Sokcho Diary

31.8.06

The First Hike

About two weeks ago, right after I arrived in town, my first weekend in fact, my new friends, Matthew and Wojtek decided to take me out for a little hike around town. We decided to not go up to Sorak-san, more on that later, but instead headed for the hills and rice fields immediately outside of town. Our goal was to find a little mineral spring and explore the surrounding countryside.

We met around noon at the school. I had taken the bus down from the north end of town so arrived fresh and dry but after stepping outside from the cool air-conditioning I was hit by this amazing wall of heat and water that is the Korean summer.

Let me digress just a little bit to describe the utter hell that is Korea in August. You are constantly wet. The air is so heavy that it hurts to breathe and the simple act of going from your bed to the bathroom is enough to make your brow break out in huge pellets of water that roll down your face, cutting through the other grime that you have sweated out over the course of the night. It is so hot that sleep is something rarely visited, that is solid, uninterrupted sleep. Your eyes may close a bit and you may rest just a little, but you never really sleep. Breathing itself requires a huge effort involving all parts of your throat and lungs screeching as super heated, super wet air are forced down your esophagus.

Koreans deal with this all-pervasive heat in time honoured ways. For one, they skip the day as much as they can, rarely leaving their homes during the day. They just go to work and then home. Trips to the store for necessities like beer are made after the sun goes down. That does not really help the heat as much as you would think because even at two or three in the morning it is still around eighty-five degrees.

Nighttime is when everyone comes out. Even at three in the morning entire families will be out in the streets, down by the sea, or up on the roofs catching any breeze that may come their way. It is not unusual to see mother, father, baby, and grandmother all sitting down on the sidewalk sleeping, eating, and talking at two in the morning.

Getting back to our little hike…

We set off from the school and started to pass into the countryside, a different world. Rice was everywhere, the green of the fields almost like emeralds, and as we got higher up the individual plots that have been farmed for roughly a thousand years showed distinctly in the valleys and in the terraces marching up the hills.

We climbed a tiny mountain road, stopping by a little fruit stand for some peaches. The man who ran the stand was a North Korean, there are quite a few here, and wanted us to sit with him and his mates drinking whisky and talking the day away, but it was just too hot and we had a mission to accomplish, we must find this mineral spring that we have heard so much about. We climbed higher and higher and the flora of the area changed. Gone were the lowland scrubs and ginkgo trees that we left at the floor of the mountain. Appearing in greater quantities were bamboo, towering sea pines, and wild flowers. Everything was this bright green. There was no brown, no black, except for the road that we were on.

A little farther on we went on to a side trail that had a sign reading “spring”. We hiked a little farther, and there it was. The water was oozing from a stone cairn set into the side of a hill. There was a crowd of natives around filling huge jugs with the amazingly cold and clear water that they would take home for its medicinal properties.

We drunk our fill and topped off our water bottles, we knew that we had a long hike still ahead of us and moved deeper into the woods.

Climbing up a set of wooden logs in the mountainside we went up and up, around one thousand meters. The countryside was strangely deserted; we did not see another person after we left the spring.

After about twenty minutes we reached the summit and all of Sokcho was laid out before us. Yongseon Lake with the bridge to nowhere was in front of us, the rest of the town moved north to south, we could see it all. Buildings, the school, the boats in harbour, even my building way off in the distance.

On the southwest side of the mountain we could look into this huge valley with triangular shaped rice fields as far as the eye could see. Everywhere was green, the most brilliant, bright, shining green that I have ever seen. Every rice paddy was like a little emerald set into a setting of brown terraced walls.

We went down the other side, into the valley, and I got my first look at Sorak-san, the most holy mountain in South Korea and second only to Budeke-san on the border with China. It rose up out of the foothills to its full height of about four thousand meters like a large jagged tooth surrounded by smaller teeth that were desperately trying to grow to the size of Sorak-san.

We followed an overgrown trail, past a row of bunkers and tank traps. We did not know when they were built. The bunkers had obviously been here a long time, they were dank and overgrown, but the tank traps looked relatively new. The conversation between the three of us centered on what it must have been like to run up and down these hills with your weapons and ammunition as about a million rather pissed off Chinese chased after you with the sole goal of destroying you.

We walked through the rice fields on the concrete paths put in to help farmers pull the sacred white grains from the muck until we found a little pagoda rest hut. In the shade of this very traditional building we threw off our packs and settled down for a good rest just staring out at the fields shimmering in the sultry air, not talking, just enjoying the heat, the sweat, and the pretty butterflies that seemed to take a great interest in us.