52 Countries in 52 Weeks, Part 24: Japan and South Korea

In Which I Think Less About The 8% Of Travelling That Everyone Talks About, And More About The 92% Of Stuff Along The Way That Makes It More Rewarding

Dec 09, 2024

After 230 days and 91,000 kilometres, it finally happened: food poisoning.

I felt it rumbling the moment I woke up off the coast of Japan after an overnight ferry from Busan to Fukoka. The prime suspect was the rubbery milmyeon noodle dish I got in an empty restaurant the afternoon before.

No food poisoning is fun, but this was one of the worst times I could have gotten it. Instead of being at a time where I could collapse in my hotel and wait it out, I had 500 kilometres, two trains and a ferry to get to the hotel I booked for the night.

Yes, I could spend $350 to stay in Fukoka and rebook my train ticket, though who knew whether I would feel any better in the morning?

So, I gritted it out. Became best friends with Pocari Sweat, Japan’s equivalent to Gatorade. Minimized my wanderings, nearly threw up on the local train from Hiroshima to the ferry terminal, and slugged my way up three flights of stairs to my hotel on Miyajima Island.

Then, I…did not go to sleep.

For you see, it was sunset, and the main point of going to Miyajima is to see the Torri shrine, the iconic orange gate that in high tide looks like it’s floating in water. On this day, high tide was happening at the same time as the sunset, and damned if I was going to miss that.

I will remember every day on this trip for the rest of my life, and within each day there are countless individual moments that will stay in my brain for a long time.

There are some special days though, all the planning and all the work leads to a singular moment, when you share in the wonder of the world in the same place as millions have done over hundreds of years, of feeling so in tune with oneself and the earth that you’re overwhelmed at both the moment and the fact that all this is happening.

I think that’s how I felt during the sunset.

It also could have just been the delirium and dehydration.

If you’re going to be semi-paralyzed by food poisoning for a few days, Miyajima is a wonderful place to do it in

Aside from some big existential thoughts about purpose and normalcy, my time in South Korea and Japan from late October to early November was a wonderful part of this trip.

My brain was regularly activated by their cultural and religious differences from Canada, yet it was still accessible enough that I never felt really stressed or anxious. The high-speed rail lines in both countries were extensive and efficient, and the relative small size of each made it a breeze to get around.

The food was great (I could eat Tteokbokki forever), the hiking plentiful, the history complex, the fall weather divine, the souvenirs ultimately too tempting to pass up.

I could have spent another month wandering the Japanese countryside, making friends with shrines and rivers and birds and pretending I was the protagonist in a Ghibli film, starting each day with a Katsu Sando from 7-Eleven and ending it with some sort of delicious sushi dish that’s better than the 7.5/10 option for $15 bucks you can find on every second street corner in Vancouver (which is pretty darn good).

If going to western Europe is travel on Level 1 easy mode for a basic Canadian, then Japan and Korea are Level 2 or 3: just different enough to force you out of your comfort zone, but still fairly straightforward and no less wonderful (not to mention 10 to 20 per cent cheaper).

I could probably spend a chapter gushing about any part of that, or my experience in any specific city*.

But I’ve done a lot of that in these entries.

So today, I want to talk about travelling when it goes awry.

*I’ll probably talk about them later, but I want to do so in the context of having seen other big east Asian cities and how they differ from their European and North American counterparts. If I had to give a very quick summary though, Tokyo was great but a tad too big and sprawling, Seoul was surprisingly awesome and one of my favourite cities so far, and Kyoto’s mix of new and old in the fall is simply heavenly.

There were so many good things to see and do in these two countries and not nearly enough room in a standard Substack post to show all the pictures

In the interest of disassociating from the local news that dominates, most of my social media time these days is on Instagram and TikTok, and the algorithm rewards me with plenty of videos from travel influencers.

And they mostly annoy me.

(I know many things “mostly annoy me”, but just roll with it)

In social media influencer land, engagement with a global algorithmic audience is the coin of the realm, and because of this posts are incentivized towards big uncomplicated emotions.

So travel videos are either tourist attraction porn of a place you’ve seen 10,000 times (but this time with drones and colour correction!), an awestruck Millennial looking at the camera saying “this is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!” before video of a 8.5/10 mountain, or some atmospheric music as you’re being told about a hidden gem or a cozy cafe or underrated village that is the truly #authentic way to visit France.

Obviously there are exceptions (some of these are also engagement bait, like Why This Tourist Trap Is Crowded And Not Actually Pretty). But by and large, travelling is sold as a series of Experiences You Must See To Believe (And Photo Number Seven Proves It!), where self-actualization and hedonism can magically happen at the exact same time if you go to this 5,000 Year Old Cave That Only Locals Know About.

And look, that’s obviously part of travel. A big emotional pull into leaving the comfortable confines of your Coquitlam existence for two weeks is to experience something new and exciting and definitely not Coquitlam.

However, let’s be optimistic and say those moments take up a full two hours of every single day on vacation.

That’s like 8% of your time. And that 8% takes up about 80% of the space that we give to talk about travel.

