My passport was not in my bag. Not in my pocket. Not anywhere on my body. The last time I’d seen it was on the bed at Dandihoe Pension on Saryangdo, and the sweet lunatic who’d driven me to the dock — the one who treated the island’s one-lane cliff road like a Formula One qualifying lap — had already screeched back into the distance.
This was not a small problem. The passport had my return ferry ticket inside it. My Korean eSIM, which I’d paid real money for, turned out not to allow outgoing calls (or incoming calls, as I’d learned the night before — so what exactly was it doing?). I was standing at a ticket window, 16kg of backpack on my back, trying to communicate the situation to three people behind plexiglass who collectively figured out that I was well and truly screwed.
Then they just… fixed it. They called the pension. They told the ferry to wait. And about three minutes later, Allison Foyt — that’s what I started calling my driver in my head — came screeching back up to the dock, leaped out of her compact car waving my passport like a relay baton, yelling at the ferryman. Turns out it had slid out of my shallow-pocketed travel shorts onto her car seat. Lesson noted, too late, as usual.
The whole time this played out, every passenger on that ferry was lined up along the rail watching. I could feel forty sets of eyes on me as I sprinted over, grabbed my passport, and tried to look like a person who had his life together. I did not look like that person.
What I did do, later, was translate a proper thank-you message and send it to the pension. Some moments you don’t let slide.
Standing at that dock, I ran the math: bus to Busan, about $25 USD and ten hours of transfers, or fly Korean Air to Jeju for $50 and get there in under three hours. I’d burned twenty minutes on a passport crisis and still made the flight with time to spare. Sometimes the chaos just sorts itself out if you stop white-knuckling it.
At Gimhae Airport in Busan, boarding the shuttle bus to the plane, I heard someone say in clear English: “Look what the cat dragged in.” Montana — a guy I’d met on a food tour back in Seoul — was boarding with his mom and her boyfriend. There are a lot of flights to Jeju. The odds of being on the exact same one were genuinely low. Small world, useful world.
Jeju itself arrived in a sheet of monsoon rain. One hour across the center of the island on a bus, then a 40-minute wait (listed as 25) for a transfer bus, then a local that stopped at every single stop while I stood braced against the door with 18kg of gear total — 16kg pack on my back, 2kg day pack on my front — and a driver who loved his brakes more than anything in this life. My legs were already destroyed from the mountain hike on Saryangdo the day before. This was not helping.
Hotel Scarboro turned out to be a medium-sized building sitting in the middle of a field, with the ocean a solid third of a mile away. The listing had said beachside. That word is doing a lot of work in Korean hospitality marketing. The cafe was about 75% finished. The lounge, same. The little above-ground pool looked like something from a suburban backyard in Ohio.
The room, though, was enormous and gorgeous. And it had its own hot tub. I’ll take the win.
Dinner that first night reset everything. I found a Korean sushi place nearby with a tour bus in the parking lot — always a good sign — walked into a wall of noise and a loud chorus of JOHN (pronounced Chon, their version of cheers), and sat down with a menu entirely in Korean. The owner pointed at tuna; I pointed back. She waved me off — too big for one person — then rattled off something in Korean that turned out to mean she’d scale down a sampler platter for a solo diner, which is genuinely not a common ask here, and charge me 60,000 won (about $40 USD). I said yes before she finished the sentence.
What followed was absurd in the best possible way. First a huge plate of tiny dishes — shrimp, garlic, edamame, and a dozen things I couldn’t identify. Then a full sushi spread, beautifully arranged. Then a fillet of cooked fish appeared, tasted like perch. Then she took the sushi platter away and came back with a portable propane burner and a bowl of fish stew that boiled like mad — red broth, bits and bones, smelled fantastic. Mixed with rice: genuinely one of the better bowls of anything I had on this trip. I was quoting Monty Python’s Meaning of Life to myself by the time the check came. “It’s only wafer thin.”
The next two days at Scarboro were the kind of slow that you only appreciate when you’ve spent three days getting somewhere the hard way. Mornings at a cafe right on the water, watching the Haenyeo — licensed women free-divers who work the rocks for shellfish — going up and down in the chop for hours at a stretch. Badass doesn’t cover it. I didn’t try to talk to them; I’d heard they don’t particularly want to be interrupted mid-dive, and that seemed fair.
Mid-afternoon I ended up helping a guy named Tikwon at the cafe figure out a knot system for anchoring beach umbrellas to the railing in the coastal wind. Rolling grip hitch, showed him three times, let him video the third attempt on his phone. Turns out Tikwon works for Korean Airlines, recognized the Delta partnership, and when I mentioned I was a 1.5-million-mile flyer he grabbed my hand and shook it like I’d done something heroic. A young mechanic on vacation, genuinely pumped about airline loyalty miles. That interaction stays with me.
The payoff for all of it was dinner Saturday night with Montana and his family at the Korean BBQ behind my hotel — black pork (a large local breed, basically pork belly) grilled over a live coal pot right at the table, hanging vent above, Terra beer all around. Creamed corn with cheese, scrambled eggs, soup on the side. Spectacular company after two days of being the only solo diner anywhere within walking distance. Korea is not built for eating alone, and I was glad not to be doing it.
Sunday brought rain from 8am, which I handled by sleeping until 11, watching a movie, and charging all my dive batteries for Thailand. Then I sat by the pool and wrote. Not every day needs to be a mission.
Field Notes: What I’d Tell You Before You Go
Rent a car on Jeju. The island is big, the buses are infrequent and local, and standing for 40 minutes with an 18kg pack on your back while a driver stress-tests his brakes is a completely avoidable experience — a rental will run you roughly 50,000–80,000 won ($38–$60 USD) per day when I was there in July 2022, but check current rates.
Shallow pockets are for people who don’t carry passports. Travel days require cargo pants or a proper hip pouch — I learned this at a ferry dock in front of a boatload of witnesses.
If there’s a tour bus in the parking lot, walk in. That Korean sushi place had no English menu and a hostess who spoke maybe thirty words of it — and it was the best meal of my time on Jeju by a wide margin, at 60,000 won ($40 USD) all-in.
The eSIM I bought for Korea didn’t allow outgoing or incoming calls. Carry your home SIM as a backup — swapping back to my US carrier cost me $10 for the day and unlimited calls; I should have done it on day one.
Entry requirements, COVID protocols, and visa rules from my July 2022 trip are a snapshot in time. Check current South Korean entry requirements before you book anything — they’ve changed significantly since then.
If you’ve got questions about routing around Jeju, what to budget, or how to set up connectivity in South Korea without getting burned the way I did, drop them into Ask WildWilliam. It’s there for exactly this kind of pre-trip planning — the stuff that keeps a lost passport from becoming a missed ferry.