So here is a little more about Jeju – it is an island; it
belongs to
South Korea
and can be accessed by boat or plane... walking does not work.
For the Koreans it is a major holiday resort (US colleagues
suggest that it is the Korean’s equivalent of their Florida but I find it more
like a supped-up version of the Isle of Wight) and pretty much the whole
landscape of the island – which is dramatic with a volcano at the centre and
beaches and cliffs at the edges – is devoted to tourism. There are many theme
parks and other large scale tourist attractions. There are also some tangerine
groves – although these are also to some extent grown to allow the tourists to
take them home as souvenirs, the other major take-home gift being fish.
Local specialties in restaurants include seafood and some of
this tends to arrive at the table alive and customers kill and cook it themselves.
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| Korean pickles |
The Scientific Committee meeting is being held in a luxurious
hotel surrounded by well manicured gardens that reach to the cliff’s edge. This
luxurious hotel is surrounded by other luxurious hotels together covering several
square miles (of luxury). Here there are things that one might expect in
western hotels like swimming pools, bars and coffee shops, but also less
expected structures, like a series of full-sized Dutch-style artificial and electrically-driven
windmills and small areas of tents. Now the tented areas in the gardens of the
hotels seem to either be a place for the children to play (and perhaps pretend
that they are out in the wild) or somewhere for families to go and have
barbecues. The tented areas come complete with not only barbequing equipment
but also large electric insect killing devices and, of course, waiters and
other highly attentive staff.
A coffee in the luxury hotel where we are meeting costs £11
(but does come with a very small cake).
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| Sperm whale in ice |
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