Danny in Asia

It doesn’t matter if you’re planning a vacation, a trek, a round-the-world trip, or a weekend getaway; whatever the scope of your adventure, a little planning is essential and can be almost as enjoyable as the trip itself. If you start early, keep your options open, and don your explorer’s hat, you won’t be disappointed.

In the past few years I’ve struck a nice balance between work and travel. The rotation pattern typically goes: work for 9-18 months, travel 3-6 months. I like this arrangement because no matter how much we love to travel, downtime and a home base are necessary from time to time. And home base is the best place to enjoy my second favorite hobby, trip planning.

At present, I am in the middle of planning my second large trip of the year, set to start in late March. For those of you in the planning stages, or others with extensive trip experience, I’d love to hear your insights. Here’s what I do:

I. Where to go?

1. Explore your options. This will require some research, but thankfully this is getting easier all the time for the independent minded traveler, especially if you have an Internet connection with a little speed. iTunes podcasts are an excellent way to get a flavor of a place in a short amount of time. In the time it takes you to drive to work you can find out how often the boat runs to Tristan de Cunha, where to find a cheap hotel in St. Petersburg, or what the Kyrgyz sport of horse back goat-ball is all about. Frommer’s, Lonely Planet, Rick Steves, National Geographic, and an assortment of independent expats all offer podcasts that may spark an interest in a place you hadn’t thought of going.

Once you’ve settled on a few possible destinations, put your library card to work. I usually start with books that include the post-script: A short history, and branch off from there based on my interests. Brushing up on the history and culture of a place always increases my excitement as the destination begins to open up, its foreign mystique slowly unravels to expose a more understandable, and therefore more accessible place to explore.

2. Keep your options open. Just when you think you’ve settled on the perfect travel spot, some other country, mountain, trail, or continent sweeps in out of nowhere and captures your imagination. This can be great, but when planning with others, runs the risk of frustrating the troops. I’m often guilty of this. If you’re prone to travel mood swings, wait to put out the call for travel partners until you’re in the later stages of planning, or get on the same page with your cohorts from the start.

3. When choosing a place to travel, you are only restricted by the limits of your imagination and sense of adventure. While people’s interests in regions, countries, and cultures of the world may be diverse, when it comes time to choose a destination, the choices narrow. Your “average Joe” finds it increasingly challenging to actually picture himself in more exotic locales. If you settle on reading books and becoming a literary traveler, that’s fine. But for the adventurous, the first challenge is breaking free from the confines of our often ill-founded, over-hyped, or even propaganda inspired notions of safe, enjoyable travel. This point is particularly salient in the age of terrorism. To cross destinations off the itinerary for reasons such as poverty, communist history, or Islam is to deprive yourself of some potentially amazing experiences. War, genocide, and famine are obvious exceptions to this rule.

Ten years ago, Asia seemed like a strange, inaccessible maze of unreadable signs and back alleys. I couldn’t imagine myself in the forefront of such a picture. As of now, I’ve lived in Japan for two years, spent time in three other Asian countries, and am currently planning a trip that will take me to 5-7 more in the coming year. Anything is possible. You can go anywhere.

II. Planning your trip

Okay, you’ve settled on the perfect place to go. You’ve looked into tickets, leafed through a couple of guide books, and planned a possible route or two. This is where it gets really fun.

1. Draw a map. If your only artistic inclination is the occasional doodle on your napkin, this will suffice. You are about to embark on an adventure, and all the great adventurers throughout history drew maps. Of course they were often drawing the first maps, mind you, but this exercise works wonders for getting you in the travel mood. It also becomes a useful tool as you start to budget time and transportation expenses, especially for those who are visual learners. Hang your map on the wall, pick up some sticky tab post-its, and go to town. I find this to be a much more interactive way to budget, rather than slumped over some excel spreadsheet. \

2. Over plan. This is the stage where guide books come in handy, primarily for budgeting purposes. Don’t use the guide to book a mid-range hotel room in Beijing, use it to find out how much mid-range hotels in Beijing generally cost. The same goes for tourist attractions, temples, tours, flights, trains, and taxis. The guide gives you a fiscal flavor of the destination, but your itinerary shouldn’t rely solely on the gospel of Lonely Planet. I pour over numerous guide books while planning a trip. Most of the popular publishers are available for free from the library, saving you the burden of these expensive, heavy, and quickly outdated books. Chances are that you won’t be seeing everything in a given country anyway, so just photocopy the sections you’ll use. Much lighter, you’ll find.

