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Goyang KB V Yongin City, Saturday 16th April 2011, 7pm

April 29, 2011

This was another Seoul based day, with some walking in the morning and a football game in the evening. Jen and I went back to the Achasan and Yongmasan mountains that we’d hiked up the previous week, but started at the other end this time for a bit of variation. Actually I’m not really sure what constitutes a mountain, these are only 287m and 348m high respectively so probably hill is a better description.

We were able to retrace our route from a week earlier, starting at Gwangnaru subway on Line 5 and walking through a park, then alongside the two thousand year old wall for a while. The route was even busier than the previous week with a number of hiking groups and most of Seoul’s pensioners out for a stroll.

I think some of them had been walking the route before the wall was built.

We passed the ice cakee man at the top of Achasan again and then pressed on to Yongmasan. The views of the city were a whole lot better than the previous week when the yellow dust had obscured all but the closest landmarks.

Instead of dropping down towards Yongmasan subway we took an alternative route towards, I think, Mungusan. It was difficult to see where the route was leading as it descended quite steeply. Some of the sections required the use of ropes and handrails and it was a lot more awkward way down than the more popular trail that we’d came up had been.

My office is out there somewhere.

We’d walked a lot quicker than the week before and despite covering a greater distance we were off the hill less than three hours after setting out. The extra time that we had in hand was quite useful as getting to Goyang is probably more of a trek than the hiking had been. Once we’d got onto Line 3 we had thirty stops to sit through until we reached Daehwa, the station right at the end of the line. It took us about an hour and a half in total and we arrived with just over an hour to spare before the 7pm kick-off.

Goyang’s stadium is pretty close to the subway and as we’d spotted it soon after coming out of the exit we had time for something to eat before the game. We popped into a place that was more like a café than a restaurant and got some of those steamed dumplings. I hadn’t realized that you could get Kimchi flavour mandu and having tried some I’d say that I prefer them. They are just that little bit spicier than the regular ones. The total bill only came to five thousand won which made me feel as if I should have been wearing a stocking over my head.

Goyang Stadium

It continued to be a cheap night out as the football was free to get in. When we passed through the entrance we were asked to add our names and phone numbers to a list. I assumed that it was some sort of visitor’s book or maybe an attempt to build up a marketing database. I was wrong though. It was the list of people who would provide the half-time entertainment on the pitch. With that in mind I thought I’d better warm up with a bit of target practice nearby.

"Gareth, why didn't you blast it, dear?"

I failed to get the ball through any of the holes, but was given bottles of shampoo and conditioner as a consolation prize. I tend to find that conditioner isn’t strictly necessary for me these days.

The stadium was very impressive. It was far too impressive for a team at National League level though. When you only get crowds of around two hundred people then a forty two thousand capacity ground seems a touch excessive.  Yongin provided eight of the total attendance. Fewer away fans than players but more than the substitutes seems to be a reasonable yardstick at this level.

Five eighths of the Yongin hardcore.

The generous hospitality continued and we were given a football and then had our photograph taken by the official Goyang bloke with a Polaroid camera. I struggle to understand why the crowds are so low really. It seemed ideal for keeping the kids amused.  A bloke can bring his kids for a free evening out, get their photo taken, let them run amok with a free football amongst the empty stands whilst he watches the match and then return home with a bag of assorted hair products to keep the missus sweet. Why wouldn’t you?

It was a fairly cagey first half, although that might have been expected with this being a game between the top two teams in the division, both of them unbeaten so far this season. Neither keeper had a shot to save and it was scoreless at the interval.

The view from our seats.

Mind you, when I say that neither keeper had a shot to save that may not be completely true. I missed the last ten minutes of the half due to making my way around to the other side of the ground after Jen got the phone call summoning me for the half time entertainment. I’d hoped that it would be penalties as even allowing for me wearing normal shoes rather than trainers I’d have been reasonably confident about not making an arse of myself. It wasn’t though. The challenge that we would face would be to try and score from the centre circle without the ball bouncing on the way in to the net.

"Did you definitely sign the medical disclaimer?"

I was asked a couple of questions beforehand, including my age, which seemed to impress the crowd. Possibly they admired the self-delusion of the old bloke. If only they knew that I’d have been just as unlikely to have scored whilst in my prime. The best I can say for my effort is that I didn’t fall over and it won yet another consolation prize. A pair of white sports socks this time.

The second half was more of the same, plenty of chances but without anyone ever really troubling the keeper and at the final whistle both sides had preserved their unbeaten records in a goalless draw. Yongin remained top of the table whilst Goyang slipped to fourth.

Goyang almost snatch a late winner.

Meanwhile for those of you keeping up with the Lion King, Jeonbuk had been playing Gangwon at home earlier in the day. Lee Dong Gook scored his fourth goal in seven games in a 6-1 victory to move them up into fifth place in the table, four points behind leaders Pohang.

