Donghuamen Night Market

Hidden away behind the palatial Beijing Hotel, in an alleyway tucked between two rather larger and newer (and therefore uglier) shopping centers, lies a seedy little market street.

The place is an unapologetic tourist trap. You will find no trace of old Peking here, no sacred remnants of Chinese culture, no bastions of traditional art, handicrafts, or culinary delights. Everything that's here is for tourists, and tourists alone.

Eagle-eyed women and smirking men stand near their stalls, verbally lassoing suckers and sapheads as they stroll by: "Hey, mister, you want medallion? Or maybe coin purse? Hey, look, nice deck of cards! I give you special deal!" The stuff they're hawking looks even cheaper than Insadong and is equally pricy.

So why go there?

For the scorpions, of course.

You know me—I'm an epicurean. I exist to fly airplanes, travel the world, read great novels, write great novels (and short fiction), mix drinks, brew beer, and eat the weirdest foods I can get my hands on. All the stuff that makes me feel happy and alive, in other words.

Nobody in China eats scorpions on a stick. The food stalls in Donghuamen are just as much a part of the tourist trap as the souvenir-mongers selling decks of Chinese emperor cards and laser pointers and faux-jade figurines.

But you know who does eat scorpions?

Me, that's who. So, on our first night in China, we marched a few of Beijing's long blocks south from the Novotel Xin Qiao and straight into Donghuamen's profiteering heart. We bellied up to a visually challenging scorpion-and-starfish stall near a bunch of trash cans that reeked to high heaven.

Having survived this little preview, I prepared myself and dove in headfirst. And this was the result:  

Let's settle the bet now: they weren't alive when I ate them. The scorpion-monger dipped the stick into a vat of boiling oil, lightly killing the arachnids before they ever got near my mouth. He also salted them up plenty, which explains my popcorn comment in the second video.

One foreigner whose accent I couldn't place (southern European, if I had to guess) walked up to us and asked if he could watch as I ate. I told him, sure, heck, why not? He stood there, a half-amused, half-revolted grin on his face as I bolted these suckers down. It's him I'm speaking to in the video when I say "You should try them."

And then I was done. Three scorpions down. An item on the bucket list scratched off. I returned to the hotel and slept...not very deeply, 'cause the mattress was harder than a slab of jade. 

Next up: TIANANMEN SQUARE. In the rain.

Peking duck...in Peking

I know I promised you a post about Beijing's most famous night market. That's coming. First I want to say a few words about what we had for dinner.

This is it, isn't it? The golden horn. China's national dish, or one of them anyway. And an animal that I don't get to eat often enough, partly because it's expensive and partly because Miss H has a thing for ducks and can't abide the thought of killing and eating the poor defenseless little rapists.

I am speaking, of course, of Peking duck.

Not my photo.

We were in Beijing: Miss H, Miss J, and I. We were hungry. Obviously the first order of business after we'd dumped our stuff off in our hotel rooms and gotten cleaned up was dinner, and a heaping mountain of it. There's something about flying across the Yellow Sea in business class and landing in the first communist country you've ever set foot in that makes you simply ravenous.

So we picked a name out of the hat—the Utopia Restaurant, a likely spot on the fourth floor of the Novotel Xin Qiao. I opened the menu and knew that I'd found my destiny.

Miss J, the little devil, talked me into ordering a whole duck instead of just half of one. This was Beijing, for Pete's sake. The capital of China. It was Chuseok. We'd be here only two days. It was ludicrously cheap, only ¥133 ($21) or so. I'd never tasted Peking duck before. I had a reputation to uphold. Blah, blah, blah, etc., etc. She rattled off at least a dozen insidiously compelling reasons why I should order the whole duck, so order it I did. It showed up at our table a few minutes later, still steaming.

Feast your eyes:

The two plates of duck (half a duck each) are in the middle of the picture. To the right is the small plate of cucumbers and onions. To the left is the container of flour pancakes, and to the far left is the bottle of Beijing Beer that I was washing all this down with.