After you do your meticulous guide book research, head to the computer. Once again, Internet 2.0 has been amazing for the effortless communication of all you plugged-in travelers. Powered by Google, the numerous independent travel forums that have sprouted up over the past several years (including the site that hosts this blog) have become a powerful tool in trip planning. Travelers can talk to travelers, spreading the good word on hot spots around the world. But why should you follow the recommendation of some stranger, you ask? Well isn’t that exactly what you’re doing with the guide book? Travel writers come in all shapes and forms. Some have lived in the area for years, and some are on whirlwind tours of country X at break-neck speed. The rooted types probably have some great recommendations, while the sprinters are more suspect. It’s difficult to judge. I take the hotel or restaurant recommendations of those who veritably slept and ate at the places, opposed to a writer who might have peaked in an open room and glanced at prices on a menu.

Use the Internet! It’s always there, it’s reasonably current, and you can even ask it questions.

3. Learn the language! This is the point where the eyes start rolling. I don’t mean learn the language, but learn the essential get-around-town sayings. Questions words, this and that, counting, and greetings are a great place to start. Once again, podcasts are wonderful, and for the time being the majority of them are still free. I’ve subscribed to podcasts for Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish. I’m downloading like crazy because I have the sneaking suspicion that they’re going to jack up the price from free to something in the near future. There are also hundreds of free language sites out there that can give you the quick and dirty on basic grammar, verb use, noun forms, and pronunciation. The world’s languages are just a Google away.

Don’t dwell on the idea that you’re studying a language to eventually communicate. This will likely not be the case at first. You’re studying to make the place open up to you. Local people love the fact that visitors to their country are making an effort to learn their language. Make a fumbled effort to order food or ask directions and you may very likely make a fast friend. You can talk for hours with someone that doesn’t share your language with only a pen and piece of paper. I’ve found that anyone can learn how to count in any language by playing slap for an hour or two. Find a deck of cards, a smoky bar, and start mispronouncing numbers. Ask the locals how to improve your tone issues. Invite them to play. I played this for hours in China with a Swede, a Japanese guy, an Israeli, and a Romanian. We went around the table learning how to count over and over again. It was a blast, and I still remember the Romanian (girl).

These six points have guided my trips well, but more importantly have made my pre-departure time an integral part of the entire journey. Some of these points have been buzzing around the independent travel blogs for some time, a testament to their effectiveness. I hope these ideas show people how to step into foreign places more seamlessly, and minimize the sore-thumb tourist effect. Planning doesn’t just need to be about logistics and packing your suitcase, it can be a process of mental preparation. The more thoroughly we plan our minds for the adventure, the more we’ll gain.

In 9 days I’ll be heading to Seoul to begin my two week “capitals tour” of Asia.  The capitals tour, as I’ve started calling it, will begin on Christmas day in Seoul.  My girlfriend and I will be spending three nights, which if Seoul is anything like Tokyo, will be plenty of time to soak in the major sights.  When Chiaki heads back to Japan, my journey truly begins and the schedule is thrown out the window.  I’ve got two weeks to wander back to Tokyo.  From Seoul I will head north to the demilitarized zone.  The North Koreans have been digging tunnels across the border for 50 years and tours are available.  I’ve heard from friends that the DMZ experience is surreal.  Each side is still locked in a steely stare, looking through the cross hairs.

From there I will catch the evening bus south to Gwangju, where I will meet up with my Ozzy buddy Scott.  Scott’s place will provide a good base to see some of the sites of the southern peninsula.  Eventually I’ll head over to South Korea’s second largest city, Pusan, and arrange ferry accommodations to Hiroshima.

