It's a Private Party

Last night I went up to the bar on the hostel rooftop.  I have been going up there at night to socialize with people, and just chill on the roof.  I saw a group of people who looked like locals, and went over to say hi to them.  I asked this guy how he was doing today, and he responded with, "Actually, this is a private party."

Well, my first thought was, um, I don't think so.  I saw the greeter/bouncers there, the guys I see every day, they greeted me warmly, and didn't say anything about no entry.  So maybe you and your buddies are having a private party, but, clearly there are other people here from the hostel who are not hanging out with you.  My second thought was, "Oh, you're an asshole." Yes, I understand. I know asshole. I don't quite speak fluent asshole, because I just don't hang out much in the asshole community, but I do know enough asshole to know the response is to walk to a different place and find friendlier people who are not assholes.  Which I did.

See, if you don't speak enough asshole, your response might be to SAY the things that I was thinking.  That would be a mistake. When assholes are surrounded by their fellow assholes, and you say things to them, they often become hostile assholes. I have observed this in the wild. And a flock of hostile assholes is likely to stampede. You don't want to be around a hostile asshole stampede. It can get ugly.

I have met a lot of people here who are not assholes. Many locals are pretty cool and interesting.  One strange thing I have noticed in the Philippines (and I even Googled to confirm this) is that Filipinos often say "yes" when they mean "no". Seriously. Check it out yourself if you don't believe me.  So if somebody answers with "yes", but they have weird body language or you have the smallest reason to suspect that they don't mean to answer in the affirmative, you have to kind of gently ask follow-up questions (but maybe not questions that require a yes or no answer) or explore the matter further to determine if it is really a "yes". There is some kind of cultural thing where some Filipinos just don't want to say "no".  Maybe part of it is that they want to acknowledge that they heard what you said. I really don't know.

Security in Makati

I can't speak for the rest of the Philippines, since I've only been to the area near Manila, but there is some serious security in Makati, and other places in Metro Manila. There are private security guards all over the place. They are on the corners in the streets, at the doors of the establishments they are guarding, and even running crowds through metal detectors in some cases. Sometimes they carry very large and powerful guns.

There are metal detectors to enter the subway, and also at the entrance of many malls. But the guards manning them don't seem to take the same methodically rigorous approach that you might see at the airport (not that airport searches are the gold standard, but they seem to have certain protocols that the searchers try to adhere to...still, I made it through the last two airport searches that I went through having forgotten that I had a bottle of water in my carry-on, and nobody confiscated it either time). They seem more like they are going through the motions. The searches they conduct at most of the metal detectors in Metro Manila seem kind of half-hearted.

Also, you can't just walk down any street in Makati. There are wide swaths of neighborhoods that are like gated communities, only there are no gates; there are only guards that will not permit you to enter at all the entry points. Then there are also streets for blocks on end that are completely closed off by physical gates and fences like the kinds you might see around paid attractions like amusement parks or outdoor concert venues. And then there are also long barrier fences that fence off poorer neighborhoods from major arterials.  I've been frustrated many a time in trying to just walk from one place to another. You can't just look at Google Maps and follow the streets to try to get somewhere.

Even the hostel I am staying at has a lot of security. There are lots of security guards all over the place at the hostel.  I've noticed they have guest books at the door, so they must know who is staying there and who has checked out. But there is a rooftop bar that is open to the public, so outsiders are allowed to come in to patronize the bar. One thing that is really a bit different and maybe even weird is that all the employees, or at least many of them, seem to know my name. When I'm walking around in the hostel, I'll often be greeted with "Hello, Stuart." Today I was walking around town, and I ran into a couple of hostel employees who greeted me by name.

Hanging out in Makati

I arrived in the Philippines, at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, a little before midnight on August 16^th. I had searched for the cheapest flight out of Japan, to wherever, using Skyscanner.com, which is now my go-to app for looking for cheap flights. No shit. You can pick a country...in this case, I picked Japan, and sort for the cheapest flights out of that country, and you don't even have to pick a destination. It will show you the cheapest flights, and then you can look at every day of the month to see if you can find them even cheaper. You can pick a destination, of course, if you want, either by city or by country, but in this case I was just looking for a roulette wheel spin to my next destination. The cheapest international flight I found was from Fukuoka to Manila, for about eighty bucks. So Manila it is. I hadn't even been considering the Philippines, but since the flight was cheap, I went for it.

The flight was on Cebu Pacific Air. I had never even heard of this airline. Once I got directed to their site to book my flight, I had to opt out of all kinds of sneaky add-ins that would have increased my fare a lot more. The only one I kept was the one-bag option, so I could check my backpack (it's a little too big to be a carry-on), and then I could carry my other bag as a carry-on.

As a sidebar, I'm traveling with the Osprey 70 Farpoint, which is probably one of the best travel bags, in my opinion. It has a 55 liter main bag, and then a front compartment bag that holds 15 liters that unzips from it to make a day pack. The day pack is a little small and has not many extra pockets, but it is great as a little day companion for a little bit of stuff. But right now, I am carrying a pair of tennis shoes in my day pack, and they take up almost the whole pack. They are the original shoes I brought with me, and I had to change to a pair of sandals because I was in the rainy season in Korea and they kept getting waterlogged. But I take them out and store them in my hostel room if I need the day pack for an outing. I haven't worn them at all since I switched to sandals, but eventually I will if it gets cold (which it won't for a while). I originally was traveling with just the Osprey, but as I gathered food and had the need for liquids, I started needing another bag. So I bought a cheap but highly functional extra bag that I wear on my front, but it doesn't have a lot of stuff in it, and I'm using it mostly for food and drinks. I was trying to avoid a front bag, but am trying to keep it down on the stuff I keep in it, so it is not too burdensome. Usually I have about 14 kilos of stuff in the Osprey, and two to six kilos in the front bag.

Anyway, I finished my interaction with the Cebu Pacific website, which is buggy and difficult, and full of scams that you have to opt out of. It probably took me two hours to book my flight. I figured that would be good practice for the Philippines.

After booking my flight, I went online to research the Philippines, and Manila in particular, since I was going there. There are some really cool places to go in the Philippines. The ones I have heard are the best are Palawan, Cebu, and the area with the rice terraces in the north part of the island of Luzon. I have even talked to one guy who went to Mindanao and had a great time, even though it is the island that is the center of the Muslim insurgency in the Philippines. But the shit I read about Manila scared the crap out of me. If you want a taste of the stuff I read, Google “Manila Danger” for some hair-raising tales. There were incidents of people being robbed at gunpoint, pickpockets everywhere, gangs of people looking to rip people off at the airport, etc. But there were also a lot of people insisting that it was a perfectly safe place, and they had had no problems. So, even though I had some trepidation, I decided to choose to believe that the danger stories were outliers, and most people have a safe and fun time. But the downside was that I only chose to stay in the Metro Manila area and not go to any of the amazing scenic spots. At least now I know where they are, so the next time I come, I can go to those places. But this time, I chose to chill just in Metro Manila (actually in Makati, which is one of the cities that makes up Metro Manila), until I split for my next destination, Vietnam, in which I will allow myself a lot more wandering space. And, really, I need the chill time. I've been traveling intensively for five months straight, and it is good to just sit and not have any expectations. So if any of you want to push any destinations in the Philippines on me, and insist that my trip won't be complete without them, well, that would be awesome, but my circumstances are different. Maybe (probably) next time.

Anyway, as I said earlier, I arrived a little after midnight. I had some trepidation about arriving so late, and wasn't sure I'd be able to find a safe cab, but it all worked out. Coming out of the airport was a little bit intense, because I had just arrived, didn't know what to expect, and was suddenly surrounded by throngs of humanity wanting to offer me all kinds of shit. I couldn't even pay attention to what they were offering, because they were all shouting over each other; all I could say was, “No, thanks.” It was human sensory overload in the worst way...I've had sensory overload from flashing buildings in Seoul and Tokyo, but never anything on the human interaction level like I did coming out of this airport. I just watched my shit, payed attention to my surroundings, had packed for security, and it was fine.

I took a Yellow Cab to the hostel from the airport because I heard they were the safest, though they were the most expensive. But it really wasn't that bad. It was about twelve bucks (about 500 and something pesos). I could have gone cheaper, and would now that I have experience with Manila, but it provided me with safety at the time, and it was the right choice to make with the information I had at the time. The Yellow Cab was very professional and dropped me off right at the hostel and waited until I had made my way in.

This hostel I stayed at (and am still staying in) is in Makati, which is the financial center of Manila, and has a reputation for being the safest area in the Metro Manila area. It is called Z Hostel, and it is a very secure and comfortable place, although maybe the security is a bit on the overkill side. But, better safe than sorry, right?

