Derek: Before arriving in Japan we needed to know our exit date for the visa application and decided that Korea would be our next stop. Rather than taking yet another flight, we found the Kampu ferry from Shimonoseki to Busan. This leaves daily and sails for about 14 hours overnight, arriving at 9 AM. The facilities were quite simple, the many reviews talking about “tired” decor were spot on. However, it traveled on time, was at least as comfortable as most of the hotels we’ve been staying at, and it was novel. I’d certainly consider taking it again, though I do hope the food selection becomes more vegetable heavy with time.

As we arrived in the morning we had six hours before we could check into our accommodation. In Japan we had made occasional use of baggage lockers at the train stations and Korea didn’t let us down in this. We dropped our bags, figured out that you can pay for subway access using an app, and went a few stops down to BIFF Square and the Gukje market. The square was quite missable and we walked right over it before noticing one of the movie star hand prints in the sidewalk, whoops. The market was fun though, and very extensive!

Charis: We stopped off for lunch at a lovely vegan restaurant, Obuthan, which had an offering similar to several Japanese vegan meals we’d had with lots of little side dishes or ‘banchan’. I must admit to preferring the Korean style, who seem to go for a bit more spice and more powerful flavours than the delicate Japanese options we’d had. I particularly enjoyed the kimchijeon, or kimchi pancake!

After lunch we headed up to Yongdusan Park for a walk and enjoyed the poetry plaques on the trees, the beautiful architecture and a lovely view back over Busan.

The poems were all self affirming, the one below reads; ‘To match the south river I must not lose sight of my feelings. I must not lose myself in order to meet others’ expectations. Life without me has no meaning‘.

An interesting phenomenon we noticed throughout Busan was the large number of little white dogs (to the point where there were dog-grooming parlours called ‘Little White Dog!) and the relative scarcity of other dogs. On doing a bit of online research, this seems to be due to the population of South Koreans who live in apartments rather than houses with gardens and is quite sensible, but it was a bit surprising to see compared to back home!

That evening we went to a gimbap shop for dinner – a bit like a qiant sushi roll and quite a bit more difficult to eat! Very tasty though, and very affordable.

Like in Japan, we also tried to organise a cooking class to try our hand at making Korean vegetable pancakes but unfortunately our session was cancelled and we didn’t have quite enough time to reschedule. Oh well, something for next time!

Derek: Our hotel was right on the Gwangalli Beach. Haeundae Beach, just a little along the coast, is a bit more of a common destination for international tourists, but it’s also farther from many places in the city and I’d read about the LED covered Gwangan Bridge and a drone light show that happens once a week.

Our room was several floors up and the entire beach facing wall was a floor to ceiling window. At night we had an amazing view of the bridge, though my photos didn’t come out at all well so here’s a video. Sadly the wind was fairly strong on the weekend so the drone show was canceled, same as the Canada Day show in Victoria!

Charis: Lining many of the streets throughout Busan were gingko trees – known to be hardy, stable and beautiful, so a good choice for city planting. Interestingly, gingko trees are also ancient, not having changed much for about 170 millions years. As such, these trees have some interesting quirks to them – the female trees produce fruitlike structures with yellowish flesh, but they smell absolutely awful, compared to rancid butter or vomit. A theory suggests this smell is similar enough to rotting meat that it could be used to entice carrion to eat it and therefore spread its seed.

Thankfully the male trees don’t produce this fruit/smell, but like fish, gingko are able to change sexes if they’re in a male-only environment, so planting only male trees doesn’t work long term to keep the streets pong-free. So yes, visiting Busan in the autumn turned out to be a bit smelly!

Derek: We had walked through Yongdusan park on our first day and spotted flyers for the Night Pop-con Festival happening the next two evenings. The shows started after sunset so we went to the nearby LOTTE department building which has a free, large rooftop observation deck to watch the sunset. It had great views over the city and the mountains which surround the city. On the first floor was a large food court where we grabbed some chestnut bread (which actually was a soft bread with large chunks of chestnut in it) and some mini gimbap which were much easier to eat than the larger version. The department store building was huge and had floor sized gyms, a kids play park, and the world’s largest indoor musical fountain.

After dinner we crossed the street and took a cool escalator to the top of the hill. The escalator had a light show across it’s ceiling, and there was an interesting artwork projected on the rocky backs of a pair of fountains. We listened to a pop group, tried a seeded hotteok, a delicious fried bread/pancake filled with sugar, cinnamon and roasted seeds. I definitely want to try making hotteok at home.

It had still been fairly hot weather for the week so on a cooler day we went out to the Oryukdo Skywalk, a glass floored observation deck reaching out over the sea from a peninsula, and hiked a section of the Haeparang Trail along the coast (behind us in the photo). This was a great break from exploring cities, and we really enjoyed the fresh sea breeze and sound of the waves.

At the end of our walk we stopped off at the Sorry Not Sorry cafe for a drink. We tried two Korean favourites; sikhye – a fermented rice and malt drink with similar but funkier vibes to horchata and misugaru – a mixed grain powder drink a bit like a very thick nutty Horlicks!

Derek: We had seen many Buddhist temples in Japan but wanted to see one in Korea. The Haedong Yonggungsa Temple is on the coast, founded in part to celebrate and observe the ocean, viewed as both ever changing and permanent.

The style and decoration was actually quite different from the temples we saw in Japan. Red gates, statues, and stone lamps were all still present but the woodwork was more often painted with geometric and floral blue and green. We saw this decoration style on a few other buildings, but didn’t go to any other temples in Busan, so the overall different feeling could be specific to this particular one. The statue is Gwan-eum, goddess of compassion, who we had seen in Japan as Kannon. It was interesting to see yet again how many cross-cultural references we saw – it would be great to go to China sometime and see how Buddhism is expressed there.

Charis: After South Korea, we were initially intending to travel to Vietnam and make our way down to Thailand via Cambodia, but after many weeks of really quite oppressive heat we decided to try and avoid areas where our outdoor activity would be significantly limited by the weather. Northern Vietnam would have been manageable temperature-wise, but Hanoi had recently been hit by the heaviest typhoon of the season, so we thought we’d give that a miss too! Hopefully we can return at a better time of year to see the best of these countries.

So with that decision made, our next stop was Australia. Brisbane, here we come!