The Japan leg of this trip is all about living cheap and seeing some of Western Japan’s sites that haven’t made the itinerary during my first two years.  The list includes Hiroshima, Himeji castle, Kobe, Nara, and Osaka.

The three yearly school holiday periods in Japan provide excellent travel opportunities.  Sure, some of the attractions are a bit crowded, but most everything is crowded in Japan anyway.  The main cost-cutting  comes with the  seishun  ju-hachi kippu, or  youth  saver  18 ticket.  For 11,500  yen,  you  can  travel  for five days unlimited on local and rapid trains.  This is a steal in Japan, where transportations costs are some of the highest in the world.  This ticket doesn’t allow you to take advantage of the modern high-speed trains, and shouldn’t be used by tourists staying briefly.  But if you have the time, a stack of books, and enjoy the slower lane of life, this ticket is for you.

My budget for this trip is thin because I am saving for my Silk Road journey from Shanghai to Germany that will start in March.  I had these 17 days off during the holidays and wanted to go somewhere on the cheap.  While I had hoped to go somewhere a bit warmer, the tickets to Korea were too cheap to pass up.  It will also be nice to get my last big dose of Japan before leaving this country, a place I’ve called home for over two years.

Japan’s over flooded market of English conversation and children’s schools ensure that most English-speaking university grads around the world will be able to find a job.  But be prepared for an east meets west experience.  The dichotomies that exist in your average private school will usually be one of the first cultural shocks that a new transplant to Japan will face.  Before arriving, I imagined overtime, weekends at work, and every other nightmarish work scenario associated with Japanese companies.  After settling in at my school, I found that my worries couldn’t be further from the truth.  There is a concerted effort to divide the labor into two distinct pools: Japanese and foreign.  While the stereotypical work conditions are definitely present, foreign teachers are largely sheltered from them.  The brunt of the workload falls on the Japanese staff, primarily the school manager.  Because we speak that Golden language, we are paid more, do less, and are able to see out a year contract without exerting much effort, seriousness, or sobriety.  It’s a pretty nice arrangement, but made guilty, a feeling that grew throughout my 16 month tenure at my fledgling company.

This is a story of English conversation school managers, a group of characters that I became quite fascinated with while teaching in Japan.  The managers that tend to succeed, and by succeed I mean don’t quit, are the biggest gluttons for punishment.  Any foreigner who has taught in Japan has no doubt marveled at the level of verbal abuse managers take from upper management on a daily basis.  The young men and women that filtered in and out of my school over the course of a year would receive a call each evening, at which time the yelling would begin for not meeting his or her ridiculously inflated sales goal.

The idea behind this management approach is that the higher the goal, the higher becomes motivation to achieve the mark.  This idea is deeply rooted in Japan’s “ganbatte” culture, where all are encouraged to “do one’s best”, regardless of the insurmountable task at hand.  To this day I can’t understand the level of self-sacrifice Japanese devote to their jobs.  Does this make me a typical Western quitter?  I don’t think so.  I like to think we’re realistic.  When you focus on realistic goals, motivation increases, time is more efficiently managed, and the work environment cultivates a higher feeling of accomplishment among workers.

At my school we would have a weekly meeting to discuss campaigns, student renewals, and fiscal goals.  The process often went painfully slow, and was generally a waste of time.  The conversation would usually go something like this:

“Our campaign goal is 900,000 yen (roughly $9,000),” the manager would start.

“Uh-huh.”

“Right now we have achieved 120,000 yen.”

“Right.”

“The campaign lasts three more days so…let’s all do our best to gain five more students so that we can achieve our goal.  Gambarimashou!” 

“Sure.  No problem.”  Our small school of 100 students should have no problem boosting its enrollment by 5% in three days.  Instead of focusing on the previous two weeks of the campaign, and why the sales results were so dismal, the manager is trained to narrowly assess only the immediate task at hand, and forge on resiliently.