So, I get to the hostel, a little after midnight, and for some reason I'm not ready to crash yet. On the plane, I had a whole row to myself, so I just put up all the armrests and lay down on all the seats. There were three empty seats next to me, and they made a nice sleepy bed, so I relaxed (I wouldn't say that I slept, but I had a restful, peaceful time) on a bed made up of the three seats making up my row. I went up to the rooftop bar at the hostel, and immediately encountered a group of young-uns who were going out partying. Well, who am I to be the stickler in the party plans...of course I'm going out with the ravenous throng. So I followed someone who knew their shit about where to go in the area, and went with a group of people after midnight to some bar in the area, even though I have no idea where I am. Everybody ended up dancing on the dance floor, and of course I danced most of the night and even ended up dancing in the gogo cage for quite a while. Somebody had shown me a video they took of it, but they disappeared into the crowd. We all ended up out until about 6 in the morning; I was kind of shocked when I left the club and found that it was daylight outside. The next day I slept most of the day.

Just a few blocks away from the hostel is P. Burgos, which is one of the major red light districts in Makati. There are highly aggressive sex workers on the streets soliciting customers. They will follow you down the street and even get grabby sometimes. The strange thing is that the highest concentration of sex workers are right by the police kiosk on the street...though prostitution is illegal, it seems to be fairly tolerated. But who knows if selective enforcement occurs. The traffic light at the corner of P. Burgos and Kalayaan has never worked the whole time I have been here. The intersection is very busy and anarchic. People are constantly trying to force their way through from all sides and it can sometimes lead to gridlock. It is also really hard to cross the street there, as everybody is trying to run you down from all sides. Well, I wouldn't really say their purpose is to run you down, they are just trying to break through and make it through the intersection, and pedestrians are just potential collateral damage, having to really watch their asses as they make their way across the street. Metro Manila traffic is just plain awful almost all of the time. You can be stuck in gridlock for a good portion of the day trying to make your way across the area, which happened to me in the jeepneys I took. Even the traffic coming from the airport when I took a taxi at midnight was fairly bad.

I spent the next few days exploring the area in Metro Manila. Metro Manila is made up of several cities all clustered around the Manila area. I am staying in Makati, so I've probably seen more of that city than any of the other cities in the area. But I have also been to Manila proper, and spent a lot of time in Intramuros, the old walled city of Manila, which was the original site of the city of Manila back in the 16^th century. It was also the center of governance during the Spanish Colonial period, which ended in the late 19^th century when the Philippines were transferred to the US after the Spanish-American war. Due to three centuries of Spanish colonization, almost all the place names are in Spanish. But this overlay of Spanish is illusory, as hardly anyone speaks Spanish...it is just a vestigial remnant of a long-ago period of Spanish Colonization of the country. I don't think I've ever been to a place where there is such a disconnect between the place names and the language; it is really kind of strange and interesting. However, there are a few borrowed words from Spanish in the Tagalog language. Many more people speak English, which is an official language of the Philippines, along with Tagalog.

When I was heading to Intramuros, I took a jeepney to the Manila Metro Station. In Manila, the Metro does not cover a lot of the area as it does in many other cities, so jeepneys have evolved to fill the transportation void and get people from areas not covered by the metro to the metro stations. So daily transportation for people in Metro Manila is usually a two or three step process. You either walk or take a jeepney to the metro station, take the metro, and then walk or jeepney to your destination. Or in some cases, you might just take a jeepney, or a series of jeepneys. They are incredibly cheap; the usual fare is seven pesos, which is about fifteen cents in US dollars. When a jeepney is starting its route, it will usually sit there for a while until enough people have boarded to make it worth it to get going. I'm not sure what the tipping point is, but it seems to be at least about half full, though if nobody else is coming for quite a while, it will probably take off. The stops are very loose...you can just let the driver know you want to get off, or people on the sidewalk will hail the jeepney like you might a taxi. Jeepneys started out after World War II as converted jeeps that have been elongated, as there were a lot of Jeeps left over after the war, but now they are manufactured especially for their intended purpose. They seem to be pretty much a phenomenon solely of the Philippines. The jeepney has two rows of bench seats which are basically long padded boxes, one one each side. It has about four feet of vertical clearance; not enough to stand up, but enough to take a seat. And if the seats are full, people can congregate on the back bumper and hang on to the rails in the back. You hand your fare to the driver, and those in back will pass their fare to the front. I have seen street children, some looking as young as about three, snatching rides on the jeepneys just hanging from the bumpers with their butts barely above the ground. And there are a lot of street children in Manila. Some of them are begging or sleeping by the sidewalk or street, and I've even seen naked toddlers walking around with nobody else in sight.

After taking the jeepney, I got off where almost everybody was getting off, at the train station. I took the train to Central Station in Manila, which was the closest station to Intramuros, and walked the rest of the way. There are many pedicabs that try to aggressively recruit people for rides to Intramuros from the station, but I wanted to walk. After leaving Intramuros and taking the train back, I got on a jeepney again, but it was going the wrong way. On the way there, I was told to take a jeepney going to “Buendia”. So I tried that again, but this time it meant it was starting from Buendia (which is the name of the boulevard and also the name of a train station, though it turns out there is more than one Buendia station far from the other one...that is a phenomenon that is repeated in Metro Manila, as there are many stations with the same name, sometimes nowhere near each other), and going to one of the other destinations listed on the jeepney. Jeepneys usually have several stops or destinations listed on the side. If you are not familiar with all the destinations, which are mostly stations in Metro Manila, it is easy to get on the wrong jeepney. Anyway, this jeepney dumped me off, after passing through some of the sketchiest neighborhoods I had yet seen, in the middle of Pasay City. I ended up walking back to Makati from there rather than risk taking another jeepney to an unknown destination. I will have to learn more about the names of the destinations and where they are if I want to take more jeepneys. But I'll only be in the Philippines for a couple of weeks, so I may not have time to become all that familiar with the names of all the places. There is a map of jeepney routes online, but I took a look at it and it is a confusing, tangled mess. And they probably change all the time...they are all run by independent operators.

In the next few days, I spent more time exploring the Metro Manila area. I walked across the river from Makati to Mandaluyong, which is a much poorer area than Makati. Many of the streets in Mandaluyong are badly torn up and filled with open sewage and inadequate drainage from the frequent rainstorms of the rainy season. The prices for almost everything there are cheaper than they are in Makati. I also visited Quezon City, which is a fairly large city and also one of the wealthier regions. I'll probably spend the rest of my time here just exploring more of Metro Manila and checking out the scene here.

The Capsule Hotel in Kumamoto, and Some of the Previous Places

I'm staying in my second capsule hotel in Japan, here in Kumamoto. Even though the sleeping compartments are small, it is almost like staying in a spa. There are hot spring baths that I use every day, you can opt for massages and other treatments (of course for an additional price), and there is a large common "relaxation room" filled with recliners with TV sets at the end. I'm laying in a recliner now, but I have the TV off. I'm the only one in the room right now. They have blankets in little cubbies that you can put on the recliner or cover yourself with.

When you check in, they assign you a robe and towels at the front desk. You have to put your shoes in a locked shoe compartment before entering, and they also assign you a locker that has the same number as the compartment you sleep in. There is a flat screen TV, a radio, an alarm clock (which i somehow accidentally set for this morning while pushing buttons on the console), a light, and an outlet. Though Japanese outlets are the same as the ones in the US and Canada, they all only have two prongs, so I still have to use an adaptor for my laptop, since it has three prongs. But anything else I have that uses electricity has two prongs.

One thing I like about this capsule hotel in Kumamoto versus the one in Tokyo is that you get to keep the key to your shoe locker. In Tokyo, you had to turn it in to the front desk before they would give you your other locker key, so you kinda had to beg for your shoes. And sometimes there was a long line at the desk, so I had to wait quite a while. But now I can retrieve my shoes right away. This capsule hotel also allows fen ales to stay here, whereas the one in Tokyo was for males only.

In this capsule hotel, the little molded plastic shelf to put things on in the capsule is very small. It barely fits my cellphone. The one in Tokyo was about three or four times the size.  You have to vacate the capsule for a couple hours around ten in the morning, and take everything out of your capsule, so they can change out the bedding and clean the capsules. It's not a big deal, I am usually either touring the city, or hanging in the relaxation room. But I wish the relaxation rooms had outlets in the recliners. The recliners will recline all the way to flat if you want.  Oh, I just found a recliner that has a wall outlet next to it, sweet. It looks like it is the only one. There are people who live here long term also, because it is cheap. I could see doing that, at least for a while. This one is a little more expensive than the one in Tokyo...it is about 25 bucks versus about 17 a night in Tokyo. But here you can pay your whole stay up front; in Tokyo I had to pay each day at a time even though I had reservations for several days. Also here I chose to keep my backpacks with me in a little corner outside the capsule, rather than keep my big pack behind the front desk and my little pack in the locker. I saw lots of people doing that in Tokyo and nobody messed with their stuff. I have locks on my packs and not much of value in them anyway.

The last place I stayed was in Miyazaki, at a place called the Peace House. It was a fairly nice looking and clean place, but it was difficult to get to from the train station and far from everything in town. The woman who ran the place was very nice and accomodating, but spoke only Japanese. Fortunately, I met a guy named Takeshi who drove me all sorts of places for the two days I was there and basically acted as my personal tour guide, so it wasnt a big deal that the place was far from everything. But it was so sweltering hot that I had difficulty sleeping at night. At least in the sweltering place I stayed in Osaka, there were fans that blew right on me so I could sleep. Not here. I even got out of bed at one in the morning to take a shower so I could cool off, but there was a line of people who had the same idea. Finally I got in to the shower, but once I got back in bed it was just as hot again.

