Home, Again

By Mary Bergin | 4/07/2006 8:25 am | ...

This is reporter Mary Bergin's final blog entry, chronicling her trip to South Korea. The entire blog can be found here.

Work on this final blog begins around 3:30 a.m., a day after returning home to Madison. It was a trip of nearly 30 hours three plane rides, a bus ride and then the final leg, a two-hour car ride from O'Hare (plus a quick stop for pizza mmmmmmm!).

As I write this, a fellow traveler in Minnesota checks in. Anybody else unable to sleep, she asks. Uh-huh. The jet lag seems to last longer when heading this far from west to east. I remember that from a 2003 Women of Wings trip to Chiba, Japan, which is a Wisconsin sister-state.

Our last two days in Korea were spent on Jeju Island, which has a population of only 540,000 rural, by Korean standards. It is 41 kilometers from north to south, 73 kilometers from east to west. Forgive me for not translating that into miles right now.

We ate oodles of tangerines, sampled cactus flavored chocolate, bought hats and purses that were dyed a reddish-brown, with unripe persimmons juice. We visited Hallim Park and some of the island's dramatic lava caves (there are more than 100). We saw the "stone grandfather," a comic-like guardian god, everywhere (there are 18,000 of them). The coastline was overpowering, glistening, rugged.

Like Australia, this island used to be used as a prison. That was long ago, during the Shilla Dynasty, Our guide, Heea Kim, talks about how she was raised in a thatched hut village, where three generations of her family seven people shared two bedrooms. She is not an old woman, more likely in her late 20s or 30s.

Jeju is the wettest place in Korea, with an average of 1,000 millimeters of rain per year, but it is mostly dry and sunny during our visit. The island is a hub for farming, and most farmers do not need hoop houses to produce their crops. Barley is the main starch harvested here, not rice.

It is a major filming location, too, particularly for popular soap operas that Americans have never heard of, but they reach a big Asian crowd -- Japan to China. There is luxury lodging near water, and tourist hotels for those with tighter budgets.

Long known as a honeymoon destination, there also are casinos. The one we visit, on our own after dark, is small, elegant and completely empty. A colleague later reports the minimum bet for blackjack was $100.

The cheap way to arrive is by ferry from Busan, but it takes at least eight hours. We come by plane, a hop of less than one hour, but our itinerary is disrupted because we all miss our scheduled flight. That means we depart later and in small groups; it takes six hours for all 28 of us to be reunited. Either Asiana Airlines or Korean Air has a flight leaving hourly, and our caretakers work like mad one check-in counter, then the other, then again -- to get us on our way.

The best memory, for me, is Spirited Garden. It is a park full of bunjae the Korean word for bonsai that are hundreds of years old. It is the work of farmer Sung Bum-young, who we get to meet. His 2,000 bunjae trees make this a sacred place for non-gardeners as well as those who know how to nurture the soil and its life forms.

You deserve to know more about him and his incredible creation, his smiling and peaceful face, Jeju's fields of vibrant yellow rapeseed flowers, the panoramic view that rewards those who climb hundreds of steps to the top of Seongsan Sunrise Peak.

In saying goodbye, a colleague contended that we had saved the best for last during this trip, and I am tempted to agree. I don't know if I'll see Jeju Island again in my life, but I feel privileged to have it as a memory.

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