The longer I stay in Japan, the more I observe this blind, masochistic dedication.  At this particular company, one the of the “big 3” conversation schools, these tendencies run rampant.  The top leadership rarely provides innovative solutions to poor business results, and their management styles seems more like belligerent bullying. 

In many ways, I look at much of the English conversation industry as a sinking ship, with the hardened, loyal staff going down valiantly, obeying the orders of their incompetent superiors until the end.  There has been a downward trend in business over the past 15 years in Japan, and the entire nature of the language industry has been drastically changed by technology.  Students have so many more options for learning English these days with the Internet, free podcasting, and interactive language software.  The lag time in reacting to these changes says a lot about the endemic lack of creativity and innovation in Japanese business.  There seems to be a time warp in reason, where the pervasive idea remains that whatever worked in 1987 should work today.

From time to time I would receive a letter from the corporate headquarters titled: The proper care and feeding of managers.  It included a list of suggestions for making the school manager’s life a bit easier.  These always amused me, because in my mind it is the head office that should be receiving these subtle tips on civility and encouragement in the workplace. 

It’s been nearly a year since I jumped ship, and I still bristle at the incoming gossip from my previous coworkers and friends who worked for other big conversation schools.  The managers keep trudging along, obeying the ridiculous orders of upper management, seemingly oblivious to the house of cards coming down around them.

The Kokai River flows below me toward the pink horizon to the southwest. Its flooded waters surge over a small diversion dam before bending west and exiting my view behind a concrete embankment, the future site of yet another bridge. I’m relaxing atop a raised levy system that runs the length of the river, winding in lockstep, a serpentine mound of earth lining each river bank. The levies cut through rice paddies, farms, and the small rural towns that populate the southern part of Ibaraki prefecture, 40 kilometers north of Tokyo. From this vantage I can see it all. Mt. Tsukuba looms over the landscape to the east. The lights on its peak are beginning to greet the evening patrons of the railway tram that runs base to summit service. A huge hall with jutting roof beams entirely out of scale with traditional Japanese architecture sits adjacent to the river, home to some kind of religious group. I try to frame a picture of the massive building, some architect’s idea of Japanese style in the medium of concrete and glass, but I can’t seem to get Mt. Tsukuba in the picture without a row of power line towers in the background of the shot. I give up and get back on my bike.

To the north I can barely make out the town of Ishige, my adopted home for the year, where the romantic silhouette of a seven story castle bisects the glowing neon of two Pachinko parlors in the foreground. This is too often the rural landscape of modern Japan, and the cause of my lament.I’ve spent the majority of my free time this fall exploring the area that surrounds Ishige, which sits in the middle of the vast lowland plain that surrounds Tokyo. It doesn’t take long when leaving the capital for the grid of the city to be replaced by the grid of the countryside, the flat expanse of rice paddies intricately manicured through the ages. The concrete waterways, levies, and flat roads don’t do much to inspire the imagination, but do make for some enjoyable cycling. My mission has been to find something distinctive, a place that sets itself away from the sameness that has come to dominate Japan.Foreigner’s visions of Japan may be that of ultra modernity; a high-tech fueled landscape of bullet trains and sleek design. To a certain degree this vision is true. I soaked up these images my first year, enjoying the foreign mystique of a new land. But there is another vision; a pastoral scene of rice paddies, quaint gardens, and mist shrouded mountain forests. This is Kurosawa’s Japan and it is on life support, in danger of being forever consigned to the post cards and calenders of souvenir shops.What I’ve found in my nine months of living in the countryside is a string of two lane highways, none moving very fast, some that abruptly end. I’ve found diversion dams, concrete spillways and hundreds of bright blue pump stations. There are empty mountain roads with hillsides layered in concrete, fortified coastlines littered with tetrapod rip-rap, and power lines criss-crossing the entire scene. It’s impossible to drive anywhere without seeing our human footprint. Roads feel like a background loop in an old black and white movie. Ramen shop, pachinko (slot pinball casinos), MacDonald’s, ramen, electronics store, ramen, repeat. It’s numbing.

