Monday 22 February 2010

12,000 - 12,200 miles: Shimonoseki to Manzanillo (via Korea)

We were woken at dawn and I went out on deck to watch the sunrise over The Land of Morning Calm and was hit with a blast of air so cold I could barely breathe. The South Korean coastline was hilly and rugged and the apartment blocks of Busan spread out from the natural harbour under a clear blue sky. Breakfast was kimchi, Korea's national dish, fermented cabbage in chilli.



The weather forecast was for snow and sub-zero so we travelled the 200 miles north-east to Seoul by train. South Korea was clearly colder than Japan - the wooded hillsides were brown and bare and agriculture took place under miles of plastic tunnels, this was a land that had been in torpor for some time. It was a beautiful day and I kept thinking we should have been riding until the doors opened and an icy blast reminded us why we weren't. We were suprised to see churches with neon crosses towering above villages and towns and hadn't realised that South Koreans are predominantly christian. The train dining carriage was serving kimchi box sets for lunch.



South Korea/Seoul was a diversion for us. Its doubtful that we would have found ourselves this far north in the middle of winter were it not for my friend Mike. He and his Korean wife, Hayon, had moved here from Australia at the end of the summer and kindly took us in for a while over Christmas. Mike was still at work when we arrived so we made our way through the homeless soup kitchen outside Seoul station and found somewhere to eat kimchi. It was bitterly cold outside and while we bungled around T´s chain came off her bike, she lent it against a wall while she put the chain back on and within moments "Trusty" was smoking like a bonfire and an inocuous pipe-vent had burnt a hole the size of a tennis ball in her pannier.



It was great to see a friend after so long on the road, especially one who could download Match of the Day and watch it on his giant TV. Mike & Hayon have a lovely flat in the Seodaemun district of the city that they share with Hayon´s brother Sokko. Their place is up on a hill and there is a fantactic view over Seoul. We had a mattress on the floor of their spare room which was luxury compared to our tent but best of all was the underfloor heating that all Korean homes have.


Seoul gets cold in winter and South Korea is bidding to host the Winter Olympics in 2018, but like the rest of the northern hemisphere the winter of 2009/10 was exceptionally cold and snowy. Mike did his best to show us around some of the city´s sights but it was -7C and we could barely survive for an hour before we had to retreat to the warmth of the Dunkin' Doughnuts handily located on every street corner.



We had been on the road and on the go almost constantly since we had left Hanoi, 3,000 miles and 3 1/2 months earlier. We were knackered and so were our bikes and gear, our blogs were out of date and we had to find a way to cross the Pacific. Mike & Hayon were absolute stars for allowing us the time for a pit stop and we spent a month getting ourselves back together and arranging the next leg of our journey. In between we visited the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that seperates North and South Korea and had a krafty peak at the isolated communist nation. T got dressed up as the traditional mayor, joined a troupe of costume performers outside a palace in Seoul and banged a huge painted drum, all the more amusing for being in front of dozens of bystanding tourists. We spent a day at Hayon´s school helping her to teach yong children english (they seemed most interested in all the strange foods I had eaten, which was quite suprising in a nation whose diet includes fermented cabbage, dog, live octopus and silkworm grubs). It snowed on Christmas Day and for New Year we visited Hayon's family in the town of Wonju and made a daytrip to the East Sea - they showed us great hospitality and a chance to sample traditional Korean home cooking. After this it snowed so heavily that just getting down the hill from the flat became an expedition.


Korea was the final country in our Far East trilogy and as much as anything we found it interesting to see how the chinese, korean and japanese cultures had developed from essentially the same seed. South Korea is situated geographically between China and Japan and in many respects seemed to us to be a half-way house; more developed and civilised than China but less so than Japan; some of the politeness and reserve of the Japanese but also the sharp elbows of the Chinese. I would suggest that a diet of cabbage and the metro system do not go well together but as elsewhere people were incredibly helpful and kind towards us despite the language barrier.



