TravelStream™ news feed for member philiad on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/philiad en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Wed, 29 Oct 2008 07:02:05 -0400 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1218365940/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1218365940/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1218365940/tpod.html Wed, 29 Oct 2008 07:02:05 -0400 The Hermit Kingdom

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Cheonan, Chungcheongnam-do, Korea Rep.

Throughout April and May Arario Gallery was full of old junk. People paid their won and came in to walk around looking at it all. Some of them left their own garbage in amidst the old junk, but they probably should have known better. Their water bottles and crisp white newspapers looked out of place among the shelves full of gramophones, typewriters, yellowing books and sightless old cameras.

All this bric-a-brac seemed out of place in this gallery. Arario Gallery opened in Cheonan in 2002, a sleek and contemporary space surrounded by the hippest department stores in downtown Cheonan (which are also Arario-owned). Since then the Arario project has expanded, opening galleries in Seoul, Beijing and New York. The Arario 'small city' in Cheonan is full of monuments to consumerism, to commercial viability. Among the giant handbags and toys and the wrecked cars stand the centrepiece figures, a couple of sculptures by Damien Hirst, the world's highest selling artist.

Hirst and his junk belong here; they are bold, high-gloss, machine-produced, utterly empty artworks. Surrounded by department stores and fast food franchises, they look very much at home. Couples sit in their shadows, eating donuts by the dozen and photographing themselves.

So with all this pretty, polished new junk surrounding the gallery, why fill the inside with such musty old junk?

These old relics have been collected by Jinyong Lee, and he uses them as the subjects of his enormous paintings. Hanging from the walls of the gallery are monumental stacks of oil-on-canvas suitcases and books.

Giant handbags outside, giant suitcases inside; perhaps there is no difference between the old junk and the new after all?

There is more to this exhibition though. In between the suitcase stacks and colossal cameras are huge photo-realistic faces, a giant clock, American city scenes. And at the centre of gallery is a massive wall of drawers, painted to look like the spines of books. Every subject is covered by these painted titles; from Harry Potter to the Palaeolithic, from psychoanalysis to the Bible. A few timid visitors tug on the drawers, and find that they slide easily open and are filled with even more old junk; keys, watches, miniature pyramids, photographs, musical instruments. The Palaeolithic draw contains a replica Neanderthal skull, set in resin. There is something fascinating about all this old stuff.

It must have taken a long, long time to paint the thousand or so books onto these drawers. It must have taken a lot longer - an entire lifetime - to collect the roomfuls of antique junk that are every bit as important to Lee as his paintings. Over the course of his thirty-odd year career he has earned a reputation for the superhuman amount of time he dedicates to his art. The appeal of this art extends back further than this one career though. Two centuries worth of junk fill the rooms of Arario Gallery, a great repository of discarded memories that have been preserved by Lee; that he has adopted and made his own.

Opening and closing drawers, wandering among the battered old relics; Lee's art takes forgotten, commonplace objects and invests them with an exotic attractiveness. They belong to different times, but also to different places. The fading words on the book spines are in English, German, Mandarin, the stamps on the suitcases bear names like Madrid, London, Savoy, the stamps and addresses on envelopes are American.

Opening and closing drawers, wandering around the collection, you could explore the past two hundred years of world history - both personal and international history. At first Lee may seem like an antiquarian, fixated on preserving the junk of the past, but it is this spirit of curiosity and exploration, of finding the exotic in a battered old suitcase, that makes him so attuned to contemporary Korea. He belongs to the new Korea, the Korea of open borders, and to the new, internationalist generation of Koreans, that cross those borders and step out into the world.

Lee has explored the world and retrieved its memories, and now he has brought his discoveries back to Korea. His art and exhibitions, his collections offer a tantalising glimpse of the richness of the world out there; each opening and closing of another drawer is another tiny exploration. It is difficult to walk away from the drawers until every single one has been explored, and even then, the curiosity isn't satisfied. Lee's art taps into that powerful yearning expressed so often by so many people around Korea; the yearning to break free, to explore and understand and engage.

When I had scrutinised every drawer, every piece of junk, I walked out of Arario Gallery and across the sculpture park, past the giant handbags and into the nearest department store, past many more handbags, and up to the bookstore on the top floor. Others had had exactly the same idea as me; a knot of people were gathered around the travel literature, opening and closing books, scrutinising pictures, planning trips. Their faces were filled with wonder and fascination, delighted by the exotic junk of the world.

This article was written for the July 2008 issue of Korea Sun..
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1219750200/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1219750200/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1219750200/tpod.html Tue, 26 Aug 2008 07:32:31 -0400 The Hermit Kingdom

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Cheorwon, Korea Rep.

August wheeled around, the final month of my contract, a time for the hopeless sentimentalist in me to start noting the last everything; the last day of school, the last bus ride, the last shitty cafeteria meal. I said my last farewells over and over again to the teachers, students and friends, often to the same person again and again.

There was also time for firsts, for new experiences and experimentations too though. I spent a week teaching an English-only summer camp to the best of the best students from each school in my city. This was my first contact with teachers that really believed in teaching, and students that really wanted to learn English. I found myself happy to wake up and stumble off to camp, happy to eat with the kids for as many meals each day as possible, happy to spend my free time avoiding the other teacher-creepers and hiding out with the students. It was an unreal week - education is not usually like this. It was the other Korea where English is something actually worth knowing, and where kids have dream jobs like diplomat, judge and civil servant instead of pro-gamer, pro-gamer or pro-gamer.

The wet season continued to sweep backwards and forwards across the country, scourging the rice fields and winnowing the corn stalks, flaying umbrellas in the streets and drenching me to the bone. But the rain was welcome; it was a re-assertion of nature over and against the sweat and grit of the concrete landscape. I collected bent and battered umbrellas and wrung out my shirts.

I said my final final goodbye to teaching, and found myself with two long and marvellous weeks in which to reconcile myself to Korea. It took less than a day to do this; the moment the shadow of work, and of life under a contract dissipated I found myself enjoying Korea immensely, rediscovering its food and its landscape, as well as uncovering new corners and dishes. Though this was the time for saying my heaviest goodbyes, it was also the time of many firsts, of many pleasant surprises.

My last weekend in Korea was full of firsts rather than lasts, or firsts that were also lasts. I had assumed the final weekend would proceed much as all the others did; with singing and dancing following drinking following eating following squandering the daylight hours. This however was not to be, and the final weekend saw me instead joining a convoy of vans motoring through midnight away into the mountains of Gangwondo, on the very border between North and South Korea.

This was the other Korea; one I had suspected must exist somewhere but had never quite managed to find. I and some twenty five others were the guests of Mr. Cha and his friends, the Mr Kims, in their enormous, empty pension up in the green hills. There was a drum kit, there was a karaoke machine, there was a barbeque, and there was a lot of floor space. From the rooftop we could see the steep folds of mountain that concealed North Korea and the DMZ.

I had spent my year teaching and - for a while - living in rural Korea. I know the rhythms of the rice harvest and of lives of the people that work them. This land we had come to was rural Korea, a patchwork of rice fields and the thin muddy roads linking them together, but it was still another world completely from that which I had known. In the morning the sky was a crisp blue, the clouds cleaner and whiter than any other clouds in Korea. In the afternoon the golden sunlight flooding the valleys picked out humming insects and blades of grass and cast long, warm shadows. Steep green hills rose up over the rice patches. There were no buildings taller than a couple of storeys. Butterflies the size of sparrows flitted among the flowers. Grasshoppers twanged about the fireplace. When it rained there was thunder and lightning over the hills, over the border.