In Kagoshima, I stayed in an actual hotel, because I couldn't find hostels. Hotels are good because they give me space to repack well, whereas in a hostel I usually have to just cram things wherever I can stuff them.  Before Kagoshima, I stayed in some of the cheapest places I had stayed in Japan, in Kyoto and Osaka. Between the two cities, I stayed five nights, and paid about ten bucks a might. In Osaka, the rooms were about the size of a capsule hotel, but with full size ceilings. No air conditioning, but the fan made it tolerable. It was also a fairly social place, and there were always people gathered around in the common areas. I met people from several different countries. The strange thing was that the elevator only stopped in the odd floors. I stayed on the sixth floor, and had to walk up or down the steps from the fifth or seventh floors. And I was newly injured from my fall in Kyoto, so it was not terribly easy.  In Kyoto, the hostel was really nice, and it was hard to believe that it was so cheap. It was right near the Kyoto Zoo, and was very well located for making my way around town.

My Tumble in Kyoto, and Down and Out in Osaka

I'm in Kyoto Station. I'm in a great mood; I've had a wonderful day. Actually, a wonderful past few days. Come to think of it, my week has been over the top.  I'm getting ready to go to Osaka, my next stop in Japan.

The only minor bummer to this exceptional week was that last night, before I went to bed, I went to feel in my pocket for my subway passes (I had two of them...I got one in Fukuoka and got another one in Tokyo before I realized that they were redundant because just about any that you get in any major city works all over the country), and they were gone. They had been there ever since I got them in Japan, and now they were just inexplicably not there.

My first reaction was to freak out. But I soon realized that it was not that big a deal, that I could just get another subway pass, and that I'd only lost $15 or so stored on it. So take it down a notch, be mellow. But it's not that easy. I had just been arranging some of my further travel plans before going to sleep, and I discovered the missing passes right before I turned off the light to go to sleep. I'm pretty sure I know what happened. I bought some rice snack crackers, and stuck them in the same pocket, and at one point when I pulled them out to munch on them, I probably pulled the cards out too, and they fell on the ground somewhere. But letting that go when you're falling asleep...it shouldn't be that big a deal, right?

Anyway, I did manage to fall asleep after a period of unjustified, overemphasized worry about the stupid passes. And I woke up the next day just making a cursory search for them, realizing I had probably dropped them somewhere walking around the city, mourning slightly, and mostly letting it go. I walked around the city a little more, and finally made my way to Kyoto Station by taking a bus...this time I had to pay cash, because I couldn't use a subway pass (the pass works on the buses as well).

So. Back to Kyoto Station. I get off the bus, and I am walking to catch the train, when my left foot catches a pavement brick that is sticking up maybe a centimeter or two higher than the other bricks. I trip on it, and I start to stumble. My first thought is that I'll just easily right myself, and my body acts like that is just going to happen, because it should in this scenario. But I have my full pack on, and my center of gravity is totally altered in a fashion that I'm not prepared for. So instead of catching myself, I watch in horror as I just continue to tumble downward, down, down. My brain is catching up to the reality of what is happening, as compared to the initial perception of what it thinks should have happened, and comes to the sudden realization that this is going to be bad. I careen to the ground, trying to catch myself as best I can, but nothing is working as it should due to the changed center of gravity. I hit the ground in several places, the last of which is my face slamming into the ground right at my right cheekbone.

I'm lying on the ground, stunned. There is a huge rush of people just making their way by me. Nobody stops to see if I'm all right. In fact, they seem to speed up. I'm an uncomfortable obstacle to the next place they are going. I'm lying on the ground, groaning. People are passing by, like purposeful, congruent meteors, and I can't even gather my thoughts yet. There is just a rush of pedestrians going to the next vortex of their overburdened lives. It's as though I'm not even there, bleeding on the ground.

And, yes, I am bleeding. I'm bleeding profusely from my left toe, sticking out of my sandaled foot, and overflowing onto the ground. The skin is torn pretty badly, and there is a lot of blood dripping out. I slowly start to take stock as the constant rush of commuting gazelles flits by me. Both knees have abrasions of the type that go into the white stuff at the fatty layer. My left arm is abraded similarly in one spot, and has spotty abrasions down the forearm. But it's the left toe that is really throbbing and bleeding heavily. I manage to start to stagger to my feet as the pedestrian gazelles passing me part slightly in an acknowledgement to my slow but increasing verticality. I walk a few meters to get out of the pedestrian zoo and sit in a place under a map of the station. I remember I have a few band-aids in my pack and dig for them. I am overwhelmed at this point. I am starting to shiver, and my teeth are rattling, and I think to myself, I'm going into shock. I pull out the band-aids and first start to stem the blood flowing from my toe. The skin looks completely separated, but I'm not really looking at it, I'm just trying to cover it so it won't continue to bleed. I put three band-aids on it haphazardly. Each is jutting out awkwardly, but it is covered; still I can see blood seeping through. Then I attend to the other abrasions and cover them as best I can. They are not an immediate concern, because they are not actively pouring blood out, just sidewalk-rashed. Next, I feel my cheekbone. It is surprisingly unproblematic, considering the force with which I felt my face hit the ground. I poke and push at it enough to ascertain with a reasonable degree of certainty that nothing there is broken, at least. Still haven't seen my face in a mirror, so I have no idea what it looks like.  And I really don't give a flying horch; if it's scary, I just have more street cred.

A guy in a uniform and a station interpreter come rushing up to me. Are you OK, she asks. I tell her I'll be fine. She asks if I am sure. I say yes. She asks me several times. Really, even though I'm hurt, I'm relatively not hurt badly in a fashion that calls for medical attention (especially if I have to pay for it). I'm comparatively unscathed, when you consider what could have happened as a result of a fall like that. But I'm not in good shape. After they leave, I slowly stagger to my feet, now that I'm bandaged up. And I'd been sitting in the sun, so I sauntered aver to a shady spot to sit for a bit,  take stock of everything, and get ready to move along again.  Because of the toe injury, I'm having a LOT of trouble walking. But fuck it. I'm ambulatory, even if it is slow and painful. I'm gonna make it to Osaka. But it's not gonna be easy.

But also, mind you, I have no subway pass. I haven't eaten. I'm almost out of money. And I need medical supplies in a realm where I can't even easily figure out what a pharmacy is. All of these things would be problems easily solved if I was uninjured, but now they are big problems that require some serious planning and effort to solve.  And suddenly distances are much, much longer, because I'm hobbling in a huge amount of pain.

I slowly start trudging my way through the station to the place where the train to Osaka is. I stop at several places I see along the way and try to load up on a couple days' worth of food, and some beverages, because my instincts tell me I'm going to be trapped in some hellhole in Osaka, unable to move. I can't find medical supplies at the station; that's OK, maybe I will find a pharmacy on the way to the hotel. I don't get a subway pass because it is just too far to hobble to the subway office. But I figure out that I can take regional Japan Rail lines for free from Osaka Station to the hotel with my Japan Rail pass, though it means more walking (hobbling). Groan.

So I get on the JP train, which is going to require a transfer from Shin-Osaka Station to Osaka Station, and then beyond to hotel land. I dutifully execute the transfer, then end up dropped off somewhere in Osaka, close to the hotel where I'll be staying.

At this point, I'm still oozing blood fairly precipitously from my body's lowest region (but a zone that is damned important for general ambulation). So I have got to find a pharmacy to get some medical supplies, and I have got to get to the hotel I've booked, so I can wash this shit up...I don't want to get gangrenous cholera or whatever, and I'm really not into the amputation thing, be it for dieting, political statements, aesthetics, or whatever the fuck.

So I decide to check Google Maps for "pharmacy" and see if one comes up nearby. One is not to far away, but not quite on the way to the hotel. That's OK, I can slowly make my way there. So I slowly and methodically limp down the street to the pharmacy. When I get there, I pull out Google Translate for the supplies I need. I type band-aids, tape, hydrogen peroxide. They have those, and put them on the counter. I try to see if they have any ointment for pain, so I type ointment and then benzocaine, lidocaine. Doesn't seem like they have anything of the sort. But the pharmacist brings out some kind of ointment...I have no idea what it is, because it is all in Japanese, but I go ahead and get it.

