I had an early and devastatingly naive notion that it might be a comparatively simple task (for such an innocent as a British passport holder) to walk on through the frontier and make the journey run from Cheju Island to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, or even to the Yalu River, on the Chinese border. I had visited the North Korean Embassy in Peking once and was told that there should be no problem at all about gaining access to North Korea—no problem, particularly, no matter how many times I had visited the South. But when I mentioned this possibility to friends in South Korea, inward whistling and pursing of lips began at a furious pace. No, they said in unison. You go to North Korea, and you will not—respectful regrets, mumble mumble, dreadful shame, mumble mumble—be permitted to enter the South. So there seemed no point: a walk through Korea that turned out to be only a walk through North Korea sounded monumentally lacking in point. Besides, Mr Hamel hadn’t been there, which realization finally set a cap on the matter.
There was little enough organization to be done, other than to secure the necessary time off. The journey would be about 320 miles, and at 20 miles a day I should need only 16 days if nothing of interest happened and nothing caught my fancy: I was certain to require more, so I arranged to be away from my base in Hong Kong for two months, which, it turned out, was almost exactly the time I needed.
I bought myself a stout Lowe rucksack and one of those canvas-and-Velcro purses in which you can keep all your valuables suspended from your neck. I dug my New Balance boots (last used a year before to clamber along the Crib Goch ridge in North Wales, and thus well worn in) out of a cupboard. I bought bars of Cadbury’s Fruit-and-Nut chocolate and sachets of instant coffee and the inevitable slabs of Kendal Mint Cake (brown, not white). I found a long blackthorn stick with a ramshorn crook that had been made by a shepherd in the Cotswolds, somewhere near Chipping Norton. I discovered, after a long hunt, my old Silva compasses, which are the best found outside ships’ bridges, are made in Finland, and must therefore be a mainstay of the Finnish export business. I bought woollen socks and gloves, cotton shirts and underwear, and a khaki-coloured neck stocking known as a ‘headover’, which I had been given one particularly frigid day in the Falkland Islands by an army sergeant who feared I might freeze to death. I begged back my Swiss army knife (two types of screwdriver, a spike for undistressing begravelled horses, several wicked blades, an ivory toothpick, tweezers, and a magnifying glass, the better for lighting fires with) from the son who had borrowed it. I bought a Sony Walkman Professional and clipped a weatherproof microphone to my shirt so that I could recite reassuring things to myself at lonely moments and then transcribe them at night into one of my waterproof-jacketed Alwych notebooks. I took a Sony ICF 4900 lightweight shortwave radio receiver so I could hear the BBC (except I rarely could; the Spanish Service of Radio Peking used an identical frequency). And I took plenty of spare batteries; pencils; a first aid kit; sunglasses; and a Leica M6 camera with a 35 mm Summicron lens, a yellow filter, and plenty of Agfa black-and-white 100 ASA film.
Thus equipped—the weight of the rucksack, like the length of the Chinese measure known as the li, would vary according to whether the journey was uphill, downhill, or on the flat—I squeezed myself into a pair of Rohan walking breeks and a Viyella shirt, thrust on my head a battered old Akubra drover hat I had bought in Queensland that was said to be good for drinking out of or for fanning a dying fire and, braving the puzzled looks from the Brooks Brother’d bankers in the Hong Kong departure lounge, boarded Cathay Pacific Flight CX410 from Kai Tak to Kimpo.
The Cathay people, unfailingly kind to the inquisitive, let me sit on the flight deck for the approach. Kimpo Airport is regarded with distaste by most professional pilots, said the captain, a rather dyspeptic Londoner. Not only was there a very nasty mountain that reared up in the final moments of the approach but the South Korean security services placed extraordinarily strict controls on the precision of that approach. A slight northward drift off the glide slope and, said the captain, ‘You’re dead meat.’ The problem was that the North Korean aerial frontier was only three minutes’ jet time away from the Kimpo glide slope, so any friendly airliner that strayed north from the slope could appear, to an unsophisticated Seoul approach radar operator, to be a North Korean intruder. And since the glide slope passed only a few miles from the Blue House—the Korean presidential palace—it could be that the intruder was on his way to blow up the Blue House. ‘So we are warned—more than at any other airport in the world—to stay exactly on the slope we’re told. Any plane that makes a mistake is in deep trouble. They nearly blew the tail off a Northwest Airlines jumbo a few years ago. They mean business, those Korean boys.’
