Adventures in Solitude, take 2

I have Monday off this week, so I decided to go back to Jirisan National Park, now that it is open. This time my travels had a much greater resemblance to the original plan.

On Friday night after work Will, John, and I went out to a restaurant a couple blocks from our apartment building. For about $20 we were served seven courses of barbecue, including roasted beef, chicken, lamb, pineapple, and pork, as well as an all you can eat buffet of everything from sushi to roast beef to smoked salmon to kiwi. During dinner the power inexplicably went out three different times, though it remained on on the outside of the building, which it covered with neon. The outages seemed very out of place at the upscale restaurant that had a waterfall outside and Plexiglas under our feet with a garden beneath.

After dinner I rushed to get ready to leave, then took the subway to the East Daejeon train station. On the subway I unexpectedly (it was 11pm) ran in to one of my Korean coworkers. She, like most people, thought that it was odd that I was traveling alone, and she also said that I was better about getting out to see Korea than she was. I was on the train from 11:45 pm to 2:30 am. The seats were sold out, so I had to sit on the floor in the dining car, which thankfully wasn't nearly as crowded as when I went to Suwon. I met a Korean man named Kae, who teaches people to be English teachers. We discussed the Korean education system, traveling, freedom, and women. While discussing hobbies he said that he liked martial arts and that even though he is 37 (we would say 35 or 36), he can still jump up in the air and kick three times before landing, and that he can still punch through cement but won't try to punch through harder bricks anymore because he broke his hand doing so. The most astounding part of the conversation concerned his relationship with his wife: he lives in Daejeon during the week and visits his wife and daughter a few towns away on the weekend, and he said his wife has never said "I love you" to him, though other women have said it to him.

Kae's stop was about halfway through my trip, and I read some War and Peace for the rest of the way (which was a rather hefty tome to bring on a backpacking trip, but oh well). In Suncheon I sat outside and read some more then spent about an hour drifting in and out of sleep before getting on the 5:30 am train to Hadong. I tried to nap for the hour long train ride, but ended up spending more time looking at the rice paddies out the window than sleeping. In Hadong I had about an hour and a half to kill before my bus left, so I wandered the streets of the village. Among the more interesting things I saw were laundry hanging from either a gravestone or some other kind of marker: ...rice patty fields forever:
...narrow squalid alleys:
...a shop literally filled with clothes:
...fish hanging up to dry on clotheslines...and a gazebo on a high hill that offered good views of the village:While I was up at the gazebo loud speakers in town made announcements of some sort that were so loud they reverberated throughout the valley. I'm glad that there aren't similar blarings in my neighborhood at 7:30am on a Saturday.

