Korea Tramp

21/08/2024

Slipping away into empty car parks at night in downtown Seoul to smoke a This dambae that cost 30c and drink a bottle of one of my favorite Makolis in Korea - the Jangsu. Sit down on the mild concrete and unbutton my black Dickies shirt. Pull up my 505 Levi’s at the foot and feel the cooling little zephyrs running and swirling around crafty street spaces and onto my humming summer night skin. My head a slight buzz from the vices. The empty car park is as large as three tennis courts. I’ve smoked here before. I should send the pic to that hot little cleopatra eyed Japanese girl that posts her night time avant-garde car park reviews on IG.

The buses and cars are drumming in the streets behind the walls and buildings that make the perimeter of this car park. It’s a very cool feeling of open space in a busy place for me. The bars are pretty lit tonite in the back streets of the cbd areas of inner Jong-gu. It’s a good local vibe. A little overlooked sometimes. And I got a swell UG room at a hotel I like, but it’s still nice to lure away from that, to a bums place, to contemplate and ponder the next steps. Yeah. And do a quick long time no hear dispatch from another me, beating out.
The p***y is gorgeous in Seoul. I’ll say that always. For a fit crooner like me it’s worth the sore legs just to walk around and scope it all day. Some of the skirts so short on long cone shaped legs. A sly durrie out the back with a hottie. Dirty ol tramp.

17/06/2024

Despite the hot days ahead, the riverside and mountain top areas’ll be good for sleeping outdoors in. It’s June so the land and water at night is still in its last lunges of cooling from winter. Humidity is still low. Bugs not bad at night it seems.

In the shade of a set sun, Big birds, like dinosaurs, Goliath herons, are standing on the top limbs of a grove of tall cypress trees that loom on a hill above the store at Myeongho-myeon - a desolate but surprisingly alluring place with good turns every now and then.

A nightjar or some bird creature is singing loudly in a dark tree above me in the car park where I pitched a small tent. It is like a ghost chanting at the fuzzy half moon shifting across the sky.

The air is cooling on the skin now. The Cheongryang-ju makoli tastes icy and tangy in the titanium mug.

I like the smell of mozzie coil.

And the river gurgles by to the lark of strange night birds.

16/12/2023

Winter scribes in the night: A wicked storm is blowing. The ground is hardening with ice.

What is the reason we are here? We live only to know that. Do we ever find out why? We can never know. Not even in death.

Is it gain. Is it provision for others? Ourselves? A quest of sorts?

But Mother Earth toils onwards. A very real and existing thing, that cares nought for us.

Is it for procreation? Then for what? Children are beautiful until they became chained like adults. Plying along only to exist. Growing only to release the carefreeness of innocence. The beauty of life.

Gales come from the hilltops and rip through the land. My Marlboro butt spins incredibly in its speedy wind. It’s orange nib roller coasting into the dark night of the snow.

The butt feels not the cold.

Why do we live?

What makes us common, even in diversity?

Language. Art. Humanism?

Is being human better than being animal? I am not sure. The ground is clearer for an animal. More realer. Less barriers.

I know that. I tracked em. Watched em. Fought em.

Who decided we should be wed? Who said we must live this meager ambition? Why would we strive for comfort only to be comfortable? So that others with power can crush you, control you, dictate to us what is the life you should live? We can all be stars. We can all be heroes.

What is a human. But blood and bone with a brain that can’t surgically feel pain, but when we feel the greatest emotion, passion, exhilaration, sadness, loss, it comes from our head, and then it wretches our heart.

This is still unexplainable, even in science and religion. That is why we still live. To seek that reason.

The snow thickens on the ground. The Jiri wind scolds the blackness of the cold merciless rock.

Regardless, in life, we should find out at least where it will end. Push back in the dark and push in the light. Coz there is no eternal happiness. That farce is crock. We know that, yet we think it can be done. No animal can expect that. This is real.

There is no nirvana. There is only now, what has been, and what can be.

A universe of unfathomable horizons. A pool break that never stops breaking. A game where when the whistle blows to start it, no one knows how to end it.

Carry on. Win or lose. Pay no attention to the fakers. The compliers. The spoilers.

Just fall. Be smart. Don’t injure those that don’t deserve it. Stamp on those that do. Forget those that no longer imply.

And be like the cold icy wind. Bold and wayward.

01/12/2023

Shane MacGowan, Mark E Smith, those type of c***s only wanna make ya drink harder and live freer.

