Korea Archives - 4corners7seas

Covid-19: Light at the End of the Tunnel

I was in Taiwan when the covid-19 pandemic started, which was pretty much the best place to be. The government there didn’t wait for Chinese authorities or the WHO to confirm human-to-human transmission, and immediately started screening inbound passengers from China and asked everyone to wear masks, practise good hygiene, and avoid crowds where possible.

They’ve basically been ready for the next one since SARS in 2003, and the vice president being an epidemiologist probably helped. It was hard to get masks and sanitiser for a month or so, when this pic was taken:

…but they quickly ramped up production and introduced a rationing system to make sure people had enough.

It was also one of the fastest countries to apply border controls, and has generally done an excellent job so far of controlling the virus – it was mind-boggling watching from a distance as places like the UK and US so badly screwed up their own responses.

I was hoping to ride the pandemic out in Taipei, and I was initially allowed to overstay for 10 weeks beyond the end of my tourist stamp (see my post here for a bit more on life in Taipei during the pandemic). Unfortunately that wasn’t extended and I had no way to stay longer, so I had to either go back to the UK or go to the one other place near Taiwan that would let me in, which was Korea.

Korea’s initial response wasn’t as fast and effective as Taiwan’s, and it suffered the first major outbreak outside China – however, after the bad start they got their shit together and even managed to be the only major economy to keep their border open to short-term visitors without also letting a ton of imported cases in and losing control of the virus. This was achieved by setting up an extremely strict quarantine system for everyone arriving in Korea – either at home for citizens and residents, or in government-managed facilities for temporary visitors (at visitors’ own expense). See here for a detailed account of quarantine in Korea and here for the rest of my stay in Seoul.

But after 14 days of quarantine and 76 days of relatively normal life in Seoul, I had to move on again. It still wasn’t possible to enter Taiwan, so back to England it was.

Here’s a photo I posted on Instagram and an excerpt from the little rant that went with it about arriving back in the UK:

…being out of options I came back to England. Absolute joke. Walked right through the airport without speaking to a human being. Coming from Korea I didn’t have to self-isolate as it’s on the safe list, but nobody checked where I’d come in from anyway, or where I was going, or how I was getting there, or even what my temperature was (never mind an actual covid test)

In Korea I’d experienced a month of semi-lockdown in Seoul, which was triggered by a spike to 300 cases per day. It worked, and a month later they were back down to double figures.

By contrast the UK was up to over 20000 cases per day before Boris Johnson realised he’d better finally do something that his science advisors told him to do many weeks earlier (but which he seems to have resisted because it wouldn’t be good for his popularity). So now we have this lockdown, and even once it ends most of the country will probably have tier 2/3 semi-lockdown conditions through the winter.

Care workers are busting their asses and the rest of us are asked to curb our lives in lockdown – we’re all doing our bit, but the government is totally failing to do theirs. Useless…

And that was before the new variant made everything even worse, which happened right after the government ended the lockdown far too early and against the advice of scientists (yet again), leading to yet another, stricter, longer lockdown which still continues as I write this.

At this point in the UK it’s already too late to stop the virus, so it’s basically just a case of waiting for the vaccine to be given to enough people for things to start getting back to normal. To be fair the vaccine rollout is the one thing that seems to have been done well by the UK in this pandemic and is progressing at pace, so hopefully things in the UK will be normal or at least normal-ish later this year. And that goes for everywhere else with an adequate vaccine supply – but there are many countries (still the majority globally) which don’t have that, so a lot of people around the world are unlikely to get it this year and a lot of countries around the world will still be messed up while others are getting back to normality.

I’m guessing this all means that borders will start slowly opening again soon, but most countries will probably only let you in with proof of vaccination.

The whole thing also has me wondering about the whole “digital nomad” thing. It sounds great, being able to travel around staying for a month here, two months there, chasing the sun or the snow or ticking off travel ambitions all while you work from your laptop; but then what happens when the shit hits the fan, countries close their borders, and most travel shuts down? You probably end up having to go back to the country you’re actually a citizen of – most others won’t let you in, and even if you can go somewhere (like I could to Korea for a few months) your income might be decimated. Mine certainly was, and any other travel blog you read will probably say the same thing.

For example, the traffic over on my Korea snowboard website this ski season was 90% down, and the income from it was 98% down. Meanwhile here on this website I’d put a ton of work into a Tokyo guide for foreign visitors heading to Japan for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, which obviously didn’t happen in 2020 and now look set to go ahead in 2021 but without any foreign fans. So that project ended up being a lot of time down the drain, and thousands of dollars of lost income.

Which is to say, job security isn’t great for digital nomad travel blogging – that obviously goes with the territory, but for many the pandemic saw that go from being a potential problem to a very real and immediate one.

Furthermore, despite this romantic notion of being a ‘citizen of the world’, of nowhere and everywhere, once again we see that your passport really does make a difference. This winter under lockdown in the UK hasn’t been a lot of fun. But (despite the idiot politicians in charge) at least I could come back to a country with a great health system that would treat me (without billing me) if I did get sick, which has developed vaccines and is rolling them out quickly, and where daily life for most of the population has remained safe & comfortable enough (although dull & frustrating). Again we see that the accident of birth on one or other side of a border can make a huge difference.

So was it all bullshit, being a digital nomad – or on the other hand, in the long run might the pandemic be seen as having accelerated the trend? One thing that always sucks about it as a long-term lifestyle is visas – take Thailand for example, which for years now has been host to a revolving population of digital nomads, some staying for a few months at a time, but others staying for years with visa runs every couple of months as necessary. It always seemed to me that Thailand (and others) would be smart to introduce some sort of long-stay visa for remote workers, allowing people to legally stay for say a year while working online, charging a visa fee in lieu of income tax.

