Welcome Back to Breakfast with Lisa & Josh!

I’m a total sucker for a good boat ride. It doesn’t matter how long, or to where, or if it’s going to be crazy bumpy - I’d take a boat of any other mode of transportation. Airplanes are super fast, but require going to an airport, which is always a treat. (Actually, Lisa loves going to the airport.) Trains are great, don’t get me wrong, but it just doesn’t have the magic that you get on the open ocean.

Walking? Well, you can only go so far, right? and we’ve reserved for the Camino de Santiago. :)

Boats, or in South Korea, ferries, are the way to go. And the ones they have here are just incredible.

These are not your typical get-from-point-A-to-point-B boats—they have some genuinely incredible features.

First of all, for about $50 per person, which is cheaper than the flight to the same destination, you can have your own massive private room with beds, your own sink, a sofa, and a spectacular view. It was the same, or much better, than most cruise ships.

On our latest and shorter ferry ride, we opted for an even more economical $30 per person ticket that gets you a spot/mat on the floor of a giant yoga-studio-esque room or a seat in the “Ocean View Beer Hall.” But we still had access to all the arcades, restaurants, an entire convenience store, free fast wifi (and LTE cell phone service during the whole trip), and plenty of places to watch the sunset over the hundreds of tiny islands that dot the coast of this beautiful country.

The most wild thing of all? Private karaoke rooms. Right on the boat. I love South Korea.

The one thing I kept wondering, that I just couldn’t shake, no matter how amazing, affordable, and beautiful this experience was -

Why were we the only foreign tourists on the boat? (More specifically, we were the only actual people in the “foreigner” line at the ferry port.)

I think it comes down to two reasons -

1. Booking a ticket on these ferries is close-to-impossible for a tourist or foreigner. Just to figure out that the ferry even existed in the first place required going 5 levels deep in an app called Naver (South Korea’s google maps-ish equivalent) - and then once we got to the point that we knew that the ferry was running and where it was headed (20 screenshots put into Google Translate later), we had to go 3 more levels deep to get a link to the ferry booking website. From there we just hit a brick wall - we didn’t have a Korean ID, so we couldn’t book the ticket. We had to have a person at our hotel book the ticket for us over the phone, but even when we made it that far, none of our 5+ different credit cards worked because they failed something called “3D Secure” that all South Korean websites require for verification. Four hours later, we withdrew a bunch of cash from the nearby ATM, gave it to the very friendly and very patient hotel staff, who paid for the ferry ticket with their own personal money and we paid them back in cash. This was the literal only way we could do it. There is a website in English called Direct Ferries, but this had the same problem as all the other methods - it just wouldn’t take any payment that we could offer it. This is a huge obstacle, not only with booking ferries online, but also generally with many companies in South Korea - if you don’t have a local bank account, using your credit or debit cards online feels nearly impossible.

2. The 2nd problem is even trickier - when you google “Ferry South Korea” or anything similar, a booking website doesn’t come up. Instead, you get this.

It’s not until page 5 that you do, eventually, make it to a ferry booking website, and after reading through 5 pages of nonstop heartwrenching news about a truly terrible, emotional, and sad tragedy involving a ferry in South Korea, well, you might not be quite as excited about hopping on a boat here as you were before you started.

But as with many truly wonderful and awesome travel experiences, the effort and challenges are part of the journey and make them so much more worth it. Traveling by boat here in South Korea is absolutely the best way to get around. Is it the fastest? Nope. Is it the most convenient? Definitely not.

But, is it the most beautiful, adventurous, cost efficient, and fun way to get around this incredible country?

Definitely.

Videos This Week

My favorite place in the ENTIRE WORLD. Give it a look. You’ll love it.

The Best Beach in the World

See you next Sunday…ish :)

- josh (and lisa)

Oh, and if you want to learn how we afford to take all these trips after quitting our jobs last year, you’ll likely be interested in our Skillshare course on Travel Hacking and Frequent Flier Miles. It’s been really taking off lately, but we still have a few uses of this link left for those of you who want to see the class for free. It comes with a free month of Skillshare, which is more than enough to watch our class and any of the other great courses on there!

Check it out here: https://skl.sh/lisaandjosh02221

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