Charlie Burchill is playing a wailing discordant guitar in the track Love Song r.81, by Simple Minds. special musicians and artists of the late 70s and into the 80s. Punk, pre or post punk, the more weirder sounds, and the more counter-culture lyrics were getting electrified by laymen. It was exciting.

My stolen Bluetooth speaker works well in my swag tent with my small Kovea Butane Gas Heater. Real cozy. Sokli-san d**g d**g ju.

Season is pretty much done now. It was a top year and I thoroughly enjoyed the privilege of working with all my guests in all the different parts of Korea in her three-seasons. My multi-day adventures always end at the beginning of Korean mountain culture for them. They get marvelous contrasts by being swayed through the provinces on peaks and towns.

I am looking forward to next season and will continue to grow my special local experience brand in Korea.

Hell man, i was once hitchhiking through Africa, crossing the Rovuma river between Mozambique and Tanzania, in a mazed dugout, and then walking another two days in tire tread sandals, to the nearest immigration post in Palma. It was my second visit at that post. I’d left through that place out onto the Indian Ocean in a dhow (wooden sailboat) some months before into Tanzania. Two days it took as well. Eating f**k all of dried something. Nine years, slumming gloriously in Africa.

There must be sods out there still doing s**t without being noticed.

Gen X is the end of the alphabet.

MacGowan and E.Smith certainly were. Coz they were real, true, and went as far as they could go. They got jagged from the shoal. I am in the shoal. Anyone can be. Still googly eyed swimming, still moving, still fretting, waiting to even jag myself. Never stopping hoping. Even in a dark pile of s**t in the back of a right turn alleyway. That is the glory of that generation. For the sailors that stayed in it. They that are still there. Dead or Alive. Swimming around in a circle of discordance. Going to die gloriously. One way or another.

Winter is here. I am again K-tramp. The realer more dangerous me. The painter. The loner bum, the ranconteur. Chur.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/6zxK3U512rKBGprX/?mibextid=O563ZM

10/08/2023

Jackie, Pablo, and their 10-year old daughter were in South Korea visiting their elder daughter while she was on the scout jamboree in Jeollabuk-do. They are a family that lives in Qatar. Jackie is from Lebanon, Pablo Colombia, and their daughters have British citizenship. Despite the understandable negatives of the globally mentioned failings of the jamboree, their daughter and her troop were being well taken care of by a mass response in Seoul while the three of them hiked with me in central Korea.

It was cooler here. From Beopju-sa temple they climbed up to Munjang-dae 1028m in Songni-san where on a blue skied clear sunny day scattered with white clouds they got a grand panoramic outlook of the mountain scape of Korea and her lushing fields with gushing valleys.

We slept two nights in rural settings deep in the mountains. The Piatjae-sanjang in one end of Songni-san where we were hosted by Master Chef Mr Seo in his rustic end of valley road farm-style home. And then last night in a temple that I organize casual sleepovers in. Gonglim-sa temple is located in the other end of Songni-san. Before arriving at the temple we hiked the spectacular and craggy ridge of Sanghak-bong 862m to Myo-bong 874m and got down by 4pm in time to avoid the main rain of the oncoming typhoon. Sleeping that night on floors again in plain rooms, the rain dripped heavily from the large eaves of the clay tiled roof. It was a good place to rest.

Today, their last day, the rain was still heavy, so we drank some maxim stick coffee with the head-monk 주지현우스님 and then left and got a breakfast at a CU convenience store. We were too tired this morning to get up for the 6.15m breakfast at Gonglim-sa temple. They had fed us well with fresh food the night before. After the CU, I made a random stop, as I often do, at the 에밀레 박물관 - Emile Museum, where there is an interesting collection of folk art associated with the late Dr Zozayang, Master of Korean Folk Tradition http://www.san-shin.org/ZoZayong.html

It is a good opportunity after some local experiences to see images and hear narrations of Koreas indigenous roots in her mountains. It compels on the overall experience I try to provide.

Before seeing them on the train from Daejeon to Seoul, where they will Metro to Incheon International Airport and fly back tonight to Qatar (their other daughter on the jamboree will leave as planned tomorrow) we ate a good scoff of Chicken-ginseng soup done in a barley broth at a sit on the floor old-school restaurant buzzing with minjung-style eaters on a rain stormy day.

I had a really great time with them. August hiking isn't easy. They were fascinating people. I was glad Korea was able to provide a unique local experience for them. We were, as always, treated genuinely well wherever we went.

Later the cockney melodies of the Puritan by Blur play in my head.