There was wilderness here; the land had not been swallowed up and paved over by concrete, the sky had not been diluted by exhaust and neon lights. The best rice in Korea is grown close to the DMZ, where it is washed by clean rain and watered by fresh streams. The people here feel different too. The pace of life here is slower, set by the rhythms of the rice and of nature. There is no industry, no competition. Mr. Cha, in his fractured English, talked of how crazy Korean life is, how obsessed with money and study and advancement. I've heard the same lament so many times, but never before seen any attempt to find an alternative lifestyle.

Up there by the border you can never forget just how close the DMZ is. There are army bases everywhere, and occasionally the road passes through a tank trap, giant concrete clocks poised ready to topple on invading armour. Skulls and crossbones are a popular motif. All the paraphernalia of war and division and invasion though is part of the paradise of the region. All that razor wire and the associations that come with it prevent the area from becoming crowded. They deter people, but nature passes through unfazed. Standing on a mountain observatory and looking down, the crooked squares of rice fields give way abruptly to overgrown wilderness at the border. There is another oasis within the DMZ, between the landmines and guard posts.

This weekend was my second visit to the border. The first time I had crossed a few steps into the official north at the JSA or joint security area, the village where north and south meet to bicker and parley. This is the public face of the DMZ, an increasingly popular tourist site. It is a war zone, and there have been incidents. There have been shooting and axings and emergencies and code reds, but the feeling of the place is that of little boys playing at war. The soldiers of the south walk rigidly and try to look tough because that is what they think the north respects. The soldiers on the north side preserve an air of jocularity and ease because they think that is what life is like in the south. The tourists that sweep through are given strict codes of dress and of conduct, but it is very hard to see why waving is prohibited but picture taking is not. The whole war, such as it exists today, has been reduced to these trivial gestures. There are still moments of hostility, there are punitive killings, but there seems to be nothing behind it nowadays. The fences themselves, the layers of wire and steel seem to exist for their own sake. The ideologies that separated the country have moved on and found new arenas to fight their wars in, but they have left their rusty remnants behind for the peninsula to grieve over and finally dispose of.

Away from the JSA though, back up in Mr. Cha's mountains, there is none of this tension. The tank traps are relics now, like the infiltration tunnels and the labour party headquarters. Their legacies are terrible, but they are terrible anachronisms, out of place in the world today. The so-called 'iron triangle' is now full of butterflies and rice fields and pension parties.

The weekend came to its end bathed in golden afternoon light at a temple in the hills looking down over the deep green valleys. Once again the drone of ending filled my ears and I realised I was saying last goodbyes, taking my last subway ride, eating my last noodles, sleeping in my bed for the last time. It seems cruelly unfair that my first real experience of life on the border should also have to be my last. It remains for me as an idea of a sanctuary, a possibility for an alternative life within the clamour of vacuity that resounds through so much of Korea.

My time was up though, and the last day and the last hours crumpled in on themselves, given me too little time to properly pack up my life. I left six umbrellas at the door of my apartment, as well as half a box or cornflakes, half a bottle of mayonnaise, an unopened bag of rice, an unused jar of year-old jam. These are the traces I left of a year in Korea. These and perhaps somewhere a few foreign words lodged in the memories of a few kids. Everything else was taped into boxes or crammed into bags and hurled off across the waters to Australia. And I followed close behind, wedged into my last bus, wedged into a flight into the night, gripped by nostalgia not for the life I had lead but for the life I had had rare and powerful glimpses and tastes of, for that other life in that other Korea that I sometimes touched upon but could never quite apprehend.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1217917560/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1217917560/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1217917560/tpod.html Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:29:03 -0400 The Hermit Kingdom

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Daecheon Beach, Korea Rep.

There are other white people on the bus. There are never other white people on the bus. Not in this province, not on this bus. Today, though, I can count at least ten of us. It is a special day.

Only one thing could bring the oegugin hordes down into Chungcheongnam-do; mud and lots of it. The 11th Boryeong mud festival is about to begin, and the pleasure-seekers are commuting in from all over the country, filling buses and clogging expressways.

Last time I took the bus to Daecheon there was no mud festival. The summer had broken over Korea, the unairconed school term seemed insufferably long, and I felt desperately the need to get away from it all, to find a place where I could uncoil my nerves and breath deeply.

Such places still exist; they are being pushed further up mountains or out to sea, but there are still plenty of remote getaways hidden about Korea. Wonsando is one of these.

Daecheon port is a jumble of rusting anchors and bright jumbles of fishnets. The ferry to Wonsando fills with cars and with cyclists, hikers and farmers, and me and my posse of stared-at foreigners.

The ferry ride only lasts twenty minutes; from our beach on Wonsando we can see Daecheon as a strip between cool grey water and the hot grey sky. The noise, the bustle, the glamour and the sleaze, though, are all too far away. We could communicate by firework semaphore, but that's about all. A twenty minute ride but it feels like a completely different world.

There are minbaks on the island, a few of them standing in dilapidated clusters and ranged along the beaches. There are restaurants, too, but they aren't open. Once we solve the question of accom - finding among the more ramshackle options some newer minbaks that have aircon and private bathrooms - we realise this could be a very very hungry weekend. Our token packets of ramyeon aren't going to go very far.

Fortunately we are not completely alone on the beach. A very hospitable group with an endless supply of food notes our plight and plies us with pajon, pork, fish, homemade kimchi, and of course with beer. Our every meal is derived from their leftovers plus our noodles. Their hospitality is magnificent; we eat like kings.

Once our feeders pack up and head back to reality, we are left in possession of the beach. Somewhere far down the other end sunhatted old ladies are mucking about in the mud looking for snacks. The beach is largely ours, however. It has a wonderfully forlorn quality. Years worth of detritus have washed up on the shore, where it has all dried and hardened or rusted and softened. A volleyball net hangs lonely and patiently, the volleyball court is as long as the beach itself. A double corona of lights hums around the pale sun, which is slowly but thoroughly cooking us.

This is exactly what I had been hoping for. A place where there is nothing to do but idle away your every concern. It is a place in which you cannot help but breathe slow and deep. A place of wonderfully empty freedom.

Returning to Daecheon for the mudfest, I wondered if I was coming to the right place. I could see Wonsando just out across the silvery sea - past the barges full of fireworks, the shore full of swimmers, the beach full of umbrellas and the buckets full of black mud. Daecheon was definitely full. That empty Wonsando freedom was calling to me.

Daecheon was full, Daecheon was full, Daecheon was full; the message resounded from every motel or minbak we came to, searching for a place to crash. Was it too late to head for the port? To catch that twenty minute ferry?

My companions had come all the way from Gimhae on the other side of the country. They're both blonde, both named Aimee, and both constantly harassed by seedy old guys who think/hope they're Russian. They had come this far. I couldn't abandon them to the sticky oegugin swarms.

The motel room we finally found stank of cigarettes and looked like it belonged in 1950s Germany, but at least it had a theme and was consistent. We slipped into our most ruinable clothes, and headed for the beach...

There are three areas of the long Daecheon beach strip dedicated to mud festivities. We were lucky to be staying close to the two smaller sites, which meant there was an abundance of mud to besmear ourselves in, and none of the long lines and dense crowds that would clog the main site.

The moment that first paintbrush full of mud slapped against my skin, I knew I was in exactly the right place. An empty beach is not the only place for finding relaxation and freedom. A brush-full of mud is another excellent place to find it. And there was another kind of freedom and contentment to be found in a pool full of slippery merrymakers. Crowds can be just as liberating as solitude.

Beaming white smiles through our thick coatings of mud, we strutted up the strip and plunged into the muddy mayhem.

When I told one of my Korean friends that I was going to the mudfest, she told me that Koreans only went there to photograph the foreigners going crazy. I had already expected this. After all, we were still in Chungnam, one of the most conservative, buttoned-down areas in Korea. All that mud, flying through the air and sloshing underfoot, though, was having a liberating effect. The mud prison was packed with locals and foreigners, old and young, shy and rambunctious. The line for the mud slide was the same. People of all shapes and sizes were clustering under the drenching torrent of the mud water fall.

