Korean customs was easy. I was initially frightened by giant lines of people, until I realized that these were only those coming back with goods to declare. In fact, it seemed that we were the only ones on the boat who did not have something to declare, for that counter had no line. As a headed there, I was stopped twice by people in the giant line adjacent to me. A man called out to me over a large box with Giant Bicycle on the side. “Where are you from?” “The United States, I said” “Ah, you are very beautiful.” This was only this first of many such complements that I was to get in Korea. They came just as often from men as from women, and were essentially devoid of sexuality. In Korea, it seems, people just stop you to tell you you’re beautiful. Wow.

Armed with a fresh Korean Visa, elevated self esteem, and plenty of energy from our 27 hours on the boat, we stuck out for the train station. We asked for directions at a tourism counter, and found that they barely spoke English, suggesting few English speakers tour Seoul (at the very least from the Tian Ren ferry). But Scott’s ever developing Chinese was easily understood. We set off to find an ATM. This was no problem. We found, however, that the ATMs in Korea do not, in general, accept foreign cards. So we turned the last of our RMB and the remainder of our American dollars into Wan at a terrible rate, with the help of a tiny currency exchange shop on a side street.

We strolled the outskirts of Seoul. I was struck with how much the place looked like Welseley Massachusetts. The streets were lined with trees. It was mildly hilly and reasonably affluent. The restaurants, however, smelled much more interesting. Most had giant aquariums in front, displaying the many types of mollusk and bivalves to be had, freshly killed for you.

We found our way to the subway, picking up some fresh fruit smoothies from a delightful pair of old Korean women selling them in the station. The subway was clean and fast. The view from the window was great. And Korean women are astoundingly beautiful. We were in a great mood.

We got off at Jongno station and stepped out into a delightful futuristic city. We walked through the streets, enjoying the many new smells, now readily accessible in the clean air. The city seemed freshly scrubbed and affluent. Without too much difficulty we were able to find Yim’s guesthouse. The place was very nice and quite affordable. Our room had two beds, a private bath, and a hot water bubbler with tea and coffee, all bundled economically and minimalistically into a small building in a back alley. The alley was something like a Korean version of the hutongs we had experienced in Beijing but very clean, and much quieter.

We dropped our stuff down on the beds. We did not have enough cash to pay Yim, but he graciously gave us the room on credit, pending our discovery of an ATM which would cater to our foreign cards. Yim even had some (admittedly tiny) bicycles. We felt great about the place. We took off on a stroll. The sun was beginning to set and Scott was struggling to get in touch with a Mrs. Ann Kidder, fellow Brown alum living in Seoul. With this finally achieved, we set out to find sustenance before meeting up with Ann and some friends she had just met that night. It is a testament to how cool Seoul is that one can just meet people and spend the rest of the night with them, without that seeming sketchy, uncomfortable or dangerous. Good one Seoul.

We stumbled upon a fine looking very small and local restaurant where a group of men were eating a giant plate of raw red meat and garlic in the window. Great. We walked in. One of the men at the table came up to us and began to yell. “This Poke!” he said. Poke? We looked at each other. He began to gesticulate incoherently. “Poke! Poke!”

“So you’re closed? I’m so sorry to dest…” We were walking away when he turned us around with one giant arm. “Ah, pork!” This is a pork restaurant. Great. So we sat down. There was no menu to speak of. But each small round table held a charcoal grill in the center. And soon the same fellow who had gotten up from the table poured some red hot coals into ours. He then pulled this great steel elephant trunk device from the ceiling, which hung down and began to inhale the smoke from the coals.

We then proceeded to have a great meal. He brought out pork, all kinds of little side dishes, and bug chunks of lettuce. We used the lettuce to make little pork and side dish roll-ups. We ordered a bottle of Soju, the local booze, made from rice. It is about as alcoholic as schnapps, and is imbibed from little shot glasses. The table of men next to us were well into their 4th or 5th bottle of the stuff and they were quick to strike up a conversation. They quite forcefully began to engage us in broken bits of conversation in English Chinese and Japanese, and the volume level continued to rise. We drank some toasts with them. They let us try the plate of raw meat (it was amazing). And we yelled a lot. At one point, Scott and I were hunkered down, close to the table, with a Korean fellow opposite us. We glared at each other through the half full plate of raw meat. The Korean gentleman would grunt percussive bits of Korean at us, and we would grunt them back as loudly as we could. This call and response continued for some time. I was reminded, oddly enough, of our time in Varanasi, in which the Hindi holy-people had helped us to pray in call and response.

