2005 South Korea Whale Embassy – Images by Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert

U is for Ulsan, South Korea. Stinky, dusty, bad diet, disease ridden bed linen, always one hour away from a beating, non-stop pornography, fermenting kimchi, Ulsan.

As so many of these stories begin, it begins with a phone call, “Can you go to Ulsan for 3 to 4 days, there’s a “Whale Embassy” and it may be cleared by the police, and we need pictures”. So off I went, to Ulsan, on assignment. Down to Haneda airport, quick flight to South Korea, few pairs socks, couple of t-shirts in my bag, cameras and laptop.

And then I get there, and there’s a ‘protest camp’ on the site of a proposed whale meat processing factory, down in the port side of Ulsan. Protest camps are not usually the type of place I like to live, I’m not overly fussy but I do have certain hygiene standards and expectations. But my client, ever considerate to the needs of their snappers, had given me two options for my accommodation on the assignment. Great I thought, always good to have choice.

Option 1. The Protest camp – a motley collection of two-man tents situated around one large protester’s ‘whale embassy’ tent/dome in the middle of a dusty, dirty piece of spare waste ground. A campsite in the middle of a car park. I forget where the toilets were, if there were any at all. Water was obtained from a standpipe a half mile down the road. And there was one shack/tent which served as a communal space, for cooking (if you can call it that), for eating, a space where one could sit and wonder how their life had ever brought them to such a miserable place. And if that wasn’t tempting enough there were rumours abounding about the ever-imminent mid-night arrival of whalers and local authorities coming to flatten the tents, to bulldoze their way through the camp. So that was accommodation Option 1. Tempting?, no not really.

Option 2. The Hotel option. The Love Hotel option. The Love Hotel with dubious hygiene regulations option. The Love Hotel with dubious hygiene regulations, which on the stairwell had an antiquated machine dispensing condoms and sex toys, the type of place you pay cash up front sometimes by the hour, but for me by the night, option.

So I weigh them up. Get bulldozed at night in a filthy dusty tent, flattened in the dark, no comfort, no toilets, no water, or, on the other Korean hand, a hotel where the noise of residents may keep me awake but at least I can look out my window and shoot the bulldozers from my bedroom should the night time ‘clear out’ take place. I choose Option 2, the Love Hotel. The Love Hotel with the neon outside. Tacky but fun.

So three or four days my boss had said, of course I should have known that that was a highly unlikely time frame. The days stretched, the weekend came, before I knew it it was Wednesday again, another weekend looming, home calling on the phone asking when I’m coming back.

The days were long. Time spent in the ‘whale embassy’, mulling around, trying to shoot images to alleviate the boredom, endless rumour and speculation abounding of imminent beatings and bulldozers. Dust on the shoes, dust on the laptop, dust on the brain. The monotonous hours would be broken only by the horror of meal times, by the horrendous food concocted by a well meaning but slightly dippy semi-religious seeming girl who happened to live in the godforsaken city and for whom the ‘whale embassy ‘ was a riotous break from her life as an English Teacher in Ulsan.

Occasionally there’d be a meeting to attend in town, any escape from the camp was welcomed, but they were short lived escapes. After all, we had to be back in case the bulldozers came. I secretly wished the bulldozers would come, the camp would become a car park and factory and we could all go home and wash, live happily ever hygienically after.

At the end of the long, hot dusty days came the night time meal. A hippy pot pourri of ingredients found in unlabeled jars and Tupperware boxes stored on rickety wooden shelves, strange packets kept in cold boxes with lids which never closed. To kill time one day I’d ventured in there, to the euphemistically named ‘kitchen space’, I’d opened a random box only to be punched in the head by the vapours of fermenting, ready to be shot and buried kimchi. Hungry?, nah, I’m fine thanks, I’ll wait.

But after – and I use the term loosely- dinner, I could escape to my Love Hotel room. Past the unfriendly receptionist who perhaps thought having a photographer on the premises was bad for business. Up the stairs to my room. Decent enough size room. Decent enough bed. Only trouble was that half of Ulsan had at one time or another probably shagged on the bed, and not only on the bed, but on those exact sheets. And I had my doubts as to whether those sheets had been washed in between clientele visits. I had these doubts when the itching began on my skin a few days into the visit, and which would last for a few days after my visit. Not the best of souvenirs to remember a place by. But hey, the television had free porn 24 hours a day so who was I to complain. And, of course, from the window I could keep an eye on the Whale Embassy.

So the days dragged on, the people got under my skin and on my nerves, and the itching just got on my skin. Like all good nightmares it finally came to an end, I had other assignments to return to Japan for. A Korean photographer was brought in to take over from me. An event that caused problems, fights, arguments within certain elements of the camp but for reasons of not wanting to be sued I won’t go into that here, buy me a beer one day and I’ll tell you.

So I was allowed to leave, to escape, to get on my motorcycle, to try to jump the barbed wire and scramble across to the Swiss Alps. But, just like Steve McQueen’s attempt, it wasn’t to be so easy. I’m home in Tokyo only a week or two, and another call comes, “Can you go back to Ulsan ?”. Me, always the hungry freelancer, always keeping my client happy, said “sure”. And off I went, back to my nightmare of Ulsan.

Perhaps I’m being unfair to the fine upstanding whaling citizens of Ulsan, being unfair to the city with a long history of whaling. Perhaps it’s not such a bad place you’re thinking, perhaps just Jeremy’s experience of it wasn’t so good, a tad unfortunate perhaps. Well, perhaps. But I have my doubts. Personally when I pick up the tourist literature for a city’s ‘10 Must See Tourist Sights’, and Number 8 says “The Petrochemical factory at night”, well, personally I think that tells you a lot about a place.