A Change of Plans

There has been a change of plans. We are now in Borneo! Our original plan was to catch a boat from South Korea to China and spend a month travelling there and then head to Vietnam. However, due to North Korea threatening South Korea, parent's worrying we are about to be bombed, and the fact that I get a sore back after one day of carrying my backpack or sitting still in a bus (I have a back injury that is slowly healing) we decided to go to Borneo instead!

Anyone want some eggs? Kota Kinabalu night market, Borneo.

Before we left Korea we spent a week in Seoul catching up with Justin's family and meeting more cousins. We also went to more markets (including some of the biggest ones I have ever seen that go for many city blocks long and are in buildings 7 stories high) and got to go to a baseball game. It was the first professional sports game I have been to and it was heaps of fun. It was between Doosan Bears and Lotte Giants. The Bears are a Seoul team and one of Justin's favourites so of course we supported them. Luckily it was a fast paced game with the Bears stealing some good bases and winning 7-2.

Doosan Bears (in white) winning against the Lotte Giants, Seoul, South Korea.

We then flew to Kota Kinabalu (KK for short), the capital of Sabah province in Borneo. Borneo itself is divided into 4 areas: Kalimantan which is part of Indonesia, Brunei, and the 2 provinces of Malaysia which are Sabah and Sarawak. Unfortunately we had already booked our tickets before realising that most of the east coast of Sabah is off limits due to an invasion and kidnappings of foreigners by the Moro National Liberation Front, a group from the Philippines fighting for independence. Unfortunately when I heard their name I had an image of them invading with moro chocolate bars while wearing their army fatigues and combat boots. Turns out this was not the case.

Fish at a market, Seoul, South Korea.

Also unfortunately this made us change our plans again. We had wanted to find a nice place to settle down for a few weeks and do some diving. Justin wants to do his dive masters and I want to do my open water qualifications. One of the best places to dive in Borneo is on the east coast but due to the travel warnings (and insurance not covering us if we go there) we have decided to travel to Kuching, the capital of Sarawak and visit the national parks in that region.

Fish and giant prawns at the night market, Kota Kinabalu, Borneo.

But before heading that way, over the last few days we have spent some time in KK. Justin did his dive refresher course and I went snorkeling around the islands just off KK. It was beautiful. The water is really clear and there are heaps of fish around. We also went to an area that is called the Coral Garden, and guess what, it was full of amazing coral. We have been eating amazing yummy cheap food and staying in a variety of accommodation. Some with air conditioning and some without. It is really hot and muggy here, averaging 33 degrees C. The heat builds throughout the morning then rains in the afternoon. Sometimes with impressive thunder and lightning.

Manana beach, with no one around, Borneo.

We have spent the last 3 days in a place called Mañana  about am hour north of KK. It is a private beach resort. Although I wouldn't really call it a resort. It has some cabins, a restaurant, a beach and nothing else. We spent the days sleeping, reading, eating, relaxing, and swimming while trying to avoid the jellyfish which sting. We also got badly bitten by mozzies (and possibly bedbugs). We got to see some impressive wildlife including the Atlas moth (also known as the Snake-head moth), the largest moth in the world, lots of insects, geckos and crabs, and a rat with large ears that chewed one of my pack straps to bits.

This Atlas moth has been in the wars, note the tips of the wings look like snakes heads, Borneo.

Anyway we are now back in KK, the land of electricity, internet and hot water, before heading to Kuching in 2 days time. We will probably be spending our time looking through the markets again, doing laundry (everything is damp and stinky thanks to the humidity) and eating more good food.

Here are a last few photos from Korea:

Monk drinking tea in a traditional tea house, Seoul, South Korea.

Blood sausage, food market in Seoul, South Korea

A whole floor of ribbons and buttons, Dongdaemun market, Seoul, South Korea.

Many floors of fabric, Dongdaemun market, Seoul, South Korea.

A delivery man at Dongdaemun market, Seoul, South Korea.

Becoming a Non-Vegetarian

Looking over my last post I realise I have been extremely slack. I had planned to update this blog, hopefully, once a week. However it is already just over 4 weeks since we started travelling and I have only written 2 posts. I apologise greatly. Unfortunately this slackness will probably happen again so I already apologise for future lack of writing.

Dried chilli is in a lot of Korean dishes.

So anyway here is a new post. Since my last post we have travelled a lot throughout the south of Korea. We  have been to Gwangju (a busy big city with not much to do), Mokpo (a bad port town with even less to do),  Heuksan Island (set in a national park, we had the scariest ferry ride in our lives with swells up to 4m!), Yeosu (a great town with the coolest aquarium that has Beluga whales), Busan (we really only saw the airport) and Jeju Island (a place we liked so much we kept extending our stay and we went 40m below sea level in a submarine!). There are many other adventures we had in each of these places but I won't bore you.