After blankly staring at this bountiful spread for a few moments, I tentatively asked the waitress how to start demolishing it. She explained the protocol: first, you pick up one of the flour pancakes. Then you snatch a rich, tender hunk of fatty duck meat (with the skin still attached), dip it in the sugary garlic sauce, and lay it on the pancake. Top it off with some slices of cucumber and green onion and roll it up. Devour it in three bites. Repeat.

Aw man, it was gorgeous. I ate and ate and ate and ate, wondering all the while why the Masters of the Universe had not seen fit to inform me of such a wondrous dish as Peking duck.

It was an absolute feast. We talked, laughed, and nibbled for hours, taking things easy, making plans for the next day, reveling in our vacation time and our new exotic bailiwick. Stuffed to the gills, we finally waddled out of the restaurant, into the cool night air, to go in search of a rather disgusting dessert. But you'll hear all about that in the next post, DONGHUAMEN NIGHT MARKET.

Stay tuned...

Beijing and back

We're back! And there's so much to do: clean the cat's litter box (and spray some air freshener), write e-mails to family members (I didn't have access to Facebook, Gmail or Blogger while in Beijing) and just generally dust the apartment off. We have a visit to Techno Mart in mind as well, and then Parmesan chicken salad for dinner. But there's still time for some bloggin'.

As promised, here's the first of many posts about our three-day sojourn in China:

Beijing's location within greater China. From Wikimedia Commons.

Aah, China. Nothing could have prepared me for it: neither the good nor the bad. It was my first time setting foot on mainland Asia—or at least a part of Asia that wasn't the tip of a peninsula cut off from the rest of the continent by the world's most heavily fortified land border. During the first 24 hours, I ate duck, scorpion and bullfrog. I rode a toboggan away from the Great Wall, a set foot in a communist country, and I discovered the glory of flying in business class.

That's right: our trip got off to a good start. Miss H and I got unexpectedly bumped up on our Air China flight across the Yellow Sea. Due to an overbooking or something, our tickets were upgraded to business class.

And you wanna know the poetical part? Miss H and I have never flown together before. Not commercially, anyway. I've taken her for rides in a Cessna 172, but this was our first flight on a big ol' jetliner. And we got bumped up to business class. On a flight to Beijing. Ain't that something?

I'd heard about business class from some of my more well-off students, and I'd caught tantalizing glimpses as I boarded commercial flights in the past. But I'd never actually stumped up for it. I don't think I can ever go back. We had all the fixin's: the latest newspapers, hot towels, free-flowing beverages, reclining seats, entertainment galore, and (best of all) plenty of legroom.

I passed the hour-and-40-minute flight like any sophisticated world traveler would: with his feet up and a good book in his hands. And a Star Wars T-shirt on.

After getting off the plane, Miss H, Miss J and I waltzed into the impressive international terminal of Peking International Airport.

We plowed through immigration (thanks to the visas we paid ₩215,000 apiece for), and found ourselves at a taxi stop. We were snapped up by a tallish man with close-cropped hair, a lined face and big rough hands, in a short-sleeved button-down shirt and slacks. He brought us to his minivan, a greasy, grimy thing (like most of the cars in Beijing) and gestured us into it. We impressed upon him that we were heading for the Novotel Xin Qiao, which we somehow managed to pronounce correctly. The rate card said 650 yuan ($108) for the trip, but our driver insisted on 700 ($116). We were neophytes at the haggling game and desperate to boot, so we said yes. The driver jumped in and off we went.

I kept my nose glued to the window for most of the ride. My brain was buzzing. For years I've compared and contrasted Japan, China, and South Korea, both mentally and in writing. Now was my chance. I could finally appraise Beijing as it stacked up against Seoul and Tokyo, and divine the character of capital-dwelling Chinese.

My first impressions weren't good. Beijing was as smoggy as I'd heard. The sunset was an apocalyptic crimson, and vanished rapidly into the grayish void which extended 15 degrees above the horizon. The buildings were blocky and featureless, monuments to Stalinism, and they didn't give the city a welcoming air. The few people I saw on the streets looked rushed, harried, and miserable.