The odd thing about Japan is that the further you get from large cities the more construction you tend to see. My rafting job last summer brought me often to the mountains of Gunma prefecture where I would take driving excursions high into the mountains to try to find the remote, pristine places I knew had to exist. This hunt often yielded only larger dams, more elaborate road projects, and longer tunnels, all with dwindling traffic flow. It leads a nature-lover to ask why? Why are there over budgeted road projects to no where, yet it still takes me three hours to drive 100km between major cities on a two-lane “highway”? Why are hundreds more dams, concrete river containment projects and other habitat destroyers in planning stages in the country that eats the most fish? Why does Japan continue to ruin its coastlines for generations to come with ugly tetrapods, despite growing evidence that they cause more erosion than they prevent? The answer is Japan’s bureaucracy, perhaps the world’s largest and most stubbornly unchangeable. This institution, combined with the powerful construction industry, has been steamrolling over Japan’s natural beauty for decades, and today much of Japans domestic economy depends on it. Japan has become addicted to building.The construction industry grew quickly after the war as it stepped up to face the gargantuan task of rebuilding a bombed-out nation. It was then further inflated by modernization efforts of the 60s and 70s. But then a strange thing happened. During the 1980s every indicator showed Japan to be a modernized, industrial country able to compete economically with other great powers on equal footing. In other countries this stage of development brought with it a slowdown in building, a shift from infrastructure development to maintenance. This is not the case in Japan. Construction efforts barreled ahead at full steam and continue to do so to this day. Japan is a post-modern nation with development goals of a pre-industrial nature, and the bureaucracy is at the reigns.Japan’s bureaucracy is difficult for Westerners to fathom. More often it is the bureaucrats, not elected officials, who write, introduce, and defend legislation in the Diet, Japan’s house of parliament. The distance between lawmaking and Japan’s complacent constituents creates a hazy system of accountability. After laws are created and funds are allocated, it is nearly impossible to retract them, even after conditions change.

In my two year stay, I’ve been able to observe how funding and construction projects effect one another. Each city, ward, and prefecture have their given budgets. This money is to be used in a given year and does not carry over to the following fiscal calendar. Starting around October, construction starts everywhere. Sidewalks are torn up, half finished bridges resume building, and road work increases, all in an effort to use up the remaining budget. The bureaucracy doesn’t look favorably on unspent funds, viewing miserly local governments as ungrateful and deserving of less money the following year. All levels of government get caught in a yearly spending trap which over time has prevented any grand planning vision, the type of planning that will improve people’s standard of living and make Japan a more attractive travel destination. Japan’s high cost of living is often attributed to its land constraints and lack of natural resources, but truly has more to do with this bureaucratic waste and a lack of foresight.

All this brings me back to the river side. Maybe all this complaining is just another example of a foreigner misinterpreting Japan. As the West slowly gained access as the Edo period came to an end, it was thought that the Japanese were nature loving people. This assumption was based on a semantical error between tennen (nature) and shizen (the way things are, natural states). Nature doesn’t need trees and pristine coastlines; nature is the way things progress, however these progressions take shape. I look around at the concrete lined river and power lines, at natural Japan, and sigh. The castle on the horizon is no castle at all, but a community center. It has an auditorium, small library, and a museum about the area. It remains empty most of the time. As my apartment sits in its shadow, it has become the symbol of my frustration, a heat and labor energy drain on this small town that is already clinging to survival on rice farm subsidies and, of course, construction. It is one of the many glaring reminders scattered throughout Japan of overzealous plans to modernize a modern country. But as no one ever seems to kick up any fuss, perhaps these are not reminders of anything, but merely the way things are.

I’ve been waiting at this luggage carasol way too long, starting to think that all of my good travel karma has finally been exhausted when I spot my bag. We made it to Seoul at last and are in Incheon International, one more super modern airport for Asia to boast about. Signs everywhere brag that Incheon is “A world best air hub”. As my bag draws near I realize it’s tagged with a big yellow contraption, like a huge anti-theft tag that says “your not going anywhere without a thorough search, buddy.” I proceed uneasily to customs where a Korean man is in a shouting match over why he can’t keep his AK-47 air rifle. He points directly at me and starts spouting out random English words.

