Positive Tension

I like to think that my posting less regularly (albeit with a regularly larger word count) leaves you with the kind of tension that today’s title implies, however I severely doubt that it comes close to the tension created amongst the three travellers who took to Jeju Island in part two of the next chapter, namely Minji, her mother and I. It also had a lot less to do with the band Bloc Party than I might have liked, whose song (and third album) entitled “Intimacy” might have posed another possible heading for this prose. Quite what I should expect, as I have hinted at before, I wasn’t exactly sure, and as our plans came together (under Minji’s adept travel-planning skills, which have been duly noted for my future reference) I began to get more and more nervous. The itinerary was packed full where I would normally improvise around a few key travel ideas. Not only this, but on the list to visit were such places as “Ja-il Park” (which boasted a high ropes course and a mirror maze), a “Trick Art Museum” (which I will not do the injustice of describing within brackets) and our first stop “Love Land” (which I will simply note tended away from an intimate setting and much more towards what I gather an Anne Summers party might look like).

That we chose to stop at “Love Land” first was of little more significance other than it was the northern-most attraction, hence closest to the airport and hence appropriate as only the first or last stop. Though we penned it in as first it was in fact pushed back to second, then third,  thanks to the moist grumbling that all are familiar with around lunch time and the realisation that a rock which supposedly looks like a dragon’s head was, in fact, just around the corner. The dragon’s head left much to be desired and looked as much like a dragon as Chinese characters look like what they’re supposed to represent, however lunch revealed the first Important Fact I learnt about Jeju Island, brought around by the purchase of a Jeju Island Pork burger from the confusingly titled “Kraze Burgers” (confusing as the burgers aren’t normal but aren’t exactly out-of-mind either). Apparently the Island is famous for three things: Wind, Rocks and Women. I thought of trying to make them alliterate but settled to have you imagine Jonathan Ross reading them aloud in an attempt to be hip and fresh and unforgettable in the few months left before he leaves the BBC. I will use these three things to detail three more Important Events of my trip and skip over the hints I’ve dropped that I visited a park, with my girlfriend and her mother, which was filled with wild sexual adventures captured in statue form and detailed in a museum which, thankfully, wasn’t quite as explicit as the statues attempted to be.

I’ll take a breath to observe that, if nothing else, my undergraduate life and completed dissertation have bestowed upon me the gift of writing a five hundred word introduction with remarkably little difficulty. Here’s then rest, then.

Wind. Though it didn’t show when flying, stepping onto the coastline revealed that, being located near the Pacific Ocean, Jeju Island is remarkably windy. This impression was dwarfed when we reached a peninsula towards the end of the week and were almost blown away, and also by the effect of the wind on some coastal rocks, which I shall return to later. The Important Event here, however, was our trip to Halla Mountain, the highest mountain in South Korea (though the National Anthem still pines for Mount Baekdu, located at the northern tip of North Korea and a certain mark of South Korea’s desire for unification). Though Korea is famous for mountains I’ve actually observed that not that many of them are mountains as classified by the West, which I’m told transforms a hill into a mountain at one thousand meters above sea level. Halla Mountain is, by these standards, certainly a mountain, and one which practically forms the entire island largely thanks to excessive volcanic activity, the last of which was recorded in 1007. This activity gives it numerous peaks and deep craters, the top most of which hosts a lake and, perhaps unrelatedly but all too often, a dense mass of cloud. In a moment of utter stupidity our trip up this mountain took us up the side which clearly led towards one of the lower peaks if one only craned one’s head upwards a little, and resulted in a rather shorter trip than expected. It also left us with a compellingly more memorable trip thanks to the fact that the peak we were climbing, or at least attempting to pull ourselves up over icy piles of snow left over from recent flurries and a rope handrail which led all the way along the earthy stairway built into the mountain, was completely untouched by the cloud which completely obscured the higher peaks. This cloud, we later discovered on a journey up a similarly famous crater on the seashore, would have meant that we would not have been able to see more than ten meters ahead of us into the lofty crater, and we certainly wouldn’t have glimpsed a view of the island, which no doubt (on a clear day) is completely epic, but today would have been utterly Lame.

Reaching the peak we could see the whole Eastern side of the Island, partly through the slit-windows of one of the last strongholds Japan made, and lost, in Korea. The west was, of course, subdued by the rest of the mountain, but this didn’t matter in the slightest. Instead of the mountain top all we could see was a white avalanche of clouds diving heavily into the valley below us before whisping into thin streaks around us. The sheer density this wall of vapour formed before spilling over the mountain slowly oozed down towards us with a momentum that would no doubt eliminate every one of the island’s ten thousand inhabitants had it not been entirely without mass. As it dipped and then rose sullenly towards us we couldn’t help but feel a certain thrilling terror, our mouths filled with cool gusts of humid air which bought tears to our eyes with our inability to close them in the face of such force. We eventually managed to tear ourselves away from the sight, partly thanks to Minji managing to slip into injury on the only part of the mountain untouched by snow, and party by the need to press on into our tightly packed schedule. This would soon bring us on to:

Rocks. Though this subtitle looks completely dull, it is in fact a rather Important Event, since, as I mentioned briefly, nearly the entire island was formed by a volcano. This means that, even outside its surprisingly immersive rock museum, there are many unusual landscapes and a good number of world heritage sites to explore. I’ll first bring you to those coastal rocks which I introduced above. These were some black sets of polygonal rocks protruding proudly from the shoreline, something which I have seen in photos and on the television but never imagined I’d come across so close before me. Whilst alone they were, in fact, nothing particularly beautiful to look at (however unusual and rare), when bothered by a stormy Pacific Ocean they were quite the sight. Not only did high, dark waves come in at a rate which I can’t remember having seen (though I do make remarkably few seaside trips), but as they crashed against these unnaturally shaped rocks the splash reached well above my head before shining white and black in the air and falling a good ten meters onto solid rock, the rest of the water having pulled itself back away from the smooth, shining and step-like protrusions which prevented it from lapping further upon the island.

On the next, decidedly wetter, day, Minji and I had arranged to take shelter in a one kilometre section of lava tunnel (part of a four kilometre wonder), created many many years ago but kept in remarkably good condition, which is open to the public. I always wonder just how people come across this kind of thing and the rush of excitement and fear they must’ve felt upon finding something so untouched yet so perfectly formed, but sufficed to present myself with it in its now much-visited state. After walking some time down the dimly lit tunnel, which is adorned with ridges, benches, stepping-stones and a large, rocky protrusion (which I discovered was the frozen end of the last lava flow to pour down the tunnel) it occurred to me that the place I was now strolling coolly and damply along had once been unbelievably hot, and not long before that a whole lot more solid. This thought felt somewhat distant, however, and upon reaching a large stone pillar (the largest known in the world), which had been created by lava flowing through another tunnel above but joining with this one, felt that the present conditions were a little more convenient for our leisurely perusal, and somewhat safer as well. It was also considerably dryer than an umbrella would have kept us, though perhaps this is to detract from the natural beauty of the tunnel and to move onto the stale dampness left by our short dash through a downpour, into the car and onto the rest of our journey, in short, into the presence of:

Women. Actually, this is where the saying breaks down into the past, since Jeju Island was once mainly populated with women after the men moved to the mainland for better prospects to support their families. Some of these women, or at least women taking advantage of tradition and Jeju’s recent surge in tourists, still dive into the sea to catch various life with their bare hands to sell and to eat. Apparently it’s quite impressive, but I didn’t quite fancy seeing some women in wetsuits waving a multi-legged sucker around. Though I didn’t see many men around I also didn’t spot a significantly large amount of women, and so will focus this last Important Event on the interaction of myself with the two women I was with, Minji and her mother.

What began as a mild worry (this trip was intended to be with friends, not family members) soon transformed into a relaxed trip after “Love Land” turned out, somehow, to be quite a small deal between the three of us. We didn’t laugh and jeer like some of the parties we came across, but we didn’t look up and stay stiff-necked either. This soft beginning set the tone for the rest of the trip whereby we travelled, ate, laughed and had some fairly serious conversations. These ranged from me being labelled as a 귀엄등이 (Gui-om Dungi, or Cute Person) thanks to my attempts to speak Korean and my completely appropriate but entirely unexpected replies to numerous comments and events (often in Korean, since my language skill is always improving). It even got to the stage that, if I spoke in English and Minji’s mum spoke in Korean, both slowly, we could often understand each other and communicate a decent amount. Along with us renting a one-room pension (remember pensions?) and me sleeping on a floor-mattress (요, or Yo) in the same room as them, which made the trip much more comfortable much more quickly, this meant that the mother felt amiable enough to ask me questions along the lines of “What do you believe about love”, leading to personal revelations of our characters and histories. Not to go into too much detail and to bring this blog to a healthy two thousand word-count ending, I will close with the remembrance that the evening after we returned back home and went our separate ways, Minj’s mother texted her daughter saying that she missed me. It certainly seems that I’m well in favour with this part of her family! There was always a lot of tension, but every part of it positive. I also, of course, had a very good time with Minji herself, who is sillier, smarter and more beautiful than ever. But that’s nothing new.

And you know what? I don’t want to leave Korea…

톰

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~ by tomsavery on March 2, 2010.