Category Archives: Travel

An unusual attachment to airports

Airports, Travel,

I just read this great description of airport-hopping across Africa, which, of course, made me want to go and explore my own continent. Exploring Africa is a running theme in my life at the moment, partly because it’s just generally amazing and partly because of my amazing friend who is currently travelling from Cape Town to Cairo on public transport. He’s been a little quiet lately – presumably because the internet is not a mango. Rumour has it he has made it to Ethiopia and is still in one travel-happy piece.

Reading about travel always makes me think about airports. When I first started working, I plunged straight into a somewhat crazy job where I found myself spending 3-4 days each week travelling. Until that point, I had no memory of flying, although I apparently flew occassionally as a small child. Literally within 7 days of working, I was (rather nervously) on my first flight to Cape Town. From then on it became a regular part of most work-weeks. There were 7am flights to Durban, 6am flights to Uppington and flights at all sorts of times to Cape Town and East London and Joburg. I became one of those people who could pack for a week away in the space of 5 minutes and once in less when I suddenly and unexpectedly had to fly to Polokwane on a Friday afternoon.

I became familiar with many of the airports in South Africa. Richards Bay airport is teeny-tiny – or at least it was the last time I was there – with one luggage carousel and a little cafe counter, run by a little old lady, where you expected to see them serving tea in proper china cups. Upington for some reason struck me as more tourist-y. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that they have, apparently, one of the longest runways in the the world – someone once told me that a space shuttle could land there if it wasn’t able to land in the Northern Hemisphere, but that may just be urban legend.

My least favourite airport in South Africa is Port Elizabeth. It is also the airport where I always, for some unknown reason, get stuck waiting for hours and hours. I once spent 6 hours there with a friend, this time due to poor planning on my part, and we were so bored we ended up sitting on a bench outside redoing the words of show-tunes to express our desperate longing one day to escape the PE airport. And that wasn’t even the last time I spent far too many hours there.

My second worst is Durban, purely because the design is horrible. I will never understand why anyone would put a security check-point, particularly at an airport where everyone in the family seems to feel the need to come along to see people off, in the middle of a crowded corridor. Durban has also been the site of far too many delays and problems. Yet another reason I’m not a fan of the city.

In the later years of working for a large organisation, most of my airport-travel was from Cape Town. At that stage, I was working between South Africa’s two largest cities, travelling up and down every 2 weeks or so. I think some part of my brain is still waiting every week for the 4:30am Monday wake up to catch an early plane so that I could make my meeting in Joburg. At one point, in the process of renovating the place, they removed about half of the chairs between the security check and the boarding gates. This airport is particularly busy on Monday mornings, so the choice was to stand around until someone finally decided that the plane was ready for boarding (an often-delayed event on those busy days) or to sit on the floor. I can’t count the number of times I sat near the boarding gates checking mail while I waited, with bleary-eyed tourists stealing bemused glances at the woman in business clothes sitting on the floor.

Apart from East London airport, which is special because it means going home – oh, and because they still have the light fittings in old-SAA colours from the 1970s – my favourite airport in South Africa is OR Tambo in Johannesburg. There are several reasons for this. The first is just that it’s a nice airport. It is spacious and modern, with good facilities and has necessities like a pharmacy, stationary shops and book stores, which are precious to find when you’re spending so much time in meetings and trainings that the only time to buy things is between flights.

It is also a fairly efficient airport. At least, I’ve always found it that way. Everything seems logical and well-designed, although possibly just because I’ve spent so much time there that I can find my way around while half-asleep purely on muscle-memory and instinct. The staff have generally been pleasant to me, too. And after a while, either because my name popped up in their computers as someone who flies an awful lot or just because I started to look like I knew what I was doing, I became one of those people who always gets the good seats and sometimes gets bumped up a class when they’re overbooked (although that only happened a couple of times).

The other reason I love Joburg airport is that it’s a great place to relax after a hectic day of work. Again, this may just be because I’ve spent so much time there. There is a bar near the domestic boarding gates, which became, for a time, my ‘local’ – the place I’d go after work on a Friday to have a quiet pint and calm down after the week. The Wimpy nearby has been the source of many quick meals. And I’ve spent many happy hours, when I arrived early or the plane was delayed, sitting reading or writing near my boarding gate. A friend of mine once pointed out that airports are a great place to write and to think. Joburg (OR Tambo) was that for me for a long time.