“You looking at problem?” I smile and follow the customs official, Chiaki following behind.

I figure I have been one of the randomly selected lucky ones to get a closer look, but soon realized these Koreans are on a mission. After a minute of unsuccessful hand gestures trying to communicate what they are looking for, they resort to the online dictionary and finally made everything clear.

“You have bullet?” he asked, his fingers raised, grasping the imaginary item.

I shake my head no.

“Mmm,” he cocks his head to the side and looks again at my bag. Slowly he begins carefully pawing through my bag, searching for the magic bullet. When he arrives at my toiletries bag he seems more assured that he’s found what he’s looking for. After emptying its contents he looks up at me and says, “no bullet.”

“Right, no bullet. I have no bullet.” Chiaki and I start to laugh and this puts the other inspection agent at ease. She says something to the man in Korean and they quickly rush my things over to the X-ray machine for another look. In another minute we’re finally stepping out into the cold Korean evening. What am I have supposed to have done with one bullet anyway?

We were greeted at Incheon airport by the travel agency coordinator. Since Incheon is about an hour from Seoul, we thought we’d take advantage of the free ride to the hotel. In the past I’ve used Japanese travel agencies for booking tickets only. This was the first time I’d booked a package that includes hotel. These packages often include daily side trips to pottery factories or Kimchi museums. When we bought the tickets it took some time to explain to the agent that we don’t want to go on the tour.

“But it’s free,” he said. “Many people go on the tours.” He didn’t say many people enjoy the tours, but go on the tours.

They made us sign an official paper stating that we were waiving our free tour priviledges. This was the first glimpse into how Japanese travel works.

The woman at the airport loaded us into a van and started rattling off a forty minute list of dangers and precautions in Seoul. “Be careful not to get charged for pay-per-view TV shows in the hotel. If you get a manicure, be sure to agree on the price first. Korean food is spicy, so watch out for anything red.”

The list went on like this and she didn’t tolerate any interruptions. It was all common sense stuff that the Japanese insist on reminding everyone about constantly.

When we arrived at the hotel it became clear that most of the guests are all Japanese, the staff all speak Japanese, and that any service provided by the hotel will be extremely overpriced, being geared toward the spend crazy Japanese person on holiday.

The experience has left me with a better understanding of why you find roaming groups of Japanese tourists everywhere following a guide with a flag. The whole travel system is organized around a highly structured itinerary, ticketing system, and hotel network. For me it takes out all of the freedom and exploration that I love about travel, but lucky for us we just had to sit through the woman’s speech on the way from the airport.

I’ve learned over the past two years of dealing with these travel agencies that the best thing to do is lie. For instance, I lied and said that I’m returning to Japan on the 30th to get a cheaper 2-way ticket, when really I’m taking the boat back. When I tried to book one-way tickets earlier this year to Thailand it was a nightmare. Japan’s travel agencies will strictly adhere to every single stupid Visa and immigration rule that countries don’t really pay attention to. These include having proof of onward travel, a Visa for the next country, and a booked hotel address. I’ve never been asked for any of these, and many travelers might get persauded into buying ridiculous travel packages geared for safe, sheltered, Japanese travelers. Just lie, and have a great independent trip.

Seoul is by far the most tourist friendly of all the huge Asian cities I’ve been. When you arrive, head straight to one of the many kiosks scattered about the tourist areas, especially the bustling markets of Namdaemun and Dongdaemun. These information centers provide free maps, brochures, and even a lengthy book listing Seoul’s best restaurants for traditional Korean cuisine. Even if the restaurants are out of your price range it’s still worth picking up for the beautiful pictures of food and ideas for your next culinary adventure.

