Sailing out of range

At some time tomorrow afternoon the ship's internet connection will cease to operate because we will enter Japanese waters. Unexplained factors interfere with the connection to the satellite. The blog will be suspended as it is in cyberspace until a land based connection becomes available in Japan or the good old USA.

We will visit three ports in Korea:  Incheon from which we made a side trip to Seoul, Mopko, a small port where we are for another hour and Pusan for a last brief stopover. Seoul seems a somewhat less crowded version of the other Asian cities - traffic, high rise apartments and pollution are a bit less dense.

Both Korean ports have welcomed us with drum performances. At Ho Chi Minh City beauty queens in national dress released dozens of balloons into the air. All other ports have taken our appearance in stride.

The Chinese

guide from Road Scholar, who is accompanying us on his first trip to Korea,  says he feels he is still in China because everything is so similar, even a palace complex based on the Forbidden City, which the Vietnamese had also.

We have visited two amazing museums in which artifacts illustrating Korean heritage were displayed with beautiful modern design, a folk crafts museum in Seoul and a maritime museum in Mopko. The maritime museum here displays remains of ships and cargos that sank in the treacherous waters here in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries plying what some call the silk road of the sea.  Delicate pieces of celadon that have spent centuries underwater look as if they were produced last month.

We had a chance to strike a ceremonial Korean bell in a traditional shape but cast to welcome the 21st century,

One aspect of a cruise ship smaller than most is that we sometimes dock in essentially working port areas.   Just beyond our rear rail is a giant red crane and, beyond it, a large lot containing Hyundai and/ or Kias that are being loaded on a huge ship, possibly bound for the US.  The working ports communicate the economic rise of Asia as effectively as the skyscrapers.