From China to South Korea

We had heard that it was possible to get a Ferry from China to Korea. We were keen to do as much of our trip as possible without flying but doing so proved more difficult than expected.

For starters the ferry company website was only in Chinese and Korean and none of the travel agents we found seemed to be able to help us. Our guidebook was of very limited help but we eventually found an office that sells tickets – only to be told that they couldn’t sell them to US because we weren’t Chinese, Japanese or Korean (they couldn’t be sure if we would be allowed into Korea). So we would have to go to the port to buy them before we leave. This was cutting things a bit close, because there are only 2 ferry sailings a week and if we missed the Sunday one, then the next one would be Thursday which would be too late for us to catch our flight to Sydney. The ferry port is actually in a town called Tanggu, about 200km from Beijing.

Nevertheless, we set off on Saturday evening, taking the train to a place called Tianjin. That was pretty cool because this is apparently the fastest intercity train in the world and travels at 330 km/h. We covered the 120km trip to Tianjin in just 30 minutes – less time than it took us to get from our Beijing Hostel to the train station. In fact, we were very impressed with how modern the train station and train was – it was by far the most modern we’ve seen, the station was more like an airport. Who said travelling in China was difficult?

We spent the night in Tianjin which turned out to be a very nice city. It was immediately clear that this place doesn’t get any tourists because (1) our guidebook had very little to say about it (2) nobody speaks ANY English (3) we foreigners were a bit of a novelty and had to pose for a number of camera-phone photos. All this was surprising as we later learned that it’s the 6th largest city in China with 11 million people!

Next morning, we were up early to get a bus to Tanggu port. Again, from the one single paragraph that our guidebook gave to this town, we were expecting something along the lines of Rosslare Harbour in Ireland, so were very surprised again to see another sprawling metropolis with skyscrapers and massive apartment blocks as far as the eye could see! Just another example of the sheer scale of China!

Thankfully, we were able to buy tickets there at the port but getting onto the boat proved to be another ordeal. For a start, it didn’t help that the name on Conor’s boarding pass was “Conor Eireannach Irish” (Tanggu port officials are obviously not familiar with the layout of Irish passports). Also, the fact that Conor’s hair now looks significantly different from his passport photo prompted suspicious staring and further questions from the immigration official. We were both pulled aside while some senior official scrutinized our passports and checked against his list, however, in the end we were both allowed onto the ferry.....horray :)

The sailing itself was largely uneventful. There were no other westerners on the boat....we were the only ones. The food was all unusual looking stuff and since everything was written in Korean and no one had any English, we didn’t really know what we were eating. The sight of a young child peeing into a paper cup at the dinner table was a little off putting (but apparently it’s normal here as no one else noticed)!

After 28 hours on the boat, we finally arrived in South Korea. We will spend 5 days around the capital Seoul before flying to Australia on Friday. Our initial thoughts are one of surprise about the technology here: This is a modern developed country but it’s the first country in all the places we’ve been where our phones don’t work and the ATMs don’t offer instructions in English.