After landing, we first cleared immigration. Nothing interesting here. Then we collected our luggage from the belt. All good here.
Now it is Customs. We needed to declare everything we bring in other than clothes and toiletries. This means all cash, all books, all electronics including how many phones / computers / memory / camera equipment.
More specific with phones. It was taken from me for registration, then returned back to me. The officer who took my phone and passed it to someone else actually forgot to return it back to me, I had to chase him. My phone was off throughout, and it had a password as you do, so they did not check what was in my phone.
They do have the right to check for all contents in phones / computers / memories, but they did not do this to our tour group.
One of us in the tour group brought a book to read just for boredom. That was scrutinised. They do not allow anything which contains information on Korea (north), or religion.
Ironically, the Customs declaration form was printed in Korean + English + Chinese simplified, and one of the questions was whether I was carrying “drugs” in English but ‘narcotic’ in Chinese. There is a big difference between drugs and narcotics. I had prescription skin cream with me. Being Australian, I decided to follow English translation, and follow what AQIS always say, that is tick yes if you are not sure. Well, turned out they did not care about this at all.
We all cleared Customs, so we sat around and waited for our tour guide, except the American man who was nowhere to be seen. Few of us went around the airport, and eventually found him drinking at a bar on his own, without telling anyone. Remember that rule about how everyone must stay with the tour guide in Korea, nobody could leave on their own? Yep, this is the sign of what was to come for the next 6 days.
