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.
