military bus returned us to Camp Bonifas. It was late afternoon. We transferred back onto our tour bus and prepared to leave for the trip back to Seoul. Fortunately, I had not been manhandled, bullied, or ridiculed by North guards, or by Naumenkof or any fellow tour members. As we motored toward Seoul, at the front of the bus, our loquacious Korean guide was talking a mile a minute over the loudspeaker — just as he had that morning on our way north. He spoke a language I was not familiar with, though snippets reminded me of English. His pronunciation was so garbled and indecipherable, it sounded like his mouth was full of marbles. So that’s what I called him.
“Do you understand what Marbles is saying, Gail?” I asked my fellow Canadian seatmate, a woman from Kamloops, British Columbia, who was in Seoul visiting her daughter, who was also teaching English.
“No,” Gail said, grinning.
“Neither do I.”
We crossed back over the Imjin River and an hour later were back among Seoul’s mass of concrete and steel. Our trip ended where it had begun that morning: at Yongsan Garrison at the USO compound in Camp Kim. Yongsan was built by the Japanese in 1910, and was later the base for the U.S.’s Korean headquarters. It’s located in south central Seoul, just north of the Han River and near Itaewon, a crowded and bustling area of old and new shops, and bars and restaurants commonly patronized by foreigners. Just north is the singular, broad, and wooded Nam Mountain. Yongsan base may be the world’s only military camp located in a major city.
Inside the USO compound were a few civilians and a smattering of young soldiers wearing military fatigues. As a well-deserved reward for having successfully survived my trip to the JSA unscathed, I treated myself to a chocolate bar and a Coke at the snack bar, then relaxed on a big comfortable sofa in front of a big-screen TV. It was tuned to FOX, and the blonde host was pontificating about something or other, so I soon left and took the subway back to my small flat in Myeongil-dong in southeast Seoul.
I’ve noticed that South Koreans seem almost blasé about the border tension. In decades past, though, when there was a serious military flare-up along the border, citizens reportedly would dash to the grocery stores to stock up on supplies, including boxes of fried noodles. These days, while border confrontations and skirmishes may create world headlines, people here have, I suppose, heard it all before; so they just get on with their lives. Mothers fret about their children’s educations. Schoolgirls are enraptured with the latest boy bands. Boys roughhouse with friends on the way home from school. Fathers work late. Citizens scurry about to earn a living. Yet, their grandfathers and grandmothers, parents, sisters and brothers in the North live largely in poverty, and have been held hostage in a closed and internationally isolated country for nearly seventy years by a despotic Kim lineage of ruthless dictators. Being separated must be heartbreaking for the older generation in both nations. Yet, for many young South Koreans, North Korea is so distant, so intangible, it might as well be Mars.
Chapter 2
I had been living in Seoul for more than a decade when my Aunt Irene in Toronto sent me a book written by American Bill Bryson. I had never heard of Bryson, but I read the book, In a Sunburned Country, which is a comic narrative of his fascinating trip through Australia. I was smitten, cognizant of why millions of readers were hooked on this bestselling author. I had not thought a simple travel book — the genre, in my mind, reminiscent of wanderers writing dull prose about what should have been fascinating adventures — could be so breezy, humorous, and illuminating.
I read Bryson’s other gems: Notes from a Small Island, about his trek through Britain, and A Walk in the Woods, which recounted his long, exhausting hike along the Appalachian Trail. I had a walloping grand time tagging along with Bryson on these excursions, too. I got to thinking that he was most definitely needed in South Korea to trundle through the country, to put it on the map by writing another bestseller. Goodness knows the peninsula could use his help. Except for its immediate neighbours, China and Japan, very few others seem to visit the country for leisure or for pleasure. (In 2014, about 5.5 million Chinese and 2.5 million Japanese tourists visited Korea, representing about 80 percent of all incoming foreign tourists. Many arrive for shopping or gambling junkets.) Most of the rest of the world seemed to know little, if anything, about South Korea. It is dominated in the media attention department by its mad-hatter neighbour, North Korea — run currently by Kim Jung-un, one of our planet’s most notorious dictators. Compared to the North, South Korea is like that standup comedian who has to follow Jerry Seinfeld on stage; he is always going to be second fiddle. Not that the South Korean government seems to do much to promote the country for tourism. When was the last time you saw an advertisement on television or in print inviting you to visit one of its sandy beaches or its ancient Buddhist temples, or hike its craggy granite mountain ridges?
It astonishes me how little Westerners seem to know about the country. When I’m back in Canada and I speak with people about my time in Korea, they sometimes ask “North or South?” Koreans living in Canada have told me with a sigh that they have been asked if they’re from the North or the South. Well, more than two million South Koreans have emigrated to North America; while the number of North Koreans is miniscule. Chances are slim that a Korean you run into at a shop or on the street will be from North Korea.
One day, in the small town of Brockville, Ontario, I was at the local post office inquiring about sending a parcel to a friend in Korea. The clerk behind the counter checked a country list and announced with a hint of bewilderment that there were two Koreas. Well, no shit, Sherlock.
“Which Korea is the parcel going to?” she asked me.
“It can only go to one place; mail doesn’t go to the other,” I replied politely, hoping by simple deduction she would conclude the correct country. She didn’t.
“So …which one?” she asked.
“South Korea,” I answered. “You can’t get in or out of the North. There’s no international mail delivery there.”
She looked surprised. “Oh, I didn’t know that.”
Even people who read newspapers and watch the news, like my mother, were pretty much clueless about South Korea. She was a school librarian in Toronto for many years, and I would have thought that in her downtime she may have wandered to the East Asia section and perhaps taken a peak at a book on, say, South Korea, considering her son was living there.
Just prior to my parents’ visit to Seoul in the early fall of 2000, my mother phoned me to ask, concerned, “Do we need to get inoculated for disease before we arrive?”
Of course, Mom — we all suffer from dengue fever and typhoid in Korea.
She next wondered innocently, “Should we bring purification tablets to put in our drinking water?”
I sighed, shook my head, and said, “Mom, South Korea is not a third-world country.” When my parents arrived in Seoul, my mother looked at all the high-rise apartments and modern buildings, and remarked with surprise, “I didn’t think there would be so many buildings,” as if she had been expecting mud huts with straw roofs.
Poor South Korea; seemingly ignored and passed over. The country has always suffered from a lack of drawing power as a travel destination. Heck, it was 1882 before Korea opened her borders for the first time to international visitors and trade. In the previous five hundred years, the conservative, Confucian-based government kept the nation cloistered and sequestered, zealously guarding against any encroachment by foreigners. This was a country where, in 1653, the government would not permit the thirty-six survivors of the Dutch ship Sparrow Hawk, wrecked off Jeju Island, to depart. Had eight of Sparrow Hawk’s crew not taken a boat and escaped to Nagasaki thirteen years later, then to The Netherlands
