Cossacks

Map time! Here we have southern Russia, western Kazakhstan, the Caucus region, and eastern Ukraine, where I live. As you can see, my little green arrow is dead in the centre of the pale yellow shape. That shape indicates the territory most heavily populated by Cossack hordes.

These nomadic horsemen once thrived in the rich steppe and river basins of this region. The Cossack people have disputed origins, but they are likely a blend of Turkish, Mongol, and Slavic peoples and gained prominence around the 15th century. They were semi-autonomous and integral to the Russian border defence for hundreds of years. However, with the mechanization of the first and second World Wars, the Cossacks (and cavalries in general) became obsolete.

No longer instrumental to the protection of the Soviet Union, the Cossack subculture fell on hard times. During the Bolshevik period and the subsequent famine, the state redistributed many of the crops grown in this region among urban centres. As a result, the Cossack population dwindled.

In recent times, Ukraine, Georgia, and even Putin's government have taken measures to increase protection of what few Cossacks remain, now mostly poor farmers or peasants. In eastern Ukraine, however, people identify closely to the Cossack heritage and keep it alive as their own. Festivals celebrating the culture, conquests, and music of the Cossack people are frequent and spirited. More than half of the collectives performing in our House of Culture are dedicated entirely to maintaining and performing Cossack folk songs.

I often hear from volunteers in western Ukraine the misconceived notion that only in their regions can you find culture and history. While it may be true that Lugansk lacks synagogues, castles, or cities older than 200 years, ours was a nomadic and oral history and is not to be discredited. It may not be as photogenic as the West, but we do have loads of this: I give you Казачья молитва, the Cossack's Prayer.

Russia Was Nothing Compared to This

In all of my traveling, I have never had to bother with visa applications. Thanks to my blessed blue American passport, Japan, Taiwan, and Bangladesh have all let me in without a second glance. Now it seems it is time to pay my dues. The greatest challenge to overcome in the execution of this trip is not the planning or even the financing; it's the paperwork. I had a taste of this bureaucratic madness when I attempted Vladivostok in February. You know, when I had to apply for an invitation to apply for a visa?

Everything before Turkey and after Australia is a freebie on account of my citizenship, but that whole middle zone wants a full visa application. This means during the final months here in Seoul at least 10 embassy runs. While many of these have proven annoying (like only being open 4 days a week or only for 2 hours in the afternoon), nothing holds a candle to getting into Saudi Arabia. Here's the break down so far:

The Plan:
My route has me going through the middle east and then on to India, but this is hindered greatly by the fact that seemingly everything between Algeria and Mumbai is either in civil war or hates Americans. Even the waters are unsafe due to dysfunctional Somalia and somewhat less than vigilant Yemen. Now with Syria falling apart and Obama screwing my chances in Pakistan, the noose is tightening. If I can't make it through Saudi to the UAE, I have no choice but to scrap it and reroute through the Trans-Siberian Railroad. I've been trying hard for a week to discover if that Plan B is necessary or if I can lock down a visa to the Kingdom.


Click to view Middle East North Africa in a larger map

The Process:
The visa seemed next to impossible to get, but I have an in. My good coworker E was born and raised in Saudi for 21 years, and knows several people still inside the country. The necessary invitation for a travel visa seems plausible, so I started hitting embassies.