This was no place for separation, no place for holding back and pondering where you belonged. The mud coated everyone with the same soothing skin, and brought the same foolish smile to every face. Whether you painted, massaged, wrestled, slid or danced; whether you ran the obstacle course or sat and watched the band, you were part of the huge crowd of like-minded revellers, all of whom were finding freedom and joy in a puddle of mud.

Behind the stage and in the sea all that mud was sliding off. When the long lines and thick crowds became stifling, when the mud dried and started to itch, there was the cool of the sea to soothe and refresh. Wonsando sat serene just out beyond the pyro-barges, and no doubt great tides of grey mud were washing up on its shore, covering the paddlers over there and infecting them with the same sense of joy.

The bodies on the beach didn't lose their happiness with their muddy coats though. The festival spirit was just as alive in the water as in the mud. As we dove into crowds all I could hear was laughter and cheersing, and greetings in many languages.

Trying to escape the mud fest with clean skin was a fraught endeavour, especially with two Russians to escort. Muddy paws shot out of the crowds, trying to snare them. Bear hugs encircled them, but somehow we made it past the mud prison and away with only a few skids, streaks and spatters of mud about us.

When the sun went down the festival deflated and was cleaned away. People gravitated to the beach and were met by the tide gravitating towards land. The stage filled again with song and dance, and Wonsando disappeared into the twilight. Daecheon beach was packed with revellers and punctuated by fireworks, but the evening had taken a more mellow turn. When the fireworks exploded magnificently into the sky, most people remained seated on the warm sand. Some had passed out, others had picked up or lit up. Others were just content being with friends new and old, watching fire and light tumble from the sky. The colours reflected the same off every pair of eyes, just as the mud had coloured all skin therapeutic-grey. It was a fitting end to the first magnificent day of the festival.

The following day cloud hung low over the beach and I escorted the Russians to their bus for St. Gimhaesburg. We parted ways and I joined the crowds sweating on finding a ride home. The only question left was where to head next weekend: Wonsando or Daecheon, Wonsando or Daecheon, two very different worlds twenty minutes apart.


This article was written for the August edition of Korea Sun Magazine.


]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1217917200/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1217917200/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1217917200/tpod.html Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:23:22 -0400 The Hermit Kingdom

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Cheonan, Korea Rep.


The kids all came to school wearing their monthly or bi-monthly haircuts. June had begun. My co-teacher warned me that the rainy season would start soon and the next day the rain came thundering across the rice fields.

When I arrived in Korea it was grape season, and I couldn't eat grapes as fast as they were gifted to me. The presents piled up and then rotted and were flung to the hungry rice fields out the window. Winter was orange or mandarin or clementine season, and by February they had become thoroughly tedious, as well as increasing small, hard and bitter. There was a brief pineapple season but none of those was actually grown in Korea. Then came tomato season, and cherry tomatoes appeared in great pyramids in the supermarkets, and in huge bags around the schools.

With the coming of the rainy reason the cycle was just about complete. The wet swathes that hung around the hills every morning were the same swathes I had seen when I first arrived in Cheonan. The rain when it came moved in silently, drenching everything, and disappeared fast but never for long. It was all so familiar.

The rice crop grew high, and one day it was too high for the herons to stride over. They became sharp-billed periscopes in the rising fields. Then one day the fields were full of tiny white butterflies, flitting over the jagged green, dancing across the damp roads.

The corn grew from knee to head height in a few short weeks, nodding its shaggy heads in the pre-storm breeze. Huge trunks of white corn appeared beside the tomato bags in the staff room. While the other teachers ate dog at our end of term picnic, I gnawed on cob after cob after cob.

In July the Buddha-bellied spiders returned and spun their perfect webs about the bus stations and farms. They snared hundreds of flies, bundling them up in gauzy cocoons. The summer orgy of the flies went on undaunted though. They filled the school, plundered the bags of tomatoes, shagged on my computer screen.

Word got out that I wouldn't be renewing my contract, and the principal invited me into his office. He gave me words of advice, encouragement, and praise, but he didn't change my mind. My jumbled explanation for why I was leaving involved homesickness and two bereft, empty-nested parents. It didn't include the truth; that I was sick of teaching, that a five day working week was more than I could handle, that I had exhausted myself in my attempts to make school as fun as possible. When he saw that I was resolute he signed my release, gave me an A+ review, took me out for lunch, and then cancelled my afternoon classes while we toured the shrines and birthplaces of the local martyrs.

I counted the days and weeks to the end of term, hungry for a vacation, for a chance to enjoy this country before I left it behind. The weeks disappeared in a blur; I have no idea how I managed to fill them so quickly or thoroughly.

The weekends remained their usual frantic business. We ventured off to a sleepy little island where nothing opened except during the 'beach season', which isn't until August. We visited a huge spa and water park, most of which was closed until the official vacation began. A mud festival on the coast attracted every foreigner in Korea to my province, and for those two brief weekends, while everyone was coated in blue-grey mud people - even locals - were permitted to relax, to smile, to dance about and talk to strangers. The weekends were filled with excursions and small explorations, but the weekends remained too small and most of the country remained unexplored.

The countdown accelerated into July, and then stalled as extra weeks of teaching were added to my summer. I scowled and growled and yearned for joblessness.

The last official week of term came around and the schools went swimming. A flotilla of flotation devices were deployed, and I was watched teachers and students alike struggle to stay afloat in hip-deep water. Life guards stalked about, ordering children out of the deep end of the pool, which was chest high (on them, not me). For a seafood loving country that once upon a time boasted an invincible navy, it was all rather ludicrous. I decided to take a dip myself, shocked and scared a few people by swimming underwater, and then sunk as student after student latched on to me. Though most of them grew tired of drowning games, one did not; a big fatty from 5th grade who had named himself Elephant King and who cried when he didn't win games. I dragged him and myself round and round the pool, swallowing water and understanding why some of the teachers were avoiding the water. By the evening I had fallen sick - it may or may not have been unrelated - and I was vowing never to swim with the elephant king.

I coughed and spluttered through my last week of classes. I lost my voice every time I opened my mouth. It was a very strange, very hoarse goodbye I bid to most of my students. The sadness of farewelling them was balanced by the elation of farewelling the cafeteria food forever. No doubt with time these goodbyes become very easy for the English teachers doing the rounds of Asia, but these were my first batch of malleable young minds, and despite their miscreant moments it was sad to be leaving them all behind so soon.

July came to its end and the tomatoes began to turn yellow and orange. Their skins became loose and their places of prominence in the supermarkets were given to peaches and melons. I reached the one month left mark and celebrated it by going to visit the DMZ, and staring across to North Korea. It was one of the things I had come to Korea to do, and it had taken me almost a year to do it. When that short tour was over I wandered what else I could do to experience and explore the partition, but there is nothing else. Whether I had taken the tour in the first month or the eleventh hardly matters, because no one here really talks about divided Korea, or the insidious north, or the impoverished north. Another tick in another box in the country full of surprises.

And then the summer vacations began, and I began my program of summer camps, and the days slid away... 31... 30... 29... 28... 27...
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1215475380/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1215475380/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1215475380/tpod.html Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:05:39 -0400 The Hermit Kingdom

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Seoul, Korea Rep.

Who can find the origins of our stupidity? You could argue that we inherited it from our monkey ancestors, but blaming our stupidity on animals is a poor rationalisation. Wherever our stupidity started, it has marched and tip-toed on throughout human history, haunting us wherever we go and whatever we do.

