Read Online Korea by Simon Winchester - Free Book Online

southwest tip of Cheju-do. (The island’s name, given by mainlanders, is memorably prosaic: che means ‘across’ or ‘over there’, ju means ‘district’, and do means, in this instance, ‘island’—hence Cheju-do is ‘the island district over there’). The locals either fished or farmed, and one might have supposed, being so far away from the realities of the Korean politics (and that is one reason why so many peninsular Koreans come to Cheju on holiday, removing themselves from the tensions prompted by the proximity of the North and the DMZ), that there would be no sign of the more distressingly martial side of life. But even down here the military were all around. High up on the cliff—my notebook records it, as though I were a birdwatcher, as my very first sighting—were two men quite obviously from the US Army. They were wearing full combat gear—packs, rifles, gas masks, rain capes, heavy boots, helmets—and when I spotted them they were gaily abseiling down the sheer basalt face. The first to get back to solid earth—a large man with more muscles than seemed decent—came over to me.
    ‘You ’murican?’ he inquired, in an accent indubitably from south of the Mason-Dixon line. I confessed that I was not. He spoke in a machine-gun staccato. ‘Limey, huh? How’re ya doin’? Goddamn shit hole of a place this is, Korea. You like it?—shit, you must be crazy. Come over ’n’ see us at the camp. We’ll set you right. I can tell you a thing or two about this place. Nothin’ else to do in this place ’cept get seriously drunk. No pussy. No pussy for miles. Nothin’. Come over ’n’ see us.’ And with that he left to retrieve his friend, who was shouting anxiously and appeared to be stuck on his rock.
    I hauled up a steady rise along the flanks of the cliff, and was soon, puffing like a pug engine, in open country. It was just likethe West of Ireland, like Connemara or Donegal. There were dry stone walls between the little fields, and there was cotton grass, and the green shoots of new barley, and a dusting of bright yellow from the spring meadows of rape. Curlews were singing, and early swallows swooped low over the little rivers. A steady, soughing wind riffled the moorland grasses, and over to my right a ragged line of foam showed where the land tilted down, via a narrow paludal plain, to its drowning in the sea. The weather was very Irish, too; there was a thin grey mist, through which a milky sun shone fitfully, and occasionally great gusts of cool and pleasant dampness whirled down from the sky. It was refreshing, exhilarating weather—perfect, had I been a professional walker, for a marathon.
    But on this first day I was not planning more than the gentlest of hikes. ‘Wearing in my boots,’ was how I excused myself. A friend in Hong Kong had given me the name of a young Cantonese man, Lawrence, who ran a hotel at Sogwipo—a honeymoon hotel, the friend had said with a knowing leer. So I kept to a more easterly track than Hamel’s men had done, and by nightfall I had reached the outskirts of the village and had found the hotel. It looked like an immense inverted jelly mould—it had been designed by a firm of Hawaiian architects—standing on the clifftop overlooking the southern sea. Lawrence was waiting for me. ‘You really did walk here?’ he asked, incredulous. He was a plumpish young man with a disagreeable pallor of grey on yellow, and he made it abundantly clear that he found it unpleasant even to have to walk across a room. ‘You know the Chinese. Just lie in bed and make money, that’s us.’
    His business was, indeed, honeymoons. I had seen dozens of young couples speeding by in taxis already that day (and the plane from Seoul had been three-quarters filled with them, nervous youngsters holding hands and clearly having little idea what to say to each other). The island is to Korean couples what the Adirondacks are to New Yorkers and the Channel Islands to Britons—with one