~KOREA: RURAL~

A hillside persimmon tree laden with fruit in an orchard in Jangyu, about an hour's walk from my apartment at the time.

Plastic-covered bales of rice straw stand amid fallow paddies after harvest, with encroaching apartment blocks in the distance.

The corpse of a male praying mantis beheaded by its mate still clings to a weed stalk on the verge of the Jangyu rice paddies.

A frosty morning on a walk between the rice paddies of a neighbouring suburb, with some of my regular hiking landscape visible in the distance.

A typical farm road in the rice-paddy landscape outside Jangyu, bordered with unkempt grass.

A dumped store mannequin lies in a ditch by the road in Yulha, with car tail-lights receding into the night.

A pumpkin vine snakes up a barbed-wire fence in the hills above Busan, with plastic greenhouses in the background.

On a wet morning in Jangyu, close to my apartment, a tree houses a few ramshackle kkachi (Korean magpie) nests.

Rows of apartment towers reflected in flooded rice paddies.

On a country road just outside Busan, not long before dark, two curious locals peer over a farm wall at the passing stranger.

A plastic greenhouse, barren fields & distant mountains beneath a vivid sunset - I spent countless weekends walking countryside like this.

A flooded rice paddy, its border strewn with litter.

A woman crosses Daecheong Creek, Jangyu, on a concrete spillover.

A farmer's bicycle, a rake strapped to its frame, stands on a farm road, with tower blocks visible in the distance.

A row of statues of animal figures I passed on the long walk back into Busan after a weekend walk to Tongdo Temple.

An autumn view of Jangyu fields, with greenhouses & distant mountains lit by the setting sun, as I headed home following a mountain hike.

Brightly coloured lanterns hang from trees on a country lane a few hours' walk from Korea's 4th-largest city.

In Yulha, a dragonfly perches on a rice stalk, silhouetted by the morning sun.

Rows of rice seedlings ready for planting in the paddies of Yulha.