For our very first Three Rides to Nowhere, we set off close to home in the up-and-coming “Inno City” of Bitgaram in Naju, South Korea. We decided to depart from the Korea Rural Economic Institute (KREI) or “KREI Fish” as we so often refer to it. Just off the road, we followed the decked walkways around the ornamental pond to the outrageously misshapen pagoda for some piping hot coffee and cheese balls. To quote the Oriental thinkers of yesteryear, “the cheesier the balls, the better the journey!”
After a slapstick circuit on the outdoor exercise machines, we hopped on bus 701 and enjoyed a jovial chat with the driver who just so happened to live in the apartment opposite us. While at the traffic lights, he even left his seat to share his own YouTube ambitions, offer us his phone number and invite us to dinner on his day off! For a deadpan Brit like myself, walking around with a camera is a great way to loosen up in public and unleash that inner goon. It is also an excuse to break through the sterility of the daily grind and spark up interactions with weird and wonderful strangers who would otherwise have passed you by.
Waving goodbye to our new bus driver friend, we exited out into the backend of Yeongsanpo Bus Terminal in the dusty old port district of Naju. It was at this point that I spotted a rather dashing mint koala in the corner of my eye and simply could not resist a go or five on the neon claw machine inside. With the claw getting the better of us this time around, we took bus 102 on a whim and rode it all the way into the character-filled countryside of Jeollanam-do.
We passed by vast expanses of naked pear trees before stumbling off the bus in the sleepy village of Gongsan. Having admired the tenacious, quad bike-riding grandmas for a while, we gravitated towards a red tent by the roadside and purchased a big bag of red bean fish. Like any local, we inhaled said fish on the move and skirted around the edge of Gongsan Middle School to absorb the stress-relieving phytoncides and negative ions from the bamboo forest. Founded in 1986, the school’s gardens looked as though they had been landscaped by Edward Scissor Hands, or Gawi Sohn as he’s known locally. We were also fortunate enough to discover a surprise hillside tomb and temple at the back of the old school house with panoramic views stretching out to the mountains all around.
Back in the center, local energies were centered around the Nonghyup supermarket and rickety storefronts, many of which had gone out of business and fallen into disrepair. Jiwon then took me on a jaunty whistle-stop tour of the village and its wafer thin cracks and crevices. From industrial scale rice cake shops to bright yellow fortune tellers who “reached Nirvana on Gyeryong Mountain,” Gongsan is a place where time really does stand still. With people spilling out of the Chinese restaurant into the pumpkin-laden streets, we relished the waft of sesame oil in the winter air and waited for our final bus of the day.
The darkness was setting in by now as the bus probed ever-deeper into the villages of Naju. As is often the case, bus three was quite literally transplanting us in the middle of nowhere, or more specifically, Yeonhwa “Lotus” Village. We were greeted by the sound of territorial white jindos, peach-headed murals, and the blended smell of spring onions and burning from the fires in the fields. Very little was going on, in fact many of the residents seemed to have abruptly upped and left. Now, their homes had been reclaimed by nature and signs advertising colored roofs faded away on the crumbling walls that remained.
We happened upon a curious kimchi farmer in the hamlet of Dongang before Jiwon demonstrated her wheat thrashing expertise. We also wandered into an open greenhouse full of grapes on the vine and watched the sun go down beside a magnificent 250-year-old dangsan tree believed to protect the residents of the village from evil spirits. We also discovered a shockingly tall swing that we absolutely had to try. It reminded me of the “dangerous plaything” swing found on the campus of Stockholm University, only less of a plaything and considerably more dangerous.
When you’re “in the swing” and so immersed in the spirit of the adventure, you feel as though you could carry on forever. Suddenly, you want to run through the fields for months, grow a beard and make national news as a man named Forrest Gump once did. Then, you realize that you are actually stuck on a dirt track at night with howls in the distance and only the bright red glare of a church’s steeple as a light source. That’s when you know that it’s time to call it a day. With the temperature below freezing, that’s when you hope to God that there is a bus back home…