By Iwazaru How do you stop a scammer? You contact the police, present evidence of the scam and wait for justice to be served, right? Unfortunately that justice may be–and usually is–slow to arrive, if it ever does. The system has to do its work as the judicial machine chugs or sputters along. Such is [...]

By Iwazaru

If you’re planning on travelling this winter pay very close attention to whom that travel agent is claiming to be able to get you “Real Cheap Travel.” The clues will be rather obvious: he goes by the name Wystan Kang or Joseph Kim; he works for Zenith Travel or Expert Travel; he promises he has a great fare lined up for you to Palau, Hanoi, Bangkok, Fukuoka…anywhere; you need to wire the amount to his bank account before you can get the ticket; days start to pass and he’s not getting back to you; The ticket may have some trouble, he tells you (or maybe he doesn’t and you end up at the airport where you’re informed the ticket has been cancelled); he can’t return your money; he’s very sorry.

This is the story that dozens of expats have to tell stretching back many months. Yet there had been a hint of justice in Ocober of 2011 when Wan-koo Kang (aka Wystan, aka Joseph Kim) was arrested, had his business license suspended by the Seocho District Office and the doors of Zenith Travel were closed. The case then went from the Seoul Metro Police Agency’s International Crime Investigation Department to the East Branch of the Seoul District Prosecutors’ Office where it is ongoing now. Reportedly, Kang was taken before a court after his arrest where the judges determined that he would be released without detention while the case proceeded.

By Iwazaru

Seven full days into the more than 400 kilometer pilgrimage across the Korean peninsula in an attempt to trace the footsteps of 7th century Buddhist monk Wonhyo, the members of the trek have changed, the leader, Tony MacGregor, has taken a dangerous fall, Koreans have stepped forward with immense generosity and the road has provided its good share of challenges and rewards. All the while Macgregor, Chris McCarthy and Sangmin sunim, a Buddhist monk who’s joined the pilgrims, have pushed on sometimes joined by professor David Mason.

On Saturday, December 10, MacGregor was happy enough to answer some questions about the journey while settling in after a dinner at Muryang Buddhist Temple in Yeongyang. Among the many things he said, one stood out toward the end of the interview when he offered that each day was a “stepping into the unknown” which he was actually enjoying.

See here for the original story about the pilgrimage and visit the official Site where the pilgrims post pictures and words each day.

By Mizaru

In the sun cased morning Sokcho is just like it’s supposed to look. The pretty blue colors on the main Yeonggeumjeong promenade offer a seaside recharge led by aquamarine everything and everywhere. Sea Women were friendly and demonstrated the accretions of a poetic life way outside the pale of fashion. Getting more familiar with the blind alleys and parallel main roads of Sokcho and its start and stop blocks of development, the overall feel for it portrays a unique place where the sea came in, picked it up and when she was finished with it, put it back wherever the waves coming in dropped it. It’s as if Sokcho was a place on the peninsula where compasses would spin out of control and nobody bothered to detect it.

By Jake Reed

Six years after first moving to Asia and I find myself becoming lazy. Lazy in my desire to care about China’s track record with respect to abusing human rights, purposely manipulating its currency and just about everything Fox News blames China for. The laziness comes out in my compliance at being on the outside looking in. Getting stared at, being cut in line, and putting up with jeering from way too serious local coworkers have become part of my 9-5. I’ve become indifferent to the expensive foreigner markets, the special foreigner price at most restaurants and the local girls ephemeral charms that hide evil intent. Despite all this and heaps more, I still choose People’s Square as the place where I close my eyes and open them to the ever-present Shanghai grey.

Take a walk anywhere and eventually you’ll run into landscapes where run-down buildings meet novel, haste-induced architecture. Building materials decorate half-finished constructions. A Chinese friend once laughingly told me that the haste and lack of quality in the construction biz is done in order to insure future jobs.

By Simon Phillips
On December 4, a motley crew of academics, explorers, and journalists will pioneer a journey which has been about five years in incubatio—following in the footsteps of the ancient Korean monk Wonhyo across the Korean Peninsula.

The pilgrimage is the first one of its kind ever undertaken in honor of Korea’s best-known Buddhist hero, who found enlightenment in Dangjin in the 7th Century while attempting to sail to China.

It will start from Gyeongju—former capital of the Buddhist Silla kingdom where Wonhyo lived, and end in Dangjin, on the west coast of South Chungcheong Province (south of Incheon). The pilgrims will travel mostly on foot along provincial roadways and mountain-trails.

By 3WM

After months of ratcheted up pressure on forums and then via 3WM and finally through the Korea Herald, MBC news ran a story this week about the scam at Zenith Travel. 3WM broke the story this week that Zenith Travel has now been shut down. We will continue to cover the legal pursuits of claimants as they develop.

