Hiking Gwanaksan

Well, the changing seasons won't let me lie. We hiked this mountain ages ago ... the first weekend in October after The School's fire, actually, when the weather still called for tank tops. It's since gotten much colder, and the tanks have been covered by tshirts, dress shirts and coats. Scarves, too. Korea's long, humid summer was gorgeous (in retrospect) and we celebrated it accordingly: an invigorating walk up a mountain. Now, it wasn't much of a real hike until the mountain became a bit more steep near its top, and the hike itself was rather short, but it was a climax to the weekend in more way than one.

Jon and I went with two coworkers - Jay and Rob - to the mountain at the southern edge of the city, to Gwacheon. By subway. The 40-minute trip included one transfer during which a middle-aged Korean man yelled at myself and Jay (who's proudly Indian-Canadian, Ottawa-based). His comments were in Korean, so we didn't understand a word, but his finger wagging and spitting spoke clearly enough for us to understand. One of the hundred-something Koreans making the same transfer seemed just as surprised as we were to hear such comments. After staring each other down (confusion from our end, anger from the spitter) as we walked down the stairs, we parted ways with the overtly racist Korean man and looked forward to our weekend excercise!

A gorgeous day for a hike - I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story.

The hike was pretty monotonous until we came across a natural spring and took our first break. We could actually drink from this spring, and ladles had been provided to access the drinking water from a crevice in the rocks.

A little further up, we came upon Gwanaksan's main attraction: a sizeable temple housing hundreds, possibly thousands, of small buddhas. All were painted gold. And if you take a close look at the photo, you can see ingenious use of space: buddhas tucked in at the side of the rafters of the structure.

Although many hikers stopped at this point, we continued to even more spectacular views - Seoul on both sides of the mountain, a tiny temple on a dangerous precipice just shy of the mountain's 625m peak, and (how wonderful) an army base at the peak of the mountain. Beside the ramen noodle vendor and beer-selling drink stand. Ahh, the athletics of our feat!

A generous hiker cutting up an Asian Pear for our foursome ... although our thanks wasn't constrained by the language barrier, we weren't able to strike up a full conversation with her. So we'll pass on her generosity to our students ...

It took us about ... 30 minutes to descend the mountain and a few hours to get back to Gangnam for beer and fried chicken with some of the other teachers. We then went for a session of Dr. Fish ... but I'll save that story for another day. Let's just say that a hungry fish is a useful fish.