Busan (부산)

After yesterday’s beautiful night views in the non-freezing night, we discovered that the temperature does not appear to have gone up during the day again. Which was not a good sign for the night to come.

We did however have to take off our jumpers when that hill we took a cable car up, was in fact quite a bit bigger than we thought it was, even just for walking down. 2km laterally and 400m vertically, over a lot of dry leaves to slide down the whole hill in one go. But even with the haze, the views were spectacular.

I don’t appear to have spotted this in Seoul, but even when we arrived at Busan and went down into the Metro, there were signs about current air quality levels like the carbon monoxide concentration. Us Aussies don’t appear to be the only ones who don’t regard the smog around here as being the healthies thing in the world. There’s also a lot of emergency air canisters, and breathing masks stored around subways and the like, which I assumed was in case of some underground air leak, but might also have something to do with the normal air quality.

The cable car and the metro spoke a bit of English, but other than that, we really seem to have wandered away from any tourist paths. Consequently, we still have not seen a single other Caucasian in this city. For me, this is great to be able to get away from all that. But it does also feel a little funny being this isolated.

Talking about isolated, the restaurants all seem to be completely abandoned around here. I’ve seen places that literally had the entire kitchen staff sitting throughout the restaurant, all with the head leaning on their hands hoping a customer would enter. I can’t quite imagine how all of these places stay in business. But eating there is not a particularly inviting prospect when nobody else seems to want to eat there either.

This was almost our last day in Korea. Tomorrow is shoot back up to Seoul, relax a couple more hours, and then it’s getting up super early to catch our flight to the next grand adventure.