Story: Dadohae National Park : Korea's 'Sea of Many Islands'

You can hardly get further from the Korean mainland, and still be in Korea, than the lonely isle of Manjae. Getting there means the speedboat from Korea’s southwestern port of Mokpo – at fifty knots an hour still a five hour journey. The irregular passenger service halts only momentarily in Manjae’s harbor, almost as an afterthought, discharging the two or three rare passengers on to a waiting local motorboat.
The deckhand on board the speedboat Southern Sea looks at me askance as if there were some mistake. ‘Surely I don’t want to get off here’, he seems to say as he glances dubiously between me and the bobbing wooden taxi. My only companion ashore is an itinerant bureaucrat, here to inspect the island’s newly erected fuel-driven electrical plant. We’ll run into each other several times over the next thirty-six hours (on Manjae Island, how could we not?) Finally, a cumbersome load of packages is thrown with an air of urgency into the taxi boat below. The Southern Sea is eager to push off to more inhabitable shores.
Not long after dropping my one bag off at the island’s only guesthouse, run by a local priest and his extended family, I’m admiring the panorama from atop Manjae Island’s highest peak. It is a stunning if lonesome vista: a village and harbor nestled in a central low ground with three rocky peninsulas emerging out of it like spokes that have lost their wheel. I watch a herd of black goats (which outnumber people three to one on Manjae, as on many of the surrounding islands) graze nonchalantly on a precipitous outcropping a hundred meters above the sea. Beyond Manjae there is little to survey but you do it to the furthest horizon. A sparkling sea carries on its erratic back the occasional lonely craft, unlikely to ever dock here, as welcome as Manjae’s sheltered harbor appears below. Floating in and out of a sea-borne haze, like some capricious memory, is the rare island, so vague I find it hard to imagine it as a place of solid rock and earth and human lives. Welcome to the heart of Dadohae Maritime National Park, Korea’s “Sea of Many Islands”.
Dadohae is one of Korea’s three National Maritime Parks, but encompassing nearly 2400 square kilometers with 1600 islands, Dadohae is far and away the largest and most impressive. Dadohae National Park is actually compassed of seven island groupings, ranging from Ui-do (pronounced oo-ee-do), a four-hour boat journey into the Yellow Sea from Mokpo, to Geomun-do, actually a ying-yang shaped pair of islands, floating fifty miles off Korea’s south central coast. All of Dadohae’s islands are well-connected by boat service to the mainland.
Wherever they float, the islands of Dadohae share a common communion with the sea. Here the winds of change blow more like a balmy breeze – if they blow at all – and traditional ways of life have been more preserved, as if exiled from modernity the way Korean kings once exiled disloyal retainers to these same islands in ages past.
Despite its diminutive size and almost crushing solitude – and maybe because of them – I discover Manjae has plenty of charm. After my brief foray up the island’s highest peak I’m met back at the inn with an evening ‘snack’ of hwae. We eat two large trays of the raw fish in the Korean style, wrapped up in lettuce and augmented by raw garlic and hot pepper paste. I’m surprised to hear that this is only to waylay our hunger, and the real evening meal comes at eight, after evening church service. The predominance of Christianity is another fascinating aspect of island life in Korea. In all the islands I visit I never see a Buddhist temple, but no island, regardless how small, is without its church. A strong missionary presence in years past is one obvious reason for this. I wonder, however, if the many fishing images in the Bible don’t also have something to do with Christianity’s popularity here.
There’s only one other guest in this home that doubles as an inn. He’s come from Pusan to do some fishing, for which Manjae has a strong reputation. It is in fact some of his catch that we’re feasting on. He invites me to accompany him the next day but I politely demure. I’d seen how these passionate weekend fishermen spend their days: they’re taxied out with their tackle and a thermos to a lonely rock lashed by the sea, where they sit for the next six hours like some form of punishment meted out by the Greek gods. All in all, I’d rather spend my day with the goats.
After our feast of hwae I take a late evening stroll out beyond Manjae’s only village, as far as the road and path will take me, which isn’t terribly far at all. Along the dirt path I come upon the traveling bureaucrat, also not sure what to do with himself on one of Manjae’s slow summer evenings. Just behind the electrical station I discover stunning high sea cliffs facing off battering surf. In the rolling surf I’m also astonished to notice snorkeled and goggled figures bobbing in waves that break not fifty meters further off on to treacherous rocks.
Here on Manjae, as in better-known Jeju Island fifty miles to the southeast, local haenyeo, or ‘sea women’, brave the sea and dive to mind-boggling depths to harvest wild seaweed and such delicacies as haenam – sea cucumber. The next morning I will see their catch drying on the beach. They are a vanishing breed, these ‘sea women’, as younger islanders opt increasingly for a mainland lifestyle with all its creature comforts.
But such are the new tides affecting life in these islands. For the elderly women it seems a less lonely fate. They are brought up to harvest the seaweed – or miyeok – plucked from lonely rock promontories, or, for the more venturesome like those of Manjae, from under the sea itself. A relatively less strenuous task, they perform it well into their seventies or beyond. Or else, as in Donggeoja Island, they busy themselves with the boiling of freshly netted anchovies in a witches’ caldron of brine.
As the Manjae night settles in, I meet two local youths – besides the bureaucrat and I, the only others not in church – sipping beer on the stone wall in front of the island’s only store. They tell me they were both born on Manjae and are back only temporarily for the summer – one from college the other on military leave. I ask one of them, Pa-U, a lanky and antsy youth serving in the army near Seoul, if he plans on returning to live on Manjae after college and the country’s compulsory two-year military service.
“No.” He tells me matter-of-factly. “There’s not even a coffee shop here and no girls. I have to live in Mokpo at least.” He looks almost expectantly across Manjae’s nighttime bay. If it’s escape he wants the Southern Sea won’t be back for two days. As for me, I’m content in my temporary island exile. And it’s almost time for dinner.

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