Korean BBQ. Cook the meat, wrap it in lettuce and dip in sauce.

One thing people have been asking me about is the food. The first time I had Korean food was when we were still in Auckland and I was meeting Justin's parents for the first time. That was nerve racking enough and what made it worse I had to use chopstick in front of them. Now I'm normally okay with chopsticks, but we went to a restaurant and they only had heavy metal ones. These are a lot harder to use than wooden chopsticks and I struggled for a while before they took pity on me and ordered a fork. Since then I have had many opportunities to use both metal chopsticks and eat Korean food.

Justin eating bung-a-pang. As mentioned in a previous post it is red beans in batter in the shape of carp.

Most food in Korea is yum. However not much of it is vegetarian friendly, and if it is then it is either spicy or monotonous. While in Seoul it was okay. There were enough places with lots of variety, but as we have travelled into smaller and smaller places it has become harder. In Mokpo and Heuksan in was almost impossible. That area's specialty is sea food. Heuksan in particular was hard as every single restaurant only had 4-6 things on their menu and they all consisted of variations on paua (abalone) and rays (stingray). I lived on white rice and bean sprouts for those few days.

Stingrays drying.

After 2 weeks of eating mostly rice, bean sprouts, mushrooms and egg for at least two meals of every day I gave in and had meat. Pork to be exact and it was yum (for those who don't know, I'm vegetarian for ethical reasons, not because I don't like it). Since then I admit I have had about half a dozen meals with meat and most of them have been good.

Traditional Korean meal. Lots of little side dishes that everyone shares and their own bowl of rice.

But I have craved fresh food and the markets have been good for that. Each region in Korea is know for a special food. Jeju Island is famous for it's mandarins so we ate lots of those when we were there. Strawberries are also plentiful here. They are all too perfect looking and tasting to be anything other than grown in a greenhouse and possibly genetically engineered, or at least covered in fertiliser. But they are still really yum.

Daikon radishes at a market, each about as big as a rugby ball. 

Today we returned to Seoul and once again it has become much easier to return to vegetarian food. It feels much better.

Here are some more foodie pictures:

Drying seaweed.

Silkworm pupae, to eat. 

Fish crates.

Squid Boat.

We went on a submarine, but these fish are not for eating. 

The submarine is in a national park with a coral reef.

Moving South

We have left Seoul and headed south. We decided we have had enough of people and busyness and wanted to escape the rat race. First stop was was a small town called Buyeo, once capital of Baekje Kingdom for a few hundred years after 50 BC. It is a tiny backwater town with 25,000 people and one roundabout. It has a hill where the old palace and fortress was, a large Buddhist temple and a cliff that 3000 court ladies threw themselves off rather than submit to attacking enemy forces.

Buddhist Temple in Buyeo.

We had visited all the sites within a day and a half and spent the rest of the time eating ho-tuk (fried batter with sugar, cinnamon and sesame seeds inside) and bung-a-pang (red bean paste inside small waffles in the shape of fish).

Making Ho-tuk

Even with so few inhabitants, Buyeo was still too big and populated. So our next stop was Songnisan National Park. National Parks in Korea are small. Mind you, Korea as a country is small. Songnisan Village has one main street, completely covered in restaurant signs. We had picked the wrong day to come to the park. It was the weekend and hiking is a huge tradition in Korea. There were hoards of people, all brightly dressed in technical gear with tramping boots and walking sticks.

This man posed for me so I had to take a photo of him.

Hoards in bright and colourful gear.

Luckly we had decided to stay in the park in an old traditional inn. We were the only ones there. The rooms were small and had underfloor heating, which we desparately needed during the night. We slept on the floor on mats and the heat rose to keep us warm. An old man that lives there by himself and warned us there was no hot water and we could only use the long drop as the pipes for the toilets were still frozen from winter.

The lake was still mostly frozen.

We spent the first day looking around the large temple with a 33m gold-plated Buddha statue. It is huge and impressive. The next day the hoards disappeared as it was Monday and we had most of the trails to ourselves. We walked up the mountain, which took about 2 hours. We even walked through patches of snow and ice at the top. You could walk through the whole park in about 6 hours. As I said national parks here are small.

The 33m gold Buddha.

Cold and bleak Songnisan National Park. The fog came in so we had no view and the trees are so small because it is too cold for them to grow well.

After our dose of no people we came back into civilisation  and we are now in Jeonju. This town is the best place we have been to so far. It has about half a million people, but small and friendly and very few high-rise buildings. It has great coffee, hot chocolate and food. There is even a few small patches of green grass and the cherry blossoms are starting to come out. We like it so much we have extended our stay here.

Beautiful smelling Cherry Blossoms.

Market in Jeonju.

It said take a photo so we did.

