Korean Job Discussion Forums

[crazylemongirl]

A few years ago I was in South Africa I was out drinking in some nightclub on the last night I was there. I got back to where I was staying and bumped into a swedish chick who decided to go to Capetown. The flights were cheap and so I sobered up on this dingy 727 and had a crazy day in cape town. Drove half way up table mountain and out to the cape of good hope before had to fly back to j burg to make the flight.

Stupid for a number of reasons but a lot of fun nonetheless. What's your craziest travel story?

[yesterday's child]

[sillywilly]

I don't know what it is about travel but you don't pack your inhibitions. 90% of the weirdest things that have happened to me have been while traveling, even only as far as The United States. I'm really pale, which isn't that unusual in Canada but I get a lot of attention elsewhere in the world.

[keithinkorea]

Being cheap in Indonesia, this is just screwed.

Gambir station Jakarta: Got to the bus station and realised I didn't have the money to get the ticket to take me up country to get the boat to Malaysia.

Find a motorcycle taxi guy to take me to a working ATM, all the ATM had been vandalised so this took about an hour in hideous traffic, saw two car accidents on the way.

Motorcycle star gets me to a working ATM, I withdraw cash. And head back to Gambir through crazy traffic at high speed, thought I was going to miss the bus. I was so grateful for the guy waiting and just generally being a star I gave him a huge tip, he looked like he was going to cry in gratitude.

Buy tickets and the bus is delayed, it's broken so go for some lunch.

In the cafe the proprietor stiffs me out of a load of cash, I go and find a policeman who is not interested and he also finds it amusing that the cafe owner is robbing me.

Pay the bast@rd of a cafe owner but throw the money literally in his face and spit on the floor, I was very angry.

Gather my crap together and head outside to the bus, still no bus it's delayed again.

Go to buy a carton of cigs as they're very cheap in Indonesia, every one of the little shops try to charge me double or as much as 4 times the proper price as I'm a foreigener, the last shop doesn't so I buy them from that lady. Crowds of Indonesians gather round her shouting abuse at her as she hadn't tried to rip me off! How stupid no wonder Indonesia is still very much in the third world. At least the honest lady got a big sale

Eventually get on a bus but is it going where we're heading... Of course not! We end up at a bus hospital for about 4 hours

When the bus starts moving it's cool till we get to Sumatra. As soon as we get back on the bus the road does ssss for a long way. About 12 hours! For no reason at all the road constantly zips from right to left and back again for the next twelve hours. I end up with a really bad case of prickly heat all around my groin that took two months to totally recover from. My gf at the time had the pleasure of a little Indonesian girl pissing herself and it came through the seat in front and ran into her bag. I told the mother that there was 'water' leaking from her daughters seat and she looked dumbly at me and shrugged, it was only later with the smell that we realised it was urine. The mother didn't change the young child, the kid sat in urine soaked underwear for the next eight hours.

On arriving at the port town we're invited to have a wash in the bathroom, I'm a really nasty filthy smelly bast@rd at this point. I go for a wash and the washroom is basically a filthy open toilet with a big tank of water. The water tank is half full of diesal and half full of water. I finish and I'm still smelly but rather than stinking of BO and filth I smell of filth and diesel.

Get on the nice fast boat back to Malaysia and wonder how everyone else managed to look so clean and dapper. Get back to Malaysia and the immigration officials are wonderful and look at me and my x in sympathy. They look at the passports and say welcome back to Malaysia with big smiles. Wonderful people, though a little incompetent, I realised that they had stamped the date wrong in the passport and I'd actually arrived back in Malaysia before I'd left for Indonesia, they were happy though embarrased that I'd noticed this, it could have led to complications.

Outside there are a bunch of really nice friendly taxi drivers who ask us nicely where we're headed, none of the semi taxi muggin riots so common in Indonesia. We tell them a nearby backpacker place and one of the guys says he'll drive us there as it's near his house and he's going home now anyway. The nice taxi driver guy refuses to accept payment for the ride as he was going home anyway.

Welcome back to Malaysia indeed and good riddance to nasty corrupt, stinky Indonesia.

That Journey was the closest thing to hell I could possibly imagine and pretty crazy too. I think next time I'll just fly around the place, though the first class train from Jakarta to the Bali ferry is really nice.

[Swiss James]

I was trying to recover an ancient artifact from an ancient temple deep in the heart of South America. After being betrayed by my local guides, and almost speared to death by the boobie traps leading towards the inner sanctum I finally found the treasure I sought.

Carefully estimating the mass of the prize with a sack of sand I was carrying, I deftly switched the counterweight for the gold idol mounted on a small pedestal.
Since at first there was no sound I assumed the exchange had been a success and tucked the riches away in my knapsack.