Posted in Football, Hiking | 2 Comments »

Nexen Heroes v Lotte Giants, Saturday 9th April 2011, 5pm

April 18, 2011

One of the things that I’ve decided to do more of this year is to visit places in Seoul. When the time comes to leave Korea it would be a shame if I’d spent so much time traveling around the rest of the country that I hadn’t seen very much of the city that I had lived in. With that in mind, I’ve been eyeing up a few of the various mountains within the city. Some of them, like Bukhansan, are pretty well known, but there are plenty of less familiar ones as well.

On Saturday Jen and I went for a walk up a couple of the hills that are over in the East of the city, Achasan and Yongmasan. They aren’t particularly high at 287m and 348m respectively, but combined with a trip to the Mokdong baseball stadium for the visit of Lotte Giants it made for a decent day out.

We got the subway to Yongmasan on Line 7 and it was easy enough to find the park that the trail to the top starts from. There was a football match going on in the park that was probably a school game, as the players all looked to be about sixteen. It was well organised though for a game at that level with the ref and his linesmen all dressed in regulation fluorescent kit. The pitch was in the shadow of the hill, with some quite Braga-esque cliff faces providing a very pleasant backdrop.

Not much space for a grandstand.

We watched the game for a few minutes before pushing on further up the trail. Just around the corner is a man-made waterfall that I read somewhere is the biggest one around. I can’t remember if it is the biggest one in Asia or just the biggest in that end of the park. Sorry. Anyway it wasn’t turned on so the effect was somewhat less impressive than it might have been.

Fake waterfall.

The views of Seoul weren’t a great deal better than the turned-off waterfall. It was a muggy day and there was a fair amount of that yellow dust hanging over the city. The path was busy though, Yongmasan is quite a popular place at this time of year, mainly I think, because of some of the purple flowers that line the trail.

We got to the top easily enough, although I wouldn’t like to have tried to find somewhere to sit down. There were dozens of people up there, picnicking, exercising on the equipment provided or taking photos of each other. We went for the latter option, although the bloke who took the photo managed to give me the sort of flat top to my head that would be ideal for resting a beer on.

There is a whole city somewhere behind us.

 I was tempted to have a go on the giant hula hoop, but I suspect that it involves a fair bit of skill.

Korean style Hula Hooping

It was about another hour’s walk to Achasan where there was a burial mound at the top that looked so new that I reckon the relatives will still have  had their black ties on. A bit further along was an old fortress wall that I grudgingly accepted might just be reasonably original. There was also a bloke selling ‘ice cakee’ which looks and tastes just like ice cream but has the benefit of a much better name.

Achasanseong - A two thousand year old fortress wall.

By the time we got down from Achasan and found Gwangnaru subway station we had spent three and a half hours wandering around. It’s an enjoyable route and our plan is to return and walk it in the reverse direction but with the addition of another hill that should extend the walk by another hour or two.

Next up was Nexen Heroes against Lotte Giants at the Mokdong stadium over in the West of the city. Gwangnaru and Mokdong are both on Line 5 of the subway but unfortunately they are twenty six stops apart. The carriage was crowded but we eventually got seats and arrived at the stadium with around half an hour to spare. There were a lot of food sellers outside and as I’d only had the ice cakee since breakfast  I was keen to get something to eat. It was all fried chicken though and that can be a bit of a gamble at the baseball. Some of the vendors were selling it in pizza style boxes which would raise my hopes before I’d discover that it was actually just more chicken.

We didn’t have much better luck in getting one of the good seats near the plate where you sit at a table. They were all sold out. In the end we just got the fifteen thousand won general admission tickets and found ourselves a pair of seats to the left of the action. With no pizza available we eventually settled for a box of fried chicken that seemed just that bit too soft to me. Perhaps it was undercooked or possibly it had just been too long in the box. Either way, the one piece that we each had was probably one too many.

The Nexen Bullpen raring to go.

The beer was ok though. They had draft that they had pre-poured into unlabeled litre plastic bottles. It’s the sort of thing that my daughter would probably describe as ‘scruffy’ had she seen it, but it went down very nicely.

The baseball season is only a week old and this was the first game we had been to since October.  I struggled a bit to remember a lot of what I’d learnt last year and so tended to concentrate on enjoying sitting in the sun with the beer.  The cheerleaders were of interest though and the bloke who tries to get the crowd singing had a new coat. I doubt he will be wearing that in a month or two when its a bit warmer.

Nice coat.

Each team is allowed two foreign players and one of them, Nexen’s Cory Aldridge, was fielding just in front of us. I looked him up on the internet and he has had a couple of short spells in the American Major League. He played a handful of games and from what I can work out the highlight was that on one occasion he managed to hit the ball far enough to be able to run to third base. Although I don’t know if he got all the way to third base in one go or whether he had to gradually make his way there.