Within the grand march of stupidity there are many smaller marches and movements. They can start with the most trivially stupid acts.

In this case the stupid act was to feed cow to a cow. There were already life-threateningly stupid cows, but it was the feeding of stupid cow brain - mashed up brain, but brain none the less - to happy, healthy cows that started the stupid cow epidemic.

Once the stupid cow epidemic had started a lot of poor, stupid cows had to be burned.

In 2003 a stupid cow from Canada was found in America (one of three ever found there), causing Japan and Korea to boycott American beef. Asia was safe from stupidity, it seemed, and the matter was quickly forgotten. American people continued to eat beef, and none of them showed Bovine Stupidity in Excess (BSE).

Four years later there was an election in Korea. In the later years of his term, the outgoing president was seen as increasingly stupid, and there had been a move to impeach him. It was felt that he was plunging Korea back into stupidity, through decisions like the deployment of forces in Iraq.

It was not popular election; voter turn-out was very low. Those that did vote largely voted against the stupidity of the last president, electing the opposition's candidate, Lee Myung-bak, by a landslide (almost 50% of the vote). It was the biggest winning margin since democracy came to Korea. Mr. Lee had convinced many voters that when it came to economics, he was not stupid.

Some of his ideas, though, did seem stupid to many people. Like carving a canal to link Seoul to Busan, or lifting the ban on imported American beef.

It can take years for the symptoms of BSE to manifest. It is an awful disease, causing degeneration of the brain and spinal cord, which is why those poor stupid cows on the videos couldn't stand up. There is nothing stupid about wanting to avoid the disease. However, the World Organisation for Animal Health considered America a BSE-controlled country (which means BSE is under control, not out of control), and no one in America seemed affected by cow stupidity.

Mr. Lee thought he was being smart, but many Korean people were concerned that he was opening the way for stupidity to enter their country. That had just voted it out, but now here it was in another form. Was their president stupid? The question was shouted louder and louder.

What makes stupidity so insidious is that it can develop spontaneously. It doesn't need to be consumed. It doesn't even need to be transmitted. The march of the stupids is a part of human history, a part we can never completely protect against. We cannot boycott our stupidity.

Almost thirty years earlier Koreans had taken to the streets, also shouting loudly. The dictatorship of the time had very stupidly decided to repress, and sometimes torture or kill its own people. The people in the streets were shouting for democracy, for an end to tyranny. Twenty years ago their shouts were heard, and democracy came to Korea. Stupidity had been overcome yet again.

When it was feared that Mr. Lee was leading the country into stupidity, many people remembered that time twenty years ago when they fought to expel stupidity from their country. They invoked this memory on its twentieth anniversary, and lit candles, and marched through the streets.

Twenty years ago they had assembled on the streets to bring democracy to their country. This time, though, they were assembling to oust their democratically elected president. It was a stupid analogy to invoke. Those protesting against Mr. Lee congregated at Cheonggyecheon stream, which Mr. Lee had overseen the redevelopment of. It was the scene of his most intelligent victory. It was a stupid incongruity; now they were throwing water balloons at murals of him, and chanting against him, and waving flags of every imaginable political agenda.

Some very stupid myths began to circulate through the country's media. Some claimed that Korean people were more disposed to BSE than other ethnic groups. They confused BSE with BME (Believing the Media Entirely). Other rumours claimed that BSE had caused the rise in instances of Alzheimer's disease in America, which was a stupid assertion with no scientific basis, but none the less it started a BME epidemic.

When he saw how many people were marching against him, Mr. Lee did something stupid, something that the stupid dictator twenty years ago might have done. He deployed riot police and water cannons. He began monitoring and editing media representations of himself. He didn't want anyone to make him look stupid.

Some particularly stupid people in the peaceful crowd decided that candles were boring, and became violent. Some particularly stupid riot police - already angered by what they considered a stupid decision to conscript them - found that their protective shields could be used as weapons too. They started hitting people with them. They thought it was smart to target vulnerable people. The crowd thought this was stupid and were reminded of the stupidity of the dictatorship. They became angrier and angrier.

Photos and videos appeared on the internet. The government couldn't prevent this. Most of them showed the police being stupid. A few of them showed people doing stupid things like inciting the police.

People were arrested. Mr. Lee really didn't want anyone saying that he was stupid. It was too late, though. Most of the crowd was saying that Mr. Lee was stupid. They were also saying that America was stupid. They thought America was stupid for interfering in their country, for dividing it into north and south sixty years ago, for supporting the stupid dictator and for their continued military presence in Korea.

Some of the people were just afraid of foreign things. It was a stupid attitude, but that believed that all stupidity originated outside of Korea. They feared American beef would make them stupid, just by entering their country, even though only consumption of the brain or spinal cord of BSE-infected cows could spread the disease.

Mr. Lee didn't want to look stupid but he had made some very stupid decisions. A lot of people were worried about foreign stupidity epidemics but they allowed this fear to reach stupid levels. A lot of consumers were scared they would catch stupidity but they could have prevented this in the supermarket instead of in the streets. The American beef industry was stupid for not having more rigorous health checks to assuage fears in the first place. Korean media was stupid for circulating obvious fallacies. Some police were stupid for attacking protestors. Some protestors were stupid for attacking police. The dictator twenty years ago was stupid. American interventionism was stupid. Feeding cow to cows was stupid. The president before Mr. Lee was stupid. Three poor, dead American or Canadian cows were stupid.

When the first new American beef reached Korea it was checked carefully and sold by a few vendors. People ate it and so far no one has become stupid as a result. The stupidity that had infected everyone was not caused by those poor stupid cows. It lies within all people, and inevitably rises up from time to time. When many people turn stupid together, terrible things can happen.

Just as stupidity can grow up spontaneously, though, reason can prevail in a room or street full of stupids. It is the great hope and wonder of human history that even the most terrible march of the stupids will eventually dissipate as people recover their senses and find reason again. We find ourselves, we scratch our heads, feel embarrassed, and wonder what on earth came over us. We plan to be more careful, more rational in the future, but there are always new outbreaks of stupidity. It is almost as if we enjoy these moments of stupidity.

It is almost as if we need them.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1213529460/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1213529460/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1213529460/tpod.html Sun, 15 Jun 2008 07:33:15 -0400 The Hermit Kingdom

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Cheonan, Korea Rep.

One the first of May all the students came to school wearing shorts. The day before had belonged to the brief spring, but the advent of May meant that summer had arrived, which meant it was time for shorts. There was no apparent change in the weather, but soon after the shorts appeared, the flies returned to the schools too.

May is the awkward month when the heat arrives but before the fans can be turned on. They sat motionless and covered in the staff room, regardless of heat or humidity, regardless of the deranged games the foreign teacher organised to tire his students out and shut them up.

The vice principal took up his stained fly swat, and re-commenced the bloodbath I had witnessed when I first came to the school at the other end of a Korean summer. With decisive strokes and an empty zen face he marched about the staff room, killing flies wherever they landed. It was a familiar massacre. My year was starting to conclude, to return to its starting point.

Outside the rice fields had become familiar too. Hump-backed ajumas waddled barefoot through the thick mud, picking weeds and arranging their rice crop. Ancient rice-planting machines lay down crooked, juvenile lines of rice plants that turned the entire landscape bright green. While the crop stayed low the flooded fields reflected the colours of the sky like huge mirrors. Then the rice grew taller, blocking out the sky and leaving only those drunken, staggering lines to adorn the land.

One morning as I walked to school I was surrounded by choirs of frogsong that floated up out of the fields, the invisible amphibs celebrating the return of life to the land. By the next day the frogs had fallen silent though, as the long-legged herons came stabbing over the fields, elegant coils of white in the world of green.

