Suspense and Relief

We awoke in the morning to find that our hotel room window looked right out onto the peaks of Wolchusan, Korea's smallest but by no means least interesting National Park. We walked by a busload of middle-aged Koreans doing calisthenics and stretches in unison and went out to a sculpture garden at the base of the trail, which had a couple interesting pieces. Then we went up, enjoying the crisp but not overly cold air, the leafless trees, the craggy mountains and the beautiful clear sky. The trail was crowded the whole way; it seems we weren't the only ones who thought that December was a perfectly reasonable time of year to go hiking, though we made bets about how many other foreigners we would see that numbered in the single digits. We saw that Wolchusan is another place where shamanism is not permitted, among other rules. The Park's most notable feature is probably the giant 52m long orange suspension bridge that takes hikers over a particularly steep gully. The picture of that bridge in the Lonely Planet: Korea was one of the things that made me most excited about going, so it was good to finally see it. The bridge now strikes me as unnecessary, but was kind of fun anyway.

Later on the trail we took a side path down to an eight meter tall seated Buddha relief. Sadly, Alanna fell on the steep unstable path down and bashed her elbow against the rock, making the rest of the trip considerably less pleasant for her. We backtracked up the steep path and continued along. At the other end of the mountain trail was a very new but intriguingly (and brightly) decorated temple. Look in the pictures for the semi-anthropomorphic rabbits using a mortar and pestle, women looking at the demon faces that they see in their mirrors, and the sign bordered by dragons and elephants.