Cars, Trains, and Planes

For our nomadic life, we usually travel around in our trusty Chevy Equinox. Even though it’s been a great vehicle, it’s hard to accept my wife’s gloating about the fact that she selected it.  She says that it’s her car, which leaves me with only the role of chauffeur since I’m the one who drives it everywhere. But that lovely little vehicle has been parked up on the mountain in north Idaho, because we were schlepping our way to, around, and from South Korea. This has put us out of our element into the alien environment of public transportation.

I already mentioned the travel paper gymnastics we had to perform to even get on the plane from Spokane to Korea in mid-April. You can read about that in the blog entry entitled Point of Embarkation. Today I just want to consider the nature of public transit itself, beginning with air travel. When you’re not traveling by air it’s easy to think that flying is glamorous. This is particularly true if you’re under the age of ten and get a crack at those cool pilot wings that drive your Mom nuts when she goes to do the laundry. But about five minutes into your second flight you suddenly realize that air travel is boring. And thank goodness for that! Interesting and exciting air travel is a thing to be avoided.

Apart from the struggle to satisfy draconian quarantine requirements, our flight to Korea was satisfyingly boring, except for the mask sucking at my face. Mask mandates for air travel were lifted the week after we arrived in Korea. I was actually thankful for the mask. Its irritating presence took my mind off the incredibly shrinking airline seats that are now precisely half the size they were when I first flew on an airplane. Well, that’s not exactly true because I was in my mother’s arms on my first airplane flight in 1954. My mom brought me out of Alaska to show me off to most of eastern Nebraska. We flew on a DC3 that is probably hiding out in a museum in North Dakota about now. But I’ll bet the seats were large enough to fit a normal-sized adult rather than today’s scissor clamp versions that are designed to squeeze the spare change out of their occupants. Instead of up-charging for aisles and windows, they should give us a chance to pay for seat sizes. I’d cough up a couple of hundred bucks for a size double D.

Well, on the matter of air travel, I can attest that the plane goes up and then down to deliver you from the USA to Korea and back. It’s not much more complicated than that. Except that they take away a day when you go to Korea where you wake up to find yourself in tomorrow. And even more surreal is that when you come back to the USA you wake up in yesterday. I’m not sure why the international dateline doesn’t rank up there with the Bermuda Triangle. It certainly causes more universal weirdness than the twilight zone. I guess it all works out in the end with the space-time continuum still intact, but it’s a little unsettling in the face of my creeping senility.

One thing that is worth mentioning is that we encountered a number of very polite and helpful airline personnel who made our travel much more enjoyable. Especially in Korea, people are so polite it makes you wonder what they are up to. It’s a good thing Americans are less cultured, or it would be the seedbed for even more conspiracy theories than there are already. But then there’s that creeping senility again.

Once one is actually on the Korean peninsula, air travel seems superfluous. I can imagine them recently shortening up runways a little to accommodate social distancing between domestic airports. But since a significant majority of Koreans live in metropolitan Seoul, other forms of public transportation abound. It is so pleasant to see thousands of Koreans getting on and off the extensive metropolitan bus system. I can imagine being able to ride nearly door to door from any location in Seoul to any other location. However, for the uninformed “waygook” (foreigner), the code-breaking skill required to decipher bus routes is way beyond us. So the primary role of buses for waygooks in Korea is to block traffic and scare the daylights out of us as they lurch their way down the street.

The subway system is a completely different matter. Subway stops are nicely dispersed around the metropolis. From where we were staying in Korea, it is a bit of a hike to the nearest subway station but at the cost of a little shoe leather, you can find yourself on one of the finest underground train systems in the world. As long as you pay attention to which side of the train you are on, you can roam around Seoul with ease. I can tell you from experience that being on the wrong side of a subway track can land you far from your intended destination. Fortunately this time, with my son’s guidance we stood on the proper side of the tracks as we took the train out to a Korean baseball game in a distant suburb. Even with a transfer, we were soon sitting in lovely seats behind first base watching the American pastime, more than amply well played by our Korean friends. Once we had figured out how to translate kilometers per hour to miles per hour so we could assess the pitcher’s prowess we were totally into the game. I even had a hotdog without a tinge of homesickness. 

