‘The ants got hurt,’ Yona admonished the girl. ‘The other bugs, too.’
‘Did their heads fall off?’
Yona didn’t know how to answer the innocent-looking child. Without waiting for an answer, the girl began to frantically trample the ants over and over again.
‘I have to do a second massacre …’ she said.
‘You can’t—then the bugs will get even more hurt,’ Yona warned. ‘We all have to live together. Don’t we?’
‘Huh? The healthy ants are carrying away the hurt ones. Look, right there!’
The girl poked at the bugs with a small tree branch that had been lying on the ground. The sand wasn’t firm like asphalt; it yielded under the stick’s pressure, to the dismay of the ants trying to hide under the surface. As the child mumbled to herself, ‘Unda ants, die,’ Yona wondered if Jungle should impose age limits on disaster trips. The girl was still ‘massacring’ the ants. Yona recalled cutting open the stomachs of crickets and grasshoppers with a box cutter when she was younger.
‘But why are there so many bugs?’ the girl asked Yona. ‘They all came out of the ground.’
As soon as the girl stopped speaking, thick raindrops began to fall from the sky. Yona grabbed the girl’s hand and they ran inside the resort.
Guests watched the streaks of rain pour down as they enjoyed afternoon tea. The manager was preparing coffee with condensed milk. Droplets of coffee made a knocking noise as they drip-drip-dripped into a cup full of ice. As Yona quietly watched, it felt like time stopped with each drop of coffee hitting its target.
‘I’ve been taking my daughter everywhere with me since she was one,’ the teacher declared at a nearby table. ‘People always tell me that kids won’t remember travel from when they’re babies, but whenever we return from a trip, I can see with my own eyes that she’s grown. She tries foods that she wouldn’t have eaten before, she’s not afraid to use tools and gadgets like an adult, she can independently do things that she used to need help with—seeing all that, I try to visit somewhere new every school holiday, for her as much as for me.’
After saying this, the teacher saw her daughter come in soaking wet and hurried out of her seat. She left the table, explaining that she’d have the child change and then both of them would come back. The writer continued the conversation. He said that he’d originally planned on taking a trip to Centralia, but then he’d changed his mind and come here instead. Centralia was a town in the United States that had been on fire for the past fifty years. Embers had set the town’s vein of underground coal ablaze, and the asphalt above it was now completely melted. Most residents had left.
‘Isn’t the movie Silent Hill about that town?’ Yona asked. ‘I was curious about the place, too, but apparently it’ll take two and hundred fifty more years for the coal to completely burn up, so I figured I still have time to go.’
‘You know a lot about holiday spots,’ the writer replied, impressed. He said that he’d put off the trip for the same reason, and excitedly shared more of his travel knowledge with Yona. The college student occupied himself with the Wi-Fi available only at the resort. He was reading news articles on his phone.
‘Apparently a basketball was discovered off the coast of Japan,’ he said.
‘A basketball?’ Yona asked.
‘It’s wreckage from the Jinhae tsunami. The story says that a basketball, with the name of some kid from Jinhae written on it, was discovered near the shoreline. I guess it was heading towards Japan.’
‘Well, you don’t need to go somewhere that far away to find relics of disaster,’ Yona replied. ‘It’s not just Japan now; our country’s not exactly safe from tsunamis either, any more.’
‘All of the southern coast was ruined in the Jinhae tsunami,’ someone at the table said.
‘Then why did we come all the way here?’ the teacher asked. She was already back from sorting out her daughter.
‘It’s too scary to visit disaster destinations close to home,’ Yona explained. ‘Don’t we need to be distanced somewhat from our ordinary lives—from the blankets we sleep under, and the bowls we eat from every day—in order to see the situation more objectively?’
People seemed to agree with Yona. The discussion went on for a while. Participants unleashed their vast disaster trip expertise—and their appreciation for them, too—until eventually the guide spoke up, reminding them that the very trip they were on was a disaster trip.
‘Tomorrow we’re going on a volcano tour,’ she informed them. ‘Be done with breakfast and ready in the lobby by 10 a.m.’
The travellers were in high spirits after returning from the desert, but it seemed like they’d seen Mui’s highlights too early. When Yona glanced at the itinerary, everything looked dull. Who had come up with such a poorly organised schedule? Yona understood why this trip was targeted for cancellation.
‘Imagine the mixture I mentioned earlier plunging deep into the earth,’ the guide said the next day as they made their way to Mui’s volcano. She wasn’t done talking about the sinkholes, even if they were no longer in the desert. ‘It’s a particularly unusual geological cocktail that leads to disasters like the holes we saw yesterday. Okay, everyone, we’ve reached the entrance to the volcano. You remember the safety precautions, right? You can’t walk on top of the lava. Even if it looks hard on the outside, the inside is still boiling. An American tourist died here in 1903, and five others were injured. Clouds of volcanic ash can travel down the side of this volcano at speeds of one hundred kilometres per hour. The internal temperature of the clouds reaches several hundred degrees. If you fall into one of them, you’ll probably be burned alive. Within five minutes, juices from your flesh will be dripping out of your body. And volcanic rock is sharp as razors, so don’t just carelessly sit down on the ground.’
But the guide’s words seemed empty. The warning sign posted at the entrance to the volcano tried hard to re-enact the horrors of the past, but the atmosphere didn’t live up to such sombre descriptions. On one side of the group, local children were rolling around on the ground playing. Korean-style street stalls by the volcano’s entrance stood ready to alleviate hunger. The available snacks included ramen and bowls of rice. Since Yona and the others were the only tourists, they felt a touch of guilt and decided to purchase some of the foods. Children hawked flowers and woodcrafts they’d carved themselves. Sometimes they showed off their business acumen by including a free postcard or two with the wooden carvings. They also sold picture postcards separately, but the scenery depicted in the cards wasn’t from here. Yona saw a postcard featuring Indonesia’s Mount Merapi, brazenly being sold here in Mui. She was again reminded why Jungle wanted to cancel this trip.
The guide stood tiredly in front of this sparse display of wares, like she had to promote the spread herself. She was describing the volcano’s most recent eruption, which had happened years ago. But it seemed like she hadn’t witnessed it first hand, based on her lacklustre retelling.
‘I wish she’d just be quiet. What she’s saying is all talk, and this is, well …’ Yona trailed off.