Matters improved when we lugged our baggage out of the hazy, stale air and into the bright, cool lobby of the Novotel Xin Qiao. Our room was spacious and comfortable, with all the amenities. The hotel itself was laden with restaurants, a convenience store, a bar, a bakery, and a spa. Best yet, we were centrally located, only a few blocks from most of the stuff worth seeing.

With that in mind, we dumped off our stuff in our rooms, took a thirty-minute rest, and then headed out into the cool, moist darkness of northeast China for the first item on our to-do list: DONGHUAMEN NIGHT MARKET. Tune in tomorrow for that one. I eat scorpions.

preconceptions about China

No word yet on that nightly journal I'm supposed to be keeping. Be that as it may, I have some thoughts to share with you.

I'm researching China, particularly the eats, and I'm getting really jazzed about this little four-day jaunt. But some unsettling questions remain in my mind.

I have mixed feelings about China.

The government, not its citizens, mind you. So far I've found that people are people, no matter where you go. But China, and her communist leaders, have done some things that I find difficult to swallow. The country's history is more checkered than the flag at the NASCAR finish line. I'm trying real hard to be objective here, but I am and always was a subjective bugger, and that usually filters through to my perceptions about other places. Some of these issues that I have with China and its history are seeping in around the loose edges of my consciousness, and I have to get them off my chest before they're diluted by experience.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of China, of course, is the color red. Communism. Mao Zedong. The Great Leap Forward. Josef Stalin, Kim Il-sung, Pol Pot, and other prominent communist dictators who've influenced or been influenced by China and its politics.

I have a problem with communism. What's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander. I get that. China has a different moral code, a different work ethic, a different societal paradigm and a much different history than America or any other Western state. But still: the idea of communism itself seems, to me, fundamentally flawed and diseased. In my mind, human beings were not meant to exist in classless, moneyless, stateless societies. I'm no social Darwinist; there's times when I've despaired of the ossification of class in Western society and its total dependence on currency. But there's no denying that capitalism and competition encourage hard work and innovation. That, to me, seems preferable to the alternative: a society focused on production (at the expense of intellectualism)—a breeding ground for conformity, mediocrity, and stagnation, in which the group is superior to the individual.

Whether or not that's what's happened in China is debatable, because of the second problem I have with the place:

They're not even doing communism right.

I remember penning a passionate article about this in my high school's literary magazine back in 2002 or thereabouts. One of the basic tenets of communist theory is that the people have control, and that's that. Society is stateless: there is little to no concentration of power, no overarching authority. This is what makes North Korea's proper name so laughable: the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is four lies in one. It's anything but democratic, inasmuch as the power is held by one family and one family only, with the mere pretense of choice on the part of the people. The citizens do not own the means of production, nor do they have any say in the government—the Great/Dear/Outstanding Leader does. The definition of the word "republic" is a state in which political affairs are public matters and not the private concern of the rulers; as I pointed out before, the people have about as much say in (or knowledge of) political affairs in North Korea as do chipmunks or cucumbers. And finally, "of Korea" implies that the DPRK considers itself the rightful government of the entire peninsula, which is about as horrifying as it is hilarious.

Not my photo. This is China, not North Korea.

Though China's human rights record is far from spotless (I'll get to that in a minute), they at least seem to have empowered their citizens to a greater degree than the Hermit Kingdom. Even so, power is centralized and concentrated in Beijing, which means that the "stateless" part of communism is being openly flouted. Moreover, even a superficial glance at China's economy and society reveals that it is neither moneyless nor classless. At best this makes the Chinese government hypocritical; at worst, it makes them dishonest. I have no use for dishonest people—let alone a dishonest political system.

Setting that aside, let's talk about the biggest bee in my bonnet about China: human rights.

Here's a little preamble from Amnesty International's website:

Amnesty International has documented widespread human rights violations in China. An estimated 500,000 people are currently enduring punitive detention without charge or trial, and millions are unable to access the legal system to seek redress for their grievances. Harassment, surveillance, house arrest, and imprisonment of human rights defenders are on the rise, and censorship of the Internet and other media has grown. Repression of minority groups, including Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians, and of Falun Gong practitioners and Christians who practice their religion outside state-sanctioned churches continues. While the recent reinstatement of Supreme People's Court review of death penalty cases may result in lower numbers of executions, China remains the leading executioner in the world.