Well, a whole bunch of countries have now started schemes along these lines, with more likely to follow: Antigua & Barbuda, Bahamas, Anguilla, Barbados, Bermuda, Caymans, Mauritius, Costa Rica, UAE, Iceland, Estonia, Croatia, and Georgia all now have some sort of remote work visa system for long stays. Although it is also worth noting that they’re mostly only available to those with income above a certain level, which is usually way more than I’ve ever earned online (50 grand in some cases) and I’m pretty confident is way more than most of those digital nomads in Thailand (and elsewhere in SE Asia, Central America and so on) have ever earned. But it’s a start, and it’ll be interesting to see if it becomes an established thing.

Even for many people who either can’t or don’t have any desire to be digital nomads, the pandemic has been a first experience of working remotely. Most of my friends in the UK, for example, have been doing their regular jobs from home during the various lockdowns – some like it, some don’t, but either way it’s definitely been a demonstration of the possibilities provided by modern tech for doing remotely what used to require everyone to commute for. In the future we may well also look back on the pandemic as being a key event in changing work cultures, perhaps with it becoming the norm for people to do a combination of office work days and remote work days.

This post is starting to ramble beyond the scope of a travel blog, but it’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out once the pandemic is finally under control globally. It did expose the insecurity of being a digital nomad, but it has also shown the viability of widespread remote work becoming a new norm.

A few months in Seoul during covid-19

Covid-19, Korea

When the covid-19 pandemic started, I was in Taiwan which was pretty much the best place to be. The government there didn’t wait for China or the WHO to confirm human-to-human transmission, and immediately started screening inbound passengers from China and asked everyone to wear masks, practise good hygiene, and avoid crowds where possible. It was also one of the fastest to apply border controls, and has generally done an excellent job so far of controlling the virus – it was mind-boggling watching places like the UK and US so badly screwing up their own responses.

I was hoping to ride the pandemic out in Taipei, and I was initially allowed to overstay for 10 weeks beyond the end of my tourist stamp (see here about life in Taipei during the pandemic). Unfortunately that wasn’t extended and I had no way to stay longer, so I had to either go back to the UK or go to the one other place near Taiwan that would let me in, which was Korea.

Korea’s response hadn’t been quite as fast and effective as Taiwan’s, and it suffered the first major outbreak outside China – however, after the bad start they got their shit together and even managed to be the only major economy to keep their border open without also letting a ton of imported cases in and losing control of the virus. This was achieved by setting up an extremely strict quarantine system for everyone arriving in Korea – either at home for citizens and residents, or in government-managed facilities for temporary visitors (at visitors’ own expense). This was my quarantine room in Incheon:

Korea did bar entry to many nationalities as a reciprocal response, as those countries had first barred entry to Koreans during the early months of the pandemic. This didn’t apply to Brits though so I was able to go there, and as the UK government was clearly not doing a good job Korea seemed like the best option – except I could only stay 90 days total and would have to spend the first 14 doing an expensive quarantine stint. The hope was that by the end of 90 days, Taiwan might have set up some similar system by which I’d be able to go back there and avoid the UK.

That turned out not to be the case, so once my 90 days in Korea were up I did end up coming back to England, where I’m writing this now and where I guess I’m stuck until things start getting somewhat back to normal in the hopefully not-too-distant future. So the Korea plan turned out to be a waste of money really, but it was worth a try and (quarantine aside) Seoul was still a good place to spend a few months catching up with friends, eating & drinking, and doing some hiking.

You can read my detailed account of the quarantine experience here, and the rest of this post is just to share a bit of what I did after that.

Honestly, that first day after quarantine it just felt amazing to be outdoors breathing air that hadn’t come through ducts, even though the weather was shit. Actually the weather was awful for weeks, raining cats & dogs a lot of the time and leading to severe flooding in parts of the city – if you’ve seen Parasite you’ll recall a key scene in the film where torrential rain leads to their apartment flooding, and that does sometimes happen in rainy season.

Dude having a smoke and a drink during a downpour at the convenience store opposite my airbnb:

Was much better once rainy season ended:

And life continued largely as normal in most of the city, albeit with everyone wearing masks everywhere and things definitely being a bit quieter than usual. This was especially obvious in tourists areas like Myeongdong which was an absolute ghost town compared to usual, and also the normally heaving nightlife was subdued as clubs had been closed following mini-outbreaks and a lot of people were avoiding bars. Itaewon in particular was badly affected (I’m guessing a bunch of bars & clubs there won’t survive the pandemic), and Gangnam & Hongdae were pretty quiet too.

This was at the top of Namsan, where there’d normally be a sea of tourists jostling for elbow room:

Great views as usual though:

After that hike up Namsan I realised I’d made the comedy error of forgetting both to top up my subway pass or to bring any other cash or card with me, so then spent an hour and a half walking back to my airbnb on the other side of the river and up & down over a couple more small mountains. Which I didn’t mind at all, as it’s always interesting to walk through residential areas of a city you might normally never see, and it was a nice evening too. Snapped this (of the skyscrapers on Yeouido island) from the bridge over the Han:

This spell in Seoul was also a good opportunity to update and add to my Seoul hiking pages, including my favourite route up Gwanaksan again:

These weird Star Trek trees have sprouted outside Sadang Station (near Gwanaksan) since my last visit:

I also did several hikes on the ridge along the southern edge of Bukhansan National Park to check the best trails and put together this hiking route. Great terrain and views up there:

Couple of random neighbourhood shots displaying leisure time priorities in Korea:

I’ve written plenty on this blog about all the great hiking in the mountains around the city, but another really neat thing about Seoul is there are lots of smaller hills here & there which have been left as islands of real forest within the concrete forest. If you live near one of them you can go and stretch your legs in natural surroundings without even having to take the metro anywhere, and some of these parks are connected together by bridges so you can string them together for a longer walk. I went for a wander from Express Bus Terminal Station down to Naebang through a couple of these parks, connected by this pedestrian bridge over a major road:

While these mini forests are no substitute for the real thing, they’re a pretty cool feature to have right there in the middle of such a high density urban environment.

