Jack Kerouac is the ultimate Dharma Bum. He drank a lot, he prayed a lot. Whether in Busan‘s bars or Seoul’s temples, asking ‘What would Jack do?’ while in South Korea can lead to joy.

Imagine you live in the Scottish countryside. At night, there are so many stars the constellations get lost. Every morning, hard light streams through the windows and onto the dark North Sea a few fields away. The days are filled with people you love, joints of roast beef, puddings and pies. Your life is so comfortable you could scream, and so you apply to become a children’s English teacher in South Korea, because your best friend is from Seoul and living there sounds like it could be fun.

Now you live there, and every day wake up in a boxy studio with only one frosted window. Slide the window back, the mosquito mesh, and the rusting metal shutters to look out the window: you live in a back alley surrounded by brown brick walls, dirty pipes, broken bottles and cigarette butts. A tangle of black wires skirts the sad skeleton of a birch tree. You are in the center of a city of 33 million which snakes into 28 more cities all choking with concrete skyscrapers, neon lights, K-Pop, and businessmen chugging on cigarettes.

You’ve spent ten months living in the megapolis, but this is the longest you have spent without leaving – a month since you last saw a horizon, since you last saw the sea, and you feel like you cannot breathe.

Early December, that was me.

Friday night, drinking rum with my friend Fi at a dive bar just off our street, she mentioned, ‘I’m taking the free bus down to Busan tomorrow morning. You should come.’ So I did.

Saturday morning, 9am. An hour into the bus journey put on for foreigners by the Korean Tourism Board, we were still amongst Seoul’s brutal highrises. Two hours in, we were surrounded by pine-covered mountains while thick snowflakes fell from the frigid sky.

As the melting snow turned black under the tyres of thousands of passing Hyundais and BMWs, tiny towns, factories and highrises, mountains and industrial farming villages passed by. Fi huddled against the window and read the Art of Loving, I rushed through Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.

‘How was the book?’ She asked.

‘Beautiful, slow. He just spends his time going up mountains to pray, drinks too much wine. I want to be him. Can we play What Would Jack Do?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Just do what he would do.’

‘Get drunk?’

‘Exactly.’

2pm. It was warm and sunny when the bus dropped as off at one of the high-rise hotels lining Hyundae beach. Backpacks still on, at a food market off the main street we ate seafood pancakes that were shiny with cheap cooking oil.

‘Delicious.’ I lied. ‘Drink?’

At a mini-market we bought a bottle of black raspberry wine, hid it in a plastic bag and got steadily drunk for the rest of the afternoon.

Wrapped up warm, we headed down the quiet beach, ate blue candyfloss, and lazily chased pink clouds drifting across the bay to a wooded park at the top of a cliff, joking around and laughing like inner-city kids let out, giddy from the cold wind and bright December light.

The pinks and oranges of the late afternoon sky deepened. ‘Follow that sun,’ said Fi. We ran, panting round a tired harbour, into a wharf that gleamed with new glass skyscrapers.

The sun fell quickly, filling the sky with golds and reds and raw fiery light, illuminating Gwangam bridge like it was San Francisco on a starry night.

The night was a whirl. We got purple helium balloons from some PR club boys on the street and rushed to the sea to watch our balloons float towards the light of the moon, up, up, up, until they were stardust.

Into a bar called Fuzzy Navel, bartenders threw flaming bottles of liquer for packed floors of whistling Koreans and expats. We siphoned cheap plum wine into our now empty Daiquiri glasses and melted into the dancing crowd where a little baby caught our eyes.

‘There’s an actual baby in the bar.’ said Fi.

‘Get the pen! Get the napkins!’

We scrawled five verses of bad lyrics to the little babe, ‘What you doin’ up so late, baby in the club? Baby in the club. What you drinking, a milkshake?’

Fiona grabbed my hand, ‘Look, there’s a silver fox.’

‘Feefs, it’s just an old man. You’re drunk. Waaay.’ I slurred. ‘Let’s go.’

Into the cold, a mad man danced outside the bar, colliding with lampposts and drunks and tarpaulin food stands filled with the steam of bubbling red rice cakes.

We wandered back to our hostel above the sea and drifted to sleep under warm cotton sheets. Sleepy eyed on Sunday morning, the common area was an Ikea dream of Apple Macs and designer bean bags, blond wood floors and ten foot windows looking out to sea for $10 a night.

After coffee and toast, we bought more wine and for seven minutes rode on a little train. It crawled round the coast, past allotments full of cabbages and tumbling traditional Korean houses with the East Sea crashing below. We got off at Samyong beach where wild grass grew through pavement cracks.

A few surfers played in the waves. We climbed some crags on the edge of the beach, where candles were lit amongst the rocks, up to a pagoda where we silently watched the dancing waves.

Back on the white sand, white gulls all around, a naked boy ran into the sea. I took off my tights and jumped into the water, barefoot, free.