We had booked our passage to the New World on a cargo ship from Busan and it was time to head out on the road again and give Mike & Hayon their spare room back. There was still too much snow and ice to cycle from Seoul so we had decided to travel 120 miles south-east to Andong where the weather is slightly milder in the hope that we could ride to Busan from there. At Seoul station we were advised that the 10.30 train actually left from another station on the other side of the city so we rode across town to the bus station. Seoul is one of the least cycle friendly cities I have ridden (think 8 lane highways, car dominated society and a laisez-faire attitude to traffic laws). To try and compensate the authorities have created a linear park along the narrow floodplain of the Hangang River and a cycle path along its length, which understandably seems to be the only place Seoulites dare to ride. On this day the river was frozen and we cycled precariously on the snow and ice.




As the bus crossed over the Soback Mountains the snow was so deep it looked like we would need huskies and a sledge not bicycles but fortunately as we descended to Andong the snow cover thinned and the main roads were clear. The temperature was still well-below freezing so we erred in favour of a warm hotel room with a heated electric bed mat rather than getting on the bikes.



Even though it was only 14 miles alongside the Nakdong River to the 600 year old village at Hahoe on a bright sunny day we were frozen solid upon arrival. We found lodgings in the house of an old lady, a lovely traditional building of mud and timber with a clay tiled roof built around an open courtyard. We warmed up on the heated floor of one of our landlady's friends who cooked us a hearty dumpling soup. The village is normally awash with tourists but as it was midweek and -10C we had the place to ourselves and enjoyed an afternoon poking our noses around the lovely old buildings.



It was so cold the next day that we had only gone a few miles before T was close to tears and started putting plastic bags on her feet. We crossed the Nakdong River which had frozen during the night and began an ascent up a hill, which turned into a mountain with a road of snow and ice. Further on we stopped for a snack and discovered that the water in our bottles had frozen solid. I left T thawing out on the heated floor of our hotel room and went for a quick look around Gunwi market, but it was ridiculous, everything on sale was literally frozen stiff.



It took 4 more days riding to reach Busan, South Korea's second largest city and one of the world's busiest ports. The weather got a bit warmer and the snow thinner as we rode south. On the way we spent a couple of enjoyable days visiting some of the 1300 year old World Heritage Sites of the Shilla kingdom around the city of Gyeongju but further south we were depressed by the enormous petrochemical and heavy industrial complexes around Ulsan, the scale of which showed our environmentalism for the folly it is. One of the buildings we passed had a sign which read "Our business is clean air", we could only assume they were selling it to the workers in the other factories.



The Korean landscape is not so disimilar to Japan's - mainly mountainous with limited flat fertile land in valleys and coasts. Without the threat from earthquakes the Koreans have tried to make best use of their land by cramming the population into identical, box-like high rise apartments, with giant numbers painted on the sides to differentiate them. It was in one such apartment in Busan that we couch surfed with the wonderfully friendly Alan & Nicky, a young North American couple teaching english.



Our ship arrived a couple of days later than scheduled and at 9.30pm on a freezing cold saturday night we met the Port Agent at the immigration office at the docks. We were given permission to leave and followed the Port Agent's van on our bicycles to a pier on the far side of the harbour. The security guards at the gate seemed to take some convincing as to why two foreigners should be allowed to cycle around a working freighter dock in the dark. Under floodlights large trucks were transporting their loads, stacks of shipping containers towered above us and giant cranes moved around automatically on train tracks - we felt very small as we wheeled our cycles alongside the enormous bulk of the "MV CMA CGM Pacifico" while shipping containers were flying around above our heads. The crew helped us get all our gear up the gangway that is temporarily lowered down the side of the ship when it docks and before we knew it we were shaking hands with the captain and shown to our cabin - which for vagabonds like us was a luxurious, enormous suite with porthole windows on two sides. But what really put a smile on my face was a "help yourself" fridge in the officers mess full of cheeses.



The Pacifico is a 250m long, 30,000 tonne ship registered in Hamburg and was carrying 1400 containers from asia to latin america. The captain, officers and engineers were German, Polish and Finnish and the rest of the 13 crew were Filipinos. At breakfast we met the only other passenger, the very amiable Emiko, a young American making her way from Hong Kong to Lima (she would be on board for a month!). By dawn the loading was finished and as we ate our eggs on toast we rumbled slowly out of the harbour, next stop the port of Manzanillo on the west coast of Mexico, 7000 miles away.