I managed to catch a little rest on the bus up to Ssanggeysa, the beautiful temple complex which I have already thoroughly documented. Past the temple I saw the same stone paths, hills, and waterfall as before, but there was now considerably more water and the land was lusher:
Just past the waterfall I finally reached new territory. I had a pleasant but long hike across a minor ridge:Though I didn't see any of the bears, otters, or wildcats that live in the park, I did see many birds, chipmunks, dragonflies and other insects, and a small white snake. About halfway through the day I summited a small mountain (Samshinbok, 1288m). All mountaintops are fairly crowded in Korea, and Koreans like to have full picnics on top of mountains, complete with a sixpack of cheap beer. I was given some fruit that I couldn't identify and was offered a can of beer. I am always treated well at mountain tops here, perhaps because people want me to talk about Korean generosity when I leave (or perhaps I'm too cynical and it really just is generosity, but Westerners receive a lot more special treatment than their fellow Koreans for some reason).
By the end of eight hours of hiking I was rather exhausted. I hiked at least 15km, and I went at a brisk pace: during the whole weekend I passed all but one person I saw on the trail, and I was never passed myself except when I stopped to de-layer or eat. I stopped for the day at a shelter, which was really a large three story lodge. It was incredibly crowded there (this picture shows fewer than half the hikers present):
Koreans always cook primarily on gas grills, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that their dinner while backpacking were essentially identical to the dinners they would make at home, with the only difference being that the campstoves are slightly smaller than the stoves at home. I considered pressing on to the next shelter before it got dark, but the weather looked ominous. I was incredibly fortunate to meet a man named Jae Hak (pronounced Jayhawk) who was kind enough to tell me about the strange policy of the shelters in Korean National Parks. Apparently, their priority in terms of who gets to sleep indoors was (in descending order) 1. people with reservations 2. foreigners 3. children 4. women 5. the elderly, and then young men. If you have been following the Sonia Sotomayer Supreme Court nomination, you may have heard some conservative lunatics talking about her 'reverse racism,' a term that they mean in a very racist sense to mean that she is discriminatory against whites (a baseless claim), which they see as the reverse of how racism should be, or how racism naturally occurs. What I experienced was real reverse racism: I was treated differently on the basis of my race (well, technically my nationality, but in Korea the distinction is not given much notice, and skin color is treated as sufficient proof of foreigner status), but instead of being discriminated against I was given preferential treatment. Actually, I get this a lot in Korea: I am treated well because I am white, and there is even a bookstore that gives a discount to teachers, a discount that is automatically given to anyone who is white. I was mildly uncomfortable accepting this race based preference, but sleeping out in the rain would have been more uncomfortable, so I bought myself a spot on the floor. I spent some time talking to Jae Hak, who insisted on giving me dinner, so I ate tofu and kimchi instead of the bread and nutella that I packed (my parents were kind enough to send the nutella with the box of books they sent). Dinner would have been more extensive, but before it was done cooking the drizzle became a downpour. I still can't believe I forgot to bring a pack cover (i.e. a trash bag), especially since I knew rain was probable. My things didn't get too wet, and I was wearing waterproof gear head to foot, so the rain was fine, but I was glad that I wouldn't be sleeping outside. The rangers running the lodge were kind enough to ignore regulations and let in many more people than there were spaces. I had an actual designated spot on the floor to lay on my blanket, and was asleep before the lights turned off at 8pm. I awoke in need of the restroom in the middle of the night and had a difficult time traversing the floor because it was so crowded with people that at some points there were ten foot squares of space where there was not even an inch between people. I eventually followed in the wake of someone who didn't care who he woke up or stepped on. Outside and in the outhouse I became all the more thankful for my spot inside as I saw people huddled under plastic tarps and a man sleeping in the outhouse, his head inches from a urinal and his feet about two feet from one of the ceramic holes in the ground that passes for toilets outside the West (I'm glad Western style toilets are available in most parts of Korea. Much as I don't want to be a cultural imperialist, I think that we can all agree that in this particular instance one option is clearly superior).

Just before five am I got up along with a majority of the sleepers, bid farewell to Jae Hak, and started hiking. It took very little time to get to a second shelter, and then there was a steep hike up to a viewpoint where I ate breakfast: (The mountain above is Cheonwangbong, my destination.) After a quick hike (under three hours) I reached the top of Cheonwangbong, aka Jirisan, the namesake of the park. It definitely qualifies as a real mountain, since at 1915 meters it is at a higher elevation than my parents' house in Colorado Springs (1832 m). It is the tallest mountain in the mainland of South Korea (South Korea owns an island volcano whose peak is slightly higher, and the highest mountain on the peninsula is on the border between North Korea and China). The top was (unsurprisingly) crowded, which explains why someone had stacked stones into a large flat square for people to eat and wait a little bit lower than the summit:The top had a nice view of the ridgeline, though it was still too foggy to see all that far.
At the top I ate my traditional summit snack of gummy bears and decided that I would take the quicker route down to the East rather than along the huge ridge across the park to the West because 1) I hate backtracking for any distance, much less to where I had started the day, which would take two and half or three hours, 2) it would be anticlimactic to hike all those shorter mountains, and 3) I wanted to sleep in my bed that night and to be lazy on Monday instead of rushing back and going straight back into classes without any time to rest. I enjoyed my hike down, which included a couple more peaks, patches of flowers, and another waterfall.
I really enjoyed this tree, whose roots made a perfect spiral staircase. Korean mountains have very well maintained, if steep, trails, and it is not unusual to see huge staircases:It stayed misty throughout the day. It drizzled or rained lightly for a big portion of my hike down, which was actually rather pleasant and kept me from getting overheated as I had the day before.
Eventually I reached a road and walked down it along a nice stream. I was too tired to be in the mood for swimming, but I almost went in on principle because there were such beautiful deep pools:
A little ways down the road was a small temple, Daeweonsa:
If you look closely you will see a satellite tv receptor. Apparently quiet contemplation is not enough to occupy the nuns who live here:
I couldn't find the bus stop at the temple, so I walked along the road for about an hour and eventually flagged down a bus, which I took to Jinju, and then took a train back to Suncheon, where I got another seatless ride to Daejeon, and then took the subway home. It was a lot of sitting around on moving vehicles with layovers, which is always tiring, but it gave me lots of time to read and so I'm now halfway through War and Peace.