The Gamble
I landed at Incheon at 6 a.m. on a Tuesday with no plan beyond a vague belief that South Korea owed me adrenaline. My phone had died somewhere over the Pacific. I'd booked an Incheon Airport Private Pick Up to and from Seoul Incheon Airport Private Pick Up to and from Seoul the night before—one of those decisions you make half-asleep and half-hope will sort itself out—and honestly, standing in the arrivals hall with my overstuffed rucksack and a beard that screamed "I've been on a plane for sixteen hours", I was grateful someone had.
The driver, a lean man named Min-jun, appeared holding a handwritten sign with my name spelled phonetically. He didn't ask questions. He just took my bag, got me coffee, and drove. We talked about football for forty minutes. This is the thing about private transfers that the blogs don't tell you: sometimes you just need someone to handle the logistics so your brain can still be in the air.
By 9 a.m. I was in Jongno-gu, showered, and terrified.
Market at Daybreak
The next morning I showed up to Mangwon Market while the city was still deciding whether to wake up. I was there for the Korean Cooking Class with Grocery Shopping at Seoul Local Market Korean Cooking Class with Grocery Shopping at Seoul Local Market, which meant I was about to spend three hours learning to cook from a woman named Park Hee-jin, who'd fed her family from these stalls for thirty-two years.
Hee-jin didn't coddle us. There were four of us in the class—a couple from Montreal, a solo traveller from Melbourne, and me—and she herded us through the market like we were her own kids, pointing at fish with the authority of someone who knows exactly which ones weren't swimming six hours ago. She haggled in Korean. She rejected vegetables. She had opinions, fervent ones, about the texture of tofu.
"You see this?" She held up a bunch of perilla leaves, thin and lime-green. "American people, they don't understand. The leaf is the flavour. The leaf is alive."
She wasn't wrong. We bought gochugaru, dwenjang, garlic that smelled like it had something to prove. She moved through the market the way a sommelier moves through a wine cellar—purposeful, slightly impatient, absolutely certain.
Back in her kitchen—a real kitchen, not some tourist-facing studio—we made kimchi jjigae, doenjang-jjae, and a bibimbap that required me to learn that stone bowls are not decorative. She made us taste the broth at five different points. "Not ready," she'd say. "Wait." Then: "Now. Taste now." The umami hit like someone had turned up the volume on flavour itself.
I asked her why she bothered teaching tourists. "Because people should know," she said. "Food is not entertainment. Food is how you understand a place."
I left with her phone number, a promise to send photos of everything I cooked for the next month, and the first real meal I'd eaten in Korea folded into my stomach like a secret.
The Defector's Table
Three days later, I was standing at the Korean Demilitarised Zone wondering if my editor knew what she was doing when she approved this.
The Private DMZ Tour with North Korean Defector + N Korean Lunch Private DMZ Tour with North Korean Defector + N Korean Lunch picked me up from my hotel at 7 a.m. The guide's name was Jun. He was forty-one, which seemed young for everything he'd lived through. He'd escaped North Korea in 2017. He'd walked through China. He'd been a refugee. Now he was standing beside a minibus in Paju, telling me about the Joint Security Area with the kind of detail that only comes from having studied something obsessively to understand it.
The DMZ is less terrifying in person than it is in your head, and more so in other ways. We stood at Dorasan Station, empty for twenty years, waiting for a unification that hasn't come. We looked across the border at North Korean soldiers. They looked back. Jun explained the politics with precision but no anger—just facts, laid out like coordinates.
"People think it's about hate," he said. "But it's about systems. About what you're allowed to see. What you're allowed to want."
We visited the Third Tunnel of Aggression, a 2-kilometre shaft dug from the North, and I crawled through it bent almost in half, thinking about the people who'd built it, the people it was meant to kill. When we emerged, the sun was aggressive. Everything was too bright.
But the meal—the meal was the part that broke something open in my chest.
Lunch was at a small restaurant run by North Korean defectors. Jun had called ahead. We were the only table. The woman who cooked for us had been a chef in Pyongyang. The food was different from what I'd learned with Hee-jin: more restrained, less fermented, built on flavours that had to hide. Naengmyeon, cold and precise. Kimchi that was almost bitter. Steamed fish with nothing but salt.
"This is what we ate," Jun said quietly. "This is what you remember when you're hungry somewhere else."
I watched him eat. He was tasting a memory. And I was tasting his memory of a memory, which felt like standing in someone else's dream.
The Island That Heals You
I needed to remember how to be a tourist doing tourist things, so I took a ferry to Jeju. The Small Group Tour in East Jeju Healing Island w/Woman Divers Show Small Group Tour in East Jeju Healing Island w/Woman Divers Show was supposed to be gentle. It was not gentle. It was nine hours of moving through the island at exactly the right pace, which is to say, slowly enough that you actually see things.
We started at Hamdeok Beach at seven in the morning, when the light was still negotiating with the dark. Our guide, a woman named Soo-jin, took us through a forest of bijada trees—ancient, twisted things—and told us their names the way you'd introduce you to old friends. Then we waited on the rocks for the haenyeo, the women divers, and they came out of the water like they'd never left it, their wetsuits dark against the grey sea, their catches of sea urchin and abalone making that decisive sound as they filled their nets.
One of the divers, a woman in her sixties, surfaced beside where I was standing. She pulled off her goggles and looked at me with the kind of directness you only get from someone who's spent decades alone in the water.
"Good?" she asked in English.
"Very good," I said.
She nodded once and disappeared.
That evening, on the ferry back to Busan, I thought about all the women and men throughout history who've dived into the ocean and come back up with something to eat. I thought about Hee-jin in her market. I thought about Jun at that table in Paju, eating the food of his childhood in a country that no longer existed for him.
The Cliff Train Moment
My last tour was supposed to be the easy one. The Busan: Small Group With Hotel Pickup, Sky Capsule, Local Guide Busan: Small Group With Hotel Pickup, Sky Capsule, Local Guide was nine and a half hours of coastal scenery and a slow train that clings to cliffsides along Haeundae.
Except the Sky Capsule was more terrifying than advertised. It moves at about the speed of a very committed walking pace, which means you have ample time to notice how far down the drop is. I sat next to an eighty-year-old Korean woman who spent the entire ride knitting, completely unbothered by the void.
"First time?" she asked in Korean-inflected English.
"Yes," I admitted.
"You get used to it," she said.
She was right. By the third stretch, I stopped gripping the armrest and started looking. The coastline unfurled beneath us like something alive. Busan spread out below—the port, the bridges, the buildings climbing the hills like they were trying to escape something.
That night I sat in a pojangmacha, a street food tent, eating tteokbokki and talking to a group of university students who asked me what I did. When I told them I wrote about food and travel, they ordered me more street food and grilled me about why Western people didn't understand spice, why Australian coffee was becoming a thing in Seoul, and whether I'd ever tried makgeolli with fruit.
I hadn't. We fixed that.
The Real Thing
I left South Korea with four kilogrammes of gochugaru in my luggage and Hee-jin's voice in my head saying "the leaf is alive". I left with the memory of Jun's face when he talked about food you remember when you're hungry somewhere else. I left understanding, finally, why people don't just visit places—they eat them. They let them become part of their body.
The adrenaline I'd come looking for wasn't in the DMZ or the cliff train or the diving women. It was in the moment when you realise that the person feeding you is feeding you their entire story. That a market is a language. That a border is a scar.
South Korea didn't give me thrills. It gave me something better: a reason to keep showing up, hungry, to wherever comes next.