Cory Aldridge - Nexen Heroes

I’m going to try and identify some of the more notable players this year and focusing on the foreigners seems like an easy place to start. We didn’t stay until the end of the game though as after a couple of hours it had turned cold and we’d had enough. Six innings was sufficent for the first game of the season, particularly after the hiking and lack of edible food.

As often happens, it all got a bit more lively after we had left. Nexen extended their lead from a narrow 5-4 to a much more emphatic 12-6 final score with Cory Aldridge surpassing his MLB achievement by scoring his team’s only home run.

Posted in Baseball, Hiking | 32 Comments »

Seongnam Ilhwa Chumna v Busan I’Park, Sunday 3rd April 2011, 5.15pm

April 10, 2011

I like walking to the match. When I was a kid we would often walk from Norton to Ayresome Park, mainly because if we did have enough money for the bus fare it seemed a shame to waste it on taking the bus when you could buy a chip butty with it instead.

Going to a game was quite a cheap day out in those days, even more so when we would get in for free as a reward for selling Golden Goal tickets outside the stadium. You needed to sell fifty of them to get a complimentary ticket and it wasn’t too difficult. A penny and a half commission on each sale meant that we would invariably buy more chips on the way home too.

Happy days.

On the days when walking seemed like too much effort we would try to hitch a lift as we walked alongside the A19. Traffic must have been a bit less hectic back in the late seventies as it hardly seems possible that a car would be able to stop on that stretch of road these days. I once hitched to a home game from Mickleton in Teesdale where we had a caravan. That took quite a while as I had to walk through both Barnard Castle and Darlington to resume my quest for a lift at the right end of the town. I think it was about eleven o’clock at night before I got back to the caravan site.

That 'star jumper' probably won't have helped with the hitching.

I was actually back up that way a couple of weeks ago as my son and I were fishing at Grassholme Reservoir. It was an enjoyable afternoon out but the fishing was too easy. The water must have just been re-stocked as we were pulling out a trout every ten minutes or so. In the end we switched from powerbait to worms just to try to delay reaching the catch limit.

It was easier than shooting them in a barrel.

I’ve walked to the Riverside Stadium a few times too. I follow the same route as I did going to Ayresome Park thirty years ago as far as the Newport Bridge, although the prison wasn’t there in those days. It takes about an hour and a half of walking time but as I tend to call into the bookies and a pub or two on the way, I’ll usually set off about three hours before kick-off.

Seongnam’s stadium is alongside the Tancheon River and Jen and I had talked previously about walking along it from Seoul to Bundang. We’d actually intended doing it in earlier this year but missed a fork in the river and ended up in Gwacheon instead. Now that we knew where to bear left it seemed a good idea to combine the walk with going to Seongnam’s game with Busan I’Park.

It takes about forty minutes to reach the Tancheon from my apartment in Yeoksam, the best bit of that journey being when you can look down on what appear to be quite large carp underneath the bridge near Sports Complex. They just seem to sit on the bottom of the shallow water with their noses pointing upstream.

You have to look closely, but there are fish there.

Once we had successfully negotiated the fork in the river we found ourselves walking along the course of a marathon. The runners were at around the twenty mile stage, but most of them looked as if they were likely to finish. We stopped for a while to eat the Blackwell’s midget pork pies that I’d brought to Seoul on my return from the UK the week before. It was quite a strange feeling eating something from my local butcher’s six thousand miles from where it was made. Blackwell’s is pretty good, but when I was a kid we’d get our pork pies from London’s who had a shop a little further down the High Street. It might be just nostalgia, but I think they were better. London’s must have been closed for over twenty years now I’d have thought. It became an undertakers for a while where I imagine that the meat hooks came in handy and it’s currently a photographers studio where there is probably less of a use for them.

There weren't too many runners.

Whilst I’m on the pork pie theme I’ll just mention that whilst on a flight with my daughter a few years ago I needed to go to the toilet just as the drinks trollies were being wheeled down the aisle.

“Do you want me to get you something?” she asked.

“Yes please” I replied, “I’ll have a pork pie and a Magnum.”

She asked as well, bless her. Apparently they had none left.

Anyway back to the walk along the Tancheon. It’s actually not quite as picturesque as the walk to Gwacheon that we ended up doing a few weeks earlier by mistake. We saw a few fishermen but not a lot of wildlife.

They would have been better off fishing from that earlier bridge.

What we did see though were dozens of small dogs being carried or occasionally walked by their owners. Pug crosses seem to be quite popular, although perhaps I just notice them more as my daughter has a pug.

I know, I know.

We saw one that looked like it had been crossed with a chicken. A Chug, perhaps.

Definitely a pug's head, but with a chicken's tail feathers.

Another was half pug, half dragon I think. Possibly a Drug.

A pug's tail this time, but a fire-breathing mouth.

We reached Seongnam’s ground after about four hours walking and had probably done around ten miles. