Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Ferry tsu Tsushima, part I: Escape from Busan

I almost bit off more than I could chew on this side-trip.

I started out Sunday night at 9:30, taking a taxi to the Cheonan-Asan train station.  Here I collected my ticket, which we'd bought online that morning.  Now, as 10:30 was the latest train I could take, I had planned to take the slow train to Busan, since the ferry wasn't leaving until 8 a.m., and the slow train only pulled in at 4 a.m.  Which would be great, because it gave me someplace to be in relative comfort and I could maybe catch a few winks.  The slow train, however, was sold out, leaving me with the KTX, which would arrive at a quarter of 1, and even that we were afraid would sell out.  So I got off the train at 12:45 and set about to trying to waste six hours in a railway station.

I did a lap of the station and found a lot of people stretched out on the floor under newspapers, some on mats, some on cardboard.  Koreans don't seem to mind hard surfaces, and the rail stations are pretty clean.  First thing to do was get something to eat.  I was already tired, harried, and bored.  I wandered into the StoryWay, a convenience store found in rail stations, and bought a fairly bland, squishy sandwich made with mayonnaise, crab meat, and a slice of pressed ham.  I sat down on a bench and wolfed it down without pausing to object.  Shortly thereafter a 30-something woman sat down near me and tried to strike up a conversation in English.  I don't know why, but it made me instantly wary, like she was going to steal my money and take my kidneys.  So I pretended to only speak German.  I'd already seen Germans in Korea, and I was pretty sure her chances of speaking German were low.  I subsequently felt a little bad, she might have been trying to be friendly, but if she were working a scam, it required her to engage me in English.  We sat in silence for a while before she got up and wandered off.

I wandered a bit too, looking for a wifi signal and a generally secluded spot.  Every time I found a quiet spot, that section of the terminal would shut down, lights off, gates down, and a railway policeman would shoo me back to the area where all the people were.  Shortly after, some old lady began screaming and shoving a younger man.  The woman with her tried calming her down, and the man looked truly baffled at the outburst.  Of course, the railway police officer was nowhere to be seen.  It was about this time that I started to notice that a lot of the people camped out in the station were in fact itinerants, some fishing in the trash for cans, some bearing signs of emotional disability.  At this point I thought it might be worthwhile to go outside for a bit of air and see what the taxi situation was.  At the bottom of the escalator a cab driver nearly grabbed me to put me in his cab, which I resisted, and met his insistence with the insistence that I didn't want a cab.  He then tried to ply me with coffee from a nearby vending machine, and again, I felt bad, like maybe he was just trying to be friendly, but I wasn't having it.  I went back into the terminal.

Over by the ticketing counter there were steel benches which during normal hours are for the elderly to sit while waiting in line.  They weren't a whole lot harder than the wooden benches, and they had the added benefit of having only one approach, with a rolldown gate behind me.  I settled in to do a puzzle book.  At this point a big guy I'd seen sleeping on the floor elsewhere, built like me only six feet tall, in his 50s and with a long beard, shuffled up to me and said in this basso profundo voice I didn't even know Koreans had, "I'm hun-gurry."  I just stared.  He repeated himself, "I'm hun-gurry.  Hun-gurry."  I maintained my startled look, and shook my head a little.  At this point he made the sign of eating from a bowl with chopsticks, and repeated more emphatically, "I'm hun-gurry!"  At this point I managed to force my hand down into my pocket to withdraw a 5,000W note.  He took it with a grunt and wandered away, to my relief.  It wasn't that I didn't want to give him money, so much as I'd already had enough local flavor for the night.

To my relief, a good-looking, well-dressed mother and college-age daughter then sat down next to me, which somehow I assumed made me safer.  Maybe class loyalties are stronger than national loyalties?  Yeah, he's a foreigner, they'd say, but he smells like soap, so let's protect him from the crazy people?  That's ridiculous, but my nerves were frayed and I was grasping at whatever soothing thoughts and impressions I could.  It was not too much longer after this, around 4, that the station began to light up again, the steel gates rolled up, and normal people began to trickle back into the station.  I waited another hour and then caught a taxi to the ferry terminal, this time sneaking out the side to get to the taxi shelter with a queue of taxis patiently waiting for fares, and avoiding the press gang at the bottom of the escalator at the main entrance.

The taxi I got had an older washed-up hippie for a driver.  I didn't even know Koreans had hippies, but here was a guy who had long hair, obviously lived through the '60s, and killed a few brain cells along the way.  It was then that I realized Busan is like the Florida of Korea.  It's where the crazies and eccentrics go to kill each other.  At one point he nearly managed to kill us (taxis here run on compressed natural gas, with the tank between the trunk and the back seat), but at length he got me to a ferry terminal, though I was not at all positive it was the ferry terminal.  At any rate, it wasn't open yet.  I paid the guy, stamped my feet a bit, saying "Shit-shit-shit!", and strategized.  I would have to look around before I could get my bearings.  Finally I slipped in the back door, and found that the terminal had a counter for the Beetle ferry, and that it serviced Tsushima from this terminal, so I relaxed a bit.

They opened the terminal up around 5:30, and vendors began to show up around 6.  I got myself a latte, and then the ticketing window finally opened up around 7.  The let us go through security and immigration starting around 7:15, which consists of a metal detector for your person and a X-ray for your bags.  Then an immigration officer franks your passport with a "Departed" stamp.  It's at this point you really hope they let you back in which you come back at the end of the day.  Then it's more waiting, only in slightly more comfortable chairs, with a duty free neaby.  I've never seen the attraction of a duty free, they just sell Marlboros and Jack Daniels, American brands I can get back home, and not for a whole lot cheaper I don't think.  At 7:45 they let us board.

The Beetle is a two-deck ferry with a capacity of maybe 100 passengers and a dozen crew.  Once in open water, great jets push the hull out of the water, and the ship then skims over the water on skis, which provides a fairly smooth ride over even choppy waters.  Inside, the seating is arranged like a large airliner, but the chairs are of the more comfortable railway variety.  All the upholstery and carpeting looked fairly new.  I found my seat and buckled in; a few minutes later, a fashionable but snooty young lady walked up, harrumphed, and then proceeded to go forward.  I thought maybe she was my seat mate but was disgusted at the idea of sitting next to the fat, hairy American, then thought I was just making things up, then noticed she'd dropped her ticket and lo, she did in fact have the seat next to mine.

Finally they tossed off the lines and the ship began to back away from the dock.  A couple of the ticketing agents, in their matching turquoise skirts and neckerchiefs, had come out to wave and bow and wave some more to us.  It was probably the first time in twelve hours that I'd smiled.

Part II tomorrow.

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