1. I went out to the location that was throughout maps and the internet indicated as "the Embassy to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia." It seems they've moved locations over a year ago and this building is a husk. Also, visiting hours are exclusively during the hours when I'm working. After some finagling I manage to secure the new address as well as permission to come in the morning.
2. The next day, I approach a lady at the counter of the KSA embassy. She looks at me as if I were insane, then tells me I have to wait for the consular to come in. You see, they're not sure whether I even need a travel visa (which they don't do anyway) or simply a transit one. Don't ask me why the consular is not in the consulate nor ever once showed in an hour and a half. In the end I had little choice but to leave my number and a copy of the map.
3. The KSA secretary calls me back with the information that, while the embassy in Seoul could not grant me the visa I required, I could get the necessary transit visa from the consulate in Amman, Jordan. My fear is that this is not true. What if I arrived in Jordan to find a dead-end, no re-entry permit for Egypt and therefore no hope of backtracking, and a wasted booking on a freighter from Dubai?
4. By now it is Friday, and though I attempt to fact check with the Saudi consulate in Amman, I have forgotten that Friday is the Muslim Sunday.  Of course there is no one there. Instead I call the D.C. one, but then realize that the time zone math I had done isn't applicable to both Jordan and Virginia...
5. When I finally contact D.C., they tell me that a visa is not even on my list of concerns: I will not be allowed to take this bus because I am not a middle eastern national. I know for a fact that this isn't true, as it was recommended to me by an American. However, now I have to confirm that it's still available for whities.
6. In the meantime, E sets Plan A.2 in motion, which involves one of her friends applying to sponsor my transit through the KSA. I spend some serious time researching the TSR from Moscow to Beijing, as Saudi is looking more and more unlikely.
7. This morning, just as I'm warming up to thoughts of Siberia, Raed Haddad of the Jordan Express Tourist Transport Company, or JETT, writes me a very cordial email informing me that riding the bus will absolutely be "no problem at all" and that I should specifically acquire a land transit visa. All this to be back where I was before calling D.C.  Can I get the visa here in Seoul, by mail to D.C., on the ground in Amman, or not at all?

Something tells me that the struggle isn't through yet, but until I answer the question of whether I can or can not pass through Saudi, I can't book anything further or calculate the timing of my trip with any accuracy. This one visa will determine the character of the middle 2 months. Will it be Turkey, the Middle East, and India? Or will I instead be in Russia, Mongolia, the Gobi, and finally city hopping through China?

The Next Step

It's true that I've been mentally checked out of Korea for some time now. I'm in the last four months of my job at Avalon. The food and culture are so normal these days that I can barely think of things to write about on this blog. I've hit a linguistic ceiling for someone not taking classes. There are few loose ends left to tie here, and considering that I've even done and seen all the things I wanted to before leaving Korea, I'd say it's been a pretty successful ride. While four months certainly leaves time for an adventure or two, most of my energy these days is consumed with the future, and Korea is more and more a part of the past. On September first, it will be completely so.

So what does the future hold? Well, right now I've been accepted into the Peace Corps, but the details are getting more vague with time instead of more concrete. At first, it appeared as though I were going to "eastern Europe or central Asia" (2,212,896 sq mi), but within a week I was renominated to "central or south America" (7,902,233 sq mi). Mathematically, assuming the increase in vagueness is linear and not exponential, I should be volunteering in "the world" by July 9th.

In the meantime, I am busily preparing for the stopgap. In the five months between the end of Korea and the start of some new adventure in [country name], I intend to do some traveling. The goal is to circumnavigate the globe. I have set two rules for this adventure. (1) I must cross the equator, and (2) I can not leave the surface.

The first rule is simply one of the governing concepts in the definition of circumnavigation. You must cross every line of longitude and you must finish in the same place you started in, but without the restriction of crossing the equator there is nothing to prevent you from heading straight north, skipping around the pole, then going home. While that would be an adventure in and of itself, it's not a valid circumnavigation. Crossing the equator is the simplest way to guarantee that the prospective circumnavigatee completes a "great circle," or a distance equal to the full circumference of the Earth.

As for the latter rule, I don't think there's any excitement in just getting on a commuter jet and showing up nine hours later in another country. A trip of this scale is about so much more than country hopping. I actually want to see the transformation of the land as it happens. Getting way up in an airplane is a fantastic way to skip over the weirdness, the run ins, and ultimately all of the fun of a "global road trip." Not to mention I hate airports, airplanes, and flying, as many do. I've discovered during my surface transport research an entire community of airplane boycotters, either because of health, phobias, or environmental conviction. While none of those apply to me, it is reassuring to discover that thousands of modern people every year travel on freighters, trains, buses, and ferries.