Then we looked at Scott’s watch. Mine, I am sorry to report, was stolen from me on the Tian Ren ferry. So let’s pause the story here to mourn the loss. Ah! I can barely contain myself… Ok. Pause now.

Back in Korea, we had to go meet Ann. So off we went, bidding our new friends farewell, and chalking that up as one of the greatest meals of our lives.

Ann took us across the city to the night club district. There we paid our 20 dollars and went down into a raging hip hop club, by the name of “Noise Basement.” It was indeed noisy and a basement. It was also raging. Hard. It was packed and people were freaking out on the dance-floor. Perhaps the freakiest of which, was our dear Mr. Norton. He transformed from a mild mannered adventure capitalist, into a savage beast, with a heart that pumps a digitally enhanced bass to every extremity, and which glands all over his body which emit an intoxicating vapor, spreading the transformation among those nearby. The switch had been switched. It could not be unswitched. The hip-hop had taken hold. We could only wait it out now.

So at 2:30 am we exited the club. Our ears rang, and we were famished. We took turns burning our mouths on spicy rice gluten balls soaked in boiling sauce. We were collecting ourselves in a 24 hour restaurant, when we began to realize a dilemma. With the subways and buses long stopped, and a group of some 8 or 10 people, we needed to get home. It was decided that those who lived very far away would be given some place to sleep at those who were closer. Ann lived very far away, and we offered one of the beds at Yim’s guesthouse. A rather expensive taxi ride later, we were fast asleep.

Leaving Tianjin, city of rust, was like a long goodbye kiss with China. And china had  abstaining from brushing and been smoking packs of cigarettes in preparation.

We had no “clean break” as one might in a plane launching from an airstrip, rather two hours stalled ferry, as our ship was continually delayed due to smog cover. We passed the time gawking at the Port of Tianjin. The acrid fog refused to thin, and when we finally departed, it was half an hour of snaking through the smokey labyrinth of docking canals, as our pilot ship escorted our own “Tian Ren” to the mouth of the Yellow Sea.

It seemed the port was home to a single ferry, ours, and was a place clearly developed for transporting cargo. This cargo was being loaded onto all manner of ships, painted in primary colors that oxidized through the fog into twisted pastels. Cranes poised idle, weather on the dock or mounted to the boats themselves. Names of ports beckoned from the ships’ helm, and mounds of red dust awaited loading adjacent to nondescript corrugated metal containers.

These are the kind of sights that really get me going. Countless blogs cater those hounding over the latest consumer electronics. Most tech guys like watches, mobile phones, mp3 players, and little gadgets. I like the gigantic steel things that enable global trade.

These gigantic unglamorous vessels oddly poetic names like “CNA CCM AFRICA” “Overseas Soverign,” and “Shining star” are owned by greek tycoons vacationing thousands of miles away in St. Moritz, shouting orders at teams of bankers who scramble in New York to value these rusting money machines.You see, the cargo ships are not trivial.Non-trivial to finance. New builds are expensive. The bigger the boat, the bigger the earning potential, the bigger the bet. You must spend a staggering amount of money and engineer a stream of payoffs from operating profits during the lifetime of the ship. If everyone wants ships, everyone will be building them and materials, labor, and dock space will be costly. By the time you’ve finished your ship, Hanjin, Samsung Heavy, Hyundai Heavy have just rolled out new builds too. Atop that, the (roughly) six year American economic cycle has hit an inflection point and supply outpaces demand for your services, dropping the price. Oops. At least now you have a gigantic boat with a nice shiny paint job.

