K and myself were steaming drunk by that point and we probably should have gone home to bed, but we stayed out. We ended up walking around in the rain, trying to take a taxi to a certain bar (no joy, we just got driven around in a circle), then finally going into a bar called U2, where we drank, played pool and had a shisha, which I'd never tried before.

Today I'm going to Gyeongju for a few days before I go to Seoul. I'm burning up a the moment, think my metabolism is going into overdrive trying to deal with all the alcohol.

*Note: The Korean for "beach" is "beachy". Nice one.

Busan

My last night in Fukuoka turned out to be a bit of an anti-climax. I went out to find some bars with an American guy who I met at the Khaosan Fukuoka hostel. We walked for quite a way from our digs an spied a bar upstairs just before the bridge over to Nakasa island. After one beer we were ready to move on as the place was dead (it was a Sunday though), and the barman charged us 200 yen on top of the drinks just for being in the bar. Not much money but as always, its the principal of the thing, nowhere in or outside the bar was there any indication of any bar charge. We left and crossed over to the island, which is quite a seedy area, lots of girly bars and drunk business men wandering around. I realised that I had left my umbrella in the bar (amazingly it wasn't raining when we left), so I went back for it, after which we couldn't be bothered to walk back through the same area so we just went back to the hostel. Probably a good thing because I hate trying to pack my stuff up and travel with a hangover.

The next day I caught the bus to the ferry terminal easily enough. I was told about a departure tax from Japan, and indeed I was charged 700 yen "surcharge" when I went to collect my ticket, and a further 500 yen for a ticket to use the terminal facility, i.e. get through immigration. I got my own back though, as I'd bought the ferry ticket at the reduced student fare and nobody checked on my (non-existent) student status. The ferry trip on the Beetle was fast but a little boring. As it goes so fast its not allowed to go out on deck, in fact they insist that you remain in your seat, strapped in, in case they have to brake to avoid a whale or something. There was no one sitting next to me to talk to so I just used the time to try and learn Hangul, the Korean alphabet.

Immigration in Korea was easy. I had booked a hostel, Zen Backpackers, in the Seomyeon district of Busan, so I wandered out of the ferry port and used the force to find the nearest subway station. It was a bit tricky buying a ticket, as there was only vending machines and no real person. Although the machine had a button for English language, the display kept flipping back to Korean. I put my newly learned reading skills to good use an bought a ticket to what I thought at least was the right place and luckily it was. Finding the hostel was a bit trickier. The owner of Zen, June, had emailed me a map which I had dutifully copied down. However after following the directions I could not see any sign for the place. I spent a while wandering around, asking people who spoke no English for directions, and generally getting hot and fed up. At least it wasn't raining.

I noticed that there was another hostel nearby, Blue Backpackers in a bright blue building, and figured that any hostel owner must be able to speak some English. The lady owner was very nice and took me over to the huge apartment building nearby, which I had been walking around and randomly taking the lift up to various floors, and put me on the lift to the 15th floor. June (who is a man, not what I expected) couldn't understand why I had gotten lost, and it turned out that I had not noticed some additional directions on the map for getting to the right lift and floor in the building. So, my fault, as always, but a sign somewhere in the building lobby might have been handy.

That night I went out for dinner with another guest, a very young looking Taiwanese lad, at a traditional Korean restaurant. The place had floor seating on these weird chairs with no legs, just a seat and a backrest, and a barbeque pit in the centre of the table. I feared a meat feast, but it was mostly fish, tofu, and various vegetables and kimchi, with a stone pot of extremely hot rice. We had a couple of bottles of Korean lager to go with it and some soju, which is a Korean spirit I had been warned about, but I didn't think it was too bad. Certainly not as face-wrenching as the Lao-Lao whiskey. After the food, which was very good, we retired to a Hof bar, which I think is just what Koreans call their modern-style bars, for a couple of bottles of stout. It was a brand I'd not seen before but it was good. My Taiwanese friend kept me talking about what things are like in England (he had never been to Europe) and was getting increasingly red in the face, probably from the booze, so we went back to the hostel.