It wasn’t all plain sailing in Seoul while I was there – almost half of my time in the city coincided with a 6-week partial lockdown, with all the bars shut, most cafes shut, and a 9pm curfew for restaurants. This obviously wasn’t great, but everything else stayed open so it wasn’t awful either – but what was especially noteworthy was that they did this in response to having over 100 cases per day in Seoul, with the intention of getting it back down below that threshold, and it worked. Meanwhile the UK was spiking to thousands of cases a day due to everyone relaxing after the end of the first lockdown there, but the government was just dithering on, pretending the shit wasn’t massively hitting the fan again, and not responding until far too late (again). It was infuriating being in a country taking pro-active and effective measures while watching the UK blundering into a disaster, and that was the situation in which I found myself heading back to England.

The contrast between the arrival at Seoul-Incheon Airport and the arrival at London Heathrow was staggering, and it was immediately obvious to me why Korea was doing a pretty good containment job and the UK had totally failed to. But that’s a rant for another post…

Coronavirus Quarantine in Korea

Covid-19, Korea

I was woken up by the sound of a disembodied female voice speaking in heavily Korean-accented but clear English:

”This is an announcement of government support team. Your meal will be served shortly. Please do not open your door except at the allotted time”

I’d only been asleep for a few hours, had fallen asleep in my clothes with the light on in an unfamiliar hotel room, and was woken from the middle of a dream. Needless to say it took me a while to work out what the hell was going on, as the same message continued playing in a stream of a dozen different languages before repeating again. It went on for a good 5 minutes, by which time I’d realised it was being piped through a speaker in the ceiling near the door.

Such pre-recorded messages were piped in through that speaker in multiple languages in a fixed daily pattern, mostly just before and after the three daily meal times to provide general information about waste disposal and so on.

The most dystopian went like this:

“This is an announcement of government support team. In this temporary living facility, cases have been reported continuously. Do not come out of your room to prevent the transmission of covid-19. Especially be careful not to close the door when you get your meal and leave your garbage bag in front of your door”

Another warned that leaving the room would result in immediate arrest and deportation.

This was the room I’d checked into late the evening before:

My coronavirus quarantine room at Incheon airport

…and the view I woke up to that morning:

The view from my coronavirus quarantine room at Incheon airport

To be fair, if you’re going to be stuck in one room for 14 days that’s a decent room to be stuck in, and it wasn’t a bad view to be stuck with either. The large building with the angular roof is a casino (illegal for locals to gamble in, hence it being right next to the airport). Those in rooms on the other side of the hotel had views out over Incheon International Airport, probably not as nice but they said it was cool watching the planes coming and going (although far fewer than usual of course).

And this was the breakfast I found when I investigated outside my door after the announcement finished on that first morning:

A meal served during my covid-19 quarantine in Korea

Nothing fancy, but a decent enough breakfast. The meals were served thus:

Covid-19 biohazard waste disposal and food delivery bags

The orange biohazard bag outside my neighbour’s door across the hall is how you throw out your trash while in quarantine. Upon arrival you’re given a stash, one per day:

So life in quarantine followed a highly regimented pattern. Breakfast at 8am, lunch at midday, dinner at 6pm, with the piped messages before and after each meal. You drop the trash out when taking your meal in, and apart from meals you’re forbidden to open the door except when the staff knock. They do a scheduled round after the evening meal, starting from 7pm, to take everyone’s temperature and verbally check you’re okay and ask if you have any symptoms. These aren’t hotel staff, but medical professionals in full hazmat gear. All very polite and friendly, but still it feels very much like you’re in some dystopian sci-fi movie. I suppose in many ways 2020 basically is a dystopian sci-fi movie.

The most surreal part was arrival at the airport. Coming into the immigration hall you first hand in your coronavirus form at a desk, based on which you get sent to different procedure lines e.g. foreigners with residency get to do quarantine at home, so are processed differently. But if like me you’re entering on a tourist stamp, you get sent to the government quarantine line. They take a local contact number & address, and he checked the number on the spot so make sure you have a friend ready to take a call at your approximate arrival time. Then you have to download the quarantine self-assessment app on your phone or tablet to report your symptom status every day while in quarantine.

The app for home quarantine is different and actually monitors that you don’t leave your house, also requiring you to check in at regular intervals so you can’t just leave your phone at home and go off for a weekend somewhere – I was actually given the wrong app initially, so my friend got a confused call from the local government office the next day and had to explain I was in government quarantine and not staying with her.

After that there was another desk to provide some more details, and then finally the passport control line. When they stamp you in they give you a lanyard to wear, which signals the staff on the other side that you’re going to quarantine. They grab you when you come through and take you to fenced off waiting areas for quarantinees to wait for buses (all very well distanced), and a short time later we boarded our bus which then sat there for well over an hour (presumably to wait for another load of passengers, but in the end no more joined us). It was quite late and we were initially told we’d be going to a hotel near the Everland theme park way over on the southeast side of the greater Seoul conurbation (Incheon Airport is on an island on the west side of it all), but after that long wait they ended up just driving us to the Grand Hyatt near the airport. And that was a good stroke of luck – the price you pay is fixed at 100 USD per night regardless of the hotel, so the Hyatt is a score (it would actually cost more than that just to book it for a regular stay in normal circumstances). The Everland hotel looked ok too though to be fair.

