Hwamsaa

These are some pictures of Hwamsaa temple, a little visited part of rural Korea that was originally built around 1509. It lies about five miles outside of town and you can only reach it by car or by foot and since I don't have a car...................
It really is a nice temple, one of the nicest I have been to in Korea. It sits on a low ridge beneath the main line of mountains and is surrounded by flowering trees. Smaller than most temples, with only a few buildings, it is wonderfully painted with a very nice boulder filled, fast rushing stream that runs through the grounds.
Pictures
1. Ulzambowi Rock, the main ridge that you can see from anywhere in Sokcho.
2. Flowering trees and rocks that frame the tea house at Hwamsaa
3. One of the small prayer halls at Hwamsaa
4. The bell pavilion that calls the monks to prayer
5. The giant hand painted drum that rings every morning and night that opens and closes the day.

Splish Splash

After almost two years in Korea I got to go diving. Diving is immensely popular here in the land of the morning calm and especially so here in the clean waters of Sokcho. You cannot throw a stone without hitting a dive shop around here. Every weekend in the spring, summer, and early fall, you can see groups of beginners, like me, and experts heading out to dive the beaches and off shore here in Sokcho.
The main reason that the northern part of South Korea is such a hot dive area is not the coral, there isn't any, but the fact that visibility here is excellent. On our dive we could see from 15 to twenty meters.
Starting out the day did not look very promising with grey skies and light rain as we headed down to Kings Dive Shop in Yang-Yang to get kitted out and meet our new friend Kim Dong Il who would be our dive master for this trip.
For this trip we headed down to a small village just south of town to a little dive shop, which, amazingly on such a crappy day was positively loaded with divers all getting there gear together for the days activities.
As we helped Dong Il carry our gear to the small dive shop I could not help but feel almost totally out of place with all the other people around. I felt pretty much out of my league here being such a rank beginner but everyone made me feel right at home.
After taking a few minutes to get geared up, putting on our wet suits, booties, and gloves we moved outside to do tank checks and look over all our equipment. This is very important as all this gear we would wear in fifty feet of water would do its best to keep us alive, but only if we double and triple checked it to make sure that everything worked correctly.
After checking our gear we moved towards the dock to board the large Zodiac inflatable that would take us a mile off shore to the dive site.
The guys on the boat were really a bunch of tough guys. Lots of them sported tats, rare in Korea, and you could tell that it would not be very wise to mess with them, but they were really cool, telling me that I looked just like a dive master sitting in front, looking all cool and calm in my wet suit, little did they know that I was pretty damn nervous about making a fool of myself in front of all these professional looking types.
After a good ride through some pretty heavy waves we reached the dive flags and put on our fins, BCD's and masks, and after a few minutes of trouble from the rookie, me, we were ready to head down into the deep.
As I back rolled off the boat I felt a little twinge of panic, "what the hell am I doing, water isn't for humans", but as I deflated my BCD and started to sink all of the old fears drifted away as I was busy equalizing the pressure on my ears, checking my ears, motioning for Dong Il to tighten up my BCD and doing all the usual tasks one has to do to dive safely and before I knew it I bumped my knee into a big kelp covered rock at about forty feet.
The scenery on the bottom was pretty cool and because of the excellent visibility you could see a lot of things. The bottom was a mix of big rocks covered with a ton of seaweed and hard sand bottom. We saw a few fish, a speckled flounder like flatfish, and a really pretty blue one one that was almost neon bright, a ton of cockles, and one pair of old fisherman's pants that Dong Il blue up with compressed air.
After about twenty five minutes our air was pretty used up and we headed up slowly to out gas the nitrogen that had built up in our bodies and finally broke the surface after about forty minutes and bobbed in the ocean waiting for the boat to pick us up.
Pictures-
1. Jason, Kirsty, and Dong Il looking over the gear before our dive
2. Our BCD's with tanks attached ready for our dive
3. Diving is truly an international sport, these dive flags mean the same here as they do everywhere.
4. While on the bottom Dong Il picked up some sea ginseng, "good for health" he told me and urged me to dig in. Chewy and tasting of nothing but salt it was something I tried once, but never again.
5. Our feast spread out before us!

