The Fish of Hongdo

It happened fast. Racing over the water, the small boat appeared suddenly, bashing against the minor waves as it crossed them, with the whirring of its motor growing louder as it unexpectedly closed in. The vessel I was on was larger but even if it tried to power away it could hardly have escaped. It was too late for that. What did they want?

I could only take my cue from the other passengers and the crew, because with everything happening in Korean I was at a minor disadvantage. The small boat sidled up to ours, its motor cut as an animated conversation across the gap of water began. The passengers were fussing; they seemed to be negotiating. It happened near the coast of Hongdo, Red Island, in the Yellow Sea.

Winter had come to South Korea. It was cold and the waters about the eight hundred islands can only have been colder.

It’s in Korea’s far southwest where the peninsula crumbles away like cake. Those islands might almost act as stepping stones for giants attempting to cross to China. They must’ve been a worthy challenge for early navigators and cartographers, charting each isle and outcrop, bay and cove. Even on the national map the torn coastline of the southwest looks like a pile of leftover puzzle pieces.

At closer quarters the islands are similarly unwilling to conform to standardised design specifics. A vast range of rock shapes, delicate, unusual and unexpected, document the drop of the island into the sea. Or at least on Hongdo they do. One of the furthest islands from the mainland, Hongdo is famous for the artistry of wind and wave, which is why tourists go there. It’s the reason I was on that boat.

It’s not difficult to reach Hongdo. There are scheduled ferry services to cover the 115 kilometres from Mokpo City on the mainland. It takes two and a half hours. Hongdo is small, about six kilometres long and two and a half kilometres wide. It has two villages, Il-gu and the I-gu, between them home to the 710 islanders; and if it’s winter when the boat docks in Il-gu harbour, there’ll likely be locals waiting on the pier to offer home-stay style accommodation; but in the summer the island is said to be crowded, mostly by Korean mainlanders. It’s a popular destination. 

It’s not difficult to organise the two-hour circumnavigation tour of the island by boat, which is the best way to appreciate the gallery of rock formations, nature’s art.

But before that it’s possible to follow the Il-gu-to-I-gu road, the stone and dirt pathway up the nearer hill that rises to about 200 metres. There, the camellia bushes grow large and create, in places, a tunnel. The views, over the island, over the sea and down to the villages, are deep breaths of oxygen, life-bringing. The island takes its name, Red, from the effect of each sunset on its rocks and cliffs; although in spring there is the red bloom of the camellias to be considered.

It was on the second day, near to the end of the circumnavigation tour, that the smaller boat had suddenly appeared. Aboard I could see three men, in thick jackets, two in baseball caps. They had knives.

The passengers were animated. What’s going on, I thought. It was only a matter of moments before the nature of the trouble became apparent. 

It was about fish. Fresher fish there could not be. The fishermen in the smaller boat had just caught them and wished to sell them. Meanwhile the fish flapped about in a water-filled bucket.

Although I realise it’s nearly criminal activity in Bangladesh, I confess that I don’t often eat fish. A small piece on occasion I will enjoy, especially if it’s fried. But in Hongdo the challenge was greater still.

I watched as fish were sold, the unusual part being in how they were delivered: pre-chopped and salted. With each sale the fishermen took the fish to a wooden board on the deck of their boat, scaled and gutted them on the spot, cutting them into thin strips of boneless meat. Then they were sprinkled with salt, put into a bag and handed across to the larger boat.

The even more unusual part was how they were eaten: directly. There was, I thought, a missing step in the process, in accordance with usual procedure: the cooking part. I watched as Koreans took thin strips of raw fish by hand and pushed them into their mouths.

I was fortunate, arguably, because on our boat was one Ms. Kim from Suwon, near to Seoul. She was on holidays with her family and her sister’s family. Her sister was introduced as ‘aunty’, but in her fluffy leopard-skin patterned jacket she looked too young for the title. Ms. Kim spoke some English and although we’d not said much before that, the enthusiasm of the raw fish snack somehow induced greater conversation and an offer to share.