Once at the hotel you line up again to get tested, and again to pay and be checked in. I think the extra staff at the airport were all military, while the staff at the hotel were from the CDC (Center for Disease Control)

The test wasn’t exactly painful, but it’s pretty unpleasant – the swab goes in through your nose and scrapes the very top of the back of your throat. You’ve probably never had anything do that before, and it feels totally gross. But it was okay, and the result is delivered to your room the following evening.

If positive, you get hospitalised (which you don’t have to pay for) until your case is resolved. If negative, you get to stay in your deluxe prison cell for another 13 days.

If you develop a fever or other symptoms during your stay, you get another covid test and if positive you get hospitalised. Thankfully I didn’t have to have a second test – the one on arrival was more than enough!

The whole arrival process is quite time consuming, but very well organised and it’s actually really impressive that Korea set all that up in order to keep its borders open without importing uncontrollable numbers of covid cases. Most countries have either closed their borders to foreigners, or have just totally lost control of the virus situation (no coincidence). It was a relief to finally get to the room, but it wasn’t horrendous or anything – although I have to say, if you do it after a 12-hour red-eye from a completely different time zone it will be a seriously trippy experience.

Anyway once you’re in and the novelty & confusion of the first day are behind you, you have a lot of time to fill in between meals. You have a TV and wifi, one guy said he spent the entire time bingeing Netflix (probably a common strategy), another said he was working on a book so used it as writing time. Personally I treated it as a 14-day harmonica woodshed, I probably averaged 3 or 4 hours of harmonica practice per day. Hopefully my neighbours didn’t hate it…

Looking across at the other wing of the hotel (built at a slight angle, so you could see into a small portion of the rooms near the windows) I saw one room with a family in it and two young kids literally bouncing off the walls, lots of people sitting in the window playing on their phones, and most bizarrely one guy who kept standing in his window butt-naked which was an unwelcome surprise on several occasions.

And that’s life in quarantine. The strict regime makes it feel like a luxury prison, and insects landing on the window was as exciting as it got, but as long as you take something with you to pass the time (or are happy just bingeing the internet) it isn’t all that bad – especially if you get lucky with your hotel like I did.

Insect visitors:

On the last day you get escorted out early in the morning (7am in our case, so you’re out of the way before breakfast) and loaded onto shuttle buses to a nearby metro station, and then you’re finally free.

If you’re wondering about the food, no it isn’t fantastic. But it’s not too bad on the whole, each meal bag has a tray with a main dish and a few sides, plus an assortment of fresh fruit, canned drinks, water, and snacks like chocolate bars, cereal, or instant soup or noodles. You have a kettle in the room so you can make those later, and make tea & coffee.

On that note, a warning to fellow caffeine addicts: take a coffee supply in with you. They did provide a few sachets of coffee in the room, and canned coffee was sometimes provided with breakfast (not every day though), but I was very glad I took some with me. At one point I was rationing out what I had left to make sure I didn’t end up having to do caffeine cold turkey for the last few days, but the canned coffee supply was good for those days as it turned out which saved the day. Seriously, worrying about running out of coffee was the most stressful thing about quarantine! (actually, you could probably order a box in from Amazon – deliveries are allowed but not for fresh food)

Anyway, this was all they provided to start with so taking your own is a good idea:

Here are a few of the meals I was served:

I guess they get the meals in from a catering company then microwave them on site prior to serving. Sometimes the food was only lukewarm, sometimes piping hot – I was at the end room on the top floor so I think my meal was dropped off either first or last, hence the hit & miss temperature. There were a couple of main dishes I thought were pretty bad, but most of it was fine. The worst thing was the lack of variety, and after 14 days I was extremely bored of rice.

If you have veggie or religious dietary requirements you can specify this on arrival and they cater to your needs, though I doubt this extends as far as being able to ask for pescetarian or keto.

Here’s a few more window pics to finish up with, watching the tide roll in & out and dreaming of fresh air:

For some thoughts & pics of Seoul after I left quarantine see here

If you have any questions about the quarantine system in Korea give me a shout below and I’ll do my best to answer.

For more Korea posts click here

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2018 updates

Japan, Korea

It’s been a couple of years now since I launched this blog, yet I’ve been so busy catching up on writing posts from many years of earlier travel that I’ve largely failed to write posts updating where I actually am and what I’m actually doing. So with that in mind, here’s an update on my movements last year and so far this year.

I spent most of 2018 in Korea & Japan, though that wasn’t originally the plan – I was in Korea for the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics and running my website about snowboarding in Korea, expecting to leave after the season finished and go back to Taiwan. But then I crashed off a jump and fractured my wrist, and ended up at my brother’s in Australia for surgery & recuperation instead (full story here) – but with all my shit left with friends back in Seoul.

So when I left Australia I went back to Seoul to round up my belongings, entering on a fresh 3-month entry stamp; my arm needed a few months to fully heal so I used all 90 days in Korea to allow for that before heading to Japan to research my new website (a guide to Japan for rugby fans heading to this year’s World Cup there), then bounced back to Korea (as I’d left all my bulky stuff there again) before a 2nd research trip to Japan (to visit the Kamaishi rugby stadium once it finally opened), and then back to Korea again because another ski season was rolling around already – a season which just ended in a couple of broken ribs. Seems I’ll never learn!

It was great to be travelling in Japan as a tourist again (rather than stuck in the ESL classroom), and the stadiums are an impressive bunch:

Check out my site Rugby Guide Japan for more info about them and the host cities.