First Impressions Of Korea

Well the big day finally arrived and we left NZ. Very early in the morning while still half asleep. It reminded me of getting up for work when I was working in Pukekohe.

King Sejong the Great, who was a reformer and created the Korean alphabet. Police presence due to the US Embassy on the right.

The flight was uneventful and we landed safely in Seoul. The challenge was to find our guest house in Hongdae on a busy Thursday night. Yay for travelling with someone that speaks the language and once briefly lived here. You should understand that Hongdae is where all the night-life of Seoul is. It is busy, bustling, crowded, with lights and traffic everywhere. We found the place and I made my acquaintance with one of my new favourite things in Korea...underfloor heating, known as ondol. Over the next few days I also discovered another new favourite...heated toilet seats!

Subway in Seoul.

The weather is decidedly cold. The highs have been around 5-8 degrees and getting down to -3. We had been planning on going northeast but as it is still snowing there we have decided to go south instead.

Keeping the plants warm during winter.

My first impressions of Seoul: big, always busy, workaholics, tall buildings, clean although with a whiff of sewage every now and then, brilliant subways, friendly, polite, cheap (although not for accommodation), cold, grey, heaps to see and do, never ending, apartments everywhere.

Messages left by lovers.

Managed to find a cool little cafe that had reasonable coffee and hot chocolate, and also gave you free toast. We returned there several times. Been visiting lots of monuments and learning the history. Even visited National Treasure Number 1, which is Namdaemun Gate. It has been burnt and destroyed many times since it was erected in 1398, the most recent in 2008 by a homeless man looking for trouble. While we were there we visited the Namdaemun markets and accidentally bumped into Justin's mum. Out of all the millions of people in Seoul it was very strange to see her. These markets have almost anything you need. Including things to tempt us like cameras and outdoor gear.

Namdaemun market.

Over the last few days in Seoul we also visited Justin's family and I got to meet most of them for the first time. Justin also got to meet his 10 month old nephew for the first time. He is very cute and Justin keeps joking that his English name is Luke as he was born on May the 4th. Hmm maybe that is not actually a joke.

Uncle and nephew checking each other out.

Travelling this way (with someone who speaks the language and knows a bit about Korea) seem a bit strange and I feel I haven't got into travel mode yet. It is also the first time I have really traveled with someone else and it feels very different not having to figure out everything for myself. I almost feel like I'm on a lazy holiday. It seems too easy. I'm sure the difficulties will hit me once we are in China.

 Here are a few other photos to look at:

Deoksugong Palace in the middle of Seoul.

A palace ceiling.

Gyeongbukgong Palace, also in the middle of Seoul.

Signs leading to Jongno.

This is not rude, it is a game all Korean boys learn to play, and it hurts.

An Iconic Childhood

I grew up in Auckland but most holidays my family and I would visit my grandparents in Coromandel. They actually live well past Coromandel in a little bay called Te Hope, Colville, on the Port Jackson Rd. There they have a house with all the modern amenities like hot running water and TV, but they also have another house, which was the original house on the land, that doesn't have all the modern amenities. It has occasional electricity, cold running water from the stream and no TV. This house, known as the Old House, was where we stayed. It was brilliant. It was full of old creaky beds that sagged in the middle, an old table with mismatched wooden chairs, walls that didn't go all the way to the ceiling so you could hear every sound, a space were the old coal range used to be and a red corrugated iron roof that made a hell of a great noise when it rained. There was one corner set aside for Granddad's tools, seeds and knickknacks with strings of garlic and onions hanging from the rafters.

Our beach and the Old House.

This property was right by the beach and even though it was a rocky beach it was "our" beach. We always considered it "ours" as we were the only ones ever on it. We knew which rocks to jump from into the water, where the huge purple crabs lived, which rock pools had anemones in them and exactly how far out we had to swim before we got to sand. After a storm we would go hunting for quartz crystals and other treasures that had washed up on the beach.

Purple crab in a rock cave.

My grandparent's property was full of pine trees and native bush. When we were young we would have to bathe in the cold clear stream, which I hated, but we also got to explore the waterway and surrounding hills. In gumboots, shorts and t-shirt, my cousins, brother and I would be let loose with pocket knives and snacks to spend the day building huts, trying to catch eels, mining for dog-tooth amethysts (there was a hillside at the back of the property with them) and generally having a good time.

Fern.

We had been warned never to pee in the stream (it was were we got our water from), to not play in the water above the dam or we would get dirty water, and if we ever got lost to head downhill, find a stream and follow it out to the public road.

There are so many more things I could say about this place and the memories that I have: the long drop toilet that we had to be held over when we were little so we wouldn't fall in to it, the blue penguins that often nested under the house, target shooting as we got older, camping up the hill either in the huts we built or in tents, the kingfisher that always nested in a clay bank, sitting in grass so long no one could find you, looking for glow-worms, fishing and eating fresh-caught snapper, seeing dolphins and amazing sunsets. About the only thing I didn't like was the long, windy drive to get there that, to this day, makes me car sick.

