My girlfriend (who took these pictures) and I went on an organised tour to some southern islands in Korea: 외도, 장사도 and a cable car ride on the 통영 케이블카 above a national park on the mainland.

This part of Korea seemed almost mediterranean in the April sun. We ate in an Indian restaurant in the evening and the only Koreans were my girlfriend and two waiters. The chef looked to be Indian and the ther customers were a mixture of Caucasians and middle Eastern-looking races. This was fascinating as you just don’t see that up here in the capital city area, aside from migrant south-east Asian workers. The following morning I got up early and found a series of buses taking workers to the ship yards. Australians were getting onto one bus, phillipinos another bus. The two groups were wearing different uniforms.

The organised tour was a good choice to the extent that it let us see and do things things that it would have been hard to organise on our own, especially because it included transport between the sights. But the schedule was much too tight, and there were far too many people clogging the roads and attractions. I had to get up at 5:30am to make it to Seoul station in time for the train, we got to bed late, and then the following day were told to get up at 5:30am and board the bus at 6:30am to keep the the tight schedule. Then I finally got back home past midnight. It was exhausting. A three or four day trip crammed into two days. And the huge numbers of people was because in Korea no-one has very much time off work, so when there’s a national holiday everyone rushes off at the same time to the same destinations in order to try to make best use of the short time they have. The result is pretty unpleasant.