Over the two visits combined I went to Fukuoka, Oita, Kumamoto, Hiroshima, Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto, Toyota, Shizuoka, Yokohama, Tokyo, Kumagaya, and Kamaishi. It was a lot of ground to cover and I got extensive use out of a few JR Passes in doing so.

I actually stopped in Osaka for a full month of old stomping grounds, old friends, delicious food, and long summer nights watching the FIFA World Cup live from Russia, and spent about 3 weeks all together in Tokyo likewise stomping old grounds with old friends.

I did some hiking in Kyoto on the second visit to get some decent photos to replace the shitty old ones on a couple of my hiking pages (namely the Shogunzuka and Kami Daigo hikes), and the damage to the forest from Typhoon Jebi (the strongest to hit Japan in 25 years) two months earlier was incredible (for more pics see here):

I also squeezed in a quick return visit to Ishinomaki & Onagawa, the towns where I’d volunteered after the 2011 tsunami. It was so good to see them back on their feet, with Onagawa in particular having done a really good job of rebuilding – one of my old volunteer friends now has a bar in Onagawa’s handsome new waterfront shopping precinct:

Sugar Shack bar, Onagawa — Catching up with friends in Onagawa

I always encourage readers of my blog who are planning trips to Japan to try and include Tohoku – see here for some regional highlights, and read about my volunteer experiences here.

So then it was back to Korea for the ski season, another crash off a kicker and a couple of broken ribs; no surgery required this time, but an obvious time to call it a day in Korea. Now I’m finally back in lovely Taipei to get my head down for 6 months of hard blogging work until the Rugby World Cup.

Broken Bones and Silver Linings

Australia & NZ, Korea, Snow

Famous last words:

“Okay, last run and then I’m off to get some dumplings and catch the bus.”

Snowboard jumps at Welli Hilli Park, Korea — The jump that got me

I was talking to my riding pal Lilly, we were stood at the top of the terrain park at Welli Hilli Park, and 3 kickers stood between me and a plate of food followed by a 2-hour bus ride (which I’d mostly spend asleep) back to Seoul.

Just 3 easy little kickers that I’d already hit a hundred times that season – a piece of cake compared to the superpipe I’d just spent 2 hours sessioning.

I said it was the last run of the day – but it proved to be the last run of the season; the second kicker got me. Little front side 180 off the first one, landing switch and going for a cab 3 off the second; a trick I’ve done a hundred times off a jump I’d done a hundred times, no sense of danger or fear going into it, but suddenly there I was up in the air and out of control, falling toward a nasty landing. I don’t remember exactly how I fell – whether I got the board down first before slamming, or whether I came straight down on my arm – but I clearly remember the matter-of-inescapable-fact crunch of my forearm compacting and my radius snapping. It didn’t really feel like a snap though, more of a grinding sensation somehow, but snap it most certainly did.

I’m not sure what I did wrong, either. I think maybe I was a bit off-balance after the first jump, and ended up leaning back and under-rotating as I popped off the second. Possibly also too much pop for the size of the jump. Not sure. But I do remember shouting “oh shit” as I jumped; it felt immediately wrong, and in my tired & hungry state I failed to get away with it (I do wonder if I might’ve managed to get away with it, or at least tumble safely, with a bit more energy in the bank but I was running on empty).

It didn’t hurt at first, but I knew from the wave of nausea that washed over me, and the way I got tunnel vision and felt faint, that it was a bone fracture.

It’s almost as though before the brain has even registered the pain, the body realises this is significant damage and responds accordingly with a flood of endorphines and adrenaline, masking the pain but putting you in an altered physical and mental state. Rather than feeling the pain of my fractured wrist, I just felt the fact of it; mentally I felt completely clear, but despite the amazing absence of physical pain I felt queasy and faint. I’ve broken a few bones (a couple of fingers at work & school, a few ribs snowboarding), and this was the same nauseous feeling but far more intense.

$X-ray of my distal radius fracture$

I was lying there on the landing of the jump in the line of fire, so I quickly picked myself up and edged over to the side before Lilly came over the jump behind me – I wasn’t sure if she’d seen me crash – and then had to promptly lie down again to focus on breathing.

Still no pain as such, but I was definitely mildly in shock. Lilly came over the jump and saw me lying there, came over to see if I was okay, and I told her my arm was broken; she was like ‘maybe it’s just dislocated or something’, and helped me wriggle my glove off. But one look at my deformed arm confirmed what I already knew – the hideous angle of my wrist & hand could mean nothing else. Lilly managed to hold her lunch down when she saw it, and the staff in the medical room seemed to be amazed I wasn’t screaming in agony; they applied a nice tight bandage and sling arrangement to keep it immobile until I could get to ER, and Lilly drove me down to hospital in the nearby city of Wonju.

It was in the car that the adrenaline wore off enough for the pain to kick in, and holy shit did it hurt. Certainly the greatest physical pain I’ve yet experienced (though actually not quite as bad as I’d have anticipated for a broken wrist). The hospital processed me nice & quickly in typical Korean fashion, and after taking x-rays the doctor came and confirmed I had a distal radius fracture (aka dinner fork fracture, due to the way the wrist is displaced looking like an overturned fork) and needed to get it surgically fixed without too much delay.

I could’ve had it done then & there that night, but it would’ve cost around 5,000 dollars – which I must say seems a pretty reasonable price for repairing a mangled limb! – but I knew I could get it done for free on the NHS back in England so would just need to pay for a flight home. The doctor said as long as I got it done within 5 or 6 days it’d be fine, though he cautioned that the flight wouldn’t be very nice (he was not wrong).

And so began an absolute mission – but one which surprisingly ended up next to the beach on Australia’s Gold Coast, rather than in wintry northern England.

