Part of the reason we visited South Korea was to come and see the country before it was hit by too much tourism, what we didn’t think through was that western tourism is one thing but in this part of the world you have countries such as Japan, China and to be honest South Korea itself that all have a population that go on holiday. Unfortunately I think that South Korea has already been affected by tourism, it may not have a TGI on every corner but it does have a number of places that are very ‘Disney world’ added to that we are here in what is effectively their half term week but with 2 bank holidays not 1. They had Monday which was one festival and Friday which was children’s day so our guide estimated that 5 million people are on holiday at the moment, this was demonstrated at two of the places we visited today. The forecast was for sun again today after yesterdays rain and they were right, unfortunately this hasn’t cleared the air which we are currently blaming on the Chinese either from the pollution they create or the dust storm that is currently sweeping through, anyway we left the hotel at 8am after breakfast, another earlyish start to try and miss the traffic which as it turned out was needed. We drove along the coast to the Namhae bridge which links two bits of the mainland via an island, there are loads of islands along this area in the sea of Japan, some look very small and without the smog it would have been spectacular scenery. We turned right at a replica of the Statue of Liberty and drove past the American village before joining the traffic jam going into Daraengi Village on the way we saw what I thought was very tall rice but was actually field after field of garlic, this area is well known for its garlic production and even has a Garlic research institute! When we finally managed to get to the village we jumped out of the car as we couldn’t find a parking space and agreed to meet in about 40 minutes, the village is reported to have 108 terraces of rice paddies covering the hillside. A large number of them don’t seem to be farmed anymore as they were either overgrown or just dirt and we agreed that we have probably seen more impressive terracing in other countries but walking the hillside is obviously the thing to do as when we left we drove past about 3km of traffic queuing to get in and park! Out next stop was Namhae German Village, which was also packed and it took us almost 30 minutes to do the last kilometre. This village is of historical significance because it was built by Koreans who had gone to Germany after the Korean war to make a living and had returned to live in South Korea and wanted to replicate the style of housing they had in Germany, interestingly to achieve this they had to import the majority of the materials from Germany as they were not available in Korea. We walked round the village then stopped for a glass of beer which was very nice if a little strong and made it very difficult to stay awake for the rest of the journey. The good news was that we only had one more stop before being delivered to the hotel, this was at the Busan fish market which is very famous, the catch is landed each morning between 3 – 4 am and the market sells both live and dead fish, we walked round the live fish market where you can pick your fish and either take it home or they will cook it for you, then out into the dead fish market where it was all very nicely presented but to be honest still didn’t appeal! It was then back into the car for the drive round to the hotel which is actually a mock up of a temple although nothing like a temple inside, it did however have a bar which we went to so that we could update the web and see what we are going to do tomorrow.
