Sayonara Japan, Han-gul Korea! (At sea between Japan and Korea)

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(Day 185 on the road)Just a short entry to mark my departure from Japan. I hadn't realised that I have been in the country for over a month by now, spending most of my time traversing countless mountains, be it on Hokkaido, in the Northern Japan Alps, or on Mt. Fuji. As always, time has been flying, and I have the feeling that if I keep going at this speed, I will never circle the world before my money finally runs out. I thus have the firm intention of spending less than a month in Korea, so that I can finally reach South East Asia. Down there, I also hope to find a peaceful and pretty place to stop and rest for a while. I feel a little worn out, so a relaxed break from travelling for a couple of weeks in an affordable country seems pretty tempting at the moment. But for the time being, my focus is on experiencing the highlights of South Korea. A trip into North Korea seems out of the question unfortunately. It is not impossible of course, but you have to be on a very expensive organised tour to visit the country. So I leave that for later in life - South Korea surely has enough to offer to keep me well occupied.

I spent my last day in Japan pretty much eating all the time, enjoying for a last time some of my favourite food. I had Sushi for breakfast, Okonomiyaki for lunch, and Tempura for dinner. Perfect! Eating all this delicious food, thought about all the strange places I had slept in in Japan. The range was bewildering: Youth hostel, hotel, traditional ryokan, capsule hotel, overnight ferry, my tent (at campsites and in the wild), mountain hut, emergency shelter, 24h spa, and 24 Internet cafe. Not bad. I also thought about how quiet a country Japan is. In all my time here, I never once heard a mobile phone ring (they have stickers in the underground for instance telling you to switch your phone off). I can only assume that in a country as hight-tech as Japan the constant ringing of phones in this polite and hushed society eventually annoyed everyone, so that now the usage has been banned almost completely from places like trains or buses.

From Hiroshima, I took a local train to the port city of Shimonoseki , where I boarded an overnight ferry that would take me to Busan in Korea.

Next stop: Busan (South Korea).



To view my photos, have a look at pictures.beiske.com. And to read the full account of my journey, have a look at the complete book about my trip at Amazon (and most other online book shops).

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