→ Midnight on a boat in the East China Sea. Or is it the Sea of Japan? Or the Yellow Sea? It’s very strategically placed, is Jeju. That’s our destination, an island an overnight ferry ride off the bottom of South Korea. So far the port experience has gone a long way to convincing me that Dover… you know what I’m going to say here, don’t you? That Korea’s industriousness and organisation has found slick new ways of loading cars and directing people, so the whole experience whisks past so fast you barely get a whiff of fish in the nostrils.
Er, no. I park up at the terminal in Mokpo and am instructed to unload any bags I want to take onboard. Then I’m told to drive the car onto the ferry, jinking it past reversing lorries, down ramps, past pillars before reversing it into place. I then stand there like a lemon wondering what happens next, while oilskin-clad crew chain it to the deck. I interpret the international language of gestures to mean “walk off the way you drove on”, and dodge the loading melee of trucks, forklifts and containers all the way back to the terminal. I then pick up my bags, join the check-in queue and finally walk up the gangplank feeling slightly bewildered.
Not exactly slick. Lunch, on the other hand, had been. Octopus tentacles. I’d asked our guides to take us somewhere local. We ended up on plastic patio chairs selecting food from