Non-trivial to build. These gigantic things take time, space, a surprising degree of engineering expertise. Korea has a lockdown on this market, producing many ships in Incheon and Busan. Tianjin, too is trying to match the quality and undercut the price, but the Korean Chaebols have experience where the Chinese have a lot of mistakes yet to make. Additionally, these Chaebols are locked into stayed relationships with banks, governments, and may be cushioned by the other constituent firms that make up their holding conglomerate.

Non-trivial to own or operate. How long will the given economic boom last and will it overlap with the life cycle of your ship? Ever dealt with Philippine pirates armed with Russian made machine guns in the Sulu seas? They’re a real pain for your insurance premium (sea piracy and shipping accidents were the reasons Lloyds of London came about). It’s also a pain when Chinese people smugglers, known as “snakeheads,” were paid $60,000 per head to transport illegal immigrants in a shipping container, and you’ve been summoned to court to explain why they were discovered getting off your boat in Oakland, CA, rather than while getting on in Xiamen, Fujian. If the stress is too much for you, you can sell the freighter on the secondary market, like the Hua Run below: Manufactured in Vladivostok by the Russians then purchased and painted over by the Cambodians, ushered to a new home in Phnom Penh for a new life of dry goods transport.

Non-trivial to liquidate. What if the supertanker is leaking crude across the Arctic ? When repair costs exceed the expected future profitability of a vessel, its time for the graveyard. These graveyards are located in Gujarat, India, and Chittagong, Bangladesh. Why? Miles of shallow water near the mainland of these South Asian countries provide a place for the ships to sit lopsided in the sand while skinny, muscular, men are paid USD $1 per day to extract all the valuable scrap metal and disassemble the rusting beast. In industry jargon, this is referred to as “Shipbreaking.”

Assuming you’re not one of these misfortunate shipbreakers, and rather you’re a more fortunate shipbuilder its possible to get the timing right. You can borrow when money’s cheap, build where labor’s both cheap and skilled, and by the time you smash a bottle of champagne on the helm, the ever cycling economy is banging on your door to shuttle iron ore from Perth to Shanghai. That’s at least what Baosteel or Rio Tinto wants. Or it could be GE sending washing machines from Shenzhen, China to the Bahamas, where products sit in untaxed warehousing zones before going to market. A Nigerian oil magnate may send thousands of barrels of black gold from Lagos to Hong Kong. Or it could be shoes, motorcycles, steel pipe fittings, soccer jerseys, and diesel generators from Hong Kong to Lagos by Guinean traders in Guangzhou. There are ships for dry goods, ships to hold containers, and tankers to hold oil. There are even ships specially fitted to accommodate gigantic chemical tanks. Where do you think American food processing facilities off the New Jersey turnpike get their raw materials?

Shipping connects some of the worlds poorest with the worlds mass market middle class, and is overseen and orchestrated by some of the world’s richest. Catching a glimpse behind the scenes of the international logistics market on the Tianjin to Incheon ferry was stimulating and eye opening, driving my curiosity to new levels. As AsiaWheeling’s resident adventure capitalist, I will research further and determine what kind of inefficiencies or injustices exist in this market. Ones that we may address and continue to investigate on AsiaWheeling 2.0.

Back to our storyAs the Tian Ren neared the sunny Korean peninsula, shore birds began to ride the airstream created by the ferry. schoolchildren and ship engineers alike held out snacks which the birds snatched mid-flight with their beaks.

As the birds circled, darted, and arced, an engineering feat riving the natural one of the birds progressed around us.

A bridge connecting the island two bodies of land across many miles of water seemed to erect itself, as large machines filled pylons with cement mix and crane barges lifted road crew trucks up onto the causeway.

Korea was flexing its muscles. Samsung had branded this bridge, and the work itself has changed the way I consider civil engineering and its disciples.

The people on the boat began to buzz with the energy that accompanies a return trip home, and the clean sea breeze of Incheon welcomed us in a way that no burgeoning city in China could. Seoul lay before us, and with it, wheeling, drinkable tap water, post-modern metropolitan nightlife, and a new level of gonzo attitude.