And there was the silver lining – my broken forearm resulted in a month on the couch at my brother’s place in Oz, stoned on endone (a strong opioid painkiller) and sessioning Game Of Thrones.

First of all Lilly made sure I was good to get back to Seoul, dropping me at Wonju bus station; she’d actually covered me for the hospital visit & bag of painkillers as I hadn’t had enough cash on me (I paid it back into her account next day), and took my board back to her mom’s in Wonju for safekeeping (I eventually picked it up months later from her brother). The consultation, x-rays, splint, and painkillers only came to just over 100 dollars, which again seemed pretty reasonable, but I guess if I’d been riding alone that day (as I often do in Korea) I’d have just had to head home on the usual shuttle bus to Seoul without any painkillers and carrying my board, and then gone to hospital there. That would’ve really sucked! The bus ride was pretty uncomfortable as it was, but at least the pills helped a bit and made me nice & drowsy.

Then came a couple of exhausting days in Seoul getting ready to fly, packing all my shit, cleaning the apartment to move out, and dropping my big bag (with most of my stuff) off with friends, all with one functioning arm and in a not inconsiderable amount of pain. As luck had it I only had a week left on my entry stamp & my Airbnb anyway, which meant I didn’t really lose any money (other than the rent I’d already paid for those remaining few days I didn’t use), but also meant I had to clean the place properly & remove all my belongings with only one functioning arm. It was tough to sort out, but thanks to Lucas & Heejin taking most of my stuff I could fly with just a single carry-on bag.

When I broke my wrist on the Tuesday, I thought I’d be back in England by the weekend; but when I made my way to Incheon airport on Friday it was to board a flight to Brisbane, Australia. After getting back to my apartment on the Tuesday night I’d got in touch with my brother Joe, who in addition to being an all-round legend is extremely useful by way of being a doctor. I told him what I’d done and asked his advice on flying to England with a broken arm – to which he replied he advised flying to Australia instead!

I can’t believe I’d never known this before, but the UK and Australia have a reciprocal deal to provide free medical treatment on our respective NHS systems to each other’s citizens. If you’re a Brit or Aussie reading this who also didn’t know – now you do, so store that piece of information and it might just help you someday.

So I could fly to Oz, a slightly shorter flight but one with no resulting jetlag, and get fixed there instead – it was snowing in England that week, while my brother lives next to the beach in sunny Queensland with an ocean view. As much as I love my snow, when you’re nursing a broken arm there’s no doubt which of those two options is more appealing! And with my brother living Down Under and me in Asia I don’t usually get to spend much time with him, so it was to Australia that I booked a flight.

And that Wonju doctor was absolutely right – a 10-hour flight with a broken arm is not a lot of fun. The reduced pressure in the cabin increases the swelling, and when that’s happening within the confines of an immobilising splint it doesn’t feel great. But the plane wasn’t full and the ground staff sorted me a pair of seats to myself, and the cabin crew were super-helpful so it was better than it might have been.

My brother’s girlfriend Hannah picked me up at the train station and took me back to their place, and when she went to work I went in with her – she also works at the hospital, as a radiologist, and indeed it was she who took the x-rays. It was a good clean break with two pieces, nothing complex, but the level of displacement was fairly severe.

“Yeah, that’s pretty nasty Si,” was the professional opinion of someone who’s seen literally hundreds (thousands?) of them, “but we’ll sort you out.”

And so they did, though I had to wait until the following day for a surgery spot to open. They sent me away overnight with a packet of endone – very effective (and addictive) stuff – to hang out & watch TV with my bro.

Most of the staff in the emergency department were Joe’s co-workers (though he was working at another hospital at the time), and while I’m sure they’d give the same wonderful care regardless of who I was, being his brother prompted some welcome extra banter.

It’s a funny thing though, lying there on a trolley with a line in your arm, waiting to be wheeled through to theatre where you’ll be operated on under general anaesthetic. You know you’re in good hands, you know it’s a routine procedure and a short one, you know it’s going to be fine, and yet it’s there in the back of your mind, what if you don’t wake up? What if your procedure is that one in however many million that has serious complications and you just never wake up?

Well, there’d be no suffering at least – it’d be a relatively good way to go, as such things go. You’d never know.

And besides, I was being operated on by my brother’s colleagues, and when the surgeon introduced himself just before they put me under he pointed out the scar on his own wrist; he’d had the exact same wrist fracture (from a mountain biking fall in Whistler) and apparently prided himself on fixing them, and promised me a neater scar than his. His wasn’t too bad anyway, so that was all very reassuring; and just as they took me through my brother turned up, checking in on me en route home from his own shift. Again, all very reassuring.

$Post-surgery x-ray of my distal radius fracture showing plate and screws$

And next thing you know, I was waking up 90 minutes later in the recovery room; no dreams, no dozing gradually off, no sense of the passage of time, no slowly coming back around. Just goodnight, then immediately boom, wide awake again.

I squinted at the clock.

“Is that am or pm?” I asked the recovery nurse at my bedside.

“Haha, no love you haven’t been out for 12 hours, it’s still Sunday! How’s your pain?”

Good question – the asking of which brought it to my attention, and the throbbing ache I’d got used to over the last 5 days had been replaced with a far worse feeling, something like a white hot crushing sensation throughout my lower forearm.

And no surprise, really, though it surprised me at the time – perhaps because I’d failed to appreciate quite what ‘screw a plate to your bone’ entailed. They’d cut my arm open, pulled the two ends of fractured bone back into the right position, and fixed them in place with a metal plate and six screws before sewing it all back up – the thing I hadn’t appreciated was how long those screws are. They go pretty much all the way through the bone, so no wonder it hurt so much.

