Have Legs, Will Travel

01 Jun 2011

Is it about the speed at which you travel, or the mode of transportation? Or does it depend on whether you are out there instead of safely cocooned inside a metal box with wheels? It’s all a matter of perspective, say OLIVER RAW, MARIE BEAN and STEVE THOMAS – a walker, a runner and a cyclist, respectively. Illustrations by GEORGE BUTLER.

CLOSE ENCOUNTER ON FOOT
BY OLIVER RAW

One spring, I walked – some 400km – from the very south to the very north of South Korea. The journey was inspired by a Korean poet called Kim Satgat, whose life I had discovered in a second-hand bookstore in Bangkok. Kim was a vagabond who’d crisscrossed the country in the mid-19th century, penning satirical poems while seeking out a bed and a bowl of rice wine. Reading about him in hot, congested Bangkok, it all seemed rather fine, even without the poetry.

There was another reason I wished to walk across Korea. Visitors don’t often travel beyond Seoul, and although I had spent some months there, I knew nothing of what lay beyond the city’s endless suburbs.

Like Kim, I travelled light, with a rucksack holding just one change of clothes. I began my walk from the southern port city of Busan, plotting my northward route with a map.

I chose a coastal road, and for the first few days passed sights that were distinctly Korean. I saw women in black wetsuits diving for abalone off the rocky coast. Taking a short cut through some fields, I came across a training school for dogs. Once, I stopped to photograph an elderly lady with an infant strapped to her back as she hung up squid to dry. Seaweed drying on racks was a common sight; after drying, it is processed into wafer-thin slices which are eaten with alcohol.

Drinking is something Koreans enjoy, particularly on public holidays, and there were several during my trip. At times I could not walk more than a hundred yards without being invited to join yet another party of picnickers, where a shot of soju, the traditional tipple of Korea, would be pressed upon me along with a ball of rice and barbequed beef wrapped in a lettuce leaf. Made from ingredients like rice and sweet potato, soju tastes like sweet vodka, and is not something I particularly favour before lunch. But Kim Satgat would never have declined, so neither did I.

A foreigner roaming the Korean countryside is an uncommon sight and the Koreans I met took it upon themselves to make sure I formed a good impression. Early in my trip I realised that I could sleep in temples en route, and unlike in other parts of the world where a stranger at the door would be met with some degree of suspicion, this never happened in Korea. Given that the country was known as the Hermit Kingdom for centuries because of its reluctance to open its doors to the world, this was a surprise.

On one occasion, I was walking late in the evening (or rather, limping, as my feet were badly blistered), unable to find a hotel. I spotted lanterns, called out, and a nun appeared. I managed to communicate that I needed a place to stay. She was the only nun there so I expected to be sent on my way. But it was Seokga Tansinil, the festival celebrating Buddha’s birthday. She prepared a basin of hot water to soak my feet in and cooked me a supper of rice, tofu and seaweed soup. She laid out a futon for me in her cottage while she spent the night in the temple.

The next day after breakfast, she insisted on showing me another temple. She drove me – unknowingly – two hours along the same route I had walked. I was caught between gratitude and despair as my three-day journey was undone in two hours.

There were many other examples of this hospitality. Arriving to find a hotel fully booked, the manager gave me a room in his home. Another time, I was given a futon in a room adjoining a church, where a cuckoo clock struck and I improvised a mosquito net with chairs and a tablecloth. Late one night while talking about Kim Satgat with a couple, my hosts dug out a hat which they presented to me. It was the conical bamboo kind called a satgat, from which Kim Satgat got his pen name.

Encounters such as these are possible when one slows one’s speed of travel, literally, to a pace. There are disadvantages too. While language was an occasional obstacle, the greater ones were my poor, damaged feet and the tedium, following lonely roads over countless hills, with the weather growing hotter and no company. Whenever I saw the high-speed train flash by, I’d wonder why I’d chosen to walk when I could be in Seoul within a couple of comfortable hours.

This was my routine: I’d wake early, walk 20 or 30km, stopping for meals or a can of beer. As evening fell, I’d look for a place to sleep, either a motel or a temple. I’d wash my T-shirt and canvas pants in a bucket and leave them to dry, and manage about a page and a half of the novel I’d brought before falling asleep.

I ended my walk late one afternoon at a pub in downtown Seoul. I felt a little self-conscious about the aroma coming from my beaten-up boots as I sat waiting for my Guinness to settle, looking out over the market stalls selling souvenirs like wooden masks and hourglass-shaped janggu drums used in traditional Korean music. I wondered if I should have gone for a more authentic finale. And unlike Kim Satgat, who kept wandering in the Korean peninsula for over 30 years, after three weeks and 400km, my own vagabonding here was done.