Temple Walk

Pictures
1. The corner of a roof at a temple in Yang Yang. You can just see a wind chime at the very edge.
2. A mural of a pissed off holy man setting fire to a building for some transgression at the temple
3. The front gates at a Confusion school in Yang Yang
4. The inner compound of the Confusion school.
5. Rows of paper lanterns line the entrance to Naksan temple to celebrate Buddhas birthday next month.

Went for a great walk with some great friends the other day from Yang Yang to Naksan, two towns that are known for pretty much nothing. It was great day to hang out with Aubry, Paul, and Kelsey.

Hiking Up a New Mountain

For the past eight months, every time I wake up in the morning, I look out the window at this very peculiar cone shaped mountain that is just a few miles away, and every morning I think this will be the day that I will get up there and climb that damn thing. Well last Sunday was the day of reckoning.
After a fairly short bus ride on the one bus up north and a short walk through the rice fields that surround the base of the mountain, Conor and I finally reached the bottom and scouted out locations from which we could make it up the summit.
After a little while we had picked out our route and began moving slowly but surely upward through tangles of thorns and brush, following game trails and rock falls as we went up and up.
You could tell that this area had undergone massive trauma in the fairly recent past. All along the hike we found evidence that a massive fire had swept through the area no that long ago. Every where we looked there were half burned stumps and trunks of trees that were blackened by some sort of fire. The devastation was so complete that there was no growth younger than bushes on the mountain side.
After awhile we stopped to rest on a sort of saddle between a lower peak and the higher one that we were trying to get to. We were looking west, away from the sea, and down into a valley behind our little spot of heaven. From where we sat we could see a Buddhist temple and more graves than you could shake a stick at. It was obvious that at some time something really terrible happened here at some time. Korean graves are not usually together, they are usually placed in solitary areas with family groups. You almost never see this many graves together.
Moving on we saw something really amazing, especially here in Korea. For the first time in almost twenty months in this country, I saw a large mammal as a few yards ahead of us and slightly below, we kicked up a small deer that ran from us as if we were the hounds of hell. Knowing Koreans propensity for killing all things wild and eating them, it was probably a smart move on the deers part.
Moving on through even more thorns, I really should not have worn shorts this day, we finally reached something really strange just below the summit, a network of firing positions and bunkers with trenches connecting them. We found out the reason for this as we followed the trail connecting them towards the summit and looked back down the mountain on the south west side towards a huge army base buzzing with recruits doing what ever army conscripts do with their time here in Korea.
Moving up the trail on a well worn path by this time we finally reached the summit and were treated to a gorgeous view of the sea and the Diamond mountains in North Korea. Oh, I almost forgot, there was one other thing on the mountain top. A ring of white rocks that spelled out the letter H, a freaking helicopter pad.
Pictures.
1. Flowers thriving in the burnt stubble of the mountain side.
2. One of the many bunkers on the way up the mountain.
3. Looking to the east, rice fields and the sea.
4. Looking to the west, the Diamond mountains of North Korea are just to the right of the picture in the far distance. Yes I really am that close to our fraternal friends in the North.
5. With Buddhas birthday coming up you see these paper lanterns hanging every where.

Sokcho Spring Festival

Pictures
1. Catapults lining the path by the lake. I was unaware that these were a Korean invention, and judging by the fact that they only threw a small piece of wood about three feet, have not been refined in the last couple of thousand years.
2. A horse among the cherry blossoms.
3. Going back a thousand years. A Korean shaman/preistess bows before an offering to the gods for a good spring planting season.
4. The band gets ready to take the stage.
5. Two guys, on the stage, saying something that I could not at all understand, but the masks were kind of cool.

The Sokcho Spring Festival

16.4.07

This past weekend was the Sokcho spring festival. Judging by the banners that I had seen all over town the preceding weeks featuring an archer on horseback, I kind of assumed that the festival would consist of arrows and horses, hopefully in combination. But, being that this is Korea, the land of not quite right, I was disappointed. While there was archery, and horses, putting them together was just not an option.