Alas, no. I felt the vibrations under my feet first and turned, horrified to see a colossal boulder the size of an elephant rolling towards me, picking up pace.
Frantically sprinting back the way I had come, avoiding stalactites, poison darts and using my whip to cross a gaping chasm, I eventually made it out of the temple just as the boulder was about to crush me into dust.

It was only when I emerged blinking in the sunlight that I looked up to see my arch-enemy, surronded by armed guards, ready to take the well-earned prize from me.

Crazy times

[keithinkorea]

[Swiss James]

[hypnotist]

Aah, Cleethorpes. The middle class alternative to Skegness.

Mablethorpe was ok, too.

[Swiss James]

I didn't realise Cleethorpes was considered posh-
Skegness is bracing though, that can't be denied.

[khyber]

[Bo Peabody]

[deleted]

[Swiss James]

Bo Peabody, are you sure they weren't wearing this kit rather than a Man United one?

[Bo Peabody]

[deleted]

[Cedar]

I could post one story a day on here for the rest of the term and -never- run out of crazy travel stories. I am having a really hard time picking one, and the one that keeps coming to mind (involving a Burmese bus driver) is a little too risque... mmmm...

When I am in China, no one, I mean, no one, ever thinks that my husband is my husband. He must be 1. my guide -or- 2. my student. This summer we are on the train heading to Shanghai and due to a very unfortunate lack of checking the ticket, anyway, we couldn't use the sleeper tickets we'd bought for and were lucky to have two seats (hard seats) for the 30 hour journey to Shanghai. (I've done 38 hours in Chinese hard-seat, it's much worse than 30, especially since I was alone when I did 38 hours). In the beginning we didn't have two seats, we only had one. We traded off sitting, and then my husband decided I could try to sit on his lap, with his legs spread enough that I could get one butt cheek onto the seat between his legs and lean onto him. After doing this off and on for about four hours, we have to show our marriage license to the two doctors sitting next to us, who would not believe he wasn't my guide or my student, despite the extreme intimacy in which we'd been sitting.

I guess it's not very amazing, but it does tell you something about Chinese mind-sets.

In the middle of the night, we got the whole bench (three seats) to ourselves, because our seat-mate threw some newspaper under the bench and climbed down there to sleep (have you ever seen the Chinese habit of spitting... and these were sealed closed windows in this car...).

[captain kirk]

The motorbike trips in Taiwan seem better than the Korean ones, but maybe that's not true. So I was on my bike at the time, kind of a puny one but good enough, a Yamaha 150, one of those bikes tradesmen ride.

Taiwan has lots of mountains in the interior and they're higher than Korea's. The mountain roads wind and coil through beautiful subtropical, wild vegetation. Verdant green and the valleys are as far across, vast, as the mountains are impressively tall.

So anyway I was heading to the highest mountain in Taiwan according to the map. I wanted to ride there as a conquest sort of thing and something to do. It was far from Hsinchu for a weekend jaunt. It started out with this national parkish looking route with amazing, huge trees, mist, rainforest-like. Then into the higher alpine where terraces for orchards were about little villages perched along steep valleys.

By dusk, and it was a clear night with the country black sky overhead holding a shimmering lot of twinkling stars, very impressive, and it was friggin' cold. I was going along the dark highway alone, no other drivers, with the metal tank of the motorbike cold between my legs.

Then there was the sense of, after getting through a bit of drizzle and a few cliff-tunnels, a huge space opening up in front of me. I couldn't see it but it was like beside the road now was a huge expanse of steep, vast, empty space. Then the moon came out from behind some clouds and it was this HUGE valley. I saw it on the way back the next day and it was incredible.

Then some more driving after that, up, and up. I was shivering and stoppped to talk to some people in a parking lot up in the high alpine there. Dressed in parkas, they had tents up, and they had astronomical telescopes. I was so cold by now it was ridiculous, but they said there was a hotel up the road. Which is funny, because for hours there had been no other cars or buildings.

So anyway up the road was a building with lights, a hiker's hostel. They had a room and ramyon to eat, that's it, cook your own ramyon. The room was a kind of group room with thick, white quilts on a board floor. Very simple, hiking the main thing up there. I wrapped enough quilts for three people around and after a couple of hours of shivering was ok.

The next day I went outside and it wasn't clear like the cold night had been. And saw the tundra-looking, high alpine landscape with meadow, lichen, boulders, dwarf juniper bushes and so on. The trip down was easy and there was a raven in the mist at one point which appeared and disappeared which was really cool. A bit further down some Taiwanese guys were taking photos of the valley with telephoto cameras. The mist would open and close in different places the effect like looking at a mysterious dragon made of coils of mist.