I've resisted the urge to romanticize this attempted circumnavigation, but just the very word conjures images of Magellan spliced with Indiana Jones. One of the great struggles is grasping the reality that this is not a camel ride montage across the Sahara or a pan out to a brown map with an animated red dotted line representing me zipping across the Pacific. Every moment of this will not be waking up outside the Taj Mahal or some other picturesque and magnificent scene. I have to force myself to accept that this will be exceedingly boring and lonely for the most part. I have to approach this realistically or I will not be able to achieve it: I will arrive on the other side of the Atlantic after 10 days on a cramped cargo freighter and think to myself, " This sucks." It will not be a cake walk, of this I am sure. However, I know that in a year I will either remember the experience exclusively in a positive light or I will not have survived it. In the coming months I'll keep you posted with as much concrete information about my trip as I have to share with you. For now and in the future, you can see the route as it develops here.

Vladivostok: A Prologue

After a hectic month at work and an exhausting 11 day tour of America, I'm definitely due so R&R.  Thanks to Korea's independence movement celebration on March 1st, I get a 4 day weekend here in the end of February. Four days is not enough to go somewhere far like Thailand or the Philippines, but I've already been to all the close, fast places like Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.  I've been doing a lot of domestic travel this winter to boot, so where do you send the guy who's been everywhere?  Siberia, of course.


View Vlad in a larger map
The choice was easy.  In my immediate area, everything is East Asia.  That's not to say at all that everything's the same, but there are common themes throughout the whole region that are endemic of countries with common ancestry.  However, Russia is the only place that's both closer than Tokyo and extremely different from anything I've seen thus far.  It's my theory that any city that's across a land mass and around the corner can't be anything like the capital either.  So, not only am I keeping it fresh after 3 years of Asia, but I'm also laying the ground work for some distance vs. nationalism observation when I visit Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The road to Vladi, however, was not quite as simple.  The first obstacle was obtaining a tourist visa.  My application started last December.  Step 1: apply to a tourist agency to obtain an invitation.  That's right, I had to go pay for an arbitrary piece of paper in order to be invited to pay for a visa.  I finally got my hands on an invitation, but I had to put the visa process off until the end of my school's winter schedule.  Finally, just before leaving for America, I had the opportunity to get over to the grey-gated monolith that is the Russian embassy during its visiting hours.

Who uses the Russian embassy in Seoul, you might wonder.  The answer is Russian nationals living in Korea and large tour groups of Koreans who stand in the visa line with 30 passports in hand.  While in this building, I actually heard an employee refer to someone as "comrade."  Walking down the alley to get to it takes me through construction and parking lots.  My heart was in my throat every time I went through the metal detectors and passed the armed guards.

At the end of the obstacle course of security and extra paperwork, I was finally trapped between a rock and a hard place: I could pay substantially  for the one day turn around on my passport work (so that I could have my passport to go back to America with that same week) or I could postpone the visa process further and possibly jeopardize my whole trip.  In the end, it's only money.  Now, with one empty page left in my passport and Cyrillic on my visa page, I was ready to start the search for lodging.

I had decided that, given its duration, this would be a good opportunity to test couchsurfing, a community who offer a place to crash to their fellow traveler.  However, this too has proven to be problematic.  My top choice, Roman Naumenko, is currently unavailable.  Viktor Matveev is busy this weekend.  Dmitry Kirsanov recommended a hostel I could check out.  Sasha Starostin is in Valencia, but has a friend who'd be willing.  Daniil Koltsov hasn't responded.  It looks like it may be another hostel trip after all.

Wish me luck with the housing, I'll check back on Wednesday with the story of what Vladivostok has to offer.

To Taipei

In my swiftly becoming tradition of buying the cheapest plane ticket the night before a break, I recently made the snap decision to fly to Taiwan for 5 days. Hereafter is the chronicle of the sights and smells of the little island off the coast of China.

This is not the ticket,
but rather a subway token.

Day 1
With its airport well outside of the capital city of Taipei, it takes a little over an hour before I really feel like I am in a different country. The people are still short and sporting unanimously black hair, and the existence of Chinese on signs is not so abnormal in Korea. My first clue, however, has to be the weather. I hadn't realized just how close in latitude the island was to Hong Kong, but it has the same balmy sort of tropical thickness. Stepping out of the airport and waiting for the bus is like spending a half hour in the sauna. My recently shaved head is going to get so burnt!

