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| This is the TGV, a new high-speed train line that's being developed between Seoul and Busan. It's scheduled to begin carrying passengers in 2005 and will cut transit time by more than 50%. |
CLICK! to skip text and get to the pics
The Last Leg
To
complete my "air, sea, and land" tour of Korea and Japan, I took
the Korean
National Railroad's Saemaul
Express from Busan to Seoul. Although the train isn't quite as sleek
and shiny as the new prototype you see above, the Saemaul
Express is impressive and very comfortable! The image on the right is
a Korean National Railroad photograph of it. The trip from Busan to Seoul
takes about four hours and the train stops briefly at only two train
stations along the way. Because it's so unlike the cheaper lines--with
their rush seating, squat toilets, and throngs of people
crowding into standing-room-only sections for four to ten hours--the Saemaul
Express is generally thought of as the "foreigner's" or "rich
folk's" train.
The
empty interior shot below (plus all the following photos) were made
possible by the gracious hospitality of the railroad's Customer Service
people. While waiting to catch the train back to Seoul, I suddenly
realized that on that proud day (5 weeks prior) when I had bravely managed to buy my own train tickets--with
no help from Koreans--I had 
inadvertently
purchased a ticket for
the train that was scheduled to leave Busan at 5 am instead of
the required 5 PM departure time.... And "Mr.
Independent" had already missed his train by almost twelve
hours! You can imagine my chagrin and
embarrassment when I finally located customer service and, using all the body language
I could muster, asked for their help. As it turned out, I was fortunate
enough to receive some additional help from a great little language
interpretation service known as GuideCell and
ultimately ended up being personally escorted, by the Customer Service
agent, to an excellent seat. It was in the "Parlor Car" which
has several features that my errant ticket didn't provide, including a
"multimedia system" that plays English language movies. And the
Korean National Railroad people did all of this at no extra charge!
The following series of pics is a small sampling of the the exhilarating, panoramic view I had of South Korea--from my very comfortable seat in the Parlor Car.
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