At the same time from somewhere that rice wine, the Korean version called soju, surfaced, to accompany the fish. So I joined in: a nip of soju, then a few strips of salted raw fish gulped down the throat just as a pelican might do. It wasn’t bad, actually, although it might’ve been better not to know what it was. The mood on the boat became festive as everyone, and I was the only foreigner among them, drank and ate.

I don’t wish to imply it was the first time I’d faced raw fish during that preceding first week in South Korea. It was rather the opposite: as if raw fish sought me out, following me around the country like a hunter stalking deer. At almost every meal, in nearly every restaurant, I had suffered for not being able to make sense of the written Korean on the menu. The only thing to do was to randomly point to a listed item and cross fingers. The first time, when the waiter returned some minutes later with a large plate of raw fish, I thought to try my best at it, thinking on the next occasion there might be something that had seen a bit more of a pot or a pan. It’s a mystery how it came about, but inevitably, time after time, my random choice was a plate of raw fish.

This result was despite my deliberately having tried to increase the chances of variation, by pointing towards the top of one menu at lunch and towards the bottom of another during dinner. Somehow, I was remarkably consistent in my random choices. Yet I was sure Koreans ate other things.

But of all the raw fish that followed, chased and hunted me down, it was the fish of Hongdo that was the most special, and clearly the freshest.

These days in Dhaka it’s usual to consider the freshness of food, especially when eating from a street side stall. Food freshness is an important consideration anywhere. 

It’s just that in countries with a national cuisine that’s something like South Korea’s, a further consideration for the uninitiated might be if the food isn’t actually, on occasion, a little too fresh.

Or, probably, it’s the sort of thing one learns to enjoy.

Let the Boat Sail!

Arctic Ocean

Caribbean Sea

Indian Ocean

Kattegat

Luzon Strait

Mediterranean Sea

Persian Gulf

Red Sea

South Pacific Ocean

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Fish of Hongdo

The Red Bird

Eudocrimus ruber.  Adults measure 55 – 63 centimetres in length with males slightly larger weighing about 1.4 kilograms.  Wingspans are 54 centimetres and nests are messy stick constructions built well above the waterline.  Flight is nimble and the curved bills of the males are 22% longer.  Let’s talk of waders.  Let’s remember Caroni.

And there was Eid on its way.  And there was Diwali on its way.

‘Take my number,’ she said, ‘and if you’re not busy for Eid, call me and you can celebrate with us.’  Just as once there had been a coincidental meeting with a Dhakaiya businessman aboard a Bangaon train, there was that young woman in the Miami terminal, waiting as we were for the flight to Port of Spain.  We’d asked her of her country and she’d said a few things.  You know a country has to be good when the first invitation is granted before arrival.

She had no way to know there’d be knobble-kneed Shazam in Bermuda shorts and t-shirt to look after us.  Neither did we.  It was our very first trip to Trinidad.

Shazam was used to tourists because he was the driver at the guest house in Diego Martin.  He’d spent the week before us with a wealthy American woman who’d had shopping to do and he’d enjoyed that.  He knew the tourist routines of the north of the island and he’d heard all the tourist complaints.  He was used to the sometimes fussiness of foreigners.

Shazam was expert enough indeed to dutifully ignore the instructions of the guest house manager regarding the ordering of the sites.  The main trouble seemed to be with Maracas Bay, a postcard beach on Trinidad’s northern shore where the manager may have thought about the tourist-friendly sunset, telling Shazam to go there last.  Shazam thought about the traffic and the narrow winding road.  Despite working as a driver, he was nervous in traffic and on narrow winding roads.  You could tell this by the way he jerkily swung to the side on occasion as a speedier vehicle passed; and because he said as much.

It was hot in the middle of the day at Maracas Bay, perfect for a swim and a lunch of the battered shark in roti dish called shark-n-bake.  And it was just as well to do things the Shazam way.

I’m not sure why Shazam thought we’d be delighted by the modest modern shopping malls of Trinidad.  Perhaps that’s where some of the other tourists liked to go to feel at home; maybe he’d been there with the American woman the week before; but it didn’t take much time and he was pleased to show us, in between the British colonial blocks of the Trinidadian capital, so we didn’t suggest anything different.

