Something I didn’t take the remotest interest in until I came to Korea is pottery. Today I saw an exhibition at a hospital of all places. At a time when I’ve been rebelling against the tyranny of the object, these things are kind of a reminder to chill out and retreat from the MP3/digital mania. Abstract concepts don’t exude an aura, do they?

This pottery collection was themed on images of the sea. 35 objects. A big bowl with orange and blue melted together, perfectly matching the color of the setting sun melting into the water — while the spine of silver fish jutted out, snaking their way up the vase. Another object at the bottom was round like another bowl, but then was engulfed by a head of white coral. Another piece of pottery was covered by barnacles. One piece called the “Deep Sea” was at first glance just a big solid dark colored bowl, but if you peered into it from the top, you could see the distortion, the confusion, the warping of vision that you might experience peering into the deeps, the limits of where light can reach. The intensity of color, the textures — this perfect image of the unstable dance of colors of the sea melted into pottery. It was really something else to see.

Riding a rental bicycle around the island under the blackening sky. At the moment, I arrived at the beginning of the path to the rocky cliffs, a downpour started. I waited with the bicycle under a roof. Tourists filed out of the parking lot in droves, as I jealously watched. Then, the rain stopped, and everyone was gone. And the sky still black. I walked along the muddy path, lined by planted palm trees. A growing sense of awe overtook me. With lush green vegetation in the foreground, the swelling ocean caught between the black lava rocks and the black sky is something to behold. Memories of this point in the big island of Hawaii came back to me, when I was staring out at the sea, some Pagan ornaments hanging on a fence in front of me — a similar kind of day, a moment of time that for whatever reason has lingered in my consciousness for 10 years.

And then I glimpsed the rocks. It was breathtaking, beyond what I could have expected. There’s outcrops of rocks about 150 metres in distance, and the rocks are all perfectly shaped into platforms, and rising crystallized hexagrams. And the waves of the ocean break against the rocks, the white crests a powerful contrast on this day when the ocean color is practically black. I’m at a loss to describe it more, except to say that it’s one of the most mysterious places I’ve ever seen it, and it was so powerful to regard it.

Finally, some other tourists came onto the scene, and the rain started up again. Walking my bicycle back to the parking lot, I came upon a van stuck in the mud. I stopped to help — other Koreans joined the scene, but none got as muddy as me. I was trying to improve my Karma, cause I knew I’d be needing it — encroaching darkness, pissing rain, and 20 kilometres back to the town. And sure enough — this bus driver generously stopped in the middle of the road, plugging up traffic, and let me bring my bike on the bus.

Imagine an ocean without the skin of the surface. I had a dream a few days before coming to the island of Cheju (geography: South of South Korea, West of Kyushu, Japan, North of Okinawa and Taiwan), in which I rode on a boat, circumnavigating an island, and I could see a jungle of orange and purple coral reefs all around the island. It was cool, cause this dream projection seemed to be confirmed over this weekend. I got under the skin of the sea, spending two days scuba diving off Munseom Rock, off the South coast of Cheju. By virtue of its more Northern (yet still subtropical) latitude, the cool thing about Cheju scuba diving, in contrast with the tropical diving of somewhere like the Phillipines (which I’ve only heard a little about), is that here there’s 4 seasons underwater, too — the fish and the vegetation change according to the seasons, I’m told. It was a jungle underwater — so much soft coral, in so many different colors, pale blue, purple, pink, these leafy (with silvery glitter on the leafs) orange bushes that you could swim right through, these taller green plants, that reminded me of some evergreen tree struggling for life on a mountain ridge above the treeline. Particurly memorable was this obscure white and pink tree, which struck me as some alien life form.

Why does such beautiful underwater plant life have to be confined to the slopes of tiny outcrops of rocks? Why aren’t there entire fields of soft coral in the same way that there are endless fields of grass in the prairies of Canada? Is it some kind disfunction that I see the most beautiful thing, and think it should be bigger or more abundant? It’s just hard for me to accept that there is so much nothing in the ocean.

My travel reading list seems fitting: The Living Sea by Jacques Cousteau (about adventures in the early days of scuba diving), Eden (in which a group of astronauts crash onto the 4th planet from the Sun in another solar system, and discover obscure lifeforms of various descriptions) by the Polish writer Lem (who wrote a few stories from on which the Russian director Tarkovsky based movies), and Popul Vuh, the ancient text of the Mayan civilization (haven’t opened this one yet).

I’ve found myself once again on a Southern island, as if pulled by gravity. I showed up at the ferry terminal in the port city of Pusan this past Monday evening. That evening’s ferry to Cheju island was sold out, so I made the quick decision that the traveler lives for, and caught a boat to another smaller island. Not many people know it, but there’s literally thousands of tiny islands in the South seas of South Korea — though, with the exception of the southernmost Cheju island, they’re not exactly tropical — mostly fantastic-shaped, jagged rocks without beaches. One of these rocks bore an uncanny resemblance to a lion on its hind legs in mid-attack. I took a separate boat to this peculiar island called Oedo — the only island to be purchased and developed by a private individual. The island has been converted to a large scale subtropical Italian/Greek-flavored garden.

On Tuesday night, I took the 12 hour overnight boat from Pusan to Cheju. Cheju is Korea’s entry into Asia’s resort island club. The centre of the island is a massive dormant volcano called Hallasan. While, the landscape around the island is quite unique, because there’s about 300 mini-volcano-shaped hills. There’s waterfalls, and spectacular coastal rock formations. There’s also this mysterious place called Mystery Road — you can put the car into neutral, shut off the engine, and mysteriously the car or even bus, is pulled up the hill, as if by some unseen magnetic force.

I spent two days at this festival of world island cultures. It was unbelievable to see a group of Balinese playing the gamelan, Sri Lankan dancers to some particularly incredible music, Ecuadorian musicians, Samoans, a polyphonic vocal group from Sardegna, Italy, and my favorite, this group from Hainan, China — the same island where the US plane emergency landed this past Winter. I doubt the Hainan dancers had much to do with tradition — there were 15 beautiful girls in beautiful long-sleeved green dresses, and then tighter, more revealing pink dresses — while a brochure was handed out, advertising Hainan as a golf course and beach resort destination.