Aubrey, Conor, and I headed down to Yongnanho Lake to take in the sites and sounds of the festival on a pretty gorgeous spring day. As we strolled along the lakeshore we started to run into loads of people. Some were roller blading, others running and walking, everywhere there were kids playing outside, with not a computer or television in sight. It was great to see the kids being typical here. So often they are trapped in a never ending cycle of cycle of school, studying, and hagwon, that they rarely get to be outside, running and enjoying the fresh air.

The festival itself was pretty cool. There were parts of it that showed what people in this part of the world did for thousands of years such as the drumming, which was really neat, and the alter of offerings that was bowed before by a line of women wearing white. Watching this, not really knowing what it all meant, I felt that this old spirit world that I was seeing was really a vision of what life must have been like for thousands of years, for people all over the world.

The reset of the festival, outside of the drumming and dancing, that did not go on for very long, seemed like a celebration of traditional life. There was archery, albeit with plastic bows and arrows, kids playing on stilts, and a tug of war contest, and everywhere you looked, were people in traditional costumes. It was a pretty neat day.

Cherry Trees

One of the really beautiful things that happens in Northeast Asia in the spring is the almost mystical flowering of the cherry blossom trees. Every year, without fail, as soon as the weather warms and the chill of winter has been chased away, the white flowers start to appear on the trees that are scattered throughout China and Japan.
The first thing you notice is that little pink buds start to appear on the ends of the trees and in the nodules of the branches. Then, ever so slowly, as the wather warms a few degrees more, there appears a white flower. First just one or two but after three days whole trees and groves of the winding trunks are covered with the white petals.
It doesnt last long, this display of nature, one week, maybe ten days at the most, but while it is here people travel from all over by bus and car, loading up the whole family, just to see these white flowers.

The Coming of Spring

The Coming of Spring

1.4.07

Pictures

1. A magnolia tree in almost full bloom. Look at the colour of the sky and notice the yellow hinge, the haze, this my friends, is a prime example of yellow dust.

2. Coming out of a tunnel in the foothills of the mountians I miracously found the road free of cars and was able to snap this picture of some sort of yellow flowers that lined the road.

3. The start of the cherry blossom bloom

4-5. Early spring flowers

The first thing that I do every morning, as most of us do, is sit up and fling open the curtains to check the weather. I, like almost every other human being, want to know if the day is cloudy or sunny, and from this information I plan my activities for the day.

Today I followed my usual routine, a little later than usual, it was Sunday after all, and looked out of my window to a strange sight.

It seemed to me that an eerie sort of twilight had descended on the little town of Sokcho. Everywhere I looked was this pale, sickly, mustard yellow; there was no sun, no cloud, just this ugly haze covering the city. Odd really considering that there is almost no heavy industry here in town to cause such a massive level of pollution on this scale.

When I looked down from my sixth floor window to the parking lot below I saw that this strange yellow hue did not affect just the air. The cars, lined up in their semi-neat rows, were covered with a fine yellow dust. When I got down to the parking area and ran my hands over them they came away tinged with a pale, gritty, yellow, substance, almost like……..sand!

There kids, is the answer, the yellow grit, the haze in the sky, the lack of sun, and the low clouds, well, they were all the gift of China to Korea, yellow dust.

Yellow dust comes to us from the great, open, sandy expanses of the far western edge of China, the Gobi desert. After the cold of the winter leaves the soil, winds whip the yellow dust into a frenzy and push it ever eastward. Along the way, luckily for us in Korea, it sweeps over the massive mega cities that line the eastern edge of China, and picks up all sorts of heavy metals and pollutants from the mass industrialization programs that are taking place along the rivers and seas of the great country of China.

As the wind blows eastward, towards Korea, it sweeps across the Yellow Sea, carrying all of the topsoil, heavy metals, and manufacturing by-products that it has picked up along the way. By the time it reaches the western shore of the Korean peninsula the dust has became laden with all the great things that China is giving to the rest of Asia.

The first you hear of it is on T.V. as the warnings and dangers of the yellow dust storm are broadcast for everyone to hear, then the masks come out and everyone stays indoors to weather the storm, everyone, that is but me, who thought it was a fine time to head out and shoot some pictures of spring flowers.