Don’t remember my exact words to her, but they definitely weren’t suitable for work; probably not the worst she’s heard, but I apologised and confirmed that yes please I would very much like something for the pain. That got me a shot of morphine, mainlined into my arm via the line that was already in there, and they let me have another a while later. That stuff’s amazing – shut me right up.

It was 10pm by then so I had to stay in overnight, a bed ready & waiting on the ward. It was an uncomfortable and largely sleepless night, my arm up vertically in a so-called hangman sling, the pain gnawing in around the edges of the drugs that were blocking it, the nurse bringing me endone at the permitted intervals, and the groans of those suffering in the beds around me.

But I really couldn’t complain – come morning I saw who my neighbours were, chatted with them a bit, and I was in by far the best situation. A very elderly man recovering from a serious fall two weeks earlier, a middle-aged lady in for a hip replacement, and a late middle-aged bloke with a shattered leg; my broken wrist was far less for the body to deal with than their respective injuries, and of course mine was also entirely self-enflicted.

And I got to leave in the morning after a very decent hospital breakfast, while they would all be there for days. So I really had nothing to feel sorry for myself about and in fact left the hospital in good spirits, wishing them all a speedy recovery and thanking the nurses for their care before calling Joe for a ride back to his to settle in for a few weeks of rest and recuperation by the beach.

Me being me I failed to actually take any pictures of said beach, but here’s a few courtesy of my bro:

…and one I took on my first visit to the Gold Coast years before my brother lived there:

So yeah, not a bad place to be chilling and resting a broken limb! In fact I totally failed to take a single picture on this visit to Australia, we were going to take a selfie to send our grandad but forgot… so here’s a nice one of us with our sister (this was our spontaneous response to mum saying “look nice”):

But anyway, I had my endone, I had access to Joe & Hannah’s well-stocked beer & wine stores, and I had work I could actually do entirely online and 1-handed. But Joe & Hannah were out at work a lot of the time, and I needed something to do for relaxation – I’d have loved to finally give surfing a crack, but that was out for this visit.

And so my bro suggested Game Of Thrones – I’d never watched it, but I was a massive Dungeons & Dragons geek as a teenager and I knew I’d love it… and he has them all on DVD along with a massive fuckoff plasma screen with surround sound on which to watch them… and I was stoned on opioids at the time… so it all came together kinda nicely.

Joe went to work one morning as I was getting stuck into episode 1, and he got home just in time to see Ned Stark get his head chopped off 8 episodes later… he went to hospital and fixed people all day, while I sat on my ass taking opioids and watching Game Of Thrones all day. Think he quite liked having an excuse to sit and mong out on the couch with me when he got back though!

I sessioned seasons 1 through 5 of Game of Thrones, we sipped beers at the surf club, and I got to hang out with my brother more than I had for many years, as well as finally meeting Hannah for the first time (not counting Skype chats). I was also able to catch up with old friends from my Kyoto days, my buddy Darin and his wife Nobu (plus their puppy Mulan) who live near Surfer’s Paradise; hadn’t seen them in 6 years so was great to hang out a couple of times. All in all, I ended up being pretty stoked for a man with a snapped wrist, and I learned a good lesson about listening to your body and knowing when to stop. Honestly, I wouldn’t go back and change it even if I could.

Shout-out at this point to all the wonderful staff at Tweed Heads Hospital, the ER doctors, the surgeon & team, and the wonderful nurses on the recovery ward looking after us all with grace and dignity.

So what lesson did I learn? For one, when your body’s telling you you’re tired & hungry, listen to it. Especially when doing a potentially dangerous activity – snowboarding’s pretty safe when you ride sensibly and to your level, but when you ride tired, hungry, or drunk, injuries are far more likely, obviously even more so if you’re hitting jumps. Yeah, the drunk thing – my coworker in Thredbo snapped his collarbone on his birthday after a few shots of birthday schnapps, and any ski patroller will tell you more injuries happen after lunchtime when people have had a cheeky drink to warm their cockles.

And I had plenty of time to mull over why I’d hurt myself. Riding while tired & hungry, for sure, but something more than that too – I was pushing myself too hard that season to get my freestyle working again back to the level I’d been at a few years earlier in Japan. I’d missed an entire season while making my first full-time digital nomad attempt in Thailand (setting up an ultimately unsuccessful online English teaching business with friends), then had a very short first Korea season with zero park days, so I hadn’t ridden much for 3 years with no freestyle at all in that time.

So I was really pushing myself to get back up to 540s that season, and was running out of time as I’d missed the first half of the season for various reasons and only ended up getting a half season pass. It was also a 2-hour bus ride each way to go riding, meaning 4 hours of travel to get 4 hours at the hill, so there was also the pressure to get max riding possible done in those 4 hours (there are resorts significantly closer to Seoul, see here, but they’re not very good and Welli Hilli Park is the closest with a halfpipe).

Furthermore, I’ve always felt my riding isn’t as good as it could & should have been, especially freestyle – I didn’t learn to ride until my early 20s, which limited how good I’d ever be able to get, and I pressure myself to try & make up for lost time.

So with all this, I was pushing myself too hard. Pushing yourself is a good thing of course, and necessary if you want to improve at something, but you have to pay attention to make sure you don’t overdo it.

Actions have consequences – you accept this when you go into the mountains, when you strap in to your board, when you stand at the top of a pipe or kicker line. You accept there’s an element of risk, and you test yourself against it. But there’s no point in increasing the risk through sloppy decision making, tiredness, or impatience, and suffering an injury you could easily have avoided.

