Korean Hiking Experience

Korea is about the size of the state of Indiana in terms of land area. However, Korea has 7 times as many people living on that area of land as Indiana has (47.5 million to 6 million people). To attempt to put this into perspective, take Indiana and everyone that lives there and then add everybody that lives in the most populated state, California, and dump them in Indiana. Then you'd still have to add another 5 million people, say Colorado, and that should set the scene for the Korea I'm about to discuss.

See, when you have so many people living in such a small mass of land, there tends to be some differences.

Here's a small one: there are no late games. Have you ever been watching a sports game, say baseball for example, then had to go somewhere, say dinner, and had to miss the game because it was on during prime time? Well, your consolation is the fact that when you get back from wherever you had to go (dinner) you can still probably catch the late game being played on the West Coast. You can just catch the Dodgers, or Giants game because their prime time game is your 10 pm or 11 pm on the East Coast.

Well, you can't do that in Korea. Just the other day, my brother and I were watching a Korean baseball game on TV before dinner. We wanted to watch the game, but we were hungry and had plans to eat dinner out. No big deal. I thought to myself "we can just go eat dinner and then when we're all fat and tired we can come back and relax while watching another game." Then, I realized, "there will be no other game." When we get back from dinner at 9 or so, the game will be over and there will be no other games. There are no late games in Korea. There is no West Coast. There are no other time zones! There is only Seoul Time, and all the games are played during Seoul Time's prime time, and when that's over, there is no other prime time.

It's obvious now and ultimately it doesn't matter that much. But it's not something you expect, or think of beforehand. This is an example of a difference that you don't think about until it affects you.

Here's the bigger difference: hiking in Korea is not like hiking in America.

No, no. I'm not going to expound upon the glorious mountain ranges and beautiful national parks of America in contrast to those of Korea. The difference lies in the culture. Imagine the hiking culture in America if you can. It generally consists of a couple of people getting together, going out to a nearby park, mountain or forest and trekking around in the quiet solitude of nature for a while. Maybe there's a path somewhere. Maybe the group sees one or two other groups of people, but all-in-all it's an activity of general solitude.

Well in Korea, there are so many people on such a small plot of land that not only are the hiking options limited, but they are also unbelievably crowded. Hiking is still a small group of people getting together, going out to a nearby park, mountain, or forest and trekking around for a while. But the whole "quiet solitude of nature" part is totally lost!

It's hilarious. Awhile ago, my brother and I took a bus ride with Warren and Jin-ju to a mountain in Seoul to go hiking. We chose to hike the 3rd highest peak (the second highest being a couple of un-climbable boulders right next to the 3rd, and the highest being a bit further away). We chose to go on a Sunday and apparently so did a couple thousand other Koreans. We get off the bus, use the restroom and take a right into this area full of outdoor tents set-up to sell food and hiking gear.

Warren turns to us and says "this is the base of the mountain."

"What?! This is a village."

"Yeah, at the base of most of the major hiking spots are little villages where you can buy anything and everything hiking-related."

Hiking is not an underground culture like you may imagine it in the States. Hiking in Korea is as mainstream an activity as going to the movies - it's just another thing you can do on the weekends. Imagine going hiking in America, parking the car and seeing about a thousand other people already coming and going up the mountain. Then at the base of the mountain, before you start your hike, you have to weave your way through a bunch of people selling hiking boots, Clif-bars, Gatorades, bottles of wine, pitchers of beer, hotdogs, and nachos. And these people aren’t temporary. This is the only mountain a couple million people can hike, so these vendors have paved walk-ways and permanent buildings. Yeah, it’s bizarre.

Also, I hope you recall that Korea is a culture of group conformity and social harmony. If a style is popular, everyone adopts it. As such, when hiking, one must adopt the proper hiking style. This consists of brand-new, brown, durable hiking boots, a hiking backpack made by an Outdoors Sporting company (preferably North Face), a gortex hiking shirt, and a hiking stick (collapsible and bought from a store, not anything related to a tree). This was the attire of nearly 90% of the thousand people we passed on our way up and along the mountain. Did any of the hiking gear look used, old or rugged? Of course not. It looked like the day after Christmas and everyone got hiking gear. It was hilarious.

So we weave our way through the vendors selling the boots and shirts everyone is wearing and make it to the vendors selling food and drinks to the hungry/ parched hikers who've already made it back down the mountain. Half the people in these restaurants are old men decked out in hiking gear pounding dong-dong ju, and mek ju (milky rice-wine, and beer). Because that's what you do in Korea. You climb a mountain. Then you get drunk.

My hiking experience is limited, but I'm a young, healthy male so I knew I'd make it to the top one way or another. It ended up being about a 4 hour hike to the top of this mountain along the ridge line, which is no walk in the park (pun intended). There were a couple points along the trail where we had to pause for a spell to rest our legs and prepare for a steep, uphill section. However, these pauses were quickly over when around the corner coming down the steep section would be either a group of 70 year old women (decked out in hiking gear of course) or an old man holding his granddaughter's hand, both of them waddling down the mountain. Immediately, we'd all look at each other and say "well if they made it up, what are we waiting for?"

We made it to the peak, took some pictures, and made the 3.5 hr trek back down with the Sun dipping below the horizon just before we made it to the village. Naturally, after a 7.5 hour hike we were hungry/ parched. So we did what any Korean hiker would do at the end of a good mountain climb - we popped into one of the tent vendor restaurants and ordered a couple bowls of dong-dong ju.

When in Korea, do as the Koreans.

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