This was the Korea I had remembered, it had come back, and I realised that my year was ending already. The whole long winter, the brief eruptions of spring and autumn collapsed into truncated memory. Had there really been time for the seasons to wheel so quickly by?

May was a strange month for the schools. Long weekends multiplied as class time dwindled away; national holidays, a school birthday, volleyball tournaments, English festivals, training days, a field trip all encroached upon the school days. On the long weekends every person in Korea took the roads and went travelling and visiting. My spirit of adventure, however, ebbed low. I visited Busan again. I visited Seoul again. I visited Buyeo again. May was a paradise of time-off and of time away, but these diversions proved dangerous; the extra days inadequate to the desire for freedom stirred up by the warming weather.

With a collective groan the English teachers decided that teaching wasn't really for them after all. Everyone I talked to felt suddenly stifled by their work, felt desperate to fly free, to explore the land before the weather turned oppressive. I started finding more and more inventive reasons to have time off work. I became resentful whenever I had to work a full week. As the long weekends dwindled away so did my desire to renew my contract and keep teaching in Korea. The country had never been prettier or more interesting, but the desire to work and to explore the country in tiny two-day windows had never weaker. I began to think about all the unfinished business I had involved myself in, and how I might go about it bundling it all up into neatly completed parcels.

But there are far too many loose ends, far too many started and unfinished projects, far too many students that still don't speak English.

At the end of May my sis came to visit, and I tried to share my whole experience of Korea with her in three short days. Most of the weekend was spent on overlong bus or train or subway rides, trying to visit as many places and cram as much into the evaporating days as possible. It was in fact a very good sample of my time in Korea, of my life spent in transit, of my many ideas all half-baked and half-completed.

And then there was hours of tambourines and hoarse voices in a luxurious noraebang, the spicy everything, the quirky bars, the packs of old men and their games of checkers, the sweaty subways, the cool mountains, the big Buddha, the empty temple, the late night ramyeon, the sun coming up far too early, the wrong bus, the early morning wake-up, the photos with strangers. All the things that fill those brief days between the working weeks.

The mad month twisted to its conclusion, and I counted three months left in Korea. The rice grew taller and the sun rose higher. And then the kids all came to school with haircuts marking off another month passed, and June arrived, bringing with it the summer rains and the Mormons, and the countdown to the completing of my cycle, and to my departure.

]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1210380000/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1210380000/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1210380000/tpod.html Fri, 09 May 2008 20:45:59 -0400 The Hermit Kingdom

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Cheonghakdong, Korea Rep.

It took an act of faith just to reach Cheonghakdong. The long weekend crush of vehicles on the roads put carloads of people to sleep and left lonely drivers twitching behind the steering wheels.

Once out of the tangle of greater-Busan and lesser-Gimhae, once safely past Masan and off of the major expressways the traffic began to dwindle away, first dwarfed and then lost completely in the soaring green slopes. The vibrant green ripples of the land on the south coast remain for me the highlight of trips down here. My provincial, Chungcheongnam-do eyes are used to unrelenting rice paddies, which at this time of year are a hideous bog.

I knew we were coming to a special place when I peered down into the valleys below us and saw rivers: undammed, unbridged, unpolluted, unstagnated rivers tumbling crisp and white over the stones that collected down there. It was odd to see a river without a soccer field or expressway beside it.

The farms became smaller and more inventive as we approached our destination. The landscape offered no horizontal surfaces and so crude terraces had been scraped into the slopes. Tiny farm houses hunched stoically over patches of clear ground, surrounded by strips of seedlings. But most of the land lay untouched and summer-green.

Our car climbed and climbed, and we espied Jirisan nestled amidst the other, younger mountains. With the mountain soaring above us and the rivers tumbling below us, it wasn't hard to imagine the road as an incline towards heaven, which is exactly what the Cheonghakdong locals have always had in mind.

The violent twentieth century that has so shaped and defined Korea largely bypassed Cheonghakdong, preserving it as a sanctuary of traditional culture; for a long time the village went without electricity, and was exempt from mandatory military service. During this time the people set about the creation of a paradise-on-earth, where the ancestors of Korea could be venerated and the traditions of the land observed and preserved.

Twenty years ago we couldn't have visited the village at all. But since then a paved road has gone up and electricity has come down to the village. And with these has come tourism. Rather than turn inwards, the people of Cheonghakdong have welcomed their new guests, incorporating them into their vision of paradise.

Today Cheonghakdong is still a private place, and one has the sense, wandering around, that you are a privileged guest rather than a paying customer who ought to be entertained. The people of the valley carry on building and maintaining their paradise, carry on observing traditional rituals, but they do so before a fascinated audience. The tranquillity of the site has not been compromised by the arrival of outsiders, instead we disappear through the gates and into the paradise-in-progress, dwarfed by the scale and determination of the endeavour around us.

The landscape of Cheonghakdong looks to be built out of stone, carefully arranged and piled up to create terraces, towers and alleys. But what it is really built of is prayers. Every stone is a prayer, an expressed desire, a yearning for the utopia that is being built here. Every prayer fits closely and balances evenly with the prayers around it, creating a very bizarre, very beautiful labyrinth of faith.

Hanging over the labyrinth are little representations of birds, made by joining a few pieces of wood together. Cheonghakdong means the Azure Crane Village, after the beautiful bird soaring upwards from earth to heaven. These rough wooden cranes are also a form of prayer, an expression of desire for fluidity and movement between heaven and earth.

Some of the twisting, curving alleyways were blocked off so that work could continue; the forming of new monuments of prayer, and the restoration of the existing ones. Returning visitors to the area find themselves walking completely different paths to last time, discovering new details and corners of the valley. But all paths eventually lead to the second gate, through which all people are shepherded by a guard, that brings them into the inner valley, the centrepiece of this whole vision, the focus of every prayer.

Here at the centre of the centre of the valley is Samseong-gung, the Palace of the Three Sages, the focus of all these prayer, all this yearning and hoping and striving. The three sages venerated in the simple, open shrine are Hwanin, Hwanung and Dangun: Hwanin the lord of Heaven; Hwanung his son, who came to earth and married the bear-woman; Dangun their son, the first king in Korea. By this short genealogy heaven and earth were united, bringing divinity into the mortal world, mixing the blood of God with that of the Korean people.

The valley at the beginning of May, as the summer green bathes everything in beauty and peace, feels very like a path from heaven to earth, and from earth to heaven. The veneration of the Gods who came to earth, the sculpting of wooden birds to fly back to the heavens, the spiralling upwards of towers built of prayer, it all contributes to this paradise ideal, the creation of the path between the two worlds.

All this gentle talk of heaven and earth, Gods and kings and mythical, garlic-eating bears rings strangely across the utilitarian Korean landscape. In the cities and in the countryside the only stairways to heaven are the long elevator shafts in those great barn-like apartment complexes. It seems so strange to hire a car and drive a few hours into the mountains, and to come back talking of faith and devotion and prayer - concepts I have barely encountered since coming to Korea.

Whether or not a God chooses to again make his residence on earth, and whether or not he chooses to do so in Korea is all finally irrelevant. The truly inspiring thing about the Cheonghakdong vision is that it doesn't belong only to this valley. The dream of these people doesn't require terraces and towers and palaces; the profundity of the place is encapsulated by the placing of one stone upon another by a person with a head full of desires for a more heavenly earth (or earthly heaven). A perfectly simple act, but one that contains the same serene beauty as all Cheonghakdong.

A stone placed atop another stone; it is the smallest of towers, the most unsteady of ladders, but it reaches all the way from earth to heaven and back again.


]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1208823240/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1208823240/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1208823240/tpod.html Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:16:33 -0400 The Hermit Kingdom

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Cheonan, Korea Rep.