Of course the easiest way to avoid snowboard injuries is not to snowboard, but an addict’s an addict! It’s certainly safer to learn a skill like a musical instrument – messing up that tricky left hand bass part in Beethoven’s Pathetique won’t break your wrist (if it does you’re playing like the devil himself…) and you can just try again. Messing up a cab 3 certainly can break your wrist, and I have the scar to prove it. But when I look at this scar, in addition to foolishness & obsession, I see commitment, dedication, and passion. Our brains are learning machines, and one thing I took away from my neuroscience degree was never stop learning, never stop adding to & improving at the list of things your brain knows how to do. Find what you love and take it as far as you can, even if that ‘only’ turns out to be a cab 5 – we can’t all be Shaun White.

…and maybe I should mention here that I twatted myself just a couple of days after watching the women’s halfpipe live at Phoenix Park (Chloe Kim killed it) and watching Shaun White’s insane gold medal run live on TV the following morning:

– so maybe I’d got a bit too pumped up watching those guys and got a bit carried away! How about that gold medal run though… imagine standing there at the top of that pipe, knowing it’s the last run of the day, knowing you have to absolutely nail it to take top spot from Hirano, knowing you totally smashed yourself (to the tune of 60-odd stitches) in the face a few months earlier practising one of these tricks, knowing gold here would be redemption following Sochi 4 years earlier and would be the defining moment of your career as a snowboarder, knowing it really is do or die, now or never, right here in this moment. As he stood at the top the pressure was insane, and he threw down that beast of a run. Surely the most nerve-racking moment of live sport I’ve ever watched that wasn’t an England penalty shootout…

Chloe Kim halfpipe run at Pyeongchang 2018 — Not a great shot, but that’s Chloe Kim bossing the halfpipe

But as for me, maybe it is time for me to admit that 540s are as advanced a trick as I’ll ever learn. Do I have a 720 in me? Yeah, possibly – but I’d need to be riding every day, all season, injury free, practising and practising and practising to build up to it, and it just isn’t practical. No-one’s going to pay me to do that. And I know that if I fucked it up, the damage could well be worse than a broken wrist. So instead of trying to just jump bigger and with more rotations, I reckon from now I’ll be focusing more on improving smoothness & style, better grabs, better jibbing & buttering tricks. And of course halfpipe whenever available – I can happily just go round & round a pipe, and for whatever reason seem to take to it much more naturally than I do kickers. Or maybe I should go back to Japan and just ride powder every day…

But anyway, no regrets, and definitely a good lesson learned on not overdoing it. Plus the unexpected trip to Australia was a nice silver lining – gonna have to binge series 6 & 7 of GOT now before the finale starts!

A few other random thoughts:

People stepping up when your ass is kicked is just the most awesome thing. Joe & Hannah for taking me in & feeding me for a month, Lilly for helping on the day & her brother for looking after my board for 10 months, and Lucas & Heejin for taking my shit off me at short notice in Seoul while I was in Australia even though they were moving soon and it was a pain in the ass for them. And again, the empathy & professionalism of nurses & doctors – all of them around the world – is utterly humbling.

And finally, to all the diehard snow junkies out there cleaning body hairs out of hotel shower drains, sleeping on couches or crammed into staff dorms, working the bar late at night after riding all day, smashing yourselves off kickers trying to learn that new trick, doing whatever you’ve got to do to get your fix – I salute your commitment and dedication. Never stop riding!

The Best Places to see the Autumn Colours in Seoul

Korea

Ask any Korean the best time of year to visit Seoul, and chances are they’ll say October; summer’s too hot (true), winter’s too cold (but good if you like skiing), spring’s lovely if you time it just right for the cherry blossoms, but visit in October and you’re virtually guaranteed pleasant weather (unless you get unlucky with a typhoon, though Korea doesn’t suffer them anywhere near as often as Japan & Taiwan).

But the real treat in October is the autumn colours, which work their way down the flanks of the mountains around the city throughout the month, peaking in the parks & palaces in mid to late-October.

The ginkgo & maple trees in particular put on the best show, their vivid yellows and reds giving Seoul a splash of welcome colour in the second half of the month. Here are the best places to see them:

The Palaces

Seoul’s Five Grand Palaces are good to visit at any time, but especially so in spring & autumn. While they all have maple & ginkgo trees on their grounds (though not so many in the case of Gyeonghuigung), the real star of the show is the Huwon secret garden at Changdeokgung:

For more on the palaces see here

Seokchon Lake

An artificial lake in the Jamsil area, also home to the Lotte World theme park and Lotte World Tower, Seokchon Lake’s surrounded by cherry blossom trees. It’s spectacular when they bloom in spring, but it’s also a popular spot for a stroll under the red leaves in mid to late-October:

Namsan

The main landmark in the middle of Seoul, topped off with N Seoul Tower. It’s not so high, but if you’re a little early for the colours at the palaces & parks try Namsan; generally it should be at peak colour around the middle of October:

For more on hiking up Namsan see here

Mountain Hikes

If you’re in Seoul in early October you’re probably too early for the places above, but go for a hike up one of the larger mountains around the city like Gwanaksan or Bukhansan and you should see some nice colours. The entire month of October’s pretty ideal for hiking, with the colours working their way down from top to bottom throughout the month and usually nice sunny days with cool air. Any mountain on this list should be good; if you have time to go a bit further afield, Seoraksan National Park (near Sokcho on the east coast) is where most Seoulites go if they can (this does mean you can expect sizeable crowds though – aim to go midweek to avoid the worst crowding). You can book tours to Seoraksan (and a few other famous mountains) here.

These pics are from the Bibong Peak hike, part of Bukhansan park:

Have you been in Seoul for the autumn colours? How was it? Any questions? Leave me a comment below and I’ll get back to you.

(Search for hotel deals in Seoul*. Also check out my guides to the best autumn colour spots in Kyoto and Tokyo, and see my Korea overland travel guide. For more Korea posts see here)

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