The sun sets early in the land of the rising sun (which we are next to) so by the time we found the mountain it was about 5pm and we didn’t have much daylight left to explore the place. We decided to head up anyway as the view of the sunset wold probably e a good one. We took a cable car up the mountain and didn’t get around trip ticket. There was only an hour until the last cable car came down so we told the guy at the base that we were going to walk down the mountain after. As we were entering the park we saw a lot of older people with walking sticks coming down from their own hikes so we knew it was a fairly common thing to do. The man smiled and made a vague hand motion as to where to take the path down, telling us it was a 40 minute walk.
Now I suppose I could be giving the wrong idea with saying that we were going up a mountain, since its really not all that steep and probably not higher than many of the other little mountains around the city. We got up to the top of the cable car and chased the sunlight to some rocks on one side so Ken could take some pictures of the sunset. I had quite uncharacteristically forgotten my camera. We had a map for the mountain that pointed out a cool restored temple and guard towers down some path, which we started towards but we got sidetracked almost everywhere along the way and ended up climbing a path to a bit of a rocky peak to check out the view. It was being up on that mostly deserted mountain that made me realize how noisy Korea can be sometimes. The honking horns, the vocal salespeople, the pop music being pumped everywhere. Up at the top of the mountain it was just quiet. Well except for Ken’s incessant nattering but I’ve learned to tune him out over the years.
The light was fading fast and after catching a few more pics of the city (which looks really nice at night from very far away, finally found an angle where those garish ads are pretty) we decided to head down. We took a look at the simple map I had but it really didn’t give us a clue as to where the walking path was. We basically set out on the idea that any path that led down would get us to the bottom of the mountain eventually. Ken spotted one such downward path and we headed off.
It only took a few minutes to realize that we were probably not on the same path all the older people take down the mountain. The path was very small and uneven and even we were losing our footing a bit. Tourist spots here aren’t like ones in Canada, where they have all sorts of rangers and lights and stuff to make sure you don’t get lost. And I guess you could say we got a little lost. But we were still confident as long as we were headed down we were fine. The pic you see above was my little joke that we should just give up and go feral, “if you want to survive in the jungle, you have to think like a jungle!” Well about ten minutes after that pic we were we no longer on any semblance of a path and were just blazing our way down the mountain with little light. We kept in high spirits but were both getting a little concerned as to exactly where we were going to end up, since we had been veering a little away from the park entrance. I rebuffed Ken’s offers of water, saying that we had to conserve it, and advised him to find a weapon of sorts in case bears attacked.
Well after going down for a while we hit a fence, with barbed wire on it. This was a problem. It was blocking us from going any further down and we were both worried we had unwillingly stepped into some secret military base. We followed the fence for a bit and found a spot where it ad been peeled away enough to walk through and continued down. We found another path soon and rushed along it until we came out in parking lot to some building. Not sure if we were on private property or not we were happy to find some streets nearby and we soon found our way back to outside the park entrance.
We were both pretty tired from the trek so decided that finding the huge local spa would be a good thing. We searched around for a bit, but having had enough of trying to find our own way I just called Patrick and asked directions.
The only spa I’ve been to here is the small one attached to my old gym, so this one was a surprise. It was fairly busy but big enough that it was not crowded. I’m running out of literary steam so I’ll just give a rundown of all the cool things it had: hot tubs, cold tubs, aromatherapy tubs (we hit up peppermint, jasmint and ‘medicinal’), footbaths, high pressure shower things (like a massage), saunas, steam rooms and even an open air sauna area. The open air one was very interesting as it was cold outside and the tubs were very hot. I had trouble decided if it was worse to be cold out of the water or way too hot in the water.
The sauna helped relax us a bit, we headed back to my area and grabbed some dinner. We went for barbeque again, but the best dish it looked like they had was pork. Which is basically just big ol strips of bacon they bring to you. We had two servings of it, the first was relatively lean, the second was almost all fat. Here they are not really into lean cuts of meat so we tried to be discreet as we cut away the fat and stashed it in a bowl on our table that the hovering propetier couldn’t see.
If you want to see pics of the day just check out Ken’s blog, he’ll probably have a different perspective on the events as well.
1 comment:
A slightly different perspective ... that was an understatement, Samwise Gamji.
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