But Cathay did its job this time with sedulous efficiency, and we screeched to a halt at Kimpo on time, and I began my struggle through the immigration counters. It took an hour or so, but by evening time I was in a hotel, asking the advice of friends, mugging up on my understanding of Korea’s hangul script (which was pretty poor and so remained), and making the last plans for the trip.
A day later I was armed with maps. I had imagined there would be some difficulty, given the security situation—after all, it is well nigh impossible to buy decent maps of countries like India and Pakistan, and one has to make do with American aerial navigation maps bought at Stanford’s in Covent Garden, where most of the world’s journeying seems properly to begin. I had asked the defence attaché at the British Embassy in Seoul, and the American Defense Mapping Agency in Washington, if I could acquire some good English-language maps of Korea, but both, with weary you-should-know-better-than-to-ask sighs, had refused. In the end I discovered you could go into an ordinary Seoul shop and buy as decent a 1:250,000 or even 1:50,000 map as you could wish for, but for the script being in either Chinese characters (which I did not understand) or hangul (which I was trying to). I thus bought coverage of the entire country in the smaller-scale 1:250,000 for about £5; and I was not particularly alarmed to notice, in red letters on the reverse, a strict enjoinment to the effect that were I to take the map abroad without permission of the director general of the National Institute of Geography, I could be sent to prison for two years or fined 2 million won. After use, the warning ended, the map should be destroyed by fire.
Now I was really ready. So I returned to Kimpo’s domestic air terminal, bought myself a single ticket for Cheju Island, and waited as flight after flight took off, filled to the brim with honeymoon couples bound for the warm wildernesses of the south. I wondered if I would ever get on a plane—the airline seemed puzzled about how to handle someone travelling alone. But, as I was to discover a dozen times a day from that moment on, there was always someone happy to oblige an Englishman. ‘Meeguk saram?’ they would inquire, asking if I was an American. ‘Anio,’ I would say brightly, ‘Yong guk saram.’ No, I’m English. And anxious faces would break into broad smiles, and someone would always come up with a mysterious phrase that instantly put me on my best behaviour. I have no idea to this day which schoolbook taught it to them, but someone would invariably say, in tones of some gravity, ‘English—an English gentleman,’ and whatever problem I had mentioned would instantly disappear.
So on this occasion, the first, the formula worked a treat.
‘Mian hamnida—excuse me, but when may I get on a plane to Cheju-do?’
‘Meeguk saram?’
‘Anio, yong guk saram.’
‘Ah, an English gentleman. Please, have this seat. Next flight. Ten minutes. Annyong-hee kashipshiyo!’
And thus bidden Godspeed, and having presented identifications galore (travellers inside Korea are required to show passports or papers at every verse end, so troubled are the authorities that infiltrating Northerners might wander freely about), I boarded the plane for the south. They had put me right at the very back of the aircraft, and I had an interesting chat with a man who confessed to being a Korean version of a sky marshal and had a very large and wicked gun hidden under his jacket, which he was nonetheless quite h
appy to show me, demonstrating how he would try to stop a hijacker, should one be so foolish as to try.
The flight took fifty minutes—a journey by air that took Mr Hamel ten days by horse and would take me, on Shanks’s pony, rather more than a month. I stepped off the plane into a fierce westerly Cheju Island gale that nearly swept the Akubra from my head. So the journey begins, I thought to myself; and, like Hamel when he heard of the orders to remove his party to Seoul, ‘I knew not whether to Rejoyce, or be Troubled.’ I found my way to an hotel and slept my last night in luxury before beginning the long march northwards, up to the border.
2. The Irish Island
On the 18th, we spent all the Morning in enlarging our Tent; and about noon there came down about 2000 Men, Horse and Foot, who drew up in order of Battel before our Hut…They were as far from understanding us as if they had never known Japan; for they call that country Jeenare, or Jirpon. The Commander, perceiving he could make nothing of all we said, caus’d a cup of Arac to be fill’d to every one of us, and sent us back to our Tent.
‘After Dinner they came with Ropes in their hands, which very much surpriz’d us, imagining they intended to strangle us; but our Fear vanish’d when we saw them run altogether towards the Wreck, to draw ashore what might be of use to them. At night they gave us more Rice to eat; and our Master having made on Observation, found we were in the Island of Quelpaert, which is in 33 degrees 32 minutes of Latitude.