Possibly I was biased by being born in a country where freedom of speech and freedom of the press actually mean something, are protected by a constitution (the supreme and inviolable law of the land), and are sacrosanct in the hearts and minds of the people. Thus it shocks me when I hear that the Internet is heavily censored in China, with social media sites like Facebook being routinely shut down or blocked. The Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is indefatigable at censoring news reports and filtering what information the people receive. The Chinese government is enormous, inefficient, bureaucratic, and callous. Petitioners cannot easily seek redress of grievances, and are often lost in the shuffle or crushed by the big wheels. The class system is not only extant but downright marginalizing, equal to anything seen in South Africa. In 2005, Jiang Wenran, acting director of the China Institute at the University of Alberta, stated that an apartheid-like segregation system was in effect in China. City-dwellers, he said, enjoy a wealth of social and economic perks while peasants, or "rural workers," are treated like second-class citizens. They require a portfolio of hard-to-obtain passes to work in provinces other than the ones in which they reside. Movement is restricted. Freedom of association is nonexistent, freedom of religion is a joke, and people are regularly stripped of their rights if they do something, anything, that causes the CPC to label them "subversive." And then of course there's the one-child policy. To me, a government that fines its citizens for having more than one kid is just plain tyrannical.

In addition to these documented transgressions, dark rumors abound of torture, brutality and degradation in China's arbitrary detention centers. Evidence has surfaced that Mao and his followers abused the science of psychiatry to their own political ends, declaring thousands of people mentally ill, thereby discrediting them. (Statistics hint that this practice continues to this day, especially in the persecution of practitioners of Falun Gong, which the CPC has branded undesirable.)

Besides all that, we have the official Chinese policy of refusing to acknowledge North Korean runaways as political refugees. Instead, China calls them "economic migrants," captures them and deports them back to North Korea, where, as we all know, they face separation, torture, "reeducation," forced labor and execution.

And speaking of North Korea, let's not forget that China has abetted the existence of that oppressive regime with food and electricity for nigh-on 60 years now. I have a bit of a problem with that as well. For all I know, Chinese soldiers might have killed some of my grandfather's best buddies back during the Korean War, too. So I'm a little ticked off at the country on my granddad's behalf, silly as that sounds.

And do I even need to mention Tibet?

Not my photo.

I don't like any of this. No way, no how.

What really sticks in my craw is that China does (or allegedly does) all of this stuff even after signing UN-sanctioned agreements saying that it won't do it. China signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but never ratified it. So they just do whatever they please. Hell's donkeys.

In a nutshell, my preconceived notion of China is this: it's a country, a big country, with a huge population and a long and storied history, which in the 20th century had some tremendous political and societal upheavals, during which a rather unscrupulous man came to power, espousing communism and imposing his vision upon the country and its people with varying degrees of success. What we have now is a country used to be doing told what to do, which is really too big to regulate, whose citizens are finally starting to get fed up thanks to the unstoppable influx of Western technology (and with it, ideology), and whose ruling party has all but abandoned the proper pursuit of dogmatic communism in favor of a corrupt regime based on absolute power, suppression of dissent, a single-party state, and strict regulation of economics, society and human life, thereby blighting a nation and its sovereign dignity.

The Temple of Heaven, one of the things on my Beijing to-do list. From Wikimedia Commons.

So, yeah. I'll visit their country. I'll peruse their monuments. I'll stand in their square. I'll tour their palaces. I'll eat their nibbles. I'll breathe their air and sleep in their beds and watch them go about their lives. But that doesn't mean I have to like the way they run their business.

We'll see how much this trip changes my mind.

mid-September 2013 bulletins

Hey there, blogsphere. In the next few days I'm going to publish a confessional about the prejudices and preconceived notions I harbor about the People's Republic of China. Might be best to do that before I go there next week, you know?