We started out in Namdaemun Market, the best place for cheap gifts and small souvenirs. Chiaki is a much better barterer than me. She picks a young Korean guy and slowly starts breaking him down. By the time she had finished talking Lee-san’s price down by ₩15,000 he turned to me and asked if I was sure she wasn’t Korean. I took it as a compliment, to her or me I’m not sure.
After buying all our omiage (Japanese souvenir gifts), we ducked into the narrow food alley for a great lunch of cold spicy noodles (bibimkimsu) and Korean style pancakes (Pajeon). We ended up coming back to this restaurant because the women serving were so fun. On our second visit Chiaki got hugs. Japanese-Korean relations on the mend!
Namdaemun is also close to one of Seoul’s ancient city gates, Sungnyemun. From the gate we took a rather lengthy stroll up to Gyeongbokgung, the work in progress that was once the emperial palace before the Japanese destroyed it…twice. The first time was about 450 years ago and then again during the 35 year occupation before and during the war.

Gyeongbokgung is impressive yet suited for travelers new to Asia. I’ve had my fair share of temples and pagodas in Japan, and on the surface these kind of places all start to look the same, only in Korea the dominat tones are green rather than red. Big deal. Since ancient Japanese cites didn’t have walls to protect from invaders, I was more interested in the gates scattered about inner Seoul, the last remaining evidence of these barriers.

Walking up the massive Namdaemunno street from Sungnyemun provides a good picture of Seoul’s immensity. There is no defined downtown, nor the pockets of skyscrapers dotting Tokyo’s skyline, although some specific commercial districts are on the rise. The majority of the central city is a random mix of buildings of all sizes with high-rise apartment blocks circling the core. Most Koreans seem to live in apartments as we saw few houses in Seoul.

We followed Cheonggyecheon creek from Gyeongbokgung down to another massive gate, Dongdaemun, surrounded by Asia’s largest outdoor market that shares it’s name. The creek is a new urban renewal project, the brainchild of Seoul’s green mayor. It was bustling with holiday excitement, it’s sunken concrete walkways and patios packed with people admiring the impressive Christmas light displays on both banks. It is a great way to get to Dongdaemun, especially if you’re in the trendy Insadong art district.

Dongdaemun market is the highlight of Seoul. You can spend hours exploring its narrow alleys filled with every random thing you can imagine. By this time we had walked all day and were losing steam, unfortunately, so we had to duck out of the market and head home to rest before dinner.

The Korean War Memorial is a must. You can wander about the huge military junkyard and larger than life statues that surrounds the fortress-like building. I felt like a kid sitting in the cockpit of an old B-52 bomber, staring down the cross-hairs of anti-tank artillery, and climbing on old bombs and submarines. Okay, okay, war is awful and all that, but this place is like a life-sized toy box from your average male’s childhood, although the Millennium Falcon was conspicuously absent. Unfortunately the inside of the Memorial was closed, marking my biggest disappointment of my Seoul trip. I was looking forward to learning about the Forgotten War that claimed the lives of 34,000 U.S. soldiers and 2.5 million Koreans. Looks like I’ll have to head to the library instead.

While the Memorial was recommended and lived up to the hype, the club district of Itaewon was a bore. It’s right next to the U.S. military base, which would have been enough to let me know to skip it had I known. It’s a foreigner friendly line of boutiques and shops by day, and apparently some lively clubs at night. It reminded me of Roppongi and we left.

I am not much for tours. I like doing touristy things at times while traveling of course, but the thought of piling in and out of a bus and anything involving a blow horn or following a flag sends me running. But in the case of Korea, my interest in seeing the Demilitarized Zone trumped my adversity to tours. If you want to see it, you have to go on a tour. It makes sense, I guess. You can’t have a bunch of camera wielding tourists traipsing about the world’s most heavily armed, semi-active war zone border. So we signed up to see this cold war throwback, a no-man’s land untouched for over 50 years.

The first thing you feel when you approach the 38th parallel is the cold. It’s strange to think that other cities that share this latitude are San Francisco and Athens, but the Asian weather system keeps Korea in the cold, often taking the frigid Siberian cold front in full force. Aside from the temperature, the place seems frozen in time. Roads get smaller, traffic all but disappears, and suddenly you realize you are driving along a very long fence. Painted white rocks are intricately placed within the cyclone fencing. More rocks, each with a thin red stripe, are stacked carefully on small bolted brackets to indicate even the slightest movement in the fence. This low-tech detection method left me wondering how they could tell the difference between a stiff wind and the North Korean 1st Infantry. Our guide, CK (crazy Korean [haha]), explained that it doesn’t really matter as this is a shoot first, ask questions later kind of place.