Kia ora.

https://youtu.be/EuDUImvxm7Q

Blur - The Puritan (live)The second of two songs written by Blur especially for Hyde Park 2012 Olympics Closing Ceremony Celebration Party. Blur debuted both...

21/06/2023

I can hear the nickel pots banging inside me head as I drive north on the 17 to my Baekdu-daegan mountains photo exhibition. In Jeonju, I’ll also give a slideshow presentation. Clang, clang, clang, clang, I can hear them in the rumbling background of a scenic highway.

The countryside is not a quiet place come dawn in Korea. People are working by then. In the fields, repeatedly clanging their nickel pots, to keep the birds off the seeds. Next, the boof of a time activated shotgun cartridge – its bellow hurling a distracting noise for the marauding birds. A Kyung Woon-Ki cranks itself up. It noisily makes its ways slowly on the thin roads between the flooded rice berms.

I am watching the act before me. It is traditional Korean pansori – done really well. Her terse vocalisms and bunting interactions with the audience, backed by an out-of-beat summer blend of melancholy and humanism, is real Jolla identity. My host had wondered how my 남북 백두대간 subject might help them with their educational agenda of North & South Korea relations. This act makes me think to add identity to my slideshow.

I start my presentation with my Pepeha. A Māori way of introducing yourself. Identity.

I wasn’t sure if I would do that because I only got it given to me last summer. And I have never done that before. But if you don’t start somewhere, you might never not.

It was watching the pansori act that made me realize again how much the North and South Koreans are the same blood, they should never be apart. Maintaining their identity will help that. The Baekdu-daegan, like pansori, can be a common identity.

Therefore I must know mine too. Pepeha. Ko Ngatiraukawa te iwi.

I feel like a bum going to the supermarket at night, just to buy a bottle of Jim beam and coke and nothing else.

As I drive south, neon lights dazzle colorfully from the black walls of the country hotels. Rain has cleared the warm air from the sky. It is like Steve Winwood on his Night Train.

Hard, h***y, Korean 80s tracks, pump from the car stereo.

I am looking for the next gas station. My mind says I’m not gonna make it. I’m gonna have to walk the last kilometers on foot to my house. I laugh at myself. Then I ask myself, why do you think like that?

The road is still dark outside. I stop at a gas stop. I notice the ground is bone dry. Less than five minutes back it was wet from a rainstorm. I ask the gas man ‘Hey buddy! No rain here today?’ ‘That’s right. No rain here today.’ He replies. I told him 2kms back it was very wet. He looked at me. What was I expecting him to say really?

As I pulled back out into the Winwood night, I thought that rain must have been a mini do-sae 도새. That is; a squall of mystic birds in June, that create rain or snow, over saddles or ridges, that separate regions.

Clang, clang, clang.

K-Tramp is a pseudo-nome.

13/06/2023

曺繼龍 Here’s a cool story I'd like ya's to hear. In 2015, Richard and Sue, her real name, Jo 曺 Mei Xan (조수화) asked me to guide them and find the site of the lineage of Sue’s family. She is the 26th generation of the Changnyeong Jo clan of Hwawang-san in what is now Changnyeong-eup (county) in the south sea province of Gyongsangnam-do. They contacted me yesterday to say they were back in Korea with their 7-year-old twin son and daughter, and they wanted to show them the site of Sue’s family and their lineage on the mountain of Hwawang-san 756m. It supposedly means a fire of vigour, based on fire festivals held each Jan 15th where they would burn the reeds on its peak, like it was some kind of marvel. Sounds a bit modern to me. Coz, the mountain has an alterntive story with an undated history. Like a lot probably do in Korea.

At that time, back in 2015, it wasn’t difficult to find, as there is a famous local story related to the Jo family on the summit of Hwawang-san. It went something like this - during the reign of the Silla King Jinpyeong (579-631), the 26th ruler of the Silla dynasty, Yehyang, a 16-year-old daughter of a local literati Yi Gwang-ok was gravely ill. An apsara (Buddhist angel) said that if she went to the pond on top of Hwawang-san and bathed and prayed in them, she would become better. A dragon lived in the pond. It was said the dragon took the girl and disappeared with her into the water. She soon reappeared alive and well. She later became pregnant and her son bore the Chinese character of Jo 曺 under his armpit. King Jinpyeong heard this and asked for the boy. On seeing the birthmark he confirmed the story and bestowed on him the family name of Jo Gye Ryong 曺繼龍 meaning the descendant of a dragon. The Jo family became known as the Jo Changnyeong clan, named after the area, and prospered very well as a noble and righteous clan. Sue is a descendant of that clan. At that time in 2015, Richard, a good Texan man, and Sue or Jo Su-hwa, had no children.

