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Published: August 11th 2013
It's so easy to be active in Korea and hiking appears to be a national sport, especially the older you get. Even when doing a nighthike at 4am we saw adjummas and adjoshis walking back down our local mountain walk.
As summer hit Busan I went on quite number of hikes. One such day was in Busan around Igidae towards Oryukdo (islands): a distinctive part of the coastline. It was a fierce hot day which contributed to very hazy views of Busan. The walk itself was nice, apart from a steep crumbly bit where we had to pull ourselves up by rope! The views of the coastline were magnificent and we left the city behind for the most part. Oryukdo comprises of five (or six depending on the tide) craggy hills of rock that line out from the coast, and are symbolic of the city. We finished the hike with views over the islands.
Another weekend I hiked up Geumgangsan to Seokbulsa again with my friend Conor, as it was his first time. As before it was a lovely walk and the temple is as stunning and peaceful as ever. Coming back down we took a different path back
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Seokbulsaand stopped off at one of the many exercise parks to play. Korea provides many of these free outdoor gyms on mountains and in cities, and you never see one empty. We've always laughed at them but some of the machines are surprisingly effective! On our way down the road we randomly stopped a roadside restaurant which was very old and tucked in behind some trees. We couldn't see a menu so we ordered some makgeolli and side dishes while trying to work things out! We were seated on a raised platform outside surrounded by trees while our 'restaurant' was operating under a tin shack roof - loved it! There was a large group of Koreans nearby and we finally worked out that most of them were deaf-mute as they were signing to each other. It's rare enough to notice people with any form of disability in Korea. We finally worked up the courage to try and order some mystery meat that other people were eating out of large pots, and it turned out our waitress was deaf/mute too! She struggled to lip read our mangled Korean, so we pointed at the nearest table and we kept our fingers crossed.
What we ended up with was
patbingsu, the red bean/ice-flake dish we'd been hearing about. It also had gelatin bits and sugar-coated corn flakes in it and it was absolutely delicious! It took us awhile to learn that red beans in Korea are not kidney beans - they are smaller and taste sweet.
The next day, after a big night out, I met up with new friends for a long car journey to Gayasan National Park near Daegu. We'd planned another hike and the clouds and rain weren't going to put us off! We parked near Haein temple, which was our starting point. The route was labelled 'easy for beginners' online but it was anything but! It wasn't particularly steep but there were a lot of stairs which felt neverending at times. We walked through clouds giving the lush green forest an eerie white backdrop, we lost all sense of time and space. Roughly about halfway up it started raining, although we were already wet with cloud and sweat. Really struggled to work out how much further up we had to go as we could barely see the mountain in front of us! The last section was all rock
and very slippery, some didgy patches but we all made it to the top! Victory! We amused ourselves by a well full of frogs before carefully making our way down again. The clouds started breaking up so we had beautiful views on the way back down of Korea's rolling tree-coated mountains.
In July I went on another organised tour - an activity day in the countryside a good bit west of Busan. After raining most of the week, the sun was splitting the sky. As usual things got all muddled up and delayed, so after waiting around a short while we went quad biking first. Apart from about about 9 of us who had to wait as they didn't have enough quads for all of us. It wasn't drastically exciting - we followed a leader around a path by the river and rice paddies. I didn't trust the steering or brakes on mine so I was happy enough not to be doing any great speeds but others were frustrated. We returned to the main centre for lunch before getting geared up for white water rafting. As it turned out it should have been named brown flatwater rafting and was
very over-controlled by our Korean guides. We had to wait at the get-in for all the buses to arrive, we had to all start together and we were only allowed to paddle for short periods at a time. The river was very wide and flat for the most part with some grade 2 bumps (which were 'very dangerous' according to our guide). There were about two waves on the whole river that were worthy of a 'whoop!', and in the meantime we kept ourselves entertained with splashing wars. Apparantly the river was very fast flowing because of all the rain - it must be excruciating otherwise!
So lots of fun times to be had in the great Korean outdoors, but don't expect anything extreme and be prepared to make your own fun!
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