Touchdown - Stopover Complete

Where do I start when trying to describe my trip so far? It has been exactly that; a trip. Ten rather uneventful hours after taking off from Sydney, for which I was very thankful, my Korean Air flight touched down on the freezing tarmac at Incheon International Airport, an hour outside the city Seoul.

I was told reassuringly by my travel agent that there would be a huge number of people on the layover to London and that I should just ‘follow the crowd’. I managed unintentionally to hang back and become one of the last people off the plane following a scuffle-like exit by my Asian predecessors and in doing so found a bunch of Aussie folks that were also stopping overnight. We cruised through customs, found our hotel guides without incident and were rushed onto buses for the short five minute trip to our 4 star Hyatt accommodation. Very nice!

Given my lamentably short visit to Korea, I think the most descript I can be is to say that the dusk horizon I glimpsed between bus and ritzy hotel was spectacular. The air was crisp to be sure, a bracing two degrees, and the night silent despite the close proximity of the airport. I managed to knick around the corner of my flashing white building to grab a glimpse of the surrounds.

There wasn’t much to them! No major mountains or houses, trees or buildings. In fact we weren’t surrounded by much at all, but this lonely fact gave way to a very specky skyline. The horizon was a dazzling violet that bled on one side into an infinite bluey-blackness that played home to a single star and the crescent moon. On the other side colours played between blues, purples, golds and bronzes and only the black silhouette of some very distant hills and trees gave a border to their game. It really was a topsy-turvey view with the sky so large and my thin, black terrain so small. Nevertheless, I was pleased to have managed the 30-second un-air conditioned reprieve before being discovered by the ever-attentive hotel staff. I took one last fresh breath and with a sigh of contented white mist, headed into the heated glory of swish hotel life.

I opted to share a room with a young German woman who’d been on a working holiday in Australia for the past four months. Her name was Sarah and she was on her way home to Berlin via Frankfurt to begin her university year. Together we discovered the delights of our accommodation from robes and slippers, soaps and lotions, cable and mini-bar (don’t worry, we knew the prices) to hammers and grappling hooks. Yes, hammers and grappling hooks. It seemed that in an emergency and if our floors were to be cut off by fire, we were expected to break the window of our ninth floor room, attach the hook and rope to the provided peg and belay ourselves down the side of the buiding. My only concern was who was going to use the ONE harness provided.

Dinner and breakfast were both provided in a disappointingly English menu of bacon, eggs, tomato and toast and pumpkin soup, whereas the plane allowed me to choose the interesting Korean dishes consisting of rices, mushrooms and other indescribable greens which one mixed together with a hot red pepper paste and sesame oil. It was delicious! There was also the much anticipated seaweed soup that bears a disturbing resemblance to the two-minute noodle, pour and ping variety of our supermarkets. But it was tasty and slippery, so no complaints!

All in all, not a bad experience for the stopover type, but I will look forward to a more extensive visit to the city of Seoul when I head back Australia way.