I arrived at the airport in Seoul and bought myself a one-way ticket to the island of Jeju. This was still pretty early on in my trip and I hadn’t exactly grasped the exchange rate. Running my card for 250,000 of anything was going to make my heart skip a beat, but it was really only about $200 to get to the beautiful island.

I discovered Jeju after purchasing a WWOOF, or Willing Workers on Organic Farms, membership and finding a tangerine farm ran by a guy named Hee-Jern. I greatly enjoyed WWOOFing in Australia and decided that this was a great opportunity to get on an island and eat, sleep, and explore for free. At the airport, they were showing some Korean baseball player on the LA Dodgers, Ryu, on repeat. After about 20 minutes of watching, I realized they were not actually showing baseball games, but merely clips of Ryu striking out the same team over and over. They just edited the entire game to be a Ryu highlight reel. Luckily, he is pretty good!

When I touched down on Jeju, I opened the email Hee-Jern sent and attempted to follow the directions to his tangerine farm. I spent probably 25 minutes calculating my next move while still at the airport and finally found a bus with the same Korean characters on it as his email showed.

This was a beautiful and remote island. It is home to one of the seven natural wonders of the world and is laced with fantastic beaches. The drive was calming and I began mentally planning my sandy excursions. We finally arrived at something that resembled a residential area. There were winding streets going in every direction and small, but lovely, houses lining them. The bus driver started yelling at me, not in an angry way but in that normal elderly Korean man way, and convinced me that this was my stop despite him having no idea where I was going.

The street was quiet. It was probably the first time I had experienced complete silence in months. I could hear the island swimming in its own bath.

There was still plenty of daylight left and I figured the region was small enough that I could find someone to help me. After all, I had to be the only lost white guy walking around this residential portion of Jeju Island.

I started seeing a handful of people and I must admit the story gets a little weird for about a paragraph here. Everyone I saw seemed mentally ill. The people were walking around very aimlessly and looked rather lost and honestly unhealthy. There was a brief moment where I thought I may have been in the middle of a zombie apocalypse… and what better place to start the end of the world than on the island of love in South Korea?

After about an hour, another bus came by and stopped. A lovely American woman stepped off the bus and looked at me like a cow does to an oncoming train. I told her I was WWOOFing here and she told me she was studying abroad at the university. That was about it. She then left me to die and wasn’t very interested in communicating at all. I was a bit concerned, but this only made it more clear that I was in the midst of a zombie apocalypse and this evil American woman had something to do with it.

I turned on my phone and started skimming for free WIFI from one of the homes. I finally found one and used an internet based communication platform to call Hee-Jern. He answered and just started Korean man yelling at me like all men do in that country. Finally, a jeep rolled up and there they were, Hee-Jern and some fellow strolling around Jeju island with the top down and not a care to give on this planet much less this island. There was no zombie apocalypse, it was chill to the extreme. Dare I say, the chillest island ever.

I hopped in and he took me to one of his establishments. Hee-jern is highly educated in botany and, as far as I could tell, quite a successful businessman and real estate mogul. He owned multiple farms, green houses, houses, and places for supplies around the island that we frequented often. This particular place, where I would be staying, consisted of a rather large farm with vegetables all over the place, a handful of dogs, a large circular sun room with a dome roof, a large wooden room that was comfortable to sleep and eat in, and lastly a back room with showers and an additional bed.