In the evening we toured the Hindu fair beyond the city, to the south.  Trinidad’s population is split, about evenly, between Africans and Indians, the descendants of slaves and of indentured labourers, and while the Africans are Christians, the Indians are divided principally between the Hindu and Muslim communities.  It’s the strong Indian influence that makes the island unique in the West Indies.  There were flashing lights and tabla songs on a stage at the fair, because Diwali was on its way.

Eudocrimus ruber.  It was after that I suggested Caroni and Shazam was quite discouraging without exactly explaining why.  I pressed him for the reason and in the end he said he’d taken tourists there before and they said there was nothing to see.  There were too many mosquitoes and Caroni was just a swamp and it was disappointing.  We had to convince him that we’d not be of such an opinion.

He was still in two minds at the dock where the small, open-air tourist boat waited.  He still worried about mosquitoes as we put repellent on.  Politely he made it clear that he’d not recommended Caroni and so if we didn’t enjoy it, it wasn’t his doing.  And we waved as the boat set off.

 At first there were narrow channels with mangroves on either side and the boat had to drive slowly to find passage between the submerged sticks and the shallows.  It was there we saw the python, spiralled tightly in a mangrove branch.  Indeed there were two.  It was there the afternoon sun sprinkled gold among the greenery and brought reflections enough on the water to make tranquillity.  There was a caiman too, a smaller alligator relative, posing in wait amid twig and branch on the channel-side mud.

Well, the channels became canals and lagoons as the sun moved lower, as the sky was decorated with those Caribbean pinks you don’t seem to get elsewhere.  And there were greys too, in the rain clouds that mostly moved around us but occasionally delivered a little light water down upon the boat.  To go further was to better appreciate the size of the marshland: at five thousand hectares it’s not the Sundarbans but it is large enough to feel lost in.

And perhaps there are no tigers in Trinidad but there are the scarlet ibises.  Eudocrimus ruber.  The main attraction.

It’s a diet of red crustaceans that produces the brilliant scarlet of their feathers.  The colour comes about at the time of the second moult, as the younger birds in grey, brown and white learn to fly.  The scarlet ibis is the only shorebird in the world with red feathers. 

As the boat once more returned to smaller channels the first ibises found us.  They were like shots of fire beneath the mangrove canopy, light streaks flashing across the mangrove green and black as they somehow negotiated the entanglement of branches in high speed flight.  What do the pythons and caimans, and all the other animals that sought to blend in, sporting mangrove tones, think of those flashy ibises?

But as soon as the flashes of red, three or four together, were spotted shooting by, so they were gone and the terrain returned to its usual shades.  Was that all we’d see of them?

And there was Eid on its way.  And there was Diwali on its way.  But it was not these occasions, rather Christmas which was still some months away that came to mind as the boat turned to enter a larger lagoon once more.  There was a large tree at some distance, and it seemed to be decorated with dozens of shining red lights.  As the sun was negotiating its last with the Gulf of Paria in the direction of Venezuela, the ibises came in to roost by the dozens, choosing that singular tree, and as each weary air circle was completed and a pair of wings finally folded, one more light was added to the unlikely, everyday, mangrove, marshland Caroni Christmas tree. 

Eudocrimus ruber.  The wader.  The eater of red crustaceans.  The tree decorator.

It was dark as the boat returned to the dock.  Shazam cautiously asked how it was and he was rather pleased with the answer.  He was relieved because we said nothing of mosquitoes, mostly as there weren’t any about.  Caroni was not ‘just a swamp’ and we had no complaints.  Who indeed could be disappointed with the red bird?

On the drive back to the guest house we passed a Christmas tree sculpture of small white lights, and on one side was the outline of a Diwali lamp and on the other a crescent moon.

On the drive back Shazam said to me excitedly, ‘I have met many tourists, but if I ever get the chance to travel I want to travel like you do.  You take things easily, as they come.’  In the car, full voiced, he sang his national anthem, and we sang ours.  And we had no complaints.

Shazam took us to a park on Diwali evening where we lit candles along with local families.  And for Eid he took us to his home, to feast and to celebrate.

Wikipedia sourced photo.

For bird enthusiasts, there are also grey birds of battle to see, while others are more kind of fish people.  There's even something here for the fruit enthusiast.


This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Red Bird