Korea

So. The first picture is of my first stop - Seoul. As the proud new owner of a digital camera, I naturally took far too many uninteresting pictures of this place, although it was not a particularly illuminating stopover, as I was confined to the airport for four hours, but an airport can be interesting enough. Seoul International (which is mainly used by Korea Air planes) is all polished granite and silky timber and taupe furniture, and there are free internet stations, and shops called "Smoker's Refuge" and "International Peace & Happiness". Although the airport is so huge that I couldn't walk around it in the four hours I had available, there are very few people in it - eerie.

There are also very nice shops such as Hermes, Gucci and Salvatore Ferragamo, mostly frequented by too-cool-for-school Japanese teenagers with wife beaters and weird orange bleached hair.

The bookshop was interesting. I obviously couldn't make head or tail of any of the titles, but the books were very beautiful, and well made, with beautiful illustrations on thick paper. The English-language stock was strictly limited to thrillers and sci-fi. Hm.

There was also a bird in the airport. It's a very antiseptic sort of place, and this little bird hopping around the seating areas made for an intriguing sight. I have no idea what kind of bird it is or whether airports are its natural habitat - if anyone knows, drop me a line.

Korean newspapers in a vending machine. It's easy to perceive a written language you don't understand as decorative - I thought even 'Burger King' written in Korean had a certain mysterious beauty, as did these newspapers.

I arrived in Auckland in the late morning of June 27. In the immigrations hall, I met up with my mate Simon (shown here digging for his passport in his very hi-tech daypack), who, as planned, had arrived twenty minutes earlier on a different airline. We had met to exchange passwords and synchronise our watches at Heathrow, and here we were, on the other side of the world. It was a fine moment, a triumph dedicated to the gods of Circumstance and Coincidence.

We went to find our hostel, the lovely Ponsonby Backpackers, where we were warmly greeted by the owner, Italian Steve. We were quite prepared to show the kiwi hipsters of trendy Ponsonby how we party in Scotland, but we had not counted on the effects of jetlag... we crashed into bed at half past seven. Sad.

After a couple of days of going to bed early, schlepping around Auckland, shopping for longjohns and slagging off the watery kiwi beer, we got ourselves a rent-a-wreck and took off for the Coromandel Peninsula.