Of course, there are bad things too. At one point when I was (quite literally) commuting between Stutterheim (East London Airport) and Pretoria (OR Tambo), I  regularly dealt with Friday 5pm flights to one of the smaller airports, invariably involving a nightmare combination of crying children, irritable, demanding politician-types and far too many people who have never flown before.

But on the whole, Joburg airport is a little home-away-from-home. Coming here (to South Korea), when I was entirely terrified of everything, it was a comfort to be leaving from ‘my airport’. I think that – along with the much-needed hand-holding of a particularly sympathetic and amazing friend – is what actually got me on the plane. The trip here is a bit of a blur except for the moments of calm at each airport – Joburg, Dubai, Incheon and finally Daegu, each with its own peculiarities and atmosphere. Dubai, huge and glittering and with palm-trees. Incheon, a maze of escalators and underground trains and following signs to try to find the right check-in desk. Daegu, small and empty and mostly closed for the evening by the time I arrived.

In the 5 and a half months I’ve been here, I’ve only once been near the airport, and that was just on a bus-ride driving past. Among the many other things I miss, I kind of miss South African airports. I miss the early morning rush and the check-in staff trying to get everyone onto the plane while dealing with the idiots who can’t understand why their precious oversized wooden giraffe will not fit in the overhead luggage compartment. I miss the ease of slipping one item of check-in luggage onto the weighing-thingy, asking the smiling check-in person for a window seat and walking away with boarding pass in hand. I miss hot coffee from Wimpy and watching the early morning mist or the frost on the ground or the rising heat of the day through the huge windows at the boarding gates. I miss sitting on the floor with my laptop sending one last email before getting onto the plane. I miss the every-time thrill of take-off as the plane speeds down the runway and I lean back against the headrest and watch from the window as Joburg slips away and away below us.

I miss the going and the waiting to go, the ‘molweni‘ and the ‘totsiens‘, the anonymity and the calm-in-the-chaos of those moments. In the midst of a life of taxis buses and subways and cavernous airport-like KTX stations, I find myself missing, just a little, the way I feel when I’m sitting alone at an airport.

40 steps and Jagalchi Fish Market (Busan Part 1)

Adventures, Food, trains and train stations, travelling in Korea, , , ,

Daegu is not a coastal city. But some days the wind blows in a certain way and the glare is a particular way and the air has that feeling of moisture that makes me think of the sea. I think that is the reason I’ve thought a lot about coastal towns since I arrived here and have, several times, made vague plans to go and find the nearest beach I know of in Busan (also called Pusan). Plans have fallen through or been shelved several times. I came close to going with friends to the Pusan International Film Festival last month and then decided against it at the last minute. This weekend, in spite of predictions of rain, I finally went to Busan.

I woke up early, thanks to a mosquito launching a concerted attack at 7am so I got my things together and headed off. The 814 bus got me to the station at 10am. A taxi would have been quicker, but I wanted to try the bus. I bought at ticket for the 10:28 KTX (11500 won) and went to find breakfast. After rejecting a ‘garlic glazed’ doughnut, I retreated from all food-related-adventurousness and picked up a sandwich at the 7eleven.

The KTX from Dongdaegu to Busan takes roughly one hour. I sat back and enjoyed the trip through rural-ish areas, watching with joy as we passed autumn vineyards. One of my favourite sites is grape vines in autumn. These could, of course, just have be table grapes but they were still pretty and familiar. Closer to Busan, the train wove it’s way through mountains and alongside and across wide rivers, or perhaps just one river – as far as I can gather, Busan is at the end of the Nakdong river but I’m not sure of that.

Outside Busan station, I wandered around feeling lost . I’m not very good at strange places with lots of people. I was going to take buses because they’re a better way to see a city but at that point I saw the subway and had had no luck finding the right bus, so I retreated to the familiar and easier option. This subway station was very different to those I know in Daegu. If you’ve ever travelled from the Eastern Cape to Joburg by bus, you may have stopped at that slightly dodgy, glaringly out-of-date place where all the buses stop in Bloem. This felt like that. Everywhere was red-brick, too many columns, primary colours and floor-tiles that screamed ‘institution’. And particularly odd murals and décor on the walls. It really all felt very 80s. The Daegu subway stations feels new and modern and efficient. This felt like a relic from a bygone era. The Busan subway system didn’t feel at all efficient and modern and first world. I eventually managed to find the ticket-machine and buy a one-day pass (3500 won). Once I’d figured out how to use the pass, I caught the train (which also seemed far from new) to Jungang-dong station.

