So last weekend I decided to work on a promise I made to myself at the start of the new year. After traveling outside of Seoul for a few weeks, I realized not only how much else there is to see in Korea, but also how good it felt to get out of a crowded city for a while.
With this in mind, I woke up one Saturday morning and decided to leave. Thankfully, my host brother was able to help me in planning my exodus from the city, and a few hours later I had a destination and a place to stay in a tiny town in Woraksan National Park.
Taking off from a bus terminal on the other side of the city, I found out just how far you can go for about five dollars. It turned out that my destination was so far off the beaten track that the driver was willing to call up the owner of my guesthouse and personally deliver me to where I needed to go.
The bus terminal I left from in Seoul.
I ended up in a town that couldn't have had more than a few hundred residents, almost all of them catering to the hiking tourists who come to the area. The peak of Mt. Woraksan overlooked my guesthouse, letting me know just how hard the climb would be as I went to bed on Saturday night.
If you squint really hard, you can see my guesthouse, it is the rightmost building.
The couple who owned the place where I stayed that night were really nice. After finding out that I was a foreign student and that I could speak a bit of Korean, they told me I reminded them a great deal of their own son currently studying in Canada. The husband himself was very interesting, a former globe-trotting architectural consultant who had decided to build his own guesthouse and settle down into retirement.
Insisting that I had to eat dinner with them rather than try to find my own meal in town, they proudly served up American beef flank and got down to what older Korean men do best with new friends: drinking.
Despite the bitter cold, I couldn't have been happier as I mixed bites of barbecued potato and beefsteak in with a bit of what I think was brewed from tree branches, I'm still not sure. Surrounded by the owner and a group of hikers also getting ready for the climb tomorrow, they collectively laughed at whatever I had to say and asked me to explain how I ended up in one of the more deserted corners of the country.
The guesthouse where I stayed.
The next morning I woke up as early as I could, as the entire hike would take about seven hours and I still had to get back to Seoul that evening.
Korea has been pretty barren and gray for the past four months, so my pictures may seem rather lifeless. Still, the emptiness and feeling of being on the mountain were great. The pictures are in chronological order as I sweated, jumped, and clambered my way to the top of the mountain.
The town was full of extremely alert guard dogs, as everyone was sleeping, their barking was the only thing I could hear as I started up the mountain.
A bird and I take in the view from the top.
The stone on the top says "Woraksan peak, height above the sea 1097 meters"
The only other people on the mountain with me were older Korean hikers, in the full hiking uniform, loud and happy to be outdoors.
Recently I got a super short haircut, my friends here either laugh and say I am trying to look like a soldier or they genuinely didn't recognize me at first.
Waiting for the bus back to Seoul, the bus stop consisted of a sidewalk, zero signage, and an older Korean women who would point people to where the bus stopped. It was great.
For me, hiking is Korea has been a great way to remember the parts of myself that I forget living in a giant apartment block and never seeing green things. Lunging over steep inclines and sharing a dinner in the midst of a quiet winter night reminded me of a lot of things I miss about Redding.
The trip was also a great way to end my vacation and get ready to begin my Spring semester, kind of like a deep breath before I went back underwater.
That's me, So Yoon, and her boyfriend Han Young. The strange triangle-shaped structure to the right is the most famous bit of architecture on campus, the main gate to the university. All incoming traffic passes under it; it actually spells out the initials of my university.
Hmm, I didn't realize how much taller I am than her family, normally I'm only a little above average in Korea. It's hard to see, but we were surrounded by families taking the same pictures on campus. People spend a lot of time buying clothes and coating themselves in makeup for this day.
Yay! I Graduated!
