Congestion defeats my Seoul ambition

By Tyler Brûlé

Published: November 17 2006 15:01 | Last updated: November 17 2006 15:01

You’ve perhaps noticed that I can become slightly obsessed with a place. Some of you have even taken the time to compose letters suggesting I vary my travel routine a bit more and find some new objects for my affection. “Enough Denmark”, “No more Helsinki” and “Stay away from Tokyo” have been the headlines of some correspondence. A more frequent subject is: “who the heck pays for all your flights, rooms and laundry bills?”

The short answer is that I finance all the travel, not Pearson shareholders. This means I have to go where my business takes me and I can’t mix up my routings as much as I’d like to. From time to time I have the rare luxury to connect via a new hub but for the most part I end up spending time in cities where I enjoy both the clients and the surroundings. I’m more than happy to accept air-miles to sample destinations new from those of you who are not fond of the places that frequently appear in this column.


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Two years ago I touched down in Seoul for the first time but had little opportunity to sample more than a body scrub at The Shilla and tour the newsrooms of various newspapers and broadcasters.

On assignment for the BBC, I was there to cover the rise of the Ohmynews brand and the boom in citizen journalism. After 48 hours of filming I was sitting on the tarmac at Gimpo airport feeling frustrated that I had no sense of what Seoul was really about and wishing I’d extended my trip.

Last week I flew into Incheon airport from Osaka and had grand plans to at least spend a night on the town, venture into an interesting neighbourhood or two and squeeze in a few meetings between. My mission was to allow myself to be seduced by the city and make it a fresh destination for my frequent jumps over to Asia. Unfortunately, Seoul’s infrastructure had other plans for me and my colleague Pam.

I can accept traffic chaos in many cities across Asia but Seoul shouldn’t be one of them. Since its debut, much has been made of Incheon as a new super-hub for Asia. The airport is certainly pleasant enough but the warm “Welcome to South Korea” experience comes to a grinding halt about 15 minutes after you hit the motorway into Seoul.

I optimistically asked the driver: “About 45 minutes to the hotel?” He laughed, pointed at the traffic and said: “No, it’s rush hour. More like two hours.”

Why the government and the country’s industrial powerhouses didn’t take the opportunity to build a showcase, high-speed rail service into the city when they decided to split flights between Gimpo and Incheon is something of a mystery – even to locals. Samsung and Hyundai, along with a few outside partners, could have built a seamless, model transport network from runway to city centre. Instead, the latter’s just managed to sell more taxis and limos to clog up the roads into the capital.

Arriving an hour late for our dinner, we were too intimidated by the congestion to attempt any further nocturnal adventures so we decided to call it an evening and retreat to the Park Hyatt. Our schedule for the following day called for three meetings spread out from morning to early evening. At a glance it looked like a bit of a lazy day, so I mentally inserted about three stops to do a bit of retail and architectural exploration.

From the moment we jumped into our Hyundai-masquerading-as-a- Lincoln-Town car the day was a stop-start, stop-start rally race across the city to make our appointments. While the roads in Seoul seem to be in reasonable shape and there appear to be enough motorways, the city is choked by the sheer volume of vehicles on the road. After the fifth hour in traffic, I started to wonder whether the mayor of Seoul had made the mistake of plucking someone from Los Angeles to oversee the city’s road network.

The more I started to think about the two cities from the back seat, the more the similarities became startling: multi-centred, a shocking transport infrastructure, wealthy people occupying sprawling mansions in the hills, hubs for entertainment, and surrounded by muscular IT businesses.

Meetings aside, I never managed to venture outside the car and before I knew it I was being deposited at Incheon for my flight to Hong Kong.

An hour later I found myself overcome by that same sense of frustration I felt two years earlier. Something tells me I’m going to love Seoul when it manages to give me a clear run at seeing its best sights or I budget in an extra day or two to compensate for the less than ideal infrastructure.


tyler.brule@ft.com


More columns at www.ft.com/brule

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006