Hendrick Hamel, 1668
The monument to Hendrick Hamel—my starting point—stood squat, ugly, looking out of place and very Bauhaus, on a windy hillside of short and springy grass a hundred feet above the sea. It was built of concrete blocks and had the legend ‘Hamel kinyombi’ engraved in hangul at the top. A plaque recording the efforts of various philanthropies—such as the Borneo Sumatra Trading Company Ltd and one Carel H. Pappenheim—that were responsible for its construction was weathering nicely in the rain on one side; and on the other, a plaque recorded the wreck of the Sparrowhawk and the consequent writing of ‘the first description of Korea ever published in the West’. This, then, undistinguished a structure though it might be, was as much a memorial to a book as to a shipwreck—a pleasant symmetry, I thought, as I hitched my pack onto my shoulders, turned my back on the sea, dug my stick firmly into the turf, switched on my tape recorder, and took the first step to the north.
I was at a village called Mosulpo, a pretty affair of blue—and orange-roofed cottages that huddled out of the wind in the shadow of a huge basalt cliff at the southwest tip of Cheju-do. (The island’s name, given by mainlanders, is memorably prosaic: che means ‘across’ or ‘over there’, ju means ‘district’, and do means, in this instance, ‘island’—hence Cheju-do is ‘the island district over there’). The locals either fished or farmed, and one might have supposed, being so far away from the realities of the Korean politics (and that is one reason why so many peninsular Koreans come to Cheju on holiday, removing themselves from the tensions prompted by the proximity of the North and the DMZ), that there would be no sign of the more distressingly martial side of life. But even down here the military were all around. High up on the cliff—my notebook records it, as though I were a birdwatcher, as my very first sighting—were two men quite obviously from the US Army. They were wearing full combat gear—packs, rifles, gas masks, rain capes, heavy boots, helmets—and when I spotted them they were gaily abseiling down the sheer basalt face. The first to get back to solid earth—a large man with more muscles than seemed decent—came over to me.
‘You ’murican?’ he inquired, in an accent indubitably from south of the Mason-Dixon line. I confessed that I was not. He spoke in a machine-gun staccato. ‘Limey, huh? How’re ya doin’? Goddamn shit hole of a place this is, Korea. You like it?—shit, you must be crazy. Come over ’n’ see us at the camp. We’ll set you right. I can tell you a thing or two about this place. Nothin’ else to do in this place ’cept get seriously drunk. No pussy. No pussy for miles. Nothin’. Come over ’n’ see us.’ And with that he left to retrieve his friend, who was shouting anxiously and appeared to be stuck on his rock.
I hauled up a steady rise along the flanks of the cliff, and was soon, puffing like a pug engine, in open country. It was just like the West of Ireland, like Connemara or Donegal. There were dry stone walls between the little fields, and there was cotton grass, and the green shoots of new barley, and a dusting of bright yellow from the spring meadows of rape. Curlews were singing, and early swallows swooped low over the little rivers. A steady, soughing wind riffled the moorland grasses, and over to my right a ragged line of foam showed where the land tilted down, via a narrow paludal plain, to its drowning in the sea. The weather was very Irish, too; there was a thin grey mist, through which a milky sun shone fitfully, and occasionally great gusts of cool and pleasant dampness whirled down from the sky. It was refreshing, exhilarating weather—perfect, had I been a professional walker, for a marathon.
But on this first day I was not planning more than the gentlest of hikes. ‘Wearing in my boots,’ was how I excused myself. A friend in Hong Kong had given me the name of a young Cantonese man, Lawrence, who ran a hotel at Sogwipo—a honeymoon hotel, the friend had said with a knowing leer. So I kept to a more easterly track than Hamel’s men had done, and by nightfall I had reached the outskirts of the village and had found the hotel. It looked like an immense inverted jelly mould—it had been designed by a firm of Hawaiian architects—standing on the clifftop overlooking the southern sea. Lawrence was waiting for me. ‘You really did walk here?’ he asked, incredulous. He was a plumpish young man with a disagreeable pallor of grey on yellow, and he made it abundantly clear that he found it unpleasant even to have to walk across a room. ‘You know the Chinese. Just lie in bed and make money, that’s us.’