As the holidays came to an end winter grew panicky and tempestuous. Over a calm few days when the cynical wind paused to catch its breath, winter gathered up its remaining stores of snow and flung them desperately across the country, blanketing the land in the thickest, cleanest white of the season. They were a pretty few days, when it was nice to be out, trailing black footprints across the white world.

And then the land began to thaw, and the hillock of ice that had stood at the foot of a dripping gutter outside my door for three months receded away into the concrete. Every morning on the bus out to school, I passed the same frozen rice fields, as hard as iron. But when the bus passed back each afternoon the same fields were wet and muddy. The stream found its way and began to flow again, and the sun hung longer in the air every afternoon.

The foreigners who had shivered and cursed their way through their first Korean winter felt a gradual, collective change in their mood. Optimism began to return. Plans were drawn up for weekend expeditions, and the dates of the ubiquitous spring festivals were checked and then checked again. But the idea of colour on the barren trees still seemed fantastical.

The farmlands entered their ugliest stage. Every morning the road to school reeked with thawing duckshit from the local farms, and the dishevelled birds inside followed the sunlight that fell through the wire and across the floor. Ducks that hadn't survived the frost were draped over a pile of rusty piping, their necks twisted and limp. The frost disappeared from the fields altogether, to be replaced by stagnant brown water, blooming with green sludge. The remaining crop stubble was burned away in low, smouldering fires that cast acrid smoke across the breezeless country and left black stains across the fields. It looked like the war zone it once was, a scorched earth that would never again be good for anything.

When the tractors emerged they churned through these barren fields, throwing up great clods of dirt, churning through the waste and ash, and leaving the world brown. But it was a brown that contained the promise of life returning. For the first time in months the rice fields had sloughed off their miasma of despair. They looked like they might be good for something after all.

The small talk in the staff room shifted from the talk of snow and coats to talk of yellow dust and health warnings. Face masks were exchanged as gifts. At the beginning of the new semester when I asked my students what the weather was like, they struggled to express that a malignant wind was sweeping across the Gobi desert, stirring up sand and dust, before howling across industrial China to be poisoned by the Beijing atmosphere, then leaping across the sea and snagging over the mountains of Korea. They eventually explained that the weather was sandwindy. That was ominous enough.

The same novice foreigners that had began to plan trips around Korea now found themselves with perpetually dry throats and encrusted noses. But these couldn't undermine the budding optimism. The heating was turned down and shoulders were shrugged free of their coats. The streets began to fill with people again, loitering about the food stalls, dawdling about in the parks with their cameras, where the naked twigs of the plants were beginning to bud with green, white and pink.

Cherry blossom festivals began around Korea, sometimes before the flowers they were honouring. When the blossoms did arrive they arrived en masse, great shimmering clouds of petals that were hard to focus on, and that seemed to dissolve into the sky. Hardly had the flowers bloomed before the off-white sky swept them away with the first and only shower of March. One weekend the flowers were not yet out, by the next the faintest tremor in the atmosphere would dislodge snowstorms of petals to insinuate themselves into the hair and clothes of the weekend crowds that clustered wherever a tree stood. And the petals were gone and the trees were green.

The ducks too, disappeared, mid-week and again in the blinking of an eye. One morning on the way to school that sat, shaggy and honking in the morning sun. The next day their muddy lots were empty and lonely.

I visited Gongju, I visited Daejeon, I visited Yeouido island in Seoul, I visited Gongju again. I dedicated each weekend to the search for cherry blossoms, and everywhere I went I found them, but they were always too young or too old, and then they were gone, the trees turned green.

And then, in another blink, spring had arrived in Korea. The fallen cherry blossoms were pushed aside by the green grass thrusting up everywhere, and where everything had been the white of sky or of blossom, Korea suddenly turned deep yellow, bright red, pink, purple, the colours changing overnight every night. Overnight every tree turned green, every garden came to life. And the air became heavy and warm. Clothes were sloughed off like petals, and every face in the street lost its hard reserve, the corners of lips curling into smiles.

Out past the flooded fields vegetables poked fingers through the soil and waved them in the sun, growing strong and green. A black squirrel chased sparrows around the schoolyards. Baby birds hatched from the eggs in the ventilation ducts and cheeped their arrival to the whole school. The dogs by the school routinely dug their way through the newly warmed soil and out of their cage, and then waited around with stupid tongues flapping, for someone to put them back in.

One of the first things any Korean person will tell me about their country is that there are four distinct seasons. This is true, spectacularly so, but the space between the Siberian winter and the Vietnamese summer doesn't last for a full three months. There had been maybe three good weeks of autumn colour before the frost arrived. Spring looks likely to last only slightly longer. Then the sandwind will be drenched from the sky by the seething humidity, and the café terraces that are, for the moment, so lovely, and so busy with people, will be abandoned once again as refuge is sought in the malls, as far from the mischief of nature as anyone can flee.

But for the moment, the brief and spectacular spring has come to Korea. The prettiness of the spring is in its transience, in the delicacy and mortality of its flowers and colours. This is a land where people earn their snaps of the trembling cherry blossoms, their coffees on the terrace, and their hand-in-hand walks through the verdant gardens. They earn them by suffering through the ugly oppressiveness of most of the year. But then in the moments of transition, every gripe and groan is forgotten, and there is time only to appreciate and enjoy, and to gather enough pretty photos and memories to last through the next rough season.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1204675920/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1204675920/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1204675920/tpod.html Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:16:39 -0500 The Hermit Kingdom

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Banaue, Philippines

The sun rose on the Hanselma highway, a dusty coil of road unravelling over Cordillera. In the plunging valleys below the mist snared and spilled over the jagged cliff faces. Along the highway trucks groaned under the weight of people and cargo, that more than negated the effect of the vehicles' raised underbellies. Green ravines dropped away from the crumbling edge of the road. Colourful squares of washing flapped over the void.

This was the second leg of my second overnight journey through north Luzon, and I had learned well and truly how deceptively far distances were in the Phils. It is not a country of straight roads. It is a country of long rides, and patient commuters crammed into and onto the rickety public transport. There is nothing to do but watch the scenery roll past. It is an infinitely worthwhile pursuit.

A road split from the highway and disappeared into pine forest. What was such forest during in this tropical world of beaches and scuba? Somewhere in the forest was Sagada, a tiny mountain town universally recommended to me.

Sagada, I had heard, was a tranquil place. It had an early curfew, few or no tricycles, prided itself on its ecological and cultural sensitivity. It was a backpacker haven, for those who liked unspoilt sanctuaries.

And then one weekend each year it threw all that aside and hosted a town fair, which drew every man and his dog and his family and his dog's family to town, where they could buy cell phones and illegal DVDs, designer brand clothing and farm supplies. Our bus ground to a halt in a traffic jam, the town's annual traffic jam, blocking both its roads. Beyond the trees in a clearing by the church raucous games of baseball, basketball and soccer were taking place.

Not all of the guides to the region were drunk or at the cockfight, or playing dice on headstones in the cemetery. Aklay extricated himself from the crowd and we headed away from the bustle, into the quiet of the forests, his barely audible, monotone chit-chat merging with the whispers of the falling, flowing river.

The colonial project that had been going on throughout the history of the Phils only began in the mountains some hundred years ago. By then the waves of conquistadors and influenza had been replaced by anthropologists and missionaries. As a result the indigenous culture has survived, and while the loin clothes and spears have disappeared, other practices remain.

Out in the craggy valley below the town, the local people have been hanging coffins from the cliffs for as long as can be remembered. When a person dies their corpse is tied to a chair and displayed for the period of mourning, and then transferred to a coffin. Those who can afford it may have their coffin hung in the valley. Others are placed in the caves below the cliffs, which are now nearly full with coffins. Others are buried in the church cemetery, where illegal dice games go on during the town fair.

