Bad Jeju

Otto von Bismarck once said that no man is an island. This still remains open to debate, but what is clear is that every island is an island.

I am currently on an island, an island called Jeju. Jeju is famous throughout East Asia for its stunning natural beauty, as well as being, according to the tourist information, an island of world peace... The idea that extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof is completely foreign to Korea, and people basically just claim whatever they want about whatever they want. Some may call it lying, I like to call it making claims of world peace.

I got to Jeju by boat. Which is the best way to get to an island, (yeah, fuck you aeroplanes). I won't tell you anything about the boat 'cos I wrote most of my postcards on the boat so you'll get an impression of it anyway. But then I got off the boat and had to do that horrible thing where you arrive in a new place and have to gather your bearings. I picked up a map and sat down to do some bearing-gathering, and as I did loads of taxi-drivers kept pestering me: "Where are you going?", "Seogwipo", "I'll take you there", "Its on the other side of the island, I'm going to take the bus, it'll cost me 3,000 won", "No no, I'll take you, it'll cost you 31,000 won", "Erm, that number is considerably larger than the one I just said", "Well then I'll drive you to the bus station", "Leave me alone", and so on...

So I got the bus to Seogwipo City, and got dropped off somewhere in that vacinity. I didn't really know where I was so I went into a tourist information place to ask. I got out my map and mimed frantically for the woman to point to where we were so I could walk to where I knew I was staying. She didn't speak any English and instead she got out a map of the whole island and started pointing at Seogwipo, and I was all like, "Yeah, I know we're in Seogwipo, but where in Seogwipo?", (I've had many maddening experiences like this in Korea, none of the streets have names so maps are basically useless, and because maps are so useless, hardly any Koreans have any clue how to read maps), at one point she got out a map of the whole of Korea and started pointing at Jeju Island. I was shocked that she thought I had somehow managed to make my way into her office without even realising what island I was on, so I decided to just walk out and figure it out on my own.

Figure it out I did when I got to the hotel I'm staying at. It is, by the way, a hotel. Despite the fact I found it on hostelworld.com, it is actually a hotel, with actual hotel rooms and actual hotel prices. Its 22,000 won a night, which isn't bad for a hotel, but is bad for a hostel. And this place was bad for a hotel. The place was swarming with bugs and the walls were covered in dead insect stains. Like, from people swatting the insects and then nobody bothering to clean it up. I decided to waste some time by using their computers, which were as slow as fuck and, I'm pretty sure, broke my phone. Ever since I lost my phone recharger in Spain I've been using a USB cable to recharge my phone, this has worked fine, if a bit slowly, for a few months, but when I plugged it into these computers, it just drained all the energy from the battery, to the point that now it refuses to recharge at all. Whenever I try to turn it on the little flashing "my battery's dead" light just flickers and the whole thing just stays dead.

A minor inconvenience you may think, afterall, I'm not going to be making any phonecalls. Well, the thing is that I've been using my phone to take pictures. And the other thing is that I'm on Jeju Island, an island that "is famous throughout East Asia for its stunning natural beauty". So this has put me in a bad mood, because after spending tens of thousands of won to get to, and stay on the island, I now have no way of recording my experiences here. Grr.

Maybe I'll try and find a cheap disposable camera. But they'll probably be a bitch to find...

Anyway, home soon! I'm getting pretty excited about getting home. To the point where I'm probably more excited about going home now than I was about going to Korea before I got here. Not to say that I haven't had a good time here, but, in retrospect, a month is a pretty long time to spend solo-travelling.