When I visit a new place, I tend to start by searching for information. Because I’ve planned to visit Busan several times, I’ve done quite a lot of this information gathering. One of the places I wanted to see, in spite of the reports on several travel websites that it wasn’t worth the effort, was the 40 Gyedan Cultural Tourist Theme Street. The reason the guide books and sites say that it’s not worth a visit is that there isn’t really all that much there except for a few statues on the street and an information board or two. But I have a fairly powerful imagination and an equally strong interest in social history. This little area – which is really just two short streets – has been important at various points in history but the bit that caught my interest was the role it played during the Korean War. During the war, there was a time when pretty much the whole of the peninsula was under the control of the North except for a small area around Busan called the Pusan Perimeter (correct romanisation at the time). This, of course, meant thousands of refugees flooded into the city. Most of them settled, temporarily, on the hills above the port area in Dongwang-dong. These two streets are just below there and would have been an important economic and social area for refugees and residents alike. At the end of one of these streets is a set of 40 steps leading from the lower street to the higher-up residential areas. These are the 40 steps and it is here that refugees would pass to try and find work and food to survive and here they ended up gathering to try to find any information about missing family members. This set of steps became the main place for separated families to seek their loved ones, for some to be reunited and for others to wait in vain and go home sad.

The Koreans are not all that good at memorialising places like this but they have placed statues in bronze around the area representing ordinary people at the time –  like father sleeping on a traditional A-frame pack at the end of work and children carrying water. One the flight of steps, about half way up, is a statue of a man playing an accordion. The story goes that he is playing a song written about the 40 steps, commemorating that time. When I was there, he was silent but the poignancy of this figure on a deserted set of steps, in a neighbourhood that was almost eerily quiet on a chilly, overcast Sunday morning was not lost. I’m not sure I agree with the way in which the area and it’s history have been commemorated. I certainly wasn’t particularly impressed with the information boards and the wooden lampposts – complete with fake pigeon that would have been right at home at Monte Casino. But that doesn’t change the history of the area and I’m glad that my internet meanderings turned up the info about the history of this place and that I was able to visit it myself so that I could visualise something of what that time must have been like.

After the 40 steps, I heading off to one of Busan’s most well-known spots – the Jagalchi Fish Market. This huge market is really meant for locals but it’s significantly large and interesting enough to make it into all the guide books. I could probably have walked there but I didn’t have a map of the area and I was feeling a little lost already, so I took the subway to Nampo-dong station. I walked out of the station (Exit 2, as per sign indicating Jagalchi Fish Market) and along a road that seemed unrelated to fish, until the first side-road on the left, down which I could see the sea. My first sight of the fish market was rows of tiny covered stalls, each with a table and chairs serving as an outdoor restaurant. Opposite them were various slightly larger restaurants. It seemed as if everyone there was trying to get people to stop and buy their seafood dishes. Turning, I saw the huge multi-story building that houses the main markets. Before I reached it, however, there was an Ajumma on the pavement with a market-cart (stall on wheels) covered in fish. She laughed at me as I stopped to take a picture of her wares – rows and rows of dead fish hanging on spikes with other fish, some filleted, some whole, in baskets on the little concrete pavement stools not far away. In Mozambique, I came across people selling fish on the street but none as enthusiastically or in such  volume as this.

Inside the doors of the first floor of the main building, the world became a blur of lights and crowds, people in yellow aprons and black gumboots and rows and rows of tanks where every seafood imaginable splashed and swam and, in the case of the crabs, tried to escape. The huge hall is arranged a little like an expo – with some stalls along the walls and others back-to-back in two or three rows in the middle. Each stall had at least 10 to 15 tanks of different kinds of fish and other sea creatures. There were eels and crabs and lobsters and shell-fish of all sorts and actual fish of every shape and size, from small lightning-quick flashes of silver to big solid-looking 30-cm swimming-lunches. Some where flat with eyes on the top of their bodies, others were thin and slimy looking. I walked through the huge crowded space. People were examining the fish and bartering with stall-holders. Women standing behind stalls currently without customers were expertly cutting up and filleting. I was a little overwhelmed by the sheer volume of seafood swimming around in tanks in that hall. I’m not squeamish about the fact that what I eat used to be alive at all but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much swimming seafood. The wriggling and splashing and looking at me became a little too much. I went outside and found an escalator to the second floor. Here there were people sitting at low tables eating some of the things from the floor below. The tables were clustered in groups around the room, crowded between stalls selling dried fish and fish-related products of every shape and size. I considered sitting down and having lunch but most of the tiny restaurant areas were full and they didn’t seem geared up for a solo traveller.