Kina, beach treasures.

As I have got older I haven't been to my grandparent's place as much. Life has been busy, first with uni and then with work and other interests to partake in. But now I am sitting on the beach, most likely for the last time before I go overseas for a year, and I realise what a privileged, iconic, kiwi childhood I had. I also see the next generation coming and spending their school holidays here and hope they have just as much fun as I did. I also wonder how much I will miss this place and what it means to me and my family.

Sunset on our beach.

Of Words and Writing

As you know I have been cleaning out the house of unwanted stuff. I came across lots of scrap paper and notebooks with writing on them, dating back to when I was a young teen. They are all my old stories and poems which I had written in a fit of creativity, but never seen by anyone as I was far too embarrassed.  I always hoped they were brilliant and  amazing stories, but of course the writing never lived up to my expectations.

Sacred Buddhist Books in a Monastery, Nepal. Each text is individually wrapped and preserved.

However, going though these old scribbles I have discovered some of them are actually OK, especially if you take into account I was 12 or 13 when I wrote them. Although I am still too embarrassed to show anyone. I have also discovered that I don't remember how to write.

Oh I have written many many words throughout my lifetime but since going to university the words have all been for scientific reports. Then once starting work, all the writing I have done are patient reports. These have all been factual and straight to the point without any imagination to them. The only other writing of significance has been when I have been travelling. I always write a diary everyday and send mass emails to friends and family about once a week. Hopefully on these travels coming up I will just write this blog and people can read it if they want instead of me filling up their email boxes.

There must be a story in this scene somewhere, surely? Dozza, Italy.

And so I am having to re-learn how to write again. It is a skilful art in getting a fictional piece of writing to be liked and well red. One that I now know I need to practice if I want to write a decent story or poem. I need to learn to show and imply instead of stating outright that this or that happened.

Early attempts at writing. San cave paintings, Spitzkoppe, Namibia. 

On the subject of words and writing, I have been learning how to play scrabble. I have never played it before, but Justin introduced it to me about 2 months ago. Since then we have played several games each week. And every time Justin has beaten me. I have become better at constructing words and finally in the last game I beat him by 1 point! He had 235 and I had 236! Finally success!!!!! Now I just need to replicate this success and I will be happy. I also need to carry on this success in my writing. This game also seems to be bring out my inner competitive spirit.

A story within a story within a story, Dozza Italy. 

With all of this word play I have rekindled my love of writing, but still find it difficult to sit down everyday to write something. I seem to have developed a sort of love-hate relationship with writing at the moment.

Packing Up

I know I'm not the first person to say this, but wow, it's amazing what people collect over the years. I have been spending the last few weeks sorting out "stuff" in the house. Packing, selling and throwing out some of it. There is also a pile of things I'm not sure what to do with. Things I'm still attached to, that are actually useless, but I can't bring myself to part with them yet. They (mostly clothes, books, and hats) are sitting on the spare bed in a big pile collecting dust and being squashed by the cat. I still have books and papers from when I was a child, things that hold great memories for me but actually have no other function than to take up space.

Jack, the cat.

In trying to sort out the clutter, I have thrown out a large pile of clothes I haven't worn for ages. Some of them I have never worn! (I know I'm not the first person to have new clothes in the wardrobe!). Books have been hard to sort and throw out. I am a definite bookworm and as much as I love my kindle, I love the smell and feel and look of books. I have managed to pack away 4 big boxes of books I want to keep, and have 3 boxes of books I am trying to sell. However I'm not even half way through all the books.

It is my first adventure into selling on Trademe (NZ's version of eBay). So far I have sold 2 books! It was actually very exciting  and prompted me to place ads for many more books. Now it is waiting game. I also placed an ad for my car. I have a great car and I will be disappointed to get rid of it. I took it for a drive today and almost cried thinking about having to sell it. But it is only a car, a material thing, I keep reminding myself. It has been as interesting experience. I have had 2 people come and look at it so far. The first person said it looked too dirty, although I had washed it. So the next time someone came, I made sure it was immaculately clean. And they said it was too clean and fancy!!! You just can't win sometimes.

Justin, not winning.

Then yesterday I had someone emailed me with an offer for less than half the price I am selling it for. He admitted he was being cheeky and offered me an even lower price the first time, then upped the offer by a $1000 the next time. All because he needed a car for the next day. Unfortunately both offers were well below it's worth and I said no.

Anyway I still have a long way to go before I have this place all packed ,cleaned and ready to go. At least I still have time to do it all. And that brings me to another dilemma. What to pack for a year away from home?

I managed to pack for a tramping trip, but how about for a year?