Having looked at a map of the world it seemed to me that we would be sailing in a more or less straight line to Mexico, taking us just north of Hawaii and the weather forecast looked great. We would finally be leaving the freezing cold and would soon be sitting on deck in our shorts, sipping iced drinks as we looked out over the calm blue ocean. There is one small problem with maps - they are flat, the Earth is not. The officers on the bridge chuckled at my naivety. The Pacific Ocean is so vast that the shortest route was in fact to head to higher latitudes, where the planet is effectively less fat and then go south, the same thing that aeroplanes do. We would in fact be a mere 150 miles from the Aluetian Islands (Alaska) in the middle of winter. The LLoyds Maritime Atlas rather accurately describes the weather hazards for the North Pacific Winter as "stormy weather" and "ice accretion on ships". The captain said there would be some "heavy seas".




The officers got us drunk on the first two nights in the relative calm of the Sea of Japan and obviously knew what they were doing. We passed through the strait that seperates the Japanese islands of Honshu and Hokkaido and as we staggered to bed we hit the Pacific Ocean and the boat started rocking and rolling. I spent all night loosely hanging on to the bed for fear of falling out and T had recourse to regurgitate her dinner. In the morning it was snowing with a 3-5 metre swell and a 20mph wind howling down from the Arctic. Waves were crashing against the bow of the ship, sea spray turned to ice on deck and the containers were creaking and moaning. We were travelling north-east, parallel with, but out of sight of the Kurile Islands, which belong to Russia. This was not Hawaii.



The clocks were going forwards every other night and the sea-sick pills turned us into zombies. All around there was nothing but water and sky. We slipped into a rocking, vibrating, timeless vacuum where the only solid landmarks were european style breakfast, lunch and dinner in the civilised surroundings of the officers mess. At least we weren't drinking our own urine and picking weavils out of our biscuits.



After 5 days we reached 180 degrees longitude and crossed the international date-line, which only added to the confusion. Since leaving London we had been losing an hour at each time zone and prior to crossing this imaginary line we had been 12 hours ahead of our friends in London. One second later and we were 12 hours behind them. I was on a boat in the middle of the ocean and had nothing else to do but try and make sense of this - but I failed, my mind was a fog. Had we lost a day or gained a day? Was I a day older, a day younger or just the same? The crew said we would put the clocks one day backwards and have two saturdays but I didn't adjust my digital casio (waterproof to 15m) and it still tallied with the calender, ships instruments and our ETA. As we advanced we continued to lose hours but gain time on London. One thing was for certian though, after 621 days we were half-way around the world, travelling somewhat slower than Phileas Fogg. After 10 days we found our sea legs but the "sea lag" had turned T into a doormouse.



At the very prow of the ship was a lookout affording a fantastic view of the waves below, sky above and the ocean receding to the horizon. It was so far forwards there was no noise or vibration from the ship's engine, just the sound of the wind and the waves - at times I felt like I was flying up there. I spent hours in the cold, gazing out over the water in the company of albatrosses, auks and dolphins. Once we left Japanese waters we didn't see another ship for over a week, we were in one of the last true wildernesses on the planet.



The Pacifico hammered east 24 hours a day without a let up of the two giant propellers spinning 80-90 times a minute. Each day we used 60 tonnes of fuel to travel 450 miles. Eventually we began to make our way south and 200 miles off the coast of California the weather warmed and we spotted whales, sealions, sharks and turtles in the calm waters.



The crew had a b-b-q party and were in high spirits at the prospect of 3 weeks in latin waters. At the front of the ship, a bright moon glistening on the sea I asked T if she would marry me - she said "OK then" and when she woke with a hang-over didn't pretend not to remember.



Ater 15 days at sea I was denied the opportunity to yell "land ahoy" as I was asleep when we docked at Manzanillo in the early hours of the morning. It was also sunday and customs was closed so we were held on the boat until mid-afternoon watching the containers being unloaded while pelicans and frigatebirds wheeled about the blue sky and we sweltered in the tropical sun. Our voyage had been immensely enjoyable and we were sad to say goodbye to what had been our temporary home on water, but beyond the dock lay a New World of swaying palms and men with moustaches.