The other side of the main building faces the sea, with views across the water of bridges and ships and a working port. There were also what looked like Sotdae except that they were fish instead of birds. Perhaps fish spirits guard this coastal town. I watched the seagulls circling for a while and breathed in the scent of the sea.

Back on the street, I joined the throngs walking down the street. I kept stepping out of the way, just to look for one moment – hardly believing my eyes – at yet more seafood-still-swimming, some in tanks as inside the building, others in large plastic basins. At one place a woman was cleaning and preparing a crab taken from a tank of crabs each with a body quite literally the size of the woman’s head. On the other side of the road, a man was selling fishing rods and gear. Little women scuttled out of each little restaurant to try and convince the Korean couple walking ahead of me to stop and have lunch in their establishments. A women on the pavement sat cleaning something beside a plastic basin of large, wriggling octopuses. Further along, a pair of women worked on a table next to a row of basins teaming with splashing fish.

I turned up a side-street, between yet more fish restaurants, and headed towards a main road. The last I saw of the fish market was a basket of filleted fish sitting forlornly on a stool on the pavement, with their owner nowhere to be seen, as crowds of people flowed past without even seeming to notice.

Jump on a high-speed train

Adventures, Seoul, trains and train stations, , , ,

This weekend, for the first time, I experienced the phenomenon of the high-speed train. In the past 6 or 7 years, I’ve spent plenty of time in South African airports and on planes but other distance public transport systems in SA are not very well-developed and there are certainly no high-speed trains. I’ve caught a train here in Korea once before, when we went to hang-gliding in Changwon but then I was with people who had already figured out the train system. This time I was alone, nervous and determined – I really needed to get out of town and a weekend with an old friend was calling. So, on Saturday morning, I got up early and headed off on a new adventure.

Early is a relative terms when one works hours as odd mine (3pm to 11pm). It was after 8:30am by the time I left home. Daegu was waking up on a crisp, overcast autumn morning. I was quite glad of my coat. The morning was also little misty and as I walked down to the main road to catch a taxi I passed children on their way to school and people starting to move through the hazy misty morning . I caught the first taxi I could find and headed to Dongdaegu station.

At the station, I headed straight for the automatic ticket issuing machine. The train stations in Korea also have the option of buying tickets from actual people at ticket counters but the machines have English and it’s easier to use a machine with English than to battle through the inevitability of miscommunication with a ticket salesperson, particularly when one is impatient to get going. After one or two tries, I managed to work the machine (which isn’t complicated – I just entered the wrong information or pressed the wrong things once or twice) and reached the confirmation screen where they showed the ticket they could offer me. There were no tickets in economy facing in the ‘forward’ direction. I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant but they did have one available facing in the ‘opposite’ direction. I decided to buy it. The ticket cost 38 600 won. I fed in my four 10 000 won notes and got my change and ticket.

I had about 10 minutes to find the track and get on the train. For those who have travelled with me before, the idea of me cutting it this fine will seem improbable. I am one of those people who tends to arrive at the airport at least an hour before the flight ‘just in case’. This time I recklessly took a chance. I’m quite familiar with the subway stations in Korea which all have English signs (along with the Korean and pictures) directing travellers to the platforms (‘tracks’ the signs say). The train stations do too. I went through the doors to the area where the platforms are, crossing the sign painted on the floor indicating that I was entering the ‘paid area’ and followed signs that informed me that the 9:05 KTX train to Seoul was leaving from platform 9.

I got to the platform with two minutes to spare, just as the loudspeaker crackled into action and announced that the train I was taking would be 3 minutes late. They really do measure time in minutes here – imagine a world where you know when the train will arrive to the last minute? I studied my ticket. All the writing on the ticket is in Korean. Although I can read some of this now – or at least figure out what the word sounds like – it didn’t help me figure out which carriage and seat I was looking for. I knew from the last time that the tickets usually show the coach and seat numbers, just as airline boarding passes do. I found something that looked like a ticket number (1D) but the only other number I could find was 9, which I assumed was the platform number. In the absence of any other information, I decided that this must actually be the carriage number, too, and the platform number wasn’t shown.