But the other 92% of the time is about being in a new place, figuring out new cultures and routines, surviving the airport and passing judgement on what the hotel room actually looks like, of breathing in the main street, using google translate to ask when the bus is going to arrive, cursing when you arrive at art gallery 10 minutes after the last tickets were closed, desperately searching for a laundromat near your hotel because you don’t want to spend $30 for a single load, debating just how adventurous you’re going to be with your food choices, whether that second glass of sangria tonight will impact the hike tomorrow, small successes and screwups, and 100 other things that never make the Instagram post but allow the Instagram post to happen.

Well, that and sleep.

That 92% isn’t talked about, because people are more interested in hearing what the Pyramids were like than the time you got sick on a boat to Japan but then felt good enough to see a shrine and the shrine was good.

But after nine months of doing this, those smaller moments of figuring things out, of adversity and accomplishment — and what it cumulatively reveals — are almost as interesting.

Which is why, to immediately undercut that point, I will now show nine photos of me being incredibly basic.

Here are a few examples from this leg:

At Seoul’s main train station, foreigners can only purchase a paper ticket, and there is no electronic backup. This became very annoying when I returned to the station a day after my purchase to take the train train to Gyeongju, only to realize that the ticket had somehow escaped my wallet…and then the cashier said all remaining trains south were sold out that day
In Tokyo, I was having a wonderful evening in the Shibuya district, alternating between trips to six-floor dollar stores and making friends in pubs, when I decided to check what subways would get me back to my hotel. The answer was “none of them”, because the city’s transit system shuts down at midnight
Also in Tokyo, I had a ticket to DisneySea, considered by many to be the best of the Disney theme parks for its unique visual presentation and rides. But the lines everywhere were at least 90 minutes long, the original point of going with my friends and their two-year-old daughter was no longer the case, and I was fast losing my joy
In Kamakura, a massive rainstorm was in the forecast, the biggest of the year…but you go there to see all the temples and shrines from its past as the head of the Kamakura shogunate, and there wasn’t much else to do in the town otherwise
That pesky aforementioned food poisoning

All of these things were somewhere between a minor annoyance and a crisis, but they all involved dealing with the gap between what the dream trip looks like in your head at every second, and the reality that shit happens.

And I dealt with them! Because you no choice! Which meant that:

In Seoul, I booked a train for early the next morning, used my Expedia points to get a free hotel close to the train station, and found a nearby night market to explore so I didn’t just throw a pity party
In Tokyo I quickly searched through all my transit options, and found one final train that would get me halfway to my hotel, and then sucked it up and took a $40 cab ride for the other half
Left DisneySea hours before it closed, and pivoted to a night of sake tastings and souvenir buying in the city’s upscale retail Ginza neighbourhood, before heading to the Tokyo Tower right at closing time
In Kamakura, dealt with the rainstorm by getting absolutely soaked, and then dragging my still wet shoes on top of my suitcase for four hours the next day as I made it to Tokyo
After arriving in Miyajima, spending the next two days mostly resting aside from a field trip to Hiroshima’s Peace Park, and then cancelling a 60km bike ride that crosses tons of small islands along one of Japan’s inland seas, sticking along the bullet train line and going to Onomichi and Okayama instead

There were a few overriding themes in my decisions: cutting losses and emotionally moving on, being patient and only pushing through when the cost would be purely cosmetic, not overthinking what Plan B would be and enjoying the energy of the unexpected.

Most importantly, it involved accepting that The Plan was not working, or at the very least needed to be examined again and adjusted if need be.

These are good muscles to grow, and they probably wouldn’t be growing in the same way if I was back home and everything was in a fairly beige routine.

Are any of these exciting stories?

Not really. That doesn’t make them any less important.

Because there’s not a good visual theme for each of the sections today, the photos are going to be very random. But that doesn’t make them any less pretty.

There were a lot of things I liked in Korea and Japan, but one of them was the visual playfulness.

There was brightness and weird art and whimsy all over the place, in a way that was relatively rare in the self-important aesthetic of the big cities in Europe and the Middle East that I visited the previous five months.

And one of those quirks brought with it a new metaphor: blind boxes.

A Japanese creation in the 1980s, blind boxes are basically mystery presents, usually presented within some sort of theme (this is a character from Powerpuff Girls, but you won’t know which one until you open the box!), that sometimes are bought straight up, and sometimes are the gift in a crane/vending machine-style game.

They’ve surged in popularity in a lot of countries recently, but none moreso than east Asia, where I probably saw more than a hundred storefronts where blind boxes.

And they mostly annoy me.

I like certainty, of knowing what I’m going to get, of planning for a thing and then getting the desired thing that I planned for, along with the satisfaction that the planning worked.

A mystery box? Where any outcome is possible, the joy is in the unexpected, and planning means nothing?

No. Thank. You.

So all through Korea and Japan, while buying plenty of plush mascots and Ghibli and Pokémon characters and ornate panel art, I bought no mystery boxes (yes i am a noble hero).

Until my last night in Japan.

There, I was in Nintendo’s flagship Kyoto store to get a gift for a friend. Next to the cash register, there was the opportunity: put the equivalent of six bucks in a vending machine, and a box would drop down, each one a different miniature version from one of their past consoles.

I won’t say I like blind boxes now.

But I will say that I’m better with unpredictability than I used to be, of having to change things on the fly, of having more patience and perspective.

Of course, the box that dropped down for me was a joyfully nostalgic N64.

Had it been a GameCube, we might be all the way back at square one.