Then I slowly hobble back up the street to the hotel. This one is not really a hostel; it has private rooms. But the rooms are tiny, musty and dingy. They are about the size of the capsule hotel I stayed in in Tokyo, but stretch all the way to the ceiling. And the light switch is in the outside of the room, in the hallway. There is a rolled up thin futon and some bedding, so I unroll it. I lay there for a while. I see some tiny smears of blood on the futon, crap, I hope they are not mine. I'm actually hoping it is someone else's blood. There is no air conditioning and it is stifling hot, but at least there is a fan. The data signal is sporadic, and the wifi doesn't work on the sixth floor, it is only on the ground floor. My room is on the sixth floor, but for some perverse reason, the elevator only goes to the odd floors, so I have to go to five or seven and walk a flight of stairs. At least I don't have to limp all the way up the stairs...i wouldnt mind taking them normally, but the toe is in pain with every step and still oozing blood beyond the bandage. And the bathroom is on the first floor...it is a communal shower room packed with tons of naked men all vying for space in one room. This is not the ideal place for dressing my wounds, but it will have to do, I guess. But later I find what looks like a mop sink on my floor, and it works better for me. I changed all the dressings I had put on hastily at the train station, washed the abrasions, and put on hydrogen peroxide and the mysterious ointment, and then covered it all with bandages and tape. Then I went to collapse in my tiny flophouse room.

Later, I make my way downstairs, and decide to try to limp around the neighborhood a little. My new toe bandage is saturated with dried blood already. I make my way into an arcade mall, and it is loaded with bars filled with older Japanese guys surrounded by young, beautiful hostesses. Looks like a money suck and an empty experience, I'll pass. There are some pachenko halls, which are some kind of pseudogambling, and little stores of all kinds. There is a small supermarket, so I get a little bit of food. Then I walk around the arcade some more, trying to practice walking without a limp...I did that a lot while healing up after I broke my ankle a couple years ago. I'm not really up for a huge amount of walking yet, so I make my way back to the hotel.

There are a bunch of people hanging out in the lobby talking, even though it's kind of a narrow space, but at least it has some chairs. It's enjoyable to sit there talking to travelers from different parts of the world. Somebody asks about my bandages, so I tell them about my fall earlier in the day. They all say they can't see any signs of injury on my cheekbone; I still haven't seen myself in a mirror, but that's a good sign. It hurts a little when I push on it, but I don't think anything is broken. We all spend several hours talking in the lobby, then I head back up to my dingy room around one in the morning to sleep.

Tokyo, Small Cars, Railway Passes, and the Capsule Hotel

In Japan, they have these smaller cars that have yellow license plates on them. They wouldn't be legal in the United States, but they're ok on the streets in Japan. They are called "kei cars", and are limited to 660 cc engines. Since my friend Philip pointed them out to me, I have been noticing them more and more.  There are really a lot of them and they make up a pretty high proportion of the cars on the road.

I arrived in Tokyo yesterday coming in on the bullet train from Fukuoka. The bullet train was a great experience and I enjoyed crossing Japan with it. I have a Japan Rail pass that allows me to take any JR train for free, but not all trains are JR trains. Some are private, and some are public but not part of JR. But I do get to take shinkansen, or bullet trains, except for the highest echelon of them, for some reason. But the ones I can take are about the same as the supposedly better ones, so I don't see why the higher status ones are not included.

The subways in each city are not included in the JR Pass, but there are regional JR trains that parallel the subways in many cases. Usually they have less stops, but they are free with my pass. All I have to do is show my pass, and I get to pass through a special manned gate at the train station. You can only get the JR Pass from outside the country, so I ordered it when I was in Korea, and got the voucher for it by FedEx at the hostel in Busan. Then, when I got to Japan, I had to exchange the voucher for the pass at the train station, and select the starting date. I also reserved tickets on the bullet train from Fukuoka to Osaka, then Osaka to Tokyo. There was only a fourteen minute layover in Osaka, so I was a bit worried about catching the next train (especially with the language barrier), but it was not a problem. I even used my JR Pass today just to get past the train gates so I could use the bathroom which was in the ticketed area. Just another perk.

Many large cities in Japan have subway systems that are separate from JR Rail. So they have subway cards you can buy and recharge with money as needed. You just swipe them at the turnstile, and it charges you the fare. In Fukuoka, the card was called Hayakaken. I got one of those cards, but when I left, I still had about ten bucks left on it. Then I got to Tokyo, and their card is called Pasmo, so I got one of those. But I didn't realize that the cards are interchangeable within both cities' subway systems (and those of many other Japanese cities), so I could have used my Hayakaken card in Tokyo. Oh, well, I can use both,  and probably in other cities as well. And I have heard they also work for buses and JR Rail, and even to make purchases in stores. But the funny thing is that I haven't even used the Tokyo subway yet, I've just been able to use the JR regional trains for free with my pass. I probably will ride the subway at some point, though.

I'm staying at a capsule hotel in Tokyo, which is a hotel that has a small chamber that you can sleep in. I have no problem with the small space (it's about two cubic meters, 1 X 1 X 2), but it is the convoluted rules that are more difficult. It is for men only, no tattoos are allowed, and you wear a robe that they assign to you. They kept my large backpack behind the front desk.  When I checked in, I had to put my shoes in a shoe locker, and it locks with a key that you can take away from the locker. Then I had to turn in that key to the front desk to get the key to my personal effects locker, which is not very big at all. The personal effects locker has the same number as the cubicle I sleep in. There is no door to the cubicle, only a bamboo mat that covers the front of it.

So every time I want to leave, I have to go to the front desk, turn in my locker key and get my shoe locker key so I can get my shoes. And there is almost always a slow-moving line at the front desk. Also, every time I want to get something out of my backpack, I have to get it from behind the front desk, and they are not very tolerant of me unpacking it in the lobby to get whatever it is I need. And I have to plan out my backpack retrieval adventure, so I can get things I need when I need them. It's kind of a pain in the ass. And whenever you leave, you are not supposed to leave anything in your cubicle, though I have seen some people leave items in there. But I take all my stuff and stuff it in the locker, then go beg for my shoes so I can leave. I suppose I could just take off barefoot, but that would probably really freak them out, and I don't really relish walking barefoot on the streets of Tokyo.

There is an outlet, a light, and a radio and TV in the cubicle. The wifi in the cube is weak and sporadic but I get a data signal in there. There is a hot spring bath, or onsen (as they are called in Japan) that comes with the capsule hotel (another plus...it's about $17 a night for the cubicle, which includes unlimited use of the hot bath and sauna), and if they see a tattoo while you are bathing naked, you could get kicked out. Everybody bathes naked in a communal fashion. This is the first one I have seen that has women walking around in the nude men area. Not women bathers, but employees of the establishment who are fully clothed; I'm not sure exactly what they do.  Some of them give massages, I think, because there are signs for massage around the place.  Some of them might clean up the place. I don't really know.

From Busan Complacence to Fukuoka Insomnia

I left Busan, South Korea yesterday morning, to fly to Fukuoka, Japan. I really wish I had taken the ferry instead of flying, but it is what it is, and I made it intact. I am not the biggest fan of flying. I don't mind the flying itself, in fact that's kind of cool. What i don't like about flying is the bureacratic part of it. The regulations of what you can bring and how you can bring stuff, the focus that is going to be placed on you by probing individuals, and the general hassles involved with getting from one side of an airport to another relatively intact. I suppose a certain amount of that is unavoidable, but some of the details get downright surrealistic. The focus on things like liquids and shoes can seem a little heavy-handed. And a lot of this seems to be peculiarly focused on air transportation rather than other forms. I always have to do a complete air travel repack. Discard the big liquids. I left a bottle of shampoo and a bottle of cooking oil behind at the Busan hostel. I also had to leave a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide behind, because you can't take that on a plane.  Find all my liquids of less than three ounces and put them in a baggie. Put all my electronics in a carry-on. Sharps (pocket knife and nail clippers) go in the checked baggage. Then when I get to my destination, I have to reassemble from the airplane repack to a more practical assembly of my stuff. But, oh, well, the airplane dance is over for me until the next time, so time to focus on new things.

My shoe crisis is somewhat resolved for now. My old shoes are waterlogged and on the verge of collapse, which led me to seek new footwear in a land where I understand very little and others understand very little from me, and shoe stores were difficult to find. My first stop was at a shoe store that was small and really didn't have many choices that worked for me, but I had to get something. So I bought some water socks and a pair of soles. They handle wetness well, but are really not meant for heavy walking. So after walking about fifty kilometers over three days, they were pretty much ruined. The soles held up fine, but they both have nickel-sized holes behind the heels. There is thirty bucks down the tube, but I had to have something on my feet. Then I found an underground mall in Busan and had a huge number of small booth stores, and a much wider selection. So I got a pair of decent walking sandals with enough fastening around the foot to provide for good support and good bottom soles. Hopefully the problem is solved for now, but I eventually will have to buy some closed-toe shoes. And right now, I'm hauling around my waterlogged old shoes that I tried unsuccessfully to dry out with a hair dryer at the old hostel, and are now taking up huge amounts of valuable space in my pack. I have just had the one pair of shoes up until now, and now I have three, which means two pair (both wet) take up pack space.