There is no squeamishness about death here. The sight of crooked rows of splintery coffins and death-chairs suspended on the cliff faces was at first very strange to my western sensibilities, but the casualness with which the locals treated the coffins meant it was easy to become comfortable with the idea, and to allow your curiosity free reign.

In the burial caves the crudeness of the coffins was obvious, some of which had rotted and split open to reveal the shrouded remains within. A pile of white bones lay at the mouth of one cave, an off-yellow skull sat alone among the coffins in another. I was welcome to poke around amidst the stacked coffins. I restrained my morbidly curious, acquisitive impulses.

The pine forests, the ridges and valleys of Sagada were pretty, but not really as magical as I had suspected. The highlight of the town was a café selling home-made yoghurt. I suspect those that elevate Sagada highest are those that visit from Manila, and find the lack of exhaust and armed guards, the cool weather and scent of pine to be as mind-boggling as I found a bunch of coffins nailed to a cliff. If I'd had the time to wait out the festival, relaxing with many bowls of yoghurt, I may have warmed to the town. But there were far more spectacular places to visit in the mountains.

A couple more jeep rides brought me out of the pine forest and along other, narrow mountain roads. Beyond the rattling windows of our crowded ride the mountains were a lucid green, their slopes transformed into grand terraces. Some of these terraces were the colour of barren mud. Others had been flooded with mountain stream water and reflected the sky. Young rice crops were sprouting bright green in others, and in the places where the crop was tall and mature rites of the harvest were being enacted by traditionally clad people standing by smoking braziers.

One hundred years ago Banaue was an indigenous village of wooden huts built on sticks. There was probably also church. The entire valley around it, both sides of the valley stretching away from the village, had been transformed into enormous rice terraces, the process taking thousands of years, the terraces hacked and scraped into shape by hands and simple tools.

Today Banaue is the most popular place in the Phils to see the rice terraces that characterise the Cordillera. Some of the terraces have had to be reclaimed to allow paved roads to go down and tourist facilities to go up. The town spawned by the arrival of tourism is pretty - too much concrete, too much rust and corrugated iron - but there is still something about it. The dirty colours of the buildings contrast perfectly with the mist on the mountain tops, the green of the crops, the brown of the terraces. Every perspective of the valley is magnificent.

There were other backpackers in the jeep - Banaue's remoteness doing nothing to deter a constant stream of tourists most of whom grind in from and return to Manila. The door of the jeep opened and we were greeted by a crowd of men all with bright red-stained mouths and teeth, the road covered in red stains. The men were smiling a non-cannibalistic smile though, their faces and town stained by the juice from the betel nut, a stimulant which is chewed, producing great gobfulls of rust-red spit. Banaue is not a resort town; it is a town of rickety tricycles and frequent brown-outs, and constant streams of spittle.

The guides in the region, I am sure, turn much brisker trade when they wipe their lips and gargle some water, making themselves look less zombie-like. Betel is one of the few things that I found the locals less-than-eager to share with any and all visitors. It is an indigenous tradition and a local addiction. Banaue was also the only place I went where there was some sort of divide between locals and tourists, where there was some level of limit to the hospitality. But this did nothing to dampen my spirit in the area. The town is still spectacular, the terraces sublime. A slight us-and-them division is only natural at a tourist site.

Beyond Banaue, along a road that had no right or left lane but only big or small rock, deep or shallow puddle, lies Batad. A tricycle or a jeep can bring visitors close to Batad, but to reach the village itself requires a hike down out into the green valleys. Batad a tiny village, some wooden huts and some metal-roofed houses clustered at the foot of a spectacular amphitheatre of rice terraces.

Here we could hike out among the terraces, walking the tightrope stone plinth that separates the deep mud of the terrace from the short drop to more deep mud. In Batad the planting season was approaching and hunched old farmers were up ladders, using chisels to pry the plants out of the stone walls of the terraces. It seems an impossibly big job, and yet it is completed every year without fail, the livelihood of a family and the wider community depending on the preservation of the walls.

Strange to look out and down on such a grand site, a project that took thousands of years to complete. These terraces are often called the 8th wonder of the world, but they differ from most of the world wonders in that there is nothing intentional about their magnificence. They are accidental monuments to and by a people who have never been wealthy, but who found themselves unable to leave the mountains, but equally unable to sustain themselves in the natural mountain environment. The grandeur of the vision, the imagination required to view mountains as malleable, transformable surfaces is awe-inspiring. I wonder how much the people knew, as they scraped their valleys into shape, of the lasting legacy they were creating. I wonder if they saw beauty in what they were doing, or just necessity. I wonder if they mourned the loss of the natural environment or marvelled at their own ingenuity and power. Their vision could be enormously beneficial to the rest of the barren, hungry world.

Banaue was only the second place where I had spent two nights in the same bed. The next night was spent aboard yet another bus, lurching through the night and finishing finally at yet another pre-dawn bus terminal. This one in the middle of Manila, and full of tired bustle.

This was the start of my last day in the Phils, another mad dash around Manila, another day lost in the labyrinth, moving from taxi to tricycle to train to jeep and back again.

Across town in the soft beds of another family home, other travellers were sleeping peacefully, before they too began their final dash about Manila and back to Korea. Jules and Viv had also decided to spend their winter holiday escaping the Korean cold. They had also found that two weeks cannot do justice to even a tiny portion of the Phils. And they were also discovering how difficult it would be to leave.

I stomped into their peace and quiet, setting dogs barking, and beginning the countdown timer on our time in Manila. It was Chinese New Year, there was plenty to see and do. But as always, Manila took our plans, chewed them up, and spit them out like betel. After a lengthy of exchange of stories and curiosities, we succumbed again to the Manila instinct, and found ourselves in a massive mall sampling as many different foods as possible.

We were also waiting, for one last grand show of Filipino generosity and hospitality. I had narrowly missed seeing a cockfight in Sagada. I was very curious to see what all the fuss was about. Jules and Viv's hosts happened to know someone whose father was very involved I cockfighting.

In typical Filipino style, there were delays and we couldn't find each other. I true daft backpacker style, none of us were carrying phones or watches. The answers to our questions of 'what time is it?' varied dramatically. But at least we found Jaydee, and we set off through the streets of Makati, away from the banks and armed guards and into a warren of little houses, and narrow streets full of people.

After all the colour of the Phils the cockfight arena came as a shock. A big white room, fluorescently lit, and devoid of details. Just concrete benches, some scoreboards, and a dirt-floored, glass-walled arena, where a couple of men were presiding. The crowd was all-male. They stared at us and for the first time in the Phils we didn't feel entirely welcome. But the scrutiny dissolved into shouts directed ring-ward, as bets were called in and received, and the excitement preceding another fight built and built. This the only pastime in the Phils sufficiently engrossing to stop the men smoking or drinking. There were just the birds, and the money changing hands.

The fights themselves depended on the money, and also the curved blades tied to the birds' feet, for their interest. The birds didn't always register each other as enemies; they sometimes took a while to actually start fighting. And when they did after some brief and intense flurries of feather both were usually too tired and wounded to be able to seriously hurt their opponents. If the fight didn't end quickly and clinically, it tended to drag on and on, both bird falling heavily, unable to jump or walk or do anything but peck ineffectually. The fights, however, continue until one bird is dead, that is, until it cannot peck. So most confrontations end with two birds, at least one of which is dying slowly, falling over each other and wallowing in a mound of feathers. All the while the crowd roars and hopes the result isn't a draw.

The first death came as a shock, but it took only a few fights for even this vegetarian to become quite comfortable watching the spectacle. The ridiculousness of the situation was much slower to dissipate. The human animals in the room became far more interesting than the birds, with their complex codes of gestures and shouts signifying different bets. Even in this colourless place there was plenty of chaos and bustle among the spectators.

