Up to this point my trip was planned and well organized: now begins the part with many unknowns. Packed and checked out and with a taxi through a rain, as I have never seen it to the station, through the small city of Seoul this takes in moderate traffic for half an hour. How far the distance I do not know, but to walk with luggage it would take probably one day.
Seoul Main Station: this is not fog, this is liquid water!
The taxi driver asks me at the station with sympathy, whether I have an umbrella, which is not the case and the distance to the nearest roof leads to a shower, which I really would not have needed. Because of the heavy continuous rain I then also waived forward to photograph the dome of the old part of the station: it should be identical to the dome of the old train station in Lucerne which burned down in 1973. I have seen it, but a picture of it: unfortunately, no.
Seoul Main Station: KTX I leaving southward
The route Seoul – Busan is the main line north-south through Korea and the parade route. On it run the KTX trains, a derivative of the French TGV, almost every half-hour. Not all the trains are equally fast, some make a few more stops than others. The northern half of the route from the outskirts of Seoul, which are reached after a speedy journey about 20 minutes after departure (!), is a new line on which my KTX-TGV reaches 300 km/h. After the first stop in Daejeon there is again a section of the new line. The rest up to Busan is under construction.
The trains of the first generation derived from the TGV-A, built and operational since 1999 differ in some respects from their French models: You have six traction motors as the first TGV’s of France and they are 18 cars long with one power car at each end. Directly important for the traveller are rotatable first class seats – all can move forward – and the bigger seat pitches, which the SNCF for the first class may well take as an example especially when considering that the average body length of the Koreans is smaller than this of the Central Europeans (oops: you think that: if you search the internet, you can see that that is not so. So, if one admits the Koreans more space, why not for us in Europe?). The new KTX II I have seen, but not used.
Approx. for two-thirds of the route the TGV is more like a submarine: it speeds through a wall of water. Then it gets better and you can see again something of the more mountainous landscape unlike the northern section, some of them reminding a bit of the southern Ticino. Here I have seen for the first time bamboo.
Green Korea: Rice fields between Dongdaegu and Busan
Korea is green: all trips that I have done here – from the east coast to Seoul, during the excursion to the mountains in the northeast (with gondola of Swiss origin) and now this trip to the South: green everywhere. On the slopes is forest – seems Korea was at the end of the Korean War and decades of Japanese occupation, largely treeless, since reforested with great success – and if it is somewhat flatter, with cultures covered rice fields, plant tunnels, gardens, simply every square meter is planted. And then in between, sometimes for no apparent direct relationship to a settlement, shooting high-rises from the ground, no one, no, in entire herds and not ten-stories high, no 30-40 floors at least.
Tree do not grow into heaven, skyscrapers do: between Dongdaegu and Busan
The journey with the Seoul-Busan KTX takes quick two hours and 24 minutes. Just time for a coffee, what a horror, with vanilla flavour (which I am brutally thrown back into everyday life!). On the other hand the basic tariff of taxis in Busan is 200 Won cheaper than in Seoul and the beer is only 5,000 won, not 11,000 or even 13,000.
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