Before that, though, here's the news:

• I am fully recovered from that week-long bout of tonsillitis that plagued me the first week of the new semester. 
• The weather appears to be turning. The dreadful summer heat has subsided, though the humidity is still sky-high. And speaking of the sky, the heavens have opened: the middle peninsula has been deluged with 120 millimeters (not quite 5 inches) of rain every day for the past three days. I'm surprised the subways haven't flooded yet. The downpour was so heavy yesterday that the lower half of my slacks were soaked through as I made my way from Gangbyeon Station to my final appointment with the ENT specialist. The rain bucketed down so hard that it was finding cracks and chinks in my umbrella, and icy drops were falling on my head at intervals. Yikes. Coupled with the unpleasant humidity (and the insane amount of sweating I do whenever it occurs), the situation has been untenable. I can't wait for fall to properly set in.
• In other news, the first two weeks of Sejong University's fall semester are over. Chuseok, the Korean harvest festival (roughly analogous to America's Thanksgiving Day) is coming up next week. It's three days, Wednesday to Friday, and that's when Miss H and I are actually going to China. I think this semester is starting out pretty well, but I feel tired already—the prospect of another four months of teaching is daunting. I think I'm finally starting to be well and truly burned out on education. I wanna go home and fly again. I may have some further news about that in the coming weeks, actually; Miss H is pretty burnt out too, what with her kids being so spoiled and unmanageable and all, so we may decide to go home early. We're going to talk it over.
• After many fits and starts, Miss H and I are going to start implementing some healthy habits around here: resuming our evening tea-and-yoga routine, for starters. It really helps us sleep. We've been looking around and garnering information about gyms, and tomorrow we'll probably stop by a few and ask about their rates and facilities. We've made dozens of attempts to get into shape on our own, but we've decided that forking over a membership fee and having personal trainers bark at us would overcome our lack of willpower and provide us with motivation. We have to start getting in shape for the wedding, you know!
• I also think I'm going to start keeping a nightly journal again. I keep buying blank journal books, excitingly leather-bound and full of blank college-ruled pages ripe for filling with life's intimate details, but I never write in 'em. It's difficult to get into the habit, for one thing. Our evenings can be so unpredictable. Hectic, too: I cook and wash dishes and plan lessons and so forth. Moreover, since I'm keeping a blog, there hardly seemed to be any point in keeping a journal...but I've realized that this blog is more like a twice-a-month thing (when I don't have travels to report on), while the journal would be every night. It'll be good to marshal my thoughts, clear my head, and sleep soundly knowing that the events of the day have been recorded and analyzed (in a non-electronic medium). Might help with penning my memoirs down the line, too. Journal-keeping rather sounds like a constructive habit to cultivate.
• Apart from that, there's not much news. After China, I don't have definite travel plans. I'm still considering doing a working holiday in Australia in January and February of 2014, but that might have to change if Miss H and I are going home early.
• Speaking of 2014, the World Cup qualifiers have begun. I was in a bottled-beer bar with a couple of coworkers last Tuesday and the Korea-Croatia game was on. I didn't stick around to see the whole thing, but apparently Korea lost 2-0. The national team has a rookie coach this year and this loss has made it warm for him. Korea will play Mali and Brazil in the coming weeks and they'd better put on a good show, or they might not qualify for the Cup. Golly, I'd hate to see what'll happen to that coach if that happens.

Alright, it's time for me to run. Miss H and I are meeting our friends Josh and JB (my coworker and his North Korean wife) for a double-date today: coffee, the Paul Gauguin exhibit at the Seoul Museum of Art, and samgyeopsal for dinner.

What's samgyeopsal, you ask?

Barbecued pork belly—strips of thick, streaky bacon fried Korean-style and eaten with lettuce leaves and ssamjang (meat sauce). Very fatty, very delicious and very popular among the locals.

Toodle-oo!

save me from the tonsillitis!

