Here's one of those travel horror stories that includes land, sea and air travel. Now, how often does that happen?
For 추석 (Chuseok) 2006, the Korean holiday closest to the American Thanksgiving, Derek and I decided we'd go to Japan. Derek was just itching to go back there. We had originally planned on teaching in Japan, but Korea had better perks and benefits. We comforted ourselves by promising ourselves at least a trip or two to Japan while we were there.
Throughout the month of September, I was looking for good deals on transportation to and hotels in Japan. I happened to find a great one--or at least I thought--through a company that I don't remember the name for. It included tickets for the "Beetle," a high-speed, hydrofoil ferry and a hotel. I talked to my boss, Mr. Kim and he was very impressed that I found such a great deal!
We purchased night bus tickets from Sokcho to Busan (the port city we would depart from). Mr. Kim suggested the night bus because the road trip would take 7 hours. There weren't any other good options for this leg of the trip. Seven hours is a long time no matter what time you take it. And the trip went smoothly. The only problem we had was the bus arrived in Busan earlier than anything opened. So we wandered around the bus station and the port for a few hours before we could pick up our tickets. A lot of people have told us how nice Busan is, but we weren't able to see much while we were there.
We got on our ferry just fine, and our trip across the Korea Strait went uneventful and very short; just three hours! If we had taken a regular ferry, it would have taken twelve! Derek slept the whole way, but I watched their Korean dubbed, Japanese anime movie.
Japan was great! We had a lot of fun and got some good souveniers. But our time in Japan isn't the point of this story. The real point is how we got home.
The evening before we were to leave, another member of our group, a very kind Korean man who spoke great English, told us that he had received word that the ferry wouldn't be coming to pick us up because of bad weather. We were a little surprised because the weather looked fine in Fukuoka, Japan, but evidently the weather wasn't so fine in Busan and hydrofoils are sensitive.
The Korean man told us that as soon as he found out more, he would let us know. Eventually, we were told that we would need to take an airplane from Fukuoka to Busan. We would pay for the tickets up front and then the travel agency would reimburse the portion that was covered by our ferry tickets.
Normally this wouldn't have made us blink. Not that we were loaded or anything, but we did have a cushion that we could fall back on, but we were in a foreign (foreign from Korea) country without a visa/debit type card from our Korean bank. Luckily, we had brought a ton of extra cash--or what seemed like a ton at the time--400,000 won. That's abut $400. It took almost exactly that much money to buy our two tickets. We literally only had pocket change, no paper bills. But we had no other choice. We had to get back to work in the amount of time it would take to get back.
So we flew to Busan, and then we were stuck. It just so happened that our bank was doing maintenance on all their ATM machines during the holiday weekend, so every one of our banks ATMs were out of order. We had no money to buy a bus ticket back to Sokcho, no money for a hotel, not even any money to get a taxi to get anywhere! AND we were in an airport that we had never been to before in an unfamiliar city in Korea. We didn't know what to do!
Our first thought, which turned out to be not our best, was to call Mr. Kim (Which was kind of a miracle. We didn't have Korean cell phones yet, and I just happened to have a calling card with a few minutes left on it.) He could solve any problem. But even he wasn't able to come up with anything great for getting us seven hours from Busan to Sokcho without any money. He was too far way to come get us and we still had the problem with the bank so he couldn't send us money either. And that wasn't the problem anyways. He said to wait for a while so he could come up with a solution, and then we were to call him back.
After a few minutes, I noticed that there was a "365World ATM," and a light went off in my head. 365World, I thought. That means I could get money from my account in America. But we had another problem. I only had about $30 in that account, and that wasn't enough to get us back to Sokcho.
It was sometime in the early afternoon in Busan so it must have been in the wee hours of the morning in North Carolina, but it was an emergency so I called my mom to see if she would transfer some money to my account. This was my breaking point. Until then, I was able to keep it together... mostly. But after calling my mom and telling her about our predicament, I started bawling. She readily agreed to transfer some money for us, and miraculously, it was there within minutes or even seconds!
For a small fee, I was able to withdraw enough money to get us a taxi from the airport to the bus station and from the bus station to Sokcho. We called Mr. Kim again and told him everything was okay and that we got some money from America, and we were on our way!
The mistake we made in calling Mr. Kim was that we didn't realize that he would tell ALL of our coworkers within hours of hearing the news. Our reception the first day back was quite mixed. Some were genuinely concerned for us, others looked at us like we were silly little foreigners who didn't know anything, and one of our coworkers (one who was annoying on regular days) berated us for not having enough extra money with us for these, shall we say, unforeseen circumstances.
We couldn't believe it! What was he talking about? We had brough $400 extra! How much were we supposed to take with us?! Our entire life savings?! Oh well, we just brushed him off and went on our way. It was a great vacation with an exciting return trip!
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