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Amsterdam and KLM to Seoul; an equally hurried change of books (the Survival Guide to Australia being dumped in favour of the Insight Guide to Korea )—and I was on my way.
    It was a wretchedly long flight. I had idly mentioned to a friend in the office that we were probably flying via my old stamping ground of New Delhi, and it was only when I saw that the sun was off the port beam that I realized, cursing my stupidity, that we were in fact headed across the Pole, via Alaska. So I called the friend, collect, from Anchorage Airport, prompting a splendidly surreal argument that revolved around his much-repeated protest to the operator that, ‘No, I won’t accept the call from him in the United States. He’s in India.’ It took a little time before the penny dropped, and by then it was time for the flight to leave again, bound across the Pacific, down to Seoul.
    During all those long hours I tried, so far as I recall, to clear my mind of most of the prejudice against Korea, the views instilled in the Gaumonts and the classrooms of old. To an extent I must have succeeded, difficult as it may have been. In any event the conversion, for that is what I underwent during the two weeks that followed, was positively Pauline in its scale and extent. I became, without a doubt, and with extraordinary suddenness, enchanted by what I found.
    All the old images suddenly melted and slipped clear away. I became captivated by Korea and the Koreans, and have remained so ever since. I hope that these pages that follow will convey some of the reasons why—reasons that remain, and may remain long after this book is written, a mystery to me. The reader will not want a litany of excuses, of course: but I sometimes find my affection for poor old Korea—this ‘unhappy country’ that so many earlier writers, half a century and more ago, discovered it to be, this ‘difficult and dangerous Kingdom’ that Hendrick Hamel found three centuries before—sometimes I find it hard to explain, even to myself. Hence the journey, and the need to try to understand both Korea and my own reactions to Korea. The journey that I planned, then, and the words that result fromit, will serve me every bit as much as I trust they may serve the reader. For, like all travels, this is as much a journey of self-discovery as the simple discovery of another country and another people. I needed to make the trip—to find out not simply what, and who, and when, but why .
     
    For several months I contemplated the best way to journey around the country. I had already driven and flown and taken the railway and the bus over many hundreds or even thousands of miles. Each was pleasant enough a mode of transport, yet each placed strict limits on the kind of Koreans one was able to meet. In a car, of course, you had either your companion or the very occasional hitchhikers—invariably students or drunks or American servicemen eager to get back before their two-day passes expired. The planes, on the other hand, tended to fill with blue-suited businessmen from Hyundai or Gold Star or Daewoo, men who would either read impenetrable documents about the finer points of oil tanker hull assembly or else, and more frequently, test their English on you in sometimes the most excruciating ways.
    I once encountered a Mr Jimmy Kim (as his card declared) on a flight to Ulsan: he approached me in the airport lounge and, with neither introductions or queries, announced his apparently rather urgent inquiry. Was the word slipper , he asked, generally used in the singular or the plural form? I thought for a moment and then replied that people normally asked for the dog or child to fetch slippers in pairs, at which news Mr Kim suddenly looked crestfallen. I asked him why. He was, he explained sadly, the publisher of a series of English conversation books, and he had just sent his latest masterpiece to press containing a sentence that read: ‘Mrs Park, would you please fetch me my slipper?’ I