I suppose I should really thank Miss H's students, because when they're not driving her up the wall with their spoiled behavior (we live right next to Walkerhill, a rich, hoity-toity and upscale neighborhood of eastern Seoul, so all her seven-year-olds are complete brats), they're infecting her with a litany of diseases. One of these was tonsillitis. Miss H herself got over it easily enough, with antibiotics prescribed by a local ENT specialist, but then she passed it on to me. I started coming down with the symptoms on Sunday, September 1...the day before the fall semester began at Sejong University.

Well, crap.

I figured I'd ride it out. It was just a fever and a sore throat, nothing to worry about. I stuck it out for nearly a week, refusing treatment even when I had to cancel classes because I couldn't speak. Despite feeling like death warmed over, I kept at it, believing a turnaround was right around the corner.

Matters came to a head on the night of Thursday, September 5. I took my temperature and discovered that I had a whopping 103.3° F (39.6° C) fever. That tore it. Miss H and I climbed into a cab and rode to the emergency room at Asan Medical Center across the river in Songpa-gu. A quick examination by the attending physician revealed that I had a heck of a case of bacterial tonsillitis, which had turned my tonsils all splotchy-white and driven my temperature through the roof. Three IV drips put me to rights: a fever reducer, saline solution to rehydrate me while I sweated it out, and a hefty dose of penicillin. I went to the pharmacy the next day to pick up some antibiotics, and then visited the ENT specialist (the same one that Miss H had seen). This articulate woman sprayed and swabbed some vile-tasting concoctions on the back of my throat, prescribed me some more drugs, and called it even.

I'm finally feeling back to normal now. I have my last appointment with the ENT specialist tomorrow (Friday), and I expect her to give me a clean bill of health. That's good, because in the middle of next week I'm jetting off for China and would hate for an infection to muck up the trip.

Anyway, this little episode impressed upon me two salient facts: (a) that Miss H needs to find a new job away from those bratty petri dishes, and (b) the Korean healthcare system is well-oiled, efficient and cheap. The visit to the ER cost me around $84, and the drugs and ENT visits were almost negligible. We sat around in the ER waiting room for quite a while, but that had more to do with my slow IV drip than any sort of patient backlog.

I sure wish the insurance situation in the U.S. was such that our hospitals could offer this kind of cheap care without a boatload of illegal immigrants creating a logjam and the creeping cancer of Obamacare driving the costs up, but hey...at the end of the day, I'm just glad I have my health.

the JR Beetle to Busan

You're right, I could have flown. Just hopped a plane out of Fukuoka Airport and zipped straight to Seoul. But you know me better than that. You know how much I hate commercial airlines. And you know I love the scenic route. That's why I'm all about small planes, trains, and...

...boats.

Yes, I said boats. Like this one, the Boeing 929 Jetfoil:

'Course, the one I rode on from Fukuoka to Busan didn't look like this. Mine was red and white and had the legend "JR BEETLE" emblazoned on its sides. But let's not quibble. I wanted a unique and leisurely (and less expensive) way to get back to Korea, and I'd never ridden on (a) an international ferry or (b) a hydrofoil before. This seemed like a great way to kill three birds with one stone: get home and knock a couple items off the bucket list.

'Sides, it's not everyone who can say they've ridden on a boat built by Boeing, right?

So I got up at a ridiculously early hour in Kumamoto on the morning of August 8th. I checked out of the APA Hotel, rode the clanking, creaking tram to the Shinkansen station and caught the next available train for Hakata, on the northern coast of Kyushu. (Like I said, that JR Rail Pass really paid for itself.)

I arrived at the station, got out, asked at the information desk for the best bus to take to the Hakata Pier, and was told that No. 88 would do the trick. At least, that's what I was told. When the 88 dumped me off about ten blocks away, I was somewhat perplexed. But thanks to a helpful tip from the driver, I waited around at the stop and caught the next one, the No. 89, and that turned out all right.

Now, here was my dilemma: I had arrived at Fukuoka Station at something like 10:00 a.m. It had only taken about an hour to get from Kumamoto to Hakata on the Shinkansen and maybe 20 minutes on the bus. But the ticket I had reserved with the Miraejet Ferry Company said that their earliest boat didn't depart until 3:00 p.m.