Shortly after arriving in the city proper with my travel buddy from work Josh, we start to scour the streets for food. Suitcases in tow, we cram into a little place with a lot of business. There seems to be little more than one thing on the menu, so we order that. Already a marked difference between Taiwanese and Korean food. This particular dish is a noodle soup, the broth of which was as viscous as Double Dare slime, though admittedly more appetizing. The what-seemed-to-be-pork and oysters was definitely an odd surf and turf meat option that I hadn't expected, but over all a nice kick off to the week of food that is to come.

The hostel's common area,
which surprised us by
just being some guy's house

After our lunch, we wander around and survey the hostels available to us while slurping down one of the many bubble teas we would drink throughout the week. Finally, we settled on a quaint place sandwiched between a bakery and a cosmetics shop. The narrow staircase to W Hostel climber up into what was certainly this man's home. (We never determined with any certainty the name of the hostel owner, but for the sake of story telling let's call him Willie.) After dropping our bags and settling our bill, it was back out into the street for some exploring.

We wander around the area we are staying in, known as Zhongxiao Fuxing on account of it being the intersection of Zhongziao and Fuxing roads.  This eventually leads us all the way down to Longshan Temple, which was seconds from closing when we arrived, and the Ximen night market.  Unfortunately, all I can say is I stood outside of a stall that serves snake.  The story is a far cry less cool than it could be, but the sight of it was stomach turning.  I haven't wimped out on a food adventure yet this year, so I think you've gotta give me this one.


Day 2

That white outline you can barely make out amid the danger pink?  That's Taiwan.

Our day starts with live footage of a sink blowing down the street during what will turn out to be, in regions south and east of the capital, devastating typhoon Fanapi.  A ponchoed female reporter screams while huddled in the fetal position behind a concrete column.  A delivery truck is toppled.  Breakfast of toast and tea.  Death toll at 10 a.m.?  One elderly woman who was trying desperately to do some last minute vegetable harvesting and two middle school students: a girl who slipped down the muddy banks into a flooded river and the boy who jumped in after her.

Rattled but not to be dissuaded on the first day of our adventure, we headed over to the original Din Tai Fung, a phenomenal 6-story dumpling and dimsum extravaganza.  Rain is off and on throughout our walk there, which is down the "runway" of sorts that leads up to the 2nd tallest building in the world: the Taipei 101.  It doesn't appear to be shaken, though the city might be.  With streets empty and the newspaper headlines ominous, we felt quite intrepid about being on the move.  The restaurant was relaxingly crowded, though, and leaving meant parting the sea of eager diners-to-be.

On the way back from brunch, we circled back through the Da'an Forest Park, then wandered down to the base of the 101 (If you haven't picked up on it yet, wandering is to be a real theme of this excursion).  The wind is really picking up by this time.  Cue the video:

Gusty and intense, you could actually at times lean 45 degrees into the wind.

A typical casualty on the streets of Taipei for the next few days.

The meandering continues as we find ourselves at the "Living Mall," which seemed like a suitable enough refuge from the wind. "Lots of shoes" and "a very confusing structure" are the memories I take away from this building that resembles a space station from Star Wars. Our impromptu walking tour of the city continues down Tea Street, or what we assume is Tea Street. There are a few tea shops, though nothing to warrant the name.

Perhaps this is as good a moment as ever to mention the bubble tea. We each drank 1-2 glasses of this a day. It's a cup filled half way with tapioca balls, half with ice cubes, then finally topped up with (typically) sweetened milk tea. I'm no stranger to bubble tea, but this is a whole new ball game. The tapioca is fresh, plentiful, and addictive. Since this trip it has been a recurring craving of mine.

We finish the day off with a series of foods, starting with a deceptively simple bowl of rice with an egg. I don't know why it tasted so good. Maybe it was the sauce the soaked into the rice, maybe the veggies and nuts, or maybe the fish shavings even. One things for certain: that would be a staple of my diet were I a local. We moved on to a beef and onion calzone type dish, a plate of butter sauteed asparagus, and some spicy tofu dish. All expertly devoured. Don't drink the sweet black licorice jello beverage.

