Seoul, South Korea

The final post of this trip comes from the 420 from Heathrow to Nottingham. This is because there was no time for my usual leisurely and beer-y departure lounge writing ritual in Seoul, and that’s a cock up entirely of my own making. 

Let’s re-cap on the sleep situation: Thursday night (Suzhou) was in a scuzzy prostitute-infested hotel and I must have got 3-4 hours sleep. Friday was spent at Disneyland, and I got less than an hour of sleep on my Shanghai-Tokyo flight overnight. Early Saturday morning I arrived in Tokyo, fell asleep on the train into the city (probably for 45 minutes), and overnight I flew to South Korea and didn’t sleep on that flight either. On Sunday I arrived in Seoul, dropped my backpack off at my hostel reception (more on this later), and joined a tour to the DMZ which departed at 07:45. No sleep there either. When I (finally; full story below) arrived back at the hostel at 18:00 I was disgustingly sweaty and the sort of exhausted I’ve never felt before even after 7 years of shift work, which I guess can only truly be appreciated after getting 5 hours sleep in 42 hours. I had ‘a little nap’ and woke up at 08:14, which would have been fine, but my flight to London was at 10:35, the airport is a 60 minute train ride away, and I’d emptied my backpack on the floor in an unsuccessful attempt to find clean pants. I made it to the boarding gate as it closed and made the flight by the width of a ball-hair.

Reading about that solid sleep might fool you into believing that this was a nice hostel. It was not, but I didn’t really pick up on it when I was dropping my backpack off in the morning. I’d noticed it was up a pretty grotty alleyway that smelt of fish and had weird men starting at me, but nothing too bad. I arrived in that 5th floor room (no lift, obviously) exhausted, sweaty and broken - and had a little cry when I saw what I’d signed up for. The air conditioning was unplugged, which was probably for the best, because you wouldn’t have wanted the amount of water dripping out of it mixing with electricity. The stains on the wallpaper hinted that this wasn’t a new problem. The room had no window, and the duvet cover didn’t completely cover the duvet which meant the stains of miscellaneous origin were very obvious. I was trying to persuade my subconscious mind not to ask questions like “how did they manage to get THAT stain THERE?!”, purely out of fear for the answer, but that positivity only lasted until I saw the first flea. And that’s how tired I was, that I stayed (sleeping on the top bunk to minimise contact, obvs). 

The de-militarised zone (DMZ) tour was good, but possibly would have been better if I wasn’t on the edge of hallucinating from tiredness. I got as close to the North Korean border as it’s possible to get from the south (and possibly closer than is advisable), and saw the stark contrast between the two nations from an observatory at the top of a mountain. The DMZ runs through countryside so there’s very little comparative architecture between the two Koreas - only nature, which I expected to be identical, but wasn’t. My guide explained that the nuclear sanctions imposed on the North had affected the country so greatly that they had to use any available fuel to survive, which included every single tree right up to the border. Next I visited Dorasan train station, which is right on the border and, theoretically, connects South Korea to China, Russia and Europe via rail although no trains currently cross the N/S border so it’s futile and empty. I also walked through one of the tunnels dug under the DMZ from the North to invade the South. 4 of these tunnels have been discovered and there are suspicions that there are still more to find, or even more currently being dug. 

As I said, the tour was good, but not good enough to override my tiredness. After being dropped off in central Seoul afterwards I was running on a kind of empty I’ve never been before. I was in a different part of town to where I’d joined the tour and had no idea how to get back to my hostel. I figured the metro would be my best bet. I walked for almost an hour to find a station (no mobile data, and no map) and working out where I needed to be and which line I needed to get there took another half hour. Next came the ticket buying, which was scuppered because I didn’t have any Korean currency, the ticket machines only accepted cash, and no ATM would accept my Monzo card. I loitered outside a Starbucks to steal sufficient WiFi to order an Uber, failed, and inwardly cried. I walked the 2.3 miles back to the crappest hostel in the world in 32 degree heat, dragged my backpack up to the 5th floor, and outwardly cried.