When you leave a country you've been traveling in and go to a new country that you've never been to before, you have to discard a whole set of learned behaviors that you have acquired in response to the cultural norms and prepare to learn a whole new set of strategies. But some things you learned in one country might carry over to the next one, too. You never know. What you have learned about the country you have spent time in brings you to a certain level of complacence that you have to trade for nearly constant vigilance when you get to the next place. And the whole process, combined with the constant moving and the packing and the lugging, can be exhausting. When I got to Fukuoka, I was exhausted. But I still had to find the hostel with full pack regalia attached to my body. I went through the orienteering ritual, combined with the occasional moments of frustration ritual, with the sit-and-rest-and-mentally-regroup moments, and this process led me to the hostel, after circling the block a few times to find my elusive prey. Then I checked in and got settled and just collapsed in sleep on the bed at five in the afternoon. Now I'm awake at two in the morning, kinda needing to go through my pack and get some stuff done, but everybody here is crashed out or at least peacefully perusing their digital devices in bed, so now is not the time for a repack and assessment. Oh, well. Maybe I can at least dig out my Kindle and read some travel guidebooks or something, to kind of get an inkling as to what the Fukuoka plan will be. I already excavated some snack bars, so my rumbling tummy is relatively satisfied now. Gotta get some water soon...discarded my water bottles for the airplane but forgot to get some on the way to the hostel. Wish I could reach for some water right now, but I'll live. Hopefully, I'll survive the night intact and move on to more challenges on the morrow. In the meantime, I'm here wide awake laying in bed at two in the morning.

The Case of the Waterlogged Shoes

I've had quite a saga in Korea. I've managed to spend a little over a month here, starting in Seoul, heading up to the DMZ and briefly setting foot in North Korea, to Chuncheon to Gangneung, stopping in Wonju and Jecheon, then Daegu, Jeonju and, finally, here in Busan. I've taken trains, inter-city buses, and express buses. Transportation for the most part is amazingly cheap, and there is a card called T-money that you can use in just about every city's subway and bus system. You can even use it for most taxis, and on ground transportation across the country. The transportational network is well-integrated and seamless.

South Korea in general is very high-tech. The T-money cards can have value added to them through touch pad machines; you just lay the card on the pad and add money. The machines are easy to use even if you don't understand Korean...most of them have an English option, but I used some that didn't, and they were very intuitive to follow. There are escalators that don't start up until you step on them. At first, I thought they just didn't work, and took the stairs. But then I started to walk up one escalator, and it just started moving. When you press some elevator buttons, sometimes if you press them a second time, it cancels the floor request.

South Korea also has the fastest average Internet speeds in the world. Most wifi I have used has been really fast. I never encounter wifi that you have to just be in a certain corner of the room for it to barely work, like I have in a lot of countries (including the US). Most of the hostels have touchpad locks to enter; they all pretty much work the same way. You lift up the cover, enter a code (usually four digits but sometimes it adds on a # or * key before or after the four digits), and lower the cover again, and the door unlocks.  A little song plays from the announcement speakers in the train station when your train is arriving (I think they did that in China too).

The rainy season is here in Korea, and up until I arrived in Busan, I had been lucky. I had only encountered sporadic rain, but mostly sun or rainless clouds. But since I arrived in Busan, it has been a different story. It has been raining almost constantly. It will often vary in intensity, but mostly it has been a steady downpour,  with occasional respites. I don't mind so much getting wet, especially when it is warm like it is here now. And I'd rather be wet than put on a raincoat and be uncomfortably sweaty under the plastic. But what I can't deal with are constantly waterlogged shoes, which I had had until yesterday.

The shoes I brought with me were not of the greatest quality. In hindsight, I might have bought better shoes. But I wanted shoes that fastened with Velcro straps rather than laces. This preference arose a couple years ago when I was in the Arctic wilderness in Alaska, and had shoes that were constantly coming untied, then one day I was startled by a bear, and one of my shoes was untied. I decided the next time I bought shoes, they would have Velcro straps.

My Velcro-strapped shoes have been serving me well,  but they don't do well in the rain,  and they are probably near what most people would consider their useful life anyway. But I usually wear shoes long after they become ragged, even though it is probably time to buy another pair for when they suddenly blow a sole or something catastrophic. And I have walked around a thousand miles so far, so it is understandable that they would be a little worn. And now they are constantly waterlogged from being in the rain, and rotting. No. Not a comfortable feeling when walking long distances every day (at least most days).

So I set off to find a shoe store, and try to buy some good walking sandals made of materials that handle rain well. But shoe stores are hard to find, given the language barrier and the limited capabilities of Google Maps in South Korea. I finally did find some shoe stores, but they were mostly small and had crappy selections. None of the sandals fastened well enough for walking, or had good enough soles. One store had some Crocs, which I consideted, but they didn't have any in my size (damn my big Western ape feet!). I finally found a quasi-acceptable solution at the third store I stopped at. I bought some water socks, but the soles were barefooty, so I then inserted some walking soles. It is actually not too bad, though I will need to buy some shoes pretty soon, and may also want some sandals too. And, if I get to a thirty-below kinda place in the winter, which is entirely possible, I'll need even another footwear solution. But I don't have a lot of room in my backpack...right now, shoving my other pair of shoes in there will be a challenge.  And they will most likely be wet. I've filled them with baking soda to try to keep the rot down, but they are definitely on their last legs.

Busan is a nice place, but the rain has made it more of a challenge to get around on foot. Still, it is doable. But it is not the best weather to enjoy the beaches, which I am hoping to get to soon. I spent one rainy day soaking in hot springs, which was wonderful. I went to Hurshimchung Spa at Dongnae Hot Springs. The water is a natural hot spring fed into the spa. There were several different pools of different temperatures, a medicinal herb bath, a "champagne bath" (which didn't actually have champagne in it, but it did have lemony effervescent water), and several scrub areas where you could swath yourself in salts, scrub down, and then shower. They give you a bracelet that unlocks two sets of lockers, one for shoes, and the next for everything else. And there was an outdoor hot pool that I sat in while it poured rain. I always feel so relaxed after sitting in the hot springs, so it was a great way to spend the day.

Then the next day, I took a day trip to Gimhae, and slogged my way through pouring rain all day. The regional airport, Gimhae Airport, is about halfway between Busan and Gimhae, and I passed it on the way. When I arrived in Gimhae, I went to a park that had a steep hill in it, but it started getting a little flash-floody (there was deep muddy water starting to pour down the rock steps, and rushing streams starting to form several inches deep), so I abandoned ship on that plan. So I visited a traditional market,  and the Tomb of King Suro, and walked around the town some before heading back to Busan on the train.

Daejeon and the Yuseong Hot Springs

I arrived in Daejeon on the express bus. Thus was the first time I had taken the express bus; prior to this I had taken the inter-city buses which are somewhat cheaper and stop more places. Still, the price wasn't bad; it was about twelve dollars for a ride that was at least two and a half hours. And I really couldn't see any real difference in quality. There was a TV at the front of the bus blaring some mindless daytime infotainment show in Korean, but I didn't understand what they were saying, and even if I had, it looked completely pointless.

When I first got on the bus, I was the only passenger. But at a later station, another person got on. So there were only two people on the bus for the entire rest of the ride to Daejeon. It was a very pleasant ride. The scenery was nice, as it usually is between cities in Korea, and the seats were fairly comfortable. I think they might have reclined a little more than the inter-city bus seats. Really, the only reason I took the express bus was that the express terminal was easier for me to find than the inter-city bus terminal. And with the language barrier, I went with what I could find. Actually, there are several bus terminals in Daegu. But the express bus terminals are all within a few blocks of each other, while the inter-city terminals are all over the city, and I had no idea which buses left from which terminals. And I had taken a train into Daegu...the first time I took a train in between Korean cities, so I didn't end up at a bus terminal. That was my bus strategy...to end up at a terminal, so I would know where it was.  But that only really works in the smaller cities, where there is only one bus terminal. No telling if the terminal I land at would be the same one I take off from in these multi-terminal cities.

At least my method for taking the bus (or train) is solid. I just pull up the city I am going to on Google Maps, and show it to the person behind the counter. It has the name of the city in English and Korean. So far that has worked. But I might mention that Google Maps doesn't really work fully in Korea. It won't map out your route, though it will show you the streets. But sometimes it takes some time before it is not blurry...maybe after an hour or so, the streets will show up with definition. But what is DOES do is show you what bus or subway you can take to your destination, and where to catch it, which is awesome. It took me a while to figure out that I could do that, and it took me a while to figure out that I could map "manually", that is, just follow the streets on the map, even if it won't plot the course. At least Google Maps has some functionality in Korea; in Mongolia it didn't work at all. Then there is maps.me, which works great, but didn't cover one city that I was in at all (Jecheon)...it didn't even look like there was a city there; it showed no streets. Also it has less landmarks, though I think there is the capability to add some, but you have to go to the Open Maps Project to do it. Anyway, I haven't taken the time to figure it out. But between the two of them, I've mostly been able to make my way around.

