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Earlier this month, in an obviously confident bid to impress the lights out of otherwise skeptical journalists, Hyundai Asia Resources, Inc. (HARI) scheduled a plant visit to the Hyundai car and ship building facilities in Ulsan, a relatively quiet city south of bustling Seoul. Unlike regular motoring related trips, there were no test drives or car launches. The trip was meant to be a statement – an effort to show just how serious the Hyundai brand is in gaining ground in the worldwide car wars.

Certain that they’d get their message through, HARI brought along an entire battalion of writers from The Philippine STAR, who as you may already be aware, also represent several other media outfits. Butch Gamboa (Motoring Today, Autofocus) James Deakin (C! Magazine, Auto Extreme) Manny N. de los Reyes (Speed Magazine) and this writer were graced with the company of yet another STAR regular, Lifestyle Section’s literary genius Butch Dalisay. The STAR troopers comprised a third of what was a relatively huge Filipino media contingent.

In the following photo essay, Manny de los Reyes further sheds light on a few of the highlights of the trip. Truthfully, however, these are just glimpses of the scope of our learnings from Korea. The full story is necessarily spread out through a whole slew of articles in The Philippine STAR. Butch Dalisay has written about the trip in his column over the past two Mondays. Ray Butch Gamboa has mentioned it twice in his motoring column as well. Manny N. de los Reyes focused on it in last week’s Backseat Driver column. And with this effort, we hope to round it out.

The bottom line in case you still missed out on it – we are now believers. Hyundai (and Korea as a whole) is serious. So get those headlines right. The Koreans aren’t coming. They’re already here. And they’re here to stay.