Armed with a makeshift Korean phrase sheet, we dismounted the ship onto a packed bus which spilled into the customs hall.

Tianjin greeted us with a deep smog that obscured our vision much worse even than Beijing had before it. We hopped in a cab and Scott attempted to communicate the the driver the location a hostel we had found on the internet. There had, however, been only a roman alphabet version of the name and the street, lacking any indication of the tones, so this took some time, as the two them tried on different tones and worked out the particulars. At one point, our fine driver even stopped the cab at a red light and just got out of the car, wandering over to question nearby drivers. The man was stellar. He joked with us, and looked something like the standard cross between Hunter S Thompson and Ghengis Khan, with a little Chuck Norris thrown in for flavor. Finally he had us on the right street and we peered through the smog until we’d spotted the place. One doesn’t tip in China. But this fellow was so great, we tipped him.

The hostel was clean and nice. The owners spoke good English, and they offered to arrange for a cab to the port for the next morning. They also rented bicycles. Really shitty bicycles. They took us out the back door and we peered at the sorry hunks of  rusting metal.

Tianjin is the city of rust.

The humid smog corrodes the exposed metal in the city so rapidly that it seems nothing gleams. And the sides of the buildings are streaked with a dried blood color, as rain dissolves rusted exterior components. Speaking of exterior components, if anyone can correctly identify this one, and state its purpose, we will gladly send you 10 free AsiaWheeling stickers.

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First waypoint of Beijing wheeling round II was a breakfast with Scott’s good friend, a Mr. MCK. The man is co-founder of Khaki Creative, a raging design firm, and currently resides in Beijing.

The fellow lived in the Russian section of Beijing. We had ridden by the day before, and marveled at the Cyrillic writing the great number of Russian groceries and restaurants. Having gotten off to a little of a late start, we wheeled hard through the smoggy Beijing morning towards that place. We finally turned into a courtyard which, at the entrance, sported a particularly a Russian grocery. At the door to MCK’s building we found another little bit of Russia. Three police officers approached us asking for our papers. I carried a photocopy of my passport and visa, but Scott had only his passport number. The similarity to Russia ended right there, however, when the cops smiled and began to converse with us jovially in English. It seems they were primarily concerned with us not sleeping at MCK’s house without registering that activity with them. To ensure this, they followed us upstairs and talked at length with MCK as well. In the end, assured that we were simply tourists, staying in a normal hotel, and soon to be gone, we all shook hands and they went on their merry way.

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Our train to Beijing had only first class cars. It was, in fact, the nicest train I have ever been on in my life. It, however, had no dining car, so we ate noodles from our auxiliary supply, and slept like stones. We awoke in Beijing.

Outside we were immediately assaulted with Olympic propaganda and advertisements. We shuffled with the giant crowd, had our tickets stamped, and were spit from the station. Shifting and fidgeting under all our belongings, which were of course strapped to our bodies, we scrutinized the giant back-lit bus map outside the station. Scott realized at this point that he had left his Panama hat on the train. So please, dear reader, may we pause a moment to morn.

We located the correct bus, and navigated to one of the 10 or so possible platforms. As the bus lumbered its way through the dense Beijing morning traffic, we began to get excited about the city. It sprawled around us, a delightfully ruddy combination of old tile roofed temples, blocky soviet-looking structures, and hyper-modern office buildings. And it was filled with bicyclists. The smog was as thick as I had ever seen in my life. Buildings and people simply meted into it. And we couldn’t wait to join them.

We got off the bus and hustled our stuff over to the Red Lantern Hostel. It had been rated the best in all of Asia. I’m afraid AsiaWheeling can’t give it that stellar of a rating, as they failed to actually record our reservation and we were forced to spend our two nights in two separate rooms. But I can say it was clean, not over-priced, and generally full of fascinating people. Oh, and they rent SAVAGE bicycles.

Our bikes in Beijing were brand new Giant brand wheeling bikes, complete with fenders, bells, and tires so new and sticky, that the little rubber hairs were still attached. Despite some of our fiercest haggling yet, we were hit with a very fat deposit, leaving us with somewhat of a shoestring budget to wheel on. Not a problem. We can forgo luxury. Just give us the open road.