The MBC clip explains the exchange of money for expected future travel and includes undercover camera footage of a visit by one of the scam victims and further footage of an attempted call to complain to Korean authorities. In the end it explains that the head of the agency is being investigated by the police.

By Belle Crawford

In Singapore we met a blind musician who plays a keyboard and sings in the underground near Orchard Road. Unlike Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder, this subway musician doesn’t hide his oddly shaped eyes with sunglasses. In many ways, his eyes are a part of his act; he wants his listeners to be conscious of his disability, and if there is a twinge of manipulation to his advertising his condition (many buskers know that pitiable circumstances often elicit payment), there is also more than a twinge of pride in the challenges he’s overcome. His presence in the metro is a clear statement about self-sufficiency.

The blind musician is well known in Singapore. Those we spoke to had affectionate things to say about him: he’d been there as long as anyone could remember, he was endearingly territorial about his pitch, and even if his music wasn’t great, he added character and charm to the underground.

By Jake Reed
This is Part 2 of Jake’s Chengdu travel. Read Part 1 here.

Chengdu might not be the frat party of China and maybe that’s a good thing. I would hate to think I went to a place just to sample the radial Dionysian outlets where the Sun rises in the East, sets in the West and what follows for me is another gripey hangover. Better to ask what was old China like in this neck of the woods? Well, Chengdu did happen to be in possession of the Tao which preceded Buddhism and is creating wonders still in effect today. Next to a KFC on any given street here you can yourself gazing into a lush garden tendered by skin headed, peace mongering Asians.

By Sam Sheppard

Overwhelmingly, at least until the earthquake struck, the Koreans I met chose to ignore Japan as much as possible, whilst the Japanese seemed to have grown used to life without the Hermit Kingdom. From this perspective, it is worth remembering that they did, until relatively recently, move in very different circles. Being the first Asian nation to industrialise, the Japanese have been a prominent international force for many years, only joined by Korea in its capacity as an ‘Asian Tiger’ with high living-standards, education levels, economic growth, and technical proficiency, from the late-twentieth century onwards.

By Sam Sheppard

Using my JR Rail Pass to the fullest, I was able to take in Hiroshima, Himeji, Kyoto, Mishima, Osaka, Nara, and Nagoya during my stay, alongside brief stopovers in Fukuoka and Kobe. In hindsight, I was immensely and unknowingly fortunate, as I largely avoided the area directly affected by March’s events, thereby preserving a margin of validity. In this fell swoop, then, I trudged around five more cities than I have in Korea – despite my being here for the last six months – all the time searching for the Japan I’d grown up with. Now, I am fully aware of how pretentious that sounds as a phrase, having absolutely no Japanese ancestry or previous history with the country. However, I should point out that as a younger, marginally nerdier man, Japan was perhaps the one foreign-speaking country that seemed to be on constant display.

By Joshua Richman

Korea’s green tea, like its ginseng, is excellent. I could have written about Art Street without visiting again, but the taxi dropped me off in the vicinity and I felt like a cup of tea. Later, I’d make sure my facts were correct about Bosung Plantation’s production. I was not happy with these two paragraphs and spent hours once I got back to Seoul trying to come up with something stronger. A basic rule of travel writing is that you try to make people feel, smell, taste, hear, and touch whatever you’re writing about. Even after multiple revisions these paragraphs seemed flat. Writing in second person is tricky. It’s hard not to write ‘you’ every other sentence because when you do use you too much, you won’t get published nor will you get paid.

By Joshua Richman

I could not write about the two things of real interest at Kwangju’s National Museum. The first was the location itself. The building and landscaping around it were well done. A long promenade lined with landscaped trees and blooming flowers leads up granite steps to the huge sloped-roofed museum. Stylish tinted windows and mighty wooden crossbeams added a simplistic yet modern touch, but no one goes to a museum to look at its exterior. It’s what’s on the inside that counts: a parable that applies to museums as well.

By Joshua Richman

Most folks who fancy becoming travel writers don’t want to write. They want to travel. Jaded, I ride on a bus, notebook handy as emerald rice fields and angular mountains slide past. A dream has come true. I am living it. I am a travel writer. An in-flight magazine is paying me $750 to write up Kwangju, the fifth largest city in South Korea. After publishing stories on South Korea in newspapers and harassing the editor of the in-flight, finally, I get monthly assignments.

Toon by Lee Scott; Writing by Iwazaru

As one of the busiest holidays in America takes place with millions of people traveling, the new airport screening rules have people up in arms. At all 450 of the nation’s commercial airports the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is using the new front-of-the-hand, slide-down screening technique for passengers who opt not to walk through full-body scanners, in addition to passengers who set off metal detectors at checkpoints without the scanners. The TSA also picks random passengers for the searches.