The next day I was up and out about 11am after I sneaked in some yoga in the lounge area while no one was about. I went to Beomeosa temple, which just looked like every temple I'd seen in Japan. But my main reason for going there was that I had read about a hiking trail that leads from that temple, over some hills to another, much nice temple. I spent the rest of the day hiking, including going up a mountain and getting a good view for a change, and trying to find a place that would give me just a rice dish and not some sort of barbequed goat meal. I failed in the food quest and just had to make do with a tasty mango ice pop and a disgusting packet of corn chips. The walk I did passes through the site of an ancient fort, Geumjeong, although the only parts remaining of it are four stone archways which served as gates. It was nice to be out in nature for the whole day, sans rain, after my last couple of hiking trips which were wet and miserable. Eventually I made it to Seokbulsa temple, and it was quite a good one, on top of a hill with some Buddhas carved into the rocks nearby. On the way back down I noticed some Korean people were using the random exercise machines which were just sitting in the forest.

After such a healthy day, I ruined it all by going on an all night drinking session with some lads from the hostel (from Wales, London and the states), with the aim of staying out for the football which was on here at 3.30AM. Highlight of the night for me was our impromptu darts tournament, played on some high-tech dartboards which electronically kept the scores. Rather than having sharp metal points, the darts have blunt plastic ends and stick between the plastic protusions on the surface of the board. (Somehow I won, and no one was more amazed than me)

I'm still in the same hostel, but moving over to Blue Backpackers tomorrow. After they were so nice to me when I arrived, even though I was staying at a rival business, I thought it was only polite to stay with them. As its the World Cup final this weekend, I thought I might as well hang around here as the area has masses of bars and food places. After this I want to go to Gyeongju, which sounds like a cool place, mountain hiking and temple visiting.

(picture: carvings at Seokbulsa)

Last night in Nippon

Konbanwa. After learning about all the atomic bomb stuff in Hiroshima, and getting soaked on Miyajima island, I took the Shinkansen and another train to get to Nagasaki. Yes, its the A-bomb tour, 2010. I stayed in a cool little hostel, Kagamiya, which was more like a traditional Japanese home which happened to have a room with some bunks in. The owners were very nice, one night they took me and two of the other guests, and Indonesian guy and a French woman, to a local bar to watch the Japan vs Paraguay match. I put down 2000 yen for an all night bar tab, which I proceeded to make full use of. A lot of the nama (draught beer) went down, followed by some Japanese spirits which I can`t remember the names of. Japan lost on penalties but no one in the bar seemed to bothered, the atmosphere was very subdued actually. The next night the lady owner drove us up to the top of Mt Inasa, which I imagine can give splendid views of Nagasaki at night when its not cloudy. As it was, the fog was so thick we coudln`t see anything.

Nagasaki is a great little town for wandering around, there is a lot of character and variation in the streets, a lot of which run up and down the hills that surround this long, narrow settlement. The other cities I visited were just too big and exhausting to walk around. I paid a visit to the Cultural museum, which had a lot of information on the first contacts between the West and Japan, by which Nagasaki was the only port that European traders could use. The Japanese built a tiny artifical island, called Dejima, which was the only place the Portuguese, and later the Dutch, could use. I had a look at Dejima island and it was tiny, it would not have been fun being cooped up there. Apparently they were let out at festival time though. Another interesting thing about the city is that it was the starting point for Christianity in Japan. When it started to take off, the reigning shogun decided he didn`t like it so had a load of Christians put to death on a hill in Nagasaki, and there is a monument there to mark it. The Christians had to practice in secret for a long time before it was accepted. (I haven`t exactly done a lot of research on this, sorry)

After Nagasaki, I had acouple of days in Aso town, which is near an active volcanic crater and some mountains which I had a hike around. It was good to be out walking but it was again very foggy with intermittent showers. I`m now at my last port of call - Fukuoka. Not much to say about the place, its a big port town, and my only reason for being here is to catch the ferry to Korea. I had some street food last night, the first in Japan, unlike in South East Asia where street vendors are everywhere this was the first place I`d seen them in Japan. It wasn`t any cheaper than a normal restaurant though. Today I went to Robosquare, a showpiece for some of Japans` robotics which is mostly aimed at children but it was a good distraction from the rain. They put on a show, which featured dancing dog-droids and two bipedal robots which were doing acrobatics.

And now it must be about time to go out, its sad to be leaving here when I`ve got my head around the way things work and I`m just getting an ear for the language. Or maybe that`s a good time to move on!

Rob