Introduction
When the container vessel Seven Seas Aurora docked at the port of Pusan in South Korea just before midnight on Thursday October 2 she was five days behind schedule.
Typhoon Maemi was the reason. Sailing out of the Gulf of Tonkin from the Vietnamese port of Haiphong, the 20,000 ton cargo ship had been forced to shelter for three days in the safety of Hong Kong's harbour as winds of 135mph lashed the region in one of the worst typhoons for almost a century.
Then she was held up for another 48 hours at Pusan, where the raging storm had wrought havoc to the dockside and forced a long line of ships to heave-to across the bay and wait their turn to unload.
Inside one of the containers, safely strapped down to avoid any damage, was a small family hatchback car which had already survived several severe batterings on a four month journey that had taken her halfway round the world.
Earlier that same day, on the other side of Pusan (Korea's second largest city which is known locally as Busan) eager motoring enthusiasts were hurrying in their thousands to the opening of an international motor show.
It was a big event in a nation where five of the world's major car-makers have helped to turn a previously faltering economy into one of the richest in Asia.
GM Daewoo Auto & Technology, investing heavily in the exhibition, has a magnificent stand featuring a range of gleaming cars, glamorous girl models and a hi-tech entertainment show all aimed at seducing their visitors into buying mood.
At the back of the display on a mural the size of a small house, is an elaborate map of half the world telling in words and pictures how one of their Kalos cars, being driven by two British adventurers, has survived a marathon journey from London to Korea.
"Welcome to the Daewoo Challengers …" says the legend at the top.
The car in front of it is a light blue Kalos, looking very smartly finished in glistening metallic paint. But keen-eyed visitors are quickly able to spot that it is not the same car they can see on the map display, and neither can they meet the adventuring drivers.
Their Challenge car is the one still cocooned in the hold of the Seven Seas Aurora, which is now waiting, five days late, in the line of anchored ships out in the bay.
Further north, 400km away on that same blue sky morning, a smartly-dressed man with his head bowed low, is led into an office for questioning at the prosecutor's department of the Supreme Court in Seoul, the nation's capital, by Ahn Dae-Hee, chief of Korea's Central Investigation Bureau.
His name is Son Kil-Seung. He is the 61-year-old chairman of the SK Corporation, a conglomerate of telecommunications and oil refining companies, which has grown into the third largest business in the country. He is also head of the Federation of Korean Industries, a lobby group for the chaebol - the local name for the leaders of Korea's biggest corporations.
Within days he will admit to fraud and false accounting; accused of setting up a multi-million-dollar slush fund with his company's money to bribe the nation's top politicians for business favours.
Shortly afterwards, the Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun, facing calls for his impeachment, will threaten to dissolve the government.
The potential scandal is a sensational jolt to the nation.
But for many Koreans, the unfolding drama also bears disturbingly similar parallels to an earlier scandal, still fresh in their memories, which brought about the downfall of Kim Woo Choong, founder of the Daewoo Corporation and another business icon belonging to the favoured chaebol group.
Ahn Dae-Hee, the head of detectives, wants to ask Mr Choong what happened to an even bigger slush fund and two missing US$ billions in cash. But despite four years of trying, the nation's police chief and detective colleagues from forces around the world still can't track him down.
I tell you these things now because the events on that very same day in October weave together the strands of the most remarkable journey of my lifetime - a journey which began on a whim and led to an adventure of excitement and danger that I shall never forget.
It started in the town of Luton in the UK, a rather nondescript place not far north of London, and it ended in South Korea, the country that has worked an economic miracle for its 47 million people, bringing wealth and prosperity to a land which only 50 years ago was devastated by a war that left more than two million dead, wounded or missing and a nation split in two.
With a friend, Phil McNerney, a young graduate with time on his hands after university, we took a car owned by GM Daewoo and drove it across 25 countries and 19,000km to raise money for SOS Children's Villages, the international child welfare organisation.
It took 115 days for the three of us to reach South Korea on our marathon journey. Our car, a Daewoo Kalos 1.4 with more than 8.000km already on the clock, was a family hatchback more usually suited to taking the kids to school or for popping along to the shops to buy some groceries.
Officially, our attempt was called the Daewoo Challenge, but we nicknamed it "the longest shopping expedition in the world" and we christened our car the Greek Goddess after we discovered that Kalos is the Greek word for beautiful. She became such a part of our lives that we even finished up talking to her.
The journey was certainly a challenge. It was never meant to be a race or a rally. We had no support car or mobile back-up and the aims of it, as set out by GM Daewoo, our sponsors, were to make checkpoint visits to a number of locations in their network, complete the journey to prove the capabilities of their Kalos car, and to achieve as much publicity as possible. My guess is that they got the bargain of a lifetime.
For SOS Chidren's Villages, our charity partners - an organisation founded by the Austrian Hermann Gmeiner after World War II to provide secure homes and a mother's love for orphaned children - the objective was to publicise the fact that the charity has now grown into a worldwide force, bringing hope and a future to more than 50,000 abandoned and destitute children in 131 countries. And, of course, to raise them some much-needed funds.
Children are an emotive cause. And children in need even more so. Their innocence in an often guilty world strikes at the hearts of everyone from the rich and famous to those who simply want to lend a hand. SOS Children's Villages, which now has a plan to expand its activities by 50% over the next five years, has many supporters.