And, by god, on the back of one of those splendid cycles, not even the thinnest wallet can get you down. Beijing raged around us, and we began to wheel hard. All the pent up energy from our days on endless trains and our frustration with the damned Xiangzimen Youth Hostel became a kind of solid rocket-fuel. We blazed forth with thousands of our wheeling brethren around us, breathing the sooty and chemically tainted air as deeply as if it were a mountain breeze.

Scott called a way-point for water and we noticed a crowded little noodle shack nearby. The decision was unanimous and unspoken. We sat down and ordered two bowls. They were killer, if perhaps somewhat poisonous, but by then we were both on Ciprofloxin, so we felt immune to culinary danger.

Now a belly of noodles added its own voltage to our ride, and we burned down the road. All in all the wheel was one for the record-books, perhaps best illustrated in pictures. So I refer you here to the Beijing Gallary Page.

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Xi’an had a feel to it. I thought to myself as we flowed in the giant crowd towards the exit of the train station, “ok, now this is China.” The streets were still wet from recent rain, and the sun shown mildly. We climbed into a taxi and started the twenty minute drive from the historical cultural district, where the station is, to the new high tech district where Jie lives. It seems Xi’an may be the in the throws of a milk craze. Everywhere we went, I saw milk commercials, and instead of beer slogans emblazoned on the umbrellas of local shops and cafes… Puzzling.

The stone walls, and tiled, sloping roofs of the old section were quickly replaced by skyscrapers. And the skyscrapers simply didn’t end for the entire 20 minutes of driving. Xi’an simply has miles and miles of skyscrapers. And more are being built everywhere. Jie’s apartment building was no exception. She came down to meet us, and we rode up 40 floors to her apartment, which was large and new looking.

We showered the Dunhuang off and the three of us strolled to a local Si Chuan restaurant. We had some ragingly spicy fish, and a delightful assortment of cold vegetables. Then we took off towards bicycles. (more…)

We had, in the planning of this adventure, expected Dunhaung to be a mere whistle-stop on an obscure Chinese train-line. In fact, we suspected it was something like Tatueen (the desert planet from which Luke Skywalker appears in the original first star wars movie). Dunhaung appeared in only the most recent Chinese train documentation, and was not even listed in our overseas rail schedule. But in our assumption, we were, however, sourly mistaken. The Dunhaung train station towered outside our train car in gleaming blocks of sandstone and glass. It did, however, seem to take architectural queues primarily from star wars.  So we were correct on some level… We would not have been surprised to find Jaba the hut holding court inside, or if a storm trooper were to walk around the corner. (more…)

Urumqi boiled in the morning sun, and we road around in a cab, searching for an internet cafe. An unsuccessful search for WiFi lead us far from the train station, and we eventually settled for one of the sprawling, and decidedly wired, World of Warcraft centers, which have spread across China like a hybrid between an opium den and a digital virus.

This particular place was decidedly unsuccessful in catering to our missions, allowing neither me to post to the blog (asiawheeling.com seemed for some reason blocked) or Scott to take his Capital Markets final exam (good one internet explorer 1.0).

So I slapped an AsiaWheeling sticker on their bathroom wall and we split. (more…)

The market proper was something else. We should have had at least a clue what we were in for when the line at every ATM in the city was five people long. Loaded with cash and extra conscious of the locations of our wallets and cell-phones, we entered the fray.

The savagery of the market was so intense it might best be told through illustrations and captions rather than a narrative. So I dispense here-forth (for the most-part) with my banter.

Bagels are very popular in Kashgar. Who knew? All around us they were being boiled and tossed, steaming, by bare hand into giant open clay ovens. This wheeler is no doubt making a delivery.

This is the so called dumpling alley. There are lots of dumpling places. Some of them staffed by beautiful Uighur women. Eat at your own risk.

A silk merchant appears to be doing just fine in his wicked hat.

Medicinal honey for the lungs…. Your guess is as good as mine.

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