His business was, indeed, honeymoons. I had seen dozens of young couples speeding by in taxis already that day (and the plane from Seoul had been three-quarters filled with them, nervous youngsters holding hands and clearly having little idea what to say to each other). The island is to Korean couples what the Adirondacks are to New Yorkers and the Channel Islands to Britons—with one significant exception. As it is well-nigh impossible for a Korean to obtain a passport (the well-worn excuse offered by the government being the need to conserve foreign exchange, the actual reason being far more complex and steeped in a political paranoia that I will discuss later), it is almost unthinkable for any Korean to travel abroad. (A businessman may, but he is obliged to hand his passport back to the government when he resigns or retires—the privilege of overseas ventures belonging more properly to his company than to him as an individual. Confucian respect for elders, however, allows passports to be kept by people over fifty, and soon, the government promises, by those over forty-five.) So most Korean couples, be they wealthy or working class, have almost no hope of spending their postmarital holiday anywhere abroad—no basking in the Balinese sun for them, unlike their Japanese or Hong Kong counterparts. The only serious trans-ocean adventure open to them is thus a journey to Cheju, the island ‘over there’. And so over there, by the tens of thousands, they flock. The Adirondacks and the Channel Islands may generally prove to be a convenient magnet for the less well-off in the West: Cheju is for everyone, with the entire spectrum of a generation there beginning its first, halting experiments in living and sleeping together.
Seven out of ten of the couples that Lawrence sees in his hotel—he reckons he sees some 36,000 a year (and to gauge the scale of this cottage industry one must note that his is but one of ten first-class honeymoon hotels on Cheju, and there are any number of meaner inns for the Korean Lumpenproletariat)—are brought together by professional matchmakers. Lawrence was not altogether approving. ‘I suppose it’s my hotelier’s greed, really. You see these wretched matchmakers sitting in the hotel coffee shops up in Seoul, with the groom’s family on one side, the bride’s on the other, and no one eating a thing. Oh yes, the matchmaker herself does; she’s not nervous at all. She’ll
have chocolate cakes—they’re usually pretty fat, these old Korean women. But everyone else is scared stiff, and if they order one cup of coffee each, for the afternoon, we’re lucky. The young boy and girl probably only have a glass of water. They don’t know what to say or do. They just sit there, looking at the table, fidgeting, looking at the backs of their hands. I’ve known café managers wanting to tear their hair out on a Saturday afternoon—every table full, seven people to a table, and no one eating anything! The manager’s lucky if he can pay one waitress’s wages for the day. Wretched women. Bane of my life.’
Usually the youngsters meet three times: once in a Seoul (or Pusan or Taegu or Inchon or wherever) coffee shop, for that initial encounter under their parents’ gaze; once at a formal dinner in one of the prospective in-laws’ homes; and once, if they’re particularly bold, on their own at a cinema or in a park or, if she’s lucky to have found a young man rich enough, in the prospective groom’s new car. (By this stage, if the arrangement has ‘taken’, the matchmaker gets her money, invariably from the parents of the bride: 5 million won in many cases—£3,000—and often a great deal more. In weddings arranged among the yangban, those who like to think of themselves as the relics of the Korean nobility, or in weddings where the prospective husband is a lawyer or a doctor or an accountant and is thus an excellent catch, the bride’s parents are commonly supposed to offer him ‘three keys’ as an inducement: a key to a new car, a key to a new apartment, and a key to the new office in which to practise his calling. Finding a suitable husband for your daughter is thus a tall order for even the most fortunate of today’s Koreans.)
The reason is a mathematical consequence of war and of the peculiar marrying habits of the Korean people. There is a custom of sorts that decrees that a girl should marry a man about four years older than herself, once he has done his compulsory stint with one of the arms of the Korean military. Girls born in the mid-1950s were the first to discover that there was a problem: when it was their turn to marry, in the late 1970s (they were then in their early twenties), they looked around for men who were then in their mid—to late twenties—born, in other words, in 1952 or 1953. But thanks to the travails of the Korean War, almost no children were conceived or born in those years, and the girls in the class of ’56, as it were, found they had to look for younger men. Like locusts, they descended on men born in 1954 and 1955, meaning that the girls poised for matrimonial bliss in the years below them suffered from what might vulgarly be termed a knock-on effect. There have, in consequence of the war, been many thousands of girls anxiously pursuing a very much reduced pool of men of the desirable age, meaning that, in order to win a traditionally suitable spouse, girls—or, rather, their parents—have to resort to extortion, bribery, and emotional grand larceny on a mighty scale. Hence the matchmakers, and hence the sobering fact that no Korean matchmaker who nailed up her shingle since the Panmunjom cease-fire was signed has ever gone to bed hungry.
Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles Page 5