By time we left our eyes were dry and hurting. None of us had blinked in a very long time, and there were plenty of airborne particles of bird floating about the room. With this sight seen, there was nothing left to do but enjoy one last relaxed Filipino meal in the evening warmth, and to raid a supermarket for its bounty of colours and flavours unavailable in Korea. It was in some ways a very depressing moment, realising how pallid the supermarkets we were returning to were, in comparison to the tantalising diversity of the Phils.

Good bye to our kind hosts, and a very crooked cab ride through the evening streets of Manila, dodging the main street gridlock but twisting and turning through innumerable side streets, and then we were at the airport. Our warmest clothes were close at hand, in preparation for the icy onslaught waiting just across the sea in Incheon. It was not easy to get on the plane, and this had less to do with any deficiencies with Korea as with the vibrancy and richness of the Phils, and the shortness of our time there. The change from Korean winter to Filipino eternal summer had been a little like stepping out of black and white Kansas and into technicolour Oz. We were not relishing the reverse process.

When the time came we boarded the plane, our eyes red with exhaustion, and a hint of desperate hysteria in our voices. Our bags were loaded down with food and toiletries unavailable in Korea, Jules and Viv were wearing dark tans, Viv had a ring on her finger and we carried great bundles of memories, stories, photos with us. Enough to distract us through the remainder of the winter until the spring broke through. Enough also to torment each other with places left unvisited, foods unsampled, people unmet. I strongly suspect that this was not the last I will see of the Phils, nor they last they will see of me. The colour of the land, the vibrancy and diversity, the details that fail to show up on most maps and generalisations about the place make it quite captivating, and utterly unleaveable in any ultimate sense.



]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1204633440/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1204633440/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/philiad/korea07-08/1204633440/tpod.html Tue, 04 Mar 2008 07:25:46 -0500 The Hermit Kingdom

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Vigan, Philippines

A Google earth, God's eye view of the Philippines shows it as thousands of tiny spots floating on the ocean. It looks like a land of coasts, thousands and thousands of convoluting, sinuous beaches demarcating the smashed pieces of island that make up the country.

From that stratospheric perspective, this land of such little land looks easy to navigate, a place to dash quickly around. The sort of place one can devote two measly weeks to, and still see plenty.

I decided to eschew those endless miles of coastline. Coasts are not such interesting places when you're travelling alone. Colonial towns, cities, remote villages - these were my target. How hard could it be to move between them?

Though those smashed fragments of land number around seven thousand, I planned to stick to just one, the big one, Luzon. It had plenty of coast line, but it also had Manila, and old Spanish towns, and Taal volcano, and apparently there was still room in there somewhere for some stunning mountains.

How deceptive this one island proved! At least to me, who looked down on it, arranged in two inadequate dimensions, and presumed I could conquer it. The first bus ride out of Manila lasted through the night, and deposited me in the middle of nowhere in the dusky grey of pre-dawn, the only cold hour of the day. A second bus ride trundled further north, back into the heat and light. I woke once to find the dishwater sea slapping at the curb. By the time I reached Vigan I had been travelling for an entire night, and had covered only centimetres of that endless coast.

Vigan is a languid town, a relic town. Long after Spain has been subsumed by European Uniformity, Vigan will remain as a preserve for an older Spanish way of life. Once upon it was crossroads in the Pacific, a place where the Spanish galleons sailing west from Mexico could meet with Chinese merchants to trade. Since then history has left it behind, too remote from Manila to be worth a train line, or a public airport, overlooked by industrialisation and business. Its fields of sugarcane, rice and corn are worked by hoof and hand, more relics of an earlier time.

I arrived in time to experience the stifling heat of the day, in time for a long Sino-Hispanic lunch and a siesta in the cool of the family home, the entire town and its fleet of tricycles and scooters growing quiet and drowsy. When we ventured out in the afternoon to visit artisan workshops, a colonial church and a museum, we found that half the town hadn't arrived for work that day, still at home sleeping off the effects of the mad zarzuela or town theatre performance of the previous night. The entire town seems poised on the edge of a sleep that will last forever, the sleep of futurelessness, the eternal siesta.

If the town is futureless it is important for being so. UNESCO has recognised it as such. In its siestas, in its Spanish-named festivities, in its local dialect - Ilocano, a divergence from Tagalog, the official national language, the language of Manila - in its street stalls selling Latin American empanadas filled with South-East Asian ingredients, in its squat white churches and crumbling bell-towers, and in its elegant dishevelled Mestizo district, it is one of the best preserves of Spanish colonial culture I have ever seen. Walking its streets is like walking a museum Latin American history. Everything is reminiscent of Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, New Orleans, but with added Oriental flourishes.

Vigan stands almost alone in the Phils as a historical site that has not required reconstruction. The ravages of World War Two somehow skipped the town. The colonial-style mansions of the rest of the country here are actual, authentic colonial mansions here. History has worn away at them, added its individuating marks, but the elegance of the architecture remains, the ground floor a cool, stone cellar, the upper floor all latticed wood and high ceilings, admitting much breeze but little light. Walking the town in the evening was a delight, most of the people having gathered for the ongoing events of the town fair, the old streets left cool and quiet and bathed in pools of soft lamplight.

In the baranguays or districts around the old town centre, workshops produce handicrafts by traditional methods. There is little reason for these industries to continue, other than out of fidelity to the past, and a lack of anything else to do. At the weaving workshop only one lady had bothered to turn up for work, clunking away rhythmically at her huge, rough loom, producing endless colourful table-runners and place mats.

The pottery workshop - a big empty wooden building with one functioning wheel - was lost in mountains of its wares. Great tumbling piles of pots were stacked or thrown around the ground, more than will ever be purchased, a surfeit sufficient to provide the entire world with these relics. And yet the wheel continues to turn, there being nothing else to do but to keep producing, to prove that the pots are local made, to try and turn a livelihood out of the infinite clay of the region. The entire town is decorated with these pots, every pathway delineated, every garden decorated. And still the surplus increases...

The baranguay that produces basi - a local, potent sugarcane wine - is trying to raise the status of its product, and bring it to the nation. It is a doomed initiative, the drink so rough it will never have merit as anything other than a curiosity of yore. A great horizontal tree trunk served as the crank for the sugar cane mill, a deep and miry ring around it showing the path beat by buffalo or tractor to crush the cane, to extract to the juice, the make the drink. Great pots were boiling, everything around them scorched black, the heat intense, the bark within them turning limp and releasing its flavour or colour or whatever property it offered into the crude and unfinished vintage.

We went searching for the place where a local, healthy, vegetable-based ice cream is produced. After a long drive out into the farms, towards the mountains, we found the guy who produces the ice cream resting by the roadside after a long afternoon in the fields. He wasn't producing any ice cream because he didn't have a freezer. He could only make it for special order.

Vigan is the kind of place where much time could be easily spent. In a day and a half I had seen all there was to see and had still had time for multiple siestas, to change a tyre, to go to a birthday party, to eat constantly, and I had never moved faster than a slow amble. Time flows slow and thick in this place, left behind by the chaotic careen of the greater world.

As much as I would love to have stayed, to have surrendered to the peace and languor of the place, my tight schedule wouldn't allow it. I was discovering how misleading these tiny isles could be. Even my seemingly humble schedule was far too rapid; it afforded no time to enjoy the slower rhythms and paces of life.

And my next stop, just up and into the mountains, so close on the map, required another long journey into the night, and a several-hour wait in the dead of night in the steep-streeted city of Baguio, and then another long and winding trip, into the morning, along the narrowest and most precipitous of 'highways', drawing me far up into the quiet roadside villages of the magnificent mountains that had been hiding invisible within my map.


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