Until now, that is. When I arrived in Daejeon, I tried to look for my hotel on maps.me, and it wasn't there. Then I tried Google Maps, and it gave me a location, and a bus to take. Great! So I took the bus across town, and searched for the hotel all around. The problem was, it wasn't there. It wasn't even anywhere near where Google Maps told me it was. So here I was, stuck somewhere across town with my full pack on, walking around looking for a phantom. Luckily, some kind teenagers working at a mobile phone store saw me wandering around aimlessly, looking for a dot on the map that was right where their store was, and helped me find the actual location of my hotel with a great Korean maps app (which I have downloaded since it is supposed to be the best one, but I can't use it because it is all in Korean), and set me off on the right bus to the correct place.

So I settled into my hotel room after a couple of hours of chaos, and in the late afternoon, explored the town and walked along a couple of rivers. But the main reason I came to Daejeon was for the hot springs. They are under the town, and come out in several different places. The easiest place to find (for me, anyway, with the language barrier), was at the Yuseong Spa located at the Yuseong Hotel. They charge a little over six dollars to use their spa. They have a public bath with several hot spring pools of varying temperatures, from lukewarm to barely tolerable, and also some cold baths. There is also a medicinal herb pool, which smelled quite aromatic, and the water was brownish. It was also pumped up and roiling like a jacuzzi. I have no idea what was in it, but I spent a lot of time in there.  The medicinal pool was 38 degrees C. The hottest pool wirh a temperature gauge was 44 C, and the main pool was 41 C.  There were two saunas; one was 77 C and the aromatic one, which I used, was 92 C. The rest of the pools didn't have temperature readings.

There were some waterfall pools, and I let the waterfalls fall on my back and shoulders so the force of the water would massage me. And there was also an outdoor hot spring and cold waterfall pool. There are even places to take naps in between the different baths. There was a also a massage table, but I couldn't figure out what the fee schedule was or where you pay, so I didn't bother with that.  The baths are segregated by gender and everybody is naked. So what I'm describing is in the male area; I have no idea what the female area was like.

You have to take off your shoes before you enter, and there are two different lockers, one for shoes, and another for the rest of your personal effects. Then they give you a little electronic submersible bracelet that unlocks both your lockers. There are also saunas in there as well. Everybody has to shower before entering any of the pools. The hot springs were superb; I spent all morning there. Then I alternated between the hottest, barely tolerable pool and the cold pool to relax before leaving. I've found in the past that alternating between hot and cold water a couple of times (actually, in the gym, I used to do a steambath then a cold shower twice) relaxes me better than Valium...Try it some time, it works for me every time.

I headed back to the hotel, and took a short nap, now I'm going out to check out the city some more.

In the JSA and the DMZ

I decided to visit the Joint Security Area and the Demilitarized Zone while I was in Seoul. The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is the Orwellian name for the demarcation line between North and South Korea, and the several-kilometers-wide buffer zone that was established to keep both sides from easily invading each other. It is an ironic misnomer, because it is actually one of the most militarized zones on earth, with massive numbers of troops on each side, but ostensibly acting as UN peacemakers.

To get to this area, you have to go with a tour that has been approved by the UN. And there are some additional requirements for visiting the Joint Security Area (JSA), which is a region jointly administered by both sides for any meetings or negotiations between the two sides. You have to apply 72 hours in advance, so they can do a security clearance on you. You also have to adhere to the dress code required in the JSA, which requires men to wear a button-down shirt, long pants, and close-toe shoes. Luckily, I brought one button-down shirt with me; it is insulated and also serves as my light jacket, so it will be a little warm, but I was able to take it off and wear my t-shirt underneath after the visit to the JSA. In the entire DMZ, you have to follow all commands that you are given, and if you fail to do so, you could be expelled, fined, or imprisoned, and your tour guide could be blacklisted. It is a serious place. They also let you know that this is an actively hostile area, an if any hostilities broke out between North and South Korea, they might not be able to protect you. Hostilities have definitely broken out, but not too often, luckily. But they get ugly fast if they do. Camp Bonifas, the first major stop, is named after a South Korean dude who was axe-murdered by a party of rampaging North Koreans who decided to come over the demarcation line and stir up some shit. But the Americans and South Koreans showed them, by gum. In response, they launched “Operation Paul Bunyan” in which they forcefully and aggressively cut down a tree that obscured their view. Take that, DPRK.

And you might think that North Korea would be the ones who would be starting all the shit in the area. But you would be wrong. Former Texas Governor Bill Clements, when he was Deputy Secretary of Defense, reported to Henry Kissinger in the 1970s that hundreds of secret sabotage raids of the North by the South had taken place. And who knows what hasn't been declassified yet. But I digress.

Our tour by bus left Seoul in the early morning and headed straight for the JSA, though we stopped briefly at Camp Bonifas near the border of the DMZ first. Shortly before crossing the Unification Bridge, which was the entry point to the DMZ, pictures were strictly forbidden most of the time, though they told us they would allow some photo opportunities later. And they were not kidding around. When we entered the DMZ, a soldier boarded the bus to make sure nobody took any pictures, and at one point, he confiscated someone's camera when he suspected them of taking pictures. I don't know if they actually took pictures or not, but they ended up getting their camera back.

After the brief stop at Camp Bonifas, we arrived at the JSA Headquarters, after passing through Daeseong-dong, a tiny village that is the only civilian community wholly contained within the DMZ. The JSA is in both North and South Korea, and the demarcation line runs right down the middle of the light blue buildings where any negotiations between the two countries takes place. When we got off the bus, pictures were still prohibited. We had to line up getting off the bus, and stay in the line while they told us which way to go. Then when we were facing the actual demarcation line, they allowed a photo op for just a couple of minutes. We had to line up in double file, and were not allowed to cross a line on the ground. We were also not allowed to take any pictures to the side and had to face forward. There was a gray building in the background behind the light blue buildings, which was the North Korean post. There are soldiers constantly facing each other down on each side of the blue buildings between the North and the South sides of Korea.

Then they allowed us to enter one of the blue buildings that straddled the demarcation line. Half of these buildings are in the South, and half are in the North. There are entrances to the buildings on each side of the building from both countries. They brought us in, gave us a brief talk about the rules, and then also allowed two minutes of pictures and an opportunity to cross the demarcation line into North Korea, but only within the building. So I actually got the chance at this point to cross into North Korean territory, briefly, and get my grinning mug photographed by another tourist while I was standing next to a dour security policeman.

Once we returned from the demarcation line, we passed by the Bridge of No Return, which is a bridge directly between the two countries. It has barriers in the middle so no vehicles can cross, and technically, pedestrians could cross but for the fact that they would probably be immediately shot at, as one defector guy found out once (though he did make it across without getting shot). They stopped the bus briefly near there so we could take pictures of the bridge; it was one of the few areas where we could take pictures. Then we headed to the visitor center of the JSA, they were looser about letting us take pictures there, and let us wander around within bounds and take photos fairly freely. But you definitely don't want to wander out of bounds anyway, because if you do, the area is pretty heavily peppered with land mines. I bought a couple of bottles of North Korean wine at the visitor center. It was bloody awful...I ended up abandoning it at the hostel when I left Seoul with a sign on it indicating it was free to any taker.

We then headed out of the JSA and DMZ for a lunch break in the village of Imjingak, safely back in South Korea. There is a little park there, and a cluster of restaurants, and our lunch was provided along with the tour, and was magnificent, consisting of a huge variety of Korean dishes, mostly vegetables but there was also some meat dishes. We all shared from among the bounty of food, and there was plenty to eat. There was an opportunity to walk around the little park and the group of monuments there, and when it was time to go, we changed buses. Some of us went on one bus, and some on another, because apparently all of the people going to the JSA were on two different tours, so the tour group split into two groups to go their separate ways.

Then we headed back into the DMZ again, but not near the JSA, so I was able to take off my button-down shirt and strip down to my t-shirt. We headed through a different checkpoint, and once again, pictures were prohibited for most of the journey. This time we entered a North Korean infiltration tunnel. The North Koreans bored several infiltration tunnels into the South so that soldiers could secretly invade the South. The tunnels were painted black so the North Koreans could cling to the facade that they were coal mines. As of now, four of these tunnels have been discovered, and the one we entered was the Third Infiltration Tunnel, also known as the Third Tunnel of Aggression. Apparently this one was discovered when there was some sort of explosion while they were making it. No pictures were allowed in the tunnel, although people were taking pictures at the visitor center for the entry to the tunnel. There was a steep descent to get down to the tunnel, and then the tunnel far below the surface was so short that I had to stoop to walk through it. Luckily, they issued us hard hats, because I banged my head repeatedly on the ceiling due to the fact that it was so low. Also, there were huge numbers of gas masks lining the walls just in case. You never know what those wild and crazy North Koreans will send through the tunnel...soldiers, gas, flames...many possibilities. After making our way through as much of the tunnel as they would let us into on the tour, we made the steep climb back to the surface.

Then we headed to Dora Observatory, which is on top of a mountain in South Korea, directly overlooking North Korea. You could hear North Korea playing propaganda music through huge speakers down below. They had binoculars up there that had stunning views of the North Korean towns below, but I tried taking pictures through the binoculars, and couldn't get it to work. You could take pictures and videos, but not of a full panorama because South Korean soldiers were standing over everyone's shoulders, making sure nobody took pictures of a fortress compound on the left, because they would have confiscated the camera and blacklisted the guide who brought us up there.