Day 3
We decide late the night before to get out of the city.  To the astonishment of our hostel owner, we inform him of our quest to take a train to the Taroko Gorge and back in one day.  Against his advice to stay Hualien, we head out to the train station.  The worst of the typhoon has passed, with nothing left but fallen branches and some light rain.  We're not quite sure where to get off the train or how to find transport from the station to the gorge, but the ride itself is quite pleasant.

It's nice to see some smaller towns and farm fields, but there's also a prominent industrial presence. We pass multiple large factories on our way. The small towns are also a good vantage point from which to notice how strongly the temples jump out of the scenery. While the majority of the landscape is grey and brown, the temples were stark, unnatural reds, yellows, and blues.

The gorge itself is a 30 minute uphill walk through a small town. There is much more evidence of Fanapi's passing on this side of the island. By now its almost noon, so we stop at a fruit stand shortly after getting off the train. Lunch is the most amazing mango and dragonfruit I've ever tasted. Vibrant color, huge flavor. Nothing will ever compare again.

Taroko Gorge is the most impressive experience of the trip. The pictures sort of do it justice, but it is absolutely breath-taking. Towering, tree-packed mountains, with fog snaking over and between them, stand like walls on either side of a typhoon-flooded river. Waterfalls drizzle out from imperceptible sources throughout the range.

It also is the site of one of our most authentic meals on the island. A small group of monks in this monastery in the foothills is preparing food for themselves. Before we know what happened, we are ushered into the silent "cafeteria" on the third floor of this temple and aimed at the dishes. Without explanation or instruction, we are observed in a hushed silence. We eat our absolutely delicious vegetarian rice mix, noodles, moon cakes, fruit, and soup in the same silence. There's a feeling of calm in the air that discourages words for fear of breaking the peace. Naturally, photographing the scene would have felt obscene. We leave the temple slack jawed and wide eyed at the hospitality we've just encountered.

We arrive, exhausted, back in the city after dark. We get a quick meal of beef noodles, pork blood soup, and pickled cabbage noodles. The bubble tea of the day is with Pu'er tea, plum juice, and lemon.

It is at this point, with 3 days left, that my camera breaks. The remaining time is captured on Josh's camera and the story will continue when I get the visuals necessary to do it up right.

Hokkaido

For my summer vacation, Hokkaido happened.  Hokkaido is the northernmost of the main islands in the Japanese archipelago, and it lived up to it's reputation amongst the Japanese people as the place to go for food.

For starters, I was lucky enough to go on this trip with a friend from college.  Thanks C.H. for coming all the way out to Korea!  When we arrived in Sapporo (like the beer), we didn't know any Japanese and we didn't have a place to stay.  Although Hokkaido is a very popular summer destination for travelers due to its temperate climate, we were fortunate to find it not too crowded.  We also soon realized that its popularity with tourists was in fact with nationals.  This fact became evident when not even our hotel spoke any English.

Inside of the city, there were several things to see, including a giant Panasonic clock styled like the Tokyo Tower and, of course, the Sapporo brewery.  We also toured a local sake factory.  The process is complicated!  We went to another old brewery that was converted into a mall, and we saw the Museum of Literature just off of Nakajima Park.

The city had a rich history, but lets be straight: this was a vacation for food.  Accordingly, as I prefer on my trips, there was non-stop eating.  Sushi all the time, some of the best shrimp I've ever had, crab legs, barbecue, grilled squid, okonomiyaki, street food, and mochi.  The pictures speak for themselves.

One of the best decisions we made was to take the train out of Sapporo and into the harbor town of Otaru.  From there, we took a ferry out and around the cape into a small town called Shukutsu.  It was a fantastic peek into the local culture (and flavor) of Hokkaido.  I want to live in this town when I'm old, fishing for squid and watching the fog roll in over the forest blanketed mountains.

Overall, a totally awesome summer break.  I think C had a great time in Korea too!  Open invitation to anyone who can get a ticket, as always...