I picked them up at D**gdaegu station this morning and we drove the hour to the mountain. We arrived in the cool little town of Changnyeong-up. From there, we climbed the shortest route up to the peak, which houses the remnants of a mountain fortress as well as the story of the Jo clan. The fortress walls have been remade, but the origins of the fortress are recorded as unknown. This is the case for many fortresses in Korea. We are talking BC period. Its earliest records are of it being garnered by the small confederate like Gaya Kingdom of 42-532AD, which has Indian influences of inter-cultural royal exchanges that stretch into the earliest introductions of Buddhism in Korea, or maybe something else? It's around the 3rd and 4th century AD I'm talking about now. The fort or the stone remnants of which the fort was built, was then used by the Silla Kingdom (6-9C) and again Joseon Dynasty period (13-19C) in times of defence and conflict. There are tens of thousands of ancient mountain fortresses all over the Korean Peninsula. I know this from having known the late Mr Choi Jin-yeon 최진연 who spent his lifetime finding, documenting and photographing them from ground and air, often with the support of Air Force helicopters. Pretty mean way to live I thought. Flying in winter was the best time he said. It was freezing in the open-door chopper, looking down through the frozen bare trees and lines of snow for the thin slogans of ancient fortresses and conical stone fire towers. Lord knows how many are waiting to be refound in the wild undergrowth of North Korea. It is quick how quickly the bush can conceal something.

Mireuk-saji in Worak-san, is an example. Only refounded in the 1970s. A 10-meter-tall standing Buddha. Or the four-sided Buddha of Chilbul-am in Namsan, Gyeongju. Or, the tomb of King Guhyeong in Sancheong-gun, Jiri-san, also recently reputed to not be his tomb, the date of this style of architecture is unknown. Is it a bit like the Geoglyphs of the Amazon they are finding now through LiDAR technology that reveals massive cities there? No one that urbanised could have lived that far south about then they said. But the Amazon just simply swallowed all that counter-evidence up.

You could even include the mystery of the stone Pyramids of Egypt and how long they have been here because that could even predate the Pharaohs of Egypt that are buried inside them. They just used them. The Egyptians I mean. And Pyramids exist all over North Africa and parts of Eastern Europe, and elsewhere from memory. The highest density of pyramids is in North Sudan.

I like being with all my guests. Returning ones are especially precious. They all have a story. That's the role of the guide. The late Alistair Gellately told me that. Working on the wild banks of the Lower Zambezi. Too right he was.

And are the ancient fortresses of Korea, made from the crumbled remains of pyramids that existed on top of what is now the oldest less than 2000m sharp peaks left in the world - that just jut straight out of the ocean?

Chur.

Counter Culture Scribes by Korea Tramp.

18/05/2023

I like my time in Seoul. I like sleeping on a bed in a dark room with curtains. Things I don’t have. I like the layout of a good hotel room. The locking oneself in there. Reminding myself no one knows where I am and I can be unfound so easily.

I like getting my work done here, then deciding what to do the next day. Walking the streets and the alleyways. Admiring the many beautiful woman that pass by. The calm yet steady beat of the town. The aching of my calf’s as I stitch up and down the underground’s staircases. Moving from A to B.

Seeing good Art, like Edward Hoppers. Which inspires me to not forget the hog hair brushes that lay on my dirty trolley in the corner of my lounge. That when you get to see such work in real life, you see up close that it is rough and unfinished, just like Picasso - who I saw at n Seoul too. That painting isn’t so much the taught technique, but the idea of great subjects and working correctly with and without colours and with or without light, and knowing what to omit and what to keep. And of course having the experience not only in an observant life like mine, but doing the mahi with the brushes. And with that mahi, you can learn to know when to stand back, take another look, and know that even though you know it is oddly incomplete in many parts, collectively it is right for the public eye. This is what I have to do more of! To paint more boldly more freely. That is the Art. But I am not a casual or flippant man. If I am not painting I am always thinking how and when to paint next. I will paint great, because I can see angles and light and through no light. Because I have draftsmanship. And because I know what is wrong with me. It’s a special thing to craft. Art.

On the bus to Inje. Been a while since I used D**g Seoul terminal. It’s still shabby and full of young soldiers and their pretty girlfriends. How many of those couples will last their forced separation? How many couples last at all anyway? Especially first loves.