But by far the most common form of transportation in Korea, in full emulation of their American counterparts, is the automobile.  Korean carmakers, Hyundai and Kia, create most of the vehicles, but for all the fun-loving nature of Koreans, they normally make them in white, gray, and black. There must be some Korean connection to Henry Ford’s conviction that cars could be any color people wanted as long as they were black. The chief exception to this is the taxi cabs, many of which are orange. There is little need to actually own a car in Korea because of the ubiquitous presence of taxi cabs on the streets of Seoul. Except, of course, when you want one. When you do finally flag one down, the cabs are cheap and clean, and the drivers are meticulously polite. I think they might be the ring leaders of whatever is going on in the Korean conspiracy.

Did I mention traffic? With almost thirty million people packed into just a little over two hundred square miles, Koreans do traffic in epic proportions. It’s a little like a giant city-wide board game.  At the beginning of your turn, I mean your trip, you roll a pair of dice which determines whether your trip to the shopping mall will take you fifteen minutes or four hours. I personally prefer to approach Korean traffic as a spectator, but my children who live there actually like to participate by driving through the ocean of cars pooled in Seoul. The unwritten rule is that if the nose of your car is in front of the nose of the car next to you then you have the right of way. This results in numerous heart-thumping maneuvers that made me wish that automobile travel in Korea was as boring as flying.

My son is not satisfied with just participating in automobile traffic on the streets of Seoul but adds the excitement of scooter travel, which he insists is the quickest way to get around the city. Part of the reason for this is that Koreans understand the space between car lanes as a kind of scooter/motorcycle highway. It is thrilling, in a less than copacetic way, to be sitting in gridlock traffic with those two-wheeled vehicles storming by at full throttle between cars an arm’s length away. As I said, I like to think of Korean car travel as a spectator sport, one that I preferably watch from an airplane high overhead.

On our last weekend in Korea, we traveled by car from Seoul to Sokcho, a city on the eastern coast. The tollway we used was very much like an interstate freeway in the USA. But the thing I did not realize was just how mountainous Korea is. It is one thing to build a freeway out through the flatlands of South Dakota. It’s another thing altogether to build an equally flat four-lane tollway through the mountains of Korea. The secret is tunnels. Lots and lots of tunnels. Seventy to be precise. My wife counted them on the way back. The overall effect is that you spend almost as much time underground as you do above on the trip between Seoul and Sokcho.

However, because of that lovely underground tollway, my son’s car got us nicely to a wonderful place in Korea. Sockcho has Soraksan National Park which reminds me of Glacier and Yellowstone for its natural beauty. But not just that, it’s also a place of spiritual significance for centuries of Buddhist devotees. The ancient monks built impressive log buildings nearly a millennium before the US Park Service got around to it. Craggy mountains and ancient Buddhist temples made for a day that was a sightseeing bonanza.

From the mountains of Soraksan, we motored down to the city on the seashore. Sockcho’s amazing fish market delighted us with magnificent catches displayed in stall after stall along the streets of the exchange. My wife was intensely worried about the poor vendors who seemed to have a supply way beyond the local demand. However, upon further inspection, we saw that many vendors were starting to pack up their wares for shipment to the fish hungry thirty million living in Seoul. It was such a relief! We did our part for the demand side of the economy as well. We contracted with a local restaurant to prepare a crab feast from three victims we selected from their large tank filled with delectable crustaceans. And some of us went for a breakfast Korean fish barbecue. It was splendid preparation for a day spent on the beach with grandchildren playing contentedly in the sand and grandpa snoozing under an umbrella. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Then, sadly, seventy tunnels brought us home to Seoul where we packed to catch our plane back to the USA. We managed to find another boring flight with no hassles over covid paperwork at all. With the mask mandate lifted, we trusted our fate to the plane’s air filtration system. That might have been interesting and exciting, but it turned out to be just as boring as we had hoped. And worst of all, we were unexpectedly placed in bulkhead seats that had ample width and miles of legroom. I couldn’t even complain about the seating. Fortunately, the connecting flight from Dallas had the shrunken seats that gave me ample opportunity for a satisfying bout of sarcastic bellyaching. Arrival in Spokane brought an end to our odyssey by public cars, trains, and planes. It was a real treat to load our luggage into my wife’s Chevy Equinox. I even got my brother to chauffeur our late night/early morning drive back to our North Idaho mountain cabin. As I buckled up for the trip home, I thought wistfully of Korea and the loved ones who live there. Yes, we’ll be back for sure.