To give some examples, they currently range from FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, to the family of Johnny Cash who, after his recent death, appealed for fans to send donations to SOS Children's Villages as a tribute to the singer's life, and to Michel van Velde and Elles Albering, a young Dutch couple who (as far as we know) are still on a six-month journey from Holland to Beijing in an "old timer" VW campervan. We think we passed them somewhere on the road near Mount Olympus in Greece although, to be quite honest, we can't be really sure.
And now they have us, the family of GM Daewoo, and Phil and me, who have combined in our efforts to put 60,000 Euros of help in the children's way.
When I approached GM Daewoo to sponsor the trip I did it with little more than hope. Phil and me don't know much about cars. He's got a degree in geology and is very handy with computers and I make a living out of writing.
The idea came about because we both wanted to go teaching in China, but flying there seemed too easy and since Korea was nicely nearby, I simply asked them if they would lend us a car and we would do the rest. Remarkably for us, they said yes - and then neither of us could think of a good enough excuse to back down!
It all happened in quite a rush. For a variety of reasons there were only four months between my original approach and us setting off down the leafy lanes of Bedfordshire, England. Sometimes, if you have too long to think about things, you can finish up not doing them. In our case, if we had known what was going to happen, I'm not sure we would have gone at all.
We certainly hadn't done much homework - except to find out that General Motors, the world's largest car-making company, had not long before bought some of the assets of the bankrupt Daewoo car business in Korea and they might therefore be up for a bit of publicity.
Our hunch was right. But what we didn't know, until the very end, was why Daewoo had gone bust.
The remarkable story of Kim Woo Choong and his Daewoo corporation will presumably have no ending while he remains a fugitive. But, as far as I know, this is what happened:
In 1968, while the Koreans in the south of their divided country were finally making progress towards building a new economy, Mr Choong set up a small textile business with just US$10,000 and five employees.
His company grew with startling speed and in little more than 30 years he had built a giant corporation - the second biggest in all of Korea - with businesses ranging from hotels to construction, ship-building, general trading and cars. They employed more than 18,000 staff in his country alone.
To many, he became a symbol of the nation's new spirit of enterprise and material gain. His personal wealth was large enough to put him well inside the Fortune 500 world's richest individuals and the corporation he founded seemed highly profitable and a huge success.
The government, busy over-arching the "economic miracle" which would raise their country to 14th wealthiest in the league table of these things, honoured his business as a chaebol (the "chosen ones") along with three others, Hyundai, Samsung and Lucky Goldstar Electronics - family-run, giant corporations that were singled out for special support and favoured dealings in a strategy of "encouraging the fittest."
At that time, the four corporations were estimated to employ 500,000 people and effectively controlled the jobs of millions more through supplier companies and affiliates.
But something went horribly wrong.
Mr Choong, then 62 and a chain-smoking, colourful character, apparently left for a meeting in China one afternoon in September 1999 and never came back. Also missing, according to the investigating accountants, was US$2 billion dollars in cash. Furthermore, they discovered a gaping hole in the books down which a vast amount of company money had been siphoned into a special fund to pay off politicians for preferential decisions.
Choong's Daewoo car company, heavily over-borrowed and unable to pay its debts, was declared bankrupt, and the group as a whole subsequently collapsed.
Meanwhile, accusations of corruption, fraud and false accounting against Mr Choong and a large number of his senior executives - involving sums which surpass even the recent Enron and WorldCom scandals in the USA - remain unproven and on the file.
Four years later, and the police are still trying to find him. He is rumoured to have been spotted in places as far apart as France and America, north and south, while Fortune magazine, earlier this year, managed to interview him somewhere in South-east Asia when, amongst many other things, he blamed the demise of his Daewoo car company on being too ambitious. "I tried to do too much too fast," he is claimed to have said.
Another recently unconfirmed sighting was at the Hanoi Daewoo Hotel, a five-star luxury centrepiece in the communist Vietnam capital, which was built with company cash and personally designed and furnished by his socialite wife Heeja Chung at an estimated cost of US$163 million in 1996.
Mrs Chung, who liked to be known as the "Lady of Seoul", was installed as chairwoman of the Daewoo Development Co., a subsidiary of the group, and opened seven hotels in Korea, China and Africa.
Cutting a stylish figure with a silver-topped ebony walking stick, she invited 3,000 guests including diplomats and politicians from across the world to the opening of the Hanoi Daewoo Hotel, which she lavishly decorated with fine art, porcelain, sculptures and marble.
In the grounds there is an 18-hole golf course and a swimming pool, which is thought to be the largest in Asia. Guests have included the Russian President Vladimir Putin and a host of senior political figures from China and the USA.
All of which kind of brings us back to Daewoo, the new GM Daewoo, and why they lent us a car.
Today, in Korea, GM Daewoo's new company, under an ambitious management team, has just finished its first year of operations and the ending of our epic journey virtually coincided with it.
Just as they would have wanted, our trip in their Kalos car - with all its twists and turns, changes of plan, excitement, danger and adventure, and all the publicity that those stories generated - has already drawn a great deal of media attention to the team now trying to restore the name and image of the Daewoo car brand.
We also hope it will have helped to build a better future for the children - now and yet to come - in the care of SOS Children's Villages.
This is our story of The Daewoo Challenge.
- Richard Meredith, South Korea, October 2003
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