There’s a saying in French which runs like this:  “God made France but human beings made The Netherlands”. Indeed, with five major rivers intersecting the country as well as a long coast facing the North Sea – and threatened with inundation by fresh water as well as salt –  the Dutch built hundreds of kilometres of dykes and huge windmills to reclaim their country from the forces of Nature. 

If there is another country in the world which has been subjected to a similar degree of human intervention, albeit of a very different kind, it is South Korea.

Before arriving in South Korea, I had various impressions of the country, gleaned from reading books fiction and nonfiction as well as the online South Korean newspapers.

Yet one of the most basic aspects of the country which I did not realise was how mountainous it was: 70% of the country. This realisation only began to dawn on me during my first bus trip from Seoul to the east coast. Half the trip was spent travelling through tunnels. Long before, I knew that South Korea had a surfeit of national parks – 20 of them – which formed the main focus of my journey there, yet I did not realise that this was because so much of the country was mountainous. 

Arriving in my first coastal city east of Seoul – population around 80,000 and therefore a relatively small city by South Korean standards – delivered another surprise besides the mountains and endless tunnels.

My apartment was on the 18^th floor of a 20 story tower and it was surrounded by others which were higher. Over the following days, I put 2 and 2 together. This mountainous nature of South Korea means that the available space to house human beings – over 50 million of them – is very small. So the answer: go up. Everyone in South Korea with remarkably few exceptions lives in an apartment tower, including the upper class areas. There are in other words standard and luxury towers.

The extent to which the Korean population lives in high rise apartment towers is  utterly unique and certainly very different to Japan where even in Tokyo, the apartment towers are nowhere near as high as in South Korea. In the course of a journey from one end of a city called Degu to the other, I saw something which really astounded me; forests of enormous apartment towers 40, 50 stories stories high. I had never seen anything like it and by this time I was used to seeing and staying in apartment towers. 

South Korea is truly a land of heights: mountains and apartment towers, nature alongside cutting edge architecture. In a high achievement culture –  Kia, Hyundia, Daewoo, Samsung, K films, K pop – one of its most impressive achievements has gone largely unnoticed.

Everywhere you look, there are mega-towers – and more  going up…

The traffic in South Korea is horrendous and pedestrians effectively have no rights. Waiting times at pedestrian crossings are tediously long and even then cars will cross over. South Koreans undergo a Jekyll and Hyde transformation when behind the wheel of a car/Suv, blowing their horns and driving like maniacs. One can hardly think of greater contrast with Japan….. 

Public transport is good and reliable and is always by bus. 

In the national parks there are also temples, on weekends especially very busy, even though well over half of the South Korean population are atheists. 

The South Korean diet is overwhelmingly based on pork and beef. As we discovered its hard getting by as a vegetarian. 

Fish is only available in towns near the sea.