Just then the train arrived. I rushed to carriage 9 and got on. I always feel a little out of my depth when travelling on a new kind of public transport or a new kind of train or plane, especially when everyone around me knows exactly where they’re going and I’m just getting in the way trying to figure it all out. This time I was lucky: my seat was just in front of the door where I entered. I had a window seat tucked in the corner, which was perfect for me. I quickly stowed my backpack, coat and scarf and settled down.

As I watched Daegu station slide away, I was filled with excitement. I love travelling and trains make me particularly happy. My seat was facing in the ‘opposite’ direction, which, it turned out, meant that my seat faced the back of the train. I was a little worried that this might be a bad thing given that I am prone to motion-sickness, but it was fine. The person in the seat next to me was an American – I suspected when I saw him and then he got a phone-call and I heard his accent – but thankfully not someone who felt the need to engage in conversation. So I was able to enjoy the trip in uninterrupted wonder as I watched the scenery pass by and to be peaceful for a bit. I think that is really the joy of travel for me – the quiet moments of uninterrupted peace while watching the world pass by.

I tried to take pictures, too, but it turns out it is really difficult to take good pictures through the window of a train when travelling at 300km/h, especially when facing backwards. The KTX trip to Seoul is remarkably brief. Until the KTX was built, the ‘express’ train used to take four hours. The KTX takes around 1 hour 45 minutes. I suppose that is a little like taking just under 2 hours by train from Johannesburg to Durban. Both flights (Joburg-Durban and Seoul-Daegu) take about an hour but thinking about the waiting time and the need to be there early, it’s pretty much equivalent. I’d say the KTX and flying are equivalent for comfort – the seats could be airline seats, with perhaps a little more legroom (I find the legroom on planes sufficient so don’t notice it much) and there are bathrooms and the like. The KTX also has the option of buying snacks from the snack and drink carts that come rattling down the aisles, just like (at least budget) airlines. The sense of speed and distance is similar, as is the time taken. The view makes me happy on both, although they are slightly different – on a plane, I adore watching the world pass below me but am occasionally frustrated by cloud cover and the that flying so high makes it difficult to see contours and definition; on the train, I loved the close-up views but was sometimes frustrated by tunnels and barriers next to the rails, particularly on bridges. Perhaps the greatest difference between the two is that the KTX is cheaper and there are none of the delays and irritations of the extensive security checks of modern airports. Also, perhaps because of the KTX and because Korea is a small country, flights are few and far between whereas the trains run extremely regularly.

Arriving in Seoul station, I disembarked and joined the crowds walking up just one set of stairs to the arrivals area. Seoul station is spacious and feels a lot like my favourite airports, so I felt immediately at home and went off with a smile to find my friend.

The return trip was just as easy. We got to the station at about 12:55 and found the auto-ticketing machines. I bought a ticket, this time costing 38 000 won and facing forward. My friend was a little shocked to realise that I’d bought a ticket leaving at 13:15 (it was now 13:05). I would normally have been shocked, too. In fact, in the past I’d have been in a panic. But somehow it seemed normal this time.

A quick goodbye and I headed for the platform (ridiculously easy to find) and boarded my train. This time I was seated right in the middle of the carriage. This carriage – perhaps all of them, I didn’t look before – had half the seats facing in one direction and half facing in the other, with the middle two sets of seats facing each other over a little fold-out table. I was in one of these middle seats, which was lovely and spacious. I was in the aisle seat but there was no-one in the seat next to me or the two facing me, so I felt a little as if I had four seats to myself.

On the trip up to Seoul, the day had been quite misty and overcast but Monday was crisp and clear so I could see for ages and ages and had a perfect view of farmlands and towns and wooded hills and mountains, with the usual temple complexes dotted in between. It was another opportunity to confirm that train travel is a lovely way to enjoy the view and get to know a country. I arrived back in Daegu at 15:02 (exactly on time), with just enough time to pop home and drop my luggage before heading off to work. I’ve always been a fan of train travel but I’m now particularly enamoured with the quick, comfortable and plane-like experience of the KTX and am already planning my next quick trip on a high-speed train.