Home Sweet Home- Sobaeksan

Over the weekend Brandon and I packed up our gear and hit the mountains.  After purchasing an abundance of hiking gear from the markets of Andong (Mask Dance Festival), we’ve been anticipating this moment- making the 5am start a bit easier to bear.

From Pyeongtaek to Chungju and Chungju to Danyang.  Although Danyang is less than 100 miles directly east of Pyeongtaek, it is a smaller city, thus there are fewer buses that head to and from there.  So the 5am start was in order.

Shortly after noon we made it to Danyang, but still had a few miles until the base of the mountain, so we hoped into a taxi… a black taxi… a luxury taxi… aka an expensive taxi.  Welp, lesson learned.  The foreigners fell for the trick.

When agreeing to hike this mountain with B, I knew that it was going to be a long ride.  But boy was that an understatement.  Prewarning to anyone intending to hike this mountain- it’s definitely a full day hike and you will be sore the next day.

As a matter of fact, when researching day hikes for this mountain, you’ll find that most are around 6 hours and level A difficulty (very steep).  But we did it!  We stumbled (I stumbled, Brandon probably could have ran) up Sobaeksan to Birobong, the pinnacle.

Along the way, I experienced my first bits of Korean autumn, which is actually quite similar to that of Baltimore, died, met a few Koreans interested in our American-ness, died, .  Oh did I mention that I basically died?  And Brandon always seemed to have the camera to catch me out of breath.  If you go on Facebook and check out my latest album, you’ll notice that I’m basically gasping for air in all of the pictures!

However, as expected, the death toll was well worth it- the views were absolutely amazing.

13.6 km later, we had been up and down the “back bone of Korea” and all we could think about was where we could crash for the night.  Lacking energy, we quickly settled for a Minbak- a traditional Korean house, typically found at the bottom of national parks, in which the family opens up a room to travelers for the night.

In the U.S. I would NEVER take my chances here, but as Korea is safe, and for only 30 buckaroos, we could not resist.  We plopped ourselves down onto our “bed” of blankets, as most traditional Korean homes do not have beds, and one bottle of Hite and ice cream later we were knocked out by 9pm. But thanks to our lovely next door neighbors, we were abruptly awoken by noises… circa midnight.  A few bangs on the wall later, and silence was upon us again.

Sunday morning did not bear as much luck as we had hoped.  After researching and weeding out the abundance of activities in Danyang, we finally settled on three things- an adventure cave, Guinsa, and a boat ride from Danyang to Chungju.

Well, let’s just say that this little adventure cave was nowhere to be found.  Part 1, crossed off.

After arriving in Guinsa, we immediately purchased bus tickets back to Danyang, allotting 1 hour to see the temple.  As 1 hour for temple viewing is typically plenty of time, we learned that 2 hours should definitely be set aside for this monstrosity. 

Built in 1945, Guinsa is the headquarters of the Cheontae sect of Buddhism.  The complex can house over ten thousand monks at a time.  It is brilliantly large!  And of course it is nudged right into the mountain side, so Sunday morning allowed for an hour of unplanned hiking.  Whew, Monday was a rough one to say the least. 

We barely made it onto the ferry back to Chungju, as the language barrier was almost too great to overcome.  But bottom line, we made it!  Needless to say, this past weekend was a success- full of hiking, beautiful scenery, and the experience of a traditional Korean home.

And quickly, since Brandon just loooved to document how tired I was ALL the way up the mountain, I would like to imitate him on Monday: “Ow Ow don’t touch my calves.  DON’T touch my calves!”