Was I content to twiddle my thumbs for seven hours? Hell's donkeys, no! I went up to the JR Beetle counter and asked if they had any seats available. They did. I made a reservation. Check-ins would begin at 11:00, and the boat itself would leave at 12:30. Or something.

Now, the process for actually paying for an international ferry ticket from Japan to Korea is a bit involved, so I'll break it down for you:

• I had to pay ¥14,000 ($140), I believe, for the actual ticket.
• There was an "oil surcharge" of ¥3,000 ($30) tacked on to that.
• ...as well as a ¥500 ($5) "terminal use fee."

Jumpin' Jiminy.

The ticket fare and oil surcharge were paid for at the counter, but the terminal use fee was paid by pumping a 500-yen coin into a machine. It then spat out a ticket which you had to show the gate agent before boarding.

After this rigamarole had been dealt with, I walked upstairs to the waiting room and examined the "New Rabbit" convenience store, which was an eclectic mixture of Korean and Japanese products.

After a while it was time to board. Or, not. As soon as we'd passed the main entrance, we were in another waiting room. Then we were sorted into two lines, depending on whether we were leaving on the JR Beetle or the larger, slower Camellia line, departing thirty minutes earlier. There was also a duty-free shop with assorted liquors (but not Suntory whisky, unfortunately).

We Beetle-people went downstairs to yet another waiting room and sat around for another 30 minutes before boarding finally began.

When the white-gloved agents opened that final set of glass doors, you better believe yours truly was the first through them.

Yes, this is a crappy photo. Not only because of the angle (I was at the head of the pack and determined to keep my place...and I did, I was first aboard!) but because my god-rotted camera lens fogged up again.

That's my seat, right there by the window. Aah, what a life.

 

That there's the Camellia thingy, departing ahead of us. It had dwindled to a tiny dot by the time we ourselves departed.

 

Couldn't resist.

And finally, the blue-green waters churning beneath us, we backed away from the pier. I believe that's the harbor control tower in the background.

My final glimpse of Japan.

The trip was largely as I had expected. The captain hit the juice as soon as we were in the middle of the bay, and I felt the ship's hull begin to rise out of the water. There was a momentary cacophony as the vessel picked up speed and the grasping wave-tops clawed at her keel...but then it fell away and died, and there was nothing. (Nothing but for the roar of the engines.) It felt like we were coasting on air. And we were going like the clappers. Though I was sad to leave Japan, I was happy that I'd be back in Korea in such a short time. Sometimes I do like my conveyances on the zippy side.

We blazed along for a couple of hours. The sun was warm and soporific. The only worthwhile sights were Tsushima Island, which appeared off the port side about an hour into the trip, and the 2003 Korean film Tube, which was shown on the big screens in the cabin (with Japanese subtitles).

And then the pine-clad, mist-shrouded hills of Korea hove into view off the port side.

The refueling launch.

I felt a tad gleeful as I stepped off the boat and back to the land of my residence and employ. Ever since I'd first taken a ferry to Busan (in 2008, from Geoje Island) and noticed that the international ferries docked there, I'd promised myself that I'd be on one someday. And lookie here! I'd gone and done it.

Customs and immigration were a breeze. I handed over my passport, ran my luggage through the X-ray machine, and caught the bus to Busan Station. Within the hour I was on the KTX to Seoul. A 45-minute subway ride from Seoul Station brought me to Gwangnaru, where I entered the apartment that Miss H and I share. I hadn't seen her or the apartment for over a month. Our reunion was joyous and luminous, and the remainder of my summer vacation idyllic and diverting.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my vacation to Japan.

Reigandō...a failed attempt

I've been hyping the heck out of my pilgrimage to Spirit Rock Cave, the penultimate home for Miyamoto Musashi in his old age, building matters up to a heck of a show for you readers...but the simple truth of the matter is, I didn't make it. Well, I did. Sort of. It's complicated.