We next visited Dorasan Station, which is the northernmost railroad station in South Korea, and the railroad used to keep going north of there before the Korean War, but stopped running into North Korea once the hostilities happened. This was the last stop on the tour, and after that, we headed back to Seoul. The bus that I was on apparently had some shopping thing going on as the last stop, at some mall in Seoul, but I really didn't want to shop, so I abandoned the tour at this point and just took a subway back to the hostel.

What Do You Do?

What do you do?

What do you do when you are sitting with a group of people at the hostel in Seoul, Korea, just having a good time talking in the common area where everybody is hanging out, and they all want to go clubbing, but you had been, up to that moment, thinking about turning in early.  But they all insist and plead. But you don't even have any nice clothes, just travel bum gear. They all keep cajoling until you and everybody else who is a little reticent finally want to go. Even Claire is going. Besides, it's Jack's birthday. So everybody is going out at eleven to celebrate, and everybody takes off to shower and change.

What do you do?

And then, everybody gets together in front of the hostel to go out. Is everybody there? Not yet. So everybody trickles out, and finally everybody is there.  You all wind down the streets. Some are screaming and howling on the street. Most have alcoholic beverages in their grip, downing them as the horde spins it's way down the street. You take the subway to some place where somebody knows there are some cool clubs, following their lead, but not really paying attention to where you are going. Some are still drinking on the subway. A conversation gets started on the train about black cock; Jenny tells them to shush because people are listening on the subway and many understand English. You get off the train and wind your way through some really shiny and busy alleyways, filled with flashing distractions and packed with people, and you take a while bunch of pictures.  The first couple of clubs don't pan out. The first club offers to let all the women in for free, and give them all free drinks, but screw the men. The second place has too long a line; it snaked around the block, and you can't even tell where exactly the place is.  But then you find a place, and you make your way in through the throbbing, pulsing masses of humanity. You hang out there until the wee hours of the morning, almost 4 am, dancing with everybody who is dancing with you because it is such a novelty to have an old dude there who is really vigorously dancing, and a bunch of people are taking your picture with them, and high-fiving you, and hugging you, and slapping you on the back, introducing themselves, having the kinds of conversations with you that people have that are yelled into each other's ears over the throbbing din, etc.

What do you do?

And then, what happens is what you knew was going to happen. Many of the twentysomethings who were wanting to go clubbing end up hooking up with someone because they are young and similar to everyone else there, while you end up, of course, alone, because you aren't really similar enough to anyone in there, despite the fact that you had great social interactions with everybody in there all night. But it's just not really your thing. It's not your natural habitat and you are an alien looking in, an anthropological observer turned participant in a ritual of passing that you have passed.

What do you do?

Then, the night churns on, and it is very late. You start thinking about leaving,  but you can't find anyone you came with, except for a few who have hooked up with someone in the bar, and they are now busy making out with their paramours, and everybody else is nowhere to be found. So you decide to leave, at around four in the morning. You wind your way out of the crowded bar to the elevator that serves as the entrance, and head to the street level, back out to the neighborhood with the flashing lights everywhere.

What do you do?

You go out into this shiny, flashing, confusing neighborhood that is still packed with people even at four in the morning.  And you realize that you have no idea how to get out of these winding, narrow, flashing streets. So you wander around, mostly aimlessly, until you think you recognize some stuff and you might know the way back to the subway station. But it's not a big deal. You don't have to be anywhere,  and it's not a requirement that you know particularly where you are. So you wander.

What do you do?

And as you are wandering around, one of the most beautiful women you have ever seen in your life calls out to you on the sidewalk, in halting English, "Hello, you are very handsome. "

What do you do?

You know this is not going to be what you might want it to be, but you stare at her for about a minute, and then you say, "You are very beautiful." She looks at you, not breaking her gaze, and says again, "You are very handsome." Maybe she doesn't know how to say much more than this in English. And you say again,  "And you are very beautiful." You look at each other for what seems like an eternity, but is only a few moments.

What do you do?

Experience tells you to move along, though part of you really doesn't want to. Experience. Its a bitch. You walk away, slowly, still looking at her and with her still looking at you. Then you finally avert your eyes and move on. But you know you will think about this moment later. Even if it was not what it seemed.

What do you do?

You finally find your way to the subway station, and go down the stairs to take the subway back to the hostel, but find the corridor to the train platform is shuttered and it is closed, because it doesn't run that late.

What do you do?

You start trying to figure out how to get back to the hostel. Google Maps doesn't work in South Korea, and you downloaded two other alternatives yesterday that do supposedly work in South Korea, but after you downloaded them, you found that they are solely in Korean, and so they are useless to you because you not only can't read Korean, but you can't even remotely figure out how to type Korean words, or even what order the characters are in. Then you turn to the offline maps app you have, which works like a charm, and maps out the path of several kilometers for you to walk back to the hostel. And you take a while bunch of pictures on the way. Then you finally stumble back into the hostel around six in the morning and crawl into bed. And you wake up the next day about four hours later, ready for the challenges and wonders of another day on the road.

I don't know if any of that is what you would do, but that's what I did.

Visiting Vladivostok in the Russian Far East

I arrived in Vladivostok on the evening of May 22, 2016, right around sunset.  It was a gorgeous sunset over Amur Bay coming into the city.  The Trans-Siberian journey had been amazing, and I had gotten to experience many different classes of the train in my journey from Ulan-Ude, stopping at Chita, Birobidzhan, Khabarovsk, and, finally, Vladivostok. So this would be the end of this leg of the Trans-Siberian.  When I had arrived in Ulan-Ude, my original intention had been to turn west toward Moscow and St. Petersburg, and end up in Europe shortly thereafter.  But, when I got on the Russian Railways website to buy my tickets for the Russian trains, I suddenly and impulsively decided to go east instead, towards Vladivostok.  I had no idea how this would work out in the long run, and am still figuring out as I go.  But, fuck, here I am in Asia, and there is this vast amount of stuff to see in this continent.

When I had originally started my journey, I had thought that I would spend a couple months in Australia, then head up through Southeast Asia, anchoring in Thailand, and visiting Laos and Cambodia, maybe even stopping in Malaysia and Indonesia on the way.  But the visa requirements for Russia and China soon threw cold water on that plan.  The deal is that for both Russia and China, you can only apply 90 days before you are going to go, and no earlier.  Plus, you have to map out your itinerary for those countries to apply for the visas, and you are supposed to have an exit strategy that you can show them.  But if you enter again at a later time, you don't really have to show all that stuff.  I was lucky in that I got multiple entry visas to both countries; for China, I got a ten-year visa, and for Russia, I got a three-year visa.  But I still had to plan it out and show where I was going to both countries to get the visas in the first place.  Since I could only apply 90 days prior to entry, I had to truncate my trip to Australia (two months came down to three weeks), and I had to completely blow off Southeast Asia, at least before China.  But it was worth it, because the linch pins of my trip were the Trans-Mongolian and the Trans-Siberian Railways; those were the main things that I was planning for.

So I guess the one of the reasons I changed my mind and went east in Russia instead of west, was that if I was going to take the Trans-Siberian Railroad, I was going to check out deep Siberia.  And I could always redouble at some point and go the other way, though I'm still not sure how that is going to play out.  But it will, it'll just be several months later than I originally thought it would.  And my journey, which I originally thought would take a year, is now maybe expanding to two years.  Or maybe even longer.  Hell, I don't know...I'm just going with the next thing that happens. And nothing is set in stone.

When I got to Vladivostok, I set off walking from the train station to the hostel where I was staying.  I stayed at Optimum Hostel, on Aleutskaya Street just a few blocks away from the train station, so it was fairly easy to get to.  The building where the hostel is is called “Grey Horse” by the locals, and is apparently an important landmark in the middle of the city.  One of the distinguishing features of the hostel is that there is a huge statue right in front of it.  Actually, the statue is directly in front of the building right next door, but both buildings are on a hill raised up from the street and are together in the same plot up the stairs from the street.  After a day or so, I went up to look at the statue to see what dignitary was depicted in full metallic splendor, and, to my surprise, it was Yul Brynner.  Apparently, he was born in Vladivostok, so city decided to honor homeboy.  I would often wonder as I passed the statue every day if people ever came up to Yul to ask him questions about their destiny, as he sat there, on his pedestal, gazing off to one side with his arms authoritatively resting on his hips. Yul, dude, should I move into a yurt in the fringes of Mongolia?  Should I bet it all on red? Are the voices in my head telling me the truth? OK, now I'm just having too much fun.

The hostel was a nice place to stay but crowded, and it didn't seem all that social to me, but maybe that was because I didn't speak Russian and almost everybody staying there was Russian. Very few Russians speak English, especially in Siberia...it is not like Europe, where almost everybody you encounter will speak English pretty well.  The common area was also small, and it would fill up fast if five or six people were in there, so if it was packed to capacity, it was hard to hang out there.  But at least it had a nice kitchen to cook in, once again, if it wasn't being used.  It didn't really seem like much of a hangout place, but more of a place to park and sleep at night.  Which was fine with me, because I mostly spent the greater part of my time there checking out the sights.