There are two fences on each side and in between is the DMZ, almost 2 kilometers across, and home to a richness in biological diversity unknown in any other temperate zone on Earth. When I say unknown, I mean it. Until future reunification comes, it remains unstudied what happens when flora and fauna are given free reign in such a huge area of land. Luckily it is mostly birds that have taken over, because bears would have a tough time contending with all the landmines.

We were not allowed to enter the “DMZ proper” on this tour. If you’re willing to pay for it you can visit Panmunjeom village which lies a stone’s throw from the stone-faced North Korean soldiers on the other side of the fence. Our tour’s highlight was the 3rd infiltration tunnel running 1600 meters under the DMZ. If remained undetected it could have flowed 30,000 troops per hour across the border, a mere 52 km from Seoul.

We entered through a tunnel built for the booming DMZ tour industry. The 3rd tunnel is 73 meters below ground and quite elaborate. We were allowed to follow it for about 300 yards before being forced back by the hermetically sealed doors, the first defense from subterranean invasion. As the North Koreans dug through solid rock, they rubbed coal into the walls to give themselves the mining excuse if detected. When the South finally did find the tunnel in 1978, the North made all kinds of wild excuses from coal exploration to accusing the South of building it, despite obvious south-pointing drill marks. North Korea finally admitted as much to building the tunnel last year when they petitioned Seoul for compensation. Pyongyang is well aware that the DMZ has become the number one tourist attraction in Korea and had the audacity to ask for some retribution for the tunnel they built, or rather their political prisoners built. It’s just another example of the North’s strange and desperate behavior.

The tunnel is interesting enough, but in the end it’s just a tunnel. A 4th tunnel was found in 1990, and despite the two Korea’s rosier relations as of late, I wouldn’t doubt the discovery of a 5th down the line.

Other stops on the tour included Dorasan military observatory and Dorasan rail station, both with strict picture policies. Dorasan station is a brand new beautiful building that remains completely empty. This is the last stop and few get off here. It has been built in anticipation of reunification and touts itself as a possible major stop on a future Trans-Korean express; Seoul to Moscow via Pyongyang. The area around the station is bustling with construction. Hyundai is building factories and tourist infrastructure, all in hope that someday Korea will once again be one. I wonder if they know something we don’t.

The tour wasn’t what I hoped, but much of what I expected. It was rushed, involved blow horn announcements to get on the bus, and didn’t live up to the promises in the flyer. I wouldn’t go so far to say it was a waste of time or money however. If you are interested in geopolitics, the DMZ has it’s fascinating moments. Most interesting is the tone and rhetoric of the place. No longer is blatant propaganda geared toward division. Everything about the place screams that Korea is on a course toward reunification. Whether this is true is unknown, but I found it interesting to find that although North Korea has increasingly isolated itself from the world community, Kim Jong Il’s government has been far more open with Seoul than his father’s.

If you’ve seen the sites in Seoul and need a day to fill, the DMZ is worthwhile, but shouldn’t be a high priority on a packed Korea itinerary.

Chiaki left this morning, catching the early flight back to Tokyo to bring her ridiculously short vacation to a close. I slept in before checking out of the hotel and beginning my long solo trip back to Japan. The past few days have been very much a vacation for me with Chiaki. I was playing the part of the camera toting tourist which I enjoy from time to time. Now starts the journey home, my overland and sea trip back to Tokyo that I’ve been planning for over a year.

With an afternoon to kill, I headed to the National Museum of Korea. As a museum buff I really enjoyed this vast building and well-organized exhibits. While the movies are in Korean, about 90% of the displays and historical explanations are also in English. This is a great place to spend a few hours.

At five I departed for Gwangju in the southwestern corner of the peninsula to meet up with my buddy Scott for a few days, including New Year’s festivities.