Let me explain. I said earlier in my post about Musashizuka Park that I got out the door of my hotel rather late on the morning of August 7th. Well, here's where it came to bite me in the butt. By the time I got around to finding a bus out of Kumamoto Terminal, and managed to make it clear to the ticket agent where I was going (Iwato Kannon Iriguchi was the nearest stop), I bought a ticket and went out to wait at platform 23. Bus No. 6 was the one I was waiting for. It didn't come but once every 40 minutes or so, and it was already late in the afternoon: 4:40 or some-such.

Well, here's the hell of it: I was on the platform when the No. 6 bus came. However, there was another bus at the platform already. Instead of waiting until that bus pulled out and then pulling up behind it, the lazy-ass No. 6 bus driver stopped at Platform 24 for about five seconds, didn't see anyone who looked like they wanted to ride with him, and then took off. All I could do was stand there, open-mouthed and dejected (like Jonathan Winters in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World) while my ride cruised off into the sunset without me.

So then it was another interminable wait for the 5:20 bus.

It never came.

It was well after six o'clock when what must have been the last No. 6 bus pulled up to the platform. I leaped on. I was beginning to panic. Iwato Kannon Iriguchi was in the middle of nowhere. Should I take too long in getting out to Reigandō, getting back to the bus stop and catching the last No. 6 bus back to town, I'd be stuck without food, a change of clothes, a toothbrush, or a roof over my head, on a dark one-lane road in rural Kyushu overnight. That was not a prospect I relished.

I did my best to enjoy the spectacular views of the city and Mount Kinpo as the bus gradually left the city limits and climbed into the wild, leafy vastness of the mountains. The lane was sinuous and narrow, and often the bus had to slow down to squeeze past a car or a minivan coming in the opposite direction. Houses were few and far between and rice paddies dominated the hillsides. I had to listen very carefully to the scratchy female voice on the loudspeaker announcing the stops. Even as it was, I very nearly missed my stop. Against my better judgment, I leaped off the bus and found myself on a sunlit road at the foot of Mount Kinpo, with rice paddies all around and the charming village of Iwato Kannon Iriguchi behind.

So I hiked a kilometer uphill, and found myself in a little parking lot with a rather lumpy and crude statue of Musashi overlooking it (the first picture in this post, up above there). A kindly young Japanese woman, impressed that I had climbed the hill on foot, gave me a few pieces of candy. At this point, with the sun getting low and my journey far from over, I considered asking her for a ride back to town, but thought better of it.

After a bit of waffling about which way to go, I went: down a hill (after all that climbing!) and then a hard right turn down a slight slope, with another village (or an extension of Iriguchi) nearby.

And lo and behold! There was the ticket office!

...closed.

Closed.

I was too late.

I'd missed my chance.

All my ambitions about seeing Musashi's final haven went up in smoke, just like that.

This was as close to the cave as I ever got.

For a brief moment, I dithered at the turnstile, considering the leap and the unknowable distance to the cave thereafter. But my worries about missing the bus back to Kumamoto and spending the night by the side of the road, being eaten alive by mosquitoes and deafened by cicadas, won out. As fast as I could I scrambled back up the narrow road, up the forest-clad hill, and down the twisting kilometer driveway back to Iwato Kannon Iriguchi. On the way down, I chatted (again, in pidgin Japanese) with a local who was busily jogging up and down the first few hundred meters of this hilly driveway, who made me think that I'd missed the last bus. I wound up waiting for about 20 minutes before (thank God!) the ol' No. 6 came chugging around the corner. I hopped on and was back at Kumamoto Station before the last rays of the sun had faded from the sky.

Okay, so Reigandō was a bust. Oh well. At least I know the way out there now, and I can budget time appropriately whenever I find my way back to Kyushu. But at the time I felt rather crushed. I was so blue I went and bought a Freshness Burger to console myself:

Then it was back to the APA Hotel for my last night in Japan. I had a celebration of sorts: an assortment of canned beers from the convenience store. I had a jolly night of it and slept pretty well on that rock-hard mattress.

What more is there to tell? Only one thing: the journey by high-speed ferry from Japan to Korea. Tomorrow: THE JR BEETLE TO BUSAN. I didn't know Boeing made boats, did you?