So, of course, the next morning after I arrived, I set out to explore Vladivostok.  One of the first places I find is the walk along Sportivnaya Harbor on Amur Bay, which I make a ritual of heading down to almost every evening that I am in Vladivostok.  The views of the bay from the shoreline boardwalk are beautiful (especially right around sunset), there are fountains with multi-colored lights that dance to music played in the streets, the cliffs along the edge of the bay are stark and imposing, and there is a whole social scene there centered around restaurants, bars and little snack booths along the bay.  But it is a powerfully peaceful and joyful place to spend your evenings while in Vladivostok.  You can also view it from several levels; there are streets above the cliffs that run along the bay, and even higher up on the hills, you can see the bay from imposing heights.

One of the next places that I found in Vladivostok was the top of Eagle's Nest Hill, the highest point in the center of Vladivostok. There is this freaky labyrinth of steep rickety stairs and goat paths that lead up the cliffs to the top. It is sort of an alternative transportation system, one that requires some discovery and innovation. Of course, I could have just taken the road, but that's no fun. I first discovered the bizarre staircases when I was making my way along the road and I noticed that a whole bunch of people were ducking behind this building and disappearing.  I watched several people do this, and almost just kept moving up the road, but curiosity got the best of me, and I had to see what was going on behind the building.  What was there was a rickety old partially corroded metal staircase that wound its way up the hill.  Once I had gone up that staircase, there were more staircases, and narrow, steep paths up the hill.  I wasn't sure where all this was going to end up, but as long as it kept going up, I figured it was going in the direction I was going in.  And logic would dictate that somebody must have put that stuff there to get to a destination. Actually, since then, I've found these little staircases tucked away in discreet places are all over Vladivostok, hidden between buildings, creeping up behind monuments, winding up hillsides.  Also, there is an expectation that spaces that are often considered proprietary in other countries are used for pedestrian traffic.  But, anyway, I got to the top of Eagle's Nest Hill, and the view of Vladivostok was majestic.  I could see all over the city, both bays that run around Vladivostok (Amur Bay and Golden Horn Bay), and all the way down the Vladivostok Peninsula that juts out into the water.

And that got me thinking about my next quest in Vladivostok.  To walk to the end of the peninsula and see what is there.  But on the way down from Eagle's Nest Hill, I walked through Pokrovskiy Park, a nice little space in town bordering a cathedral, and there were a whole bunch of tye-died hippies and punky looking kids holding an event called the “Freemarket.”  There were a whole bunch of clothes, books, and other stuff, and there were people there making music while the crowd sang along in Russian.  I was wishing that I could get through the language barrier to talk to people about the event, but nobody seemed to speak English, and I know pathetically little Russian.  I had walked through the park on the way up, also, but there was no gathering there earlier in the day.  On the way down, though, I discovered some more alternative staircases and pathways tucked away, including a running path by the park that was sort of part of several apartment parking lots...more examples of how more private spaces were accepted as public walking space.

So the next day I set off from my hostel on my quest to see what was at the end of the Vladivostok Peninsula.  It was quite a walk...I ended up walking about 35 kilometers in total getting there and back, and exploring around the vicinity.  This time I walked more along Golden Horn Bay, which is the other bay abutting the Vladivostok Peninsula.  I had been on Amur Bay a lot on the other side, and this was the first time I had seen this bay.  But a lot of it ran along commercial docks and secure harbors (lots of areas with security guards that I didn't really investigate because I didn't want to deal with security hassle), and was also on the other side of the railroad tracks from where I was walking, so it was quite a while before I was able to meet up with the bay.  Some of the roads on the outskirts of the city were not terribly pedestrian-friendly, but I trudged down the street anyway.  And what I found at the end of the peninsula was a little harbor park that connected to a path that went way out into the bay to the lighthouse at the end.  The path was the only thing sticking out of the water, and the lighthouse was closed and locked up, but still a worthy destination, jutting way out into the water from the land. On the way back, there was a large hill that I wanted to get to the top of, because I figured there would be some nice views there.  But it was mostly covered with private estates that barred entry to outsiders.  I kept going up different roads, trying to find a road that would break through to the top, but always found some gate or guardpost that would not let me pass.  I found one that was just a bar across the road, and I was able to walk around it, but then I got sent back by a guard who told me that I shouldn't be there after walking a short bit. So I was never able to make it up that hill, much less to the top.  But it was a worthy bit of exploration to see what was going on around there.

The walk took up much of the day, and I had built up an appetite, so in the evening I went to a столовая, or "stolovaya", to eat dinner. If you are ever in Russia and want a cheap, solid meal made up of good Russian cuisine, be sure and visit one of these places. These are cafeteria-style, amazingly cheap restaurants left over from the days of the Soviet Union, where you can easily get a lot of food for between two and four bucks. I just had a huge, tasty meal there for really cheap.

The morning fog at times is really spectacular.  The fog and the steep slopes in Vladivostok are part of why the city is called “Russia's San Francisco.”  I just sat in front of the hostel one morning and watched the fog roll through the city.  It envelops the hills, and creates a smoky background to an already beautiful city.

There are statues of Siberian Tigers all over the place.  I think there are a couple of likenesses that are famous, and then there are a whole bunch that are just there but don't have as much renown. The Siberian Tiger is the biggest fucking cat creature in the world.  Their habitat mostly covers Khabarovsk Krai and Primorsky Krai (which is the Krai that Vladivostok is in). People around here seem damn proud of their Siberian Tigers...also called Amur Tigers because their habitat runs along the Amur River and Amur Bay.  They used to cover a lot more territory, but hunting, poachers, and the encroachment of civilization has driven them into either a small habitat in Siberia or zoos. But, damn, it looks like there are less than 600 of these fuckers left  in the wild in Siberia.  I'm just happy that I haven't had to stare one down in the field (yet). Because you know who would win that confrontation.

Vladivostok is not too far from North Korea.  I thought about trying to make a road trip (or a boat trip, that would probably get me there faster), but then found out that it is damn near impossible for Americans to enter DPRK from Russia.  Oh, well.

Then the next day I ended up meeting with my new friend Denis.  He is an American who has relocated to Vladivostok and lived there for several years, and is a friend of a friend.  We had a great lunch together, and I got to hear his interesting stories about Vladivostok and his experiences in Russia.  It was good to meet up with somebody who could speak the same language as me, though I had been trying to pick up as much Russian as I could while I was in Russia.  But it was hard for me to converse with the people at the hostel, because most of the people there did not speak English (or any of the other languages I speak).
My next destination in Vladivostok was the S-56 submarine.  It was not too far from the hostel, along Golden Horn Bay. This was a submarine that was under active duty during WWII and is now beached as a museum.  It was interesting to crouch my way through the different chambers of the submarine, see the torpedo chambers (and there are even some torpedoes contained therein), and read the histories of the people who inhabited the submarine.  There is a square nearby (Admiralskiy Skver) with memorials to war dead...the Soviet Union had a staggering toll of people who perished, probably more than any other nation involved in the war.  There is a giant, Neptune-like figure in the square holding a huge trident.

There was an open market in the big square down the street from the hostel over the weekend. I bought some veggies and fresh dill there, and also some little Russian pastries, and made some lunch back at the hostel with buckwheat groats. There was some music playing there, and it was a pleasant place to hang out and see all the goods for sale.  Mostly it was food...it was pretty much a farmers' market.  But there were some other goodies as well.

Denis invited me to go with him and his wife Lena to Russkiy Island.  Russkiy Island is a beautiful, mostly wild place with a lot of spectacular views of the sea.  It has a catacomb of tunnels built all through it that were used for the Russian Military for many years, but are now a museum on the island.  I didn't enter the tunnels, but Denis told me that they went all over the place, and it was easy to get lost there.  Also, near the bridge that enters the island, there is a major university; I think is is called Far Eastern University.  We drove on some of the dirt trails on the island and found some great vista points. I wanted to go back and explore the island some more, but never had the chance to do so before I left Vladivostok. But Russkiy Island is a great place to spend the day hiking and there is so much to see there.

And then my next destination was the Vladivostok Funicular.  The Funicular is sort of a cross between a tramway and a streetcar, and goes up a very steep slope, almost like a ski lift.  It has two cars that are cantilevered against each other; one is red and one is blue. When one car is going up, the other is going down, and vice versa; since they are counterweighted it saves some energy in motion. They run on the same track, but in the middle it diverges into two tracks long enough for the two cars to pass each other.  There is also a stairway that goes alongside it if you choose not to take the Funicular.  It is not terribly long, but it is an interesting ride, and it is fairly cheap. After I took the Funicular, I ended up walking down the staircase to the same place I had started. It was really about the experience rather than the transportation.

All in all, Vladivostok was a really cool place to hang out.  I spent 11 days there in total, and up until this time, it was the city I had stayed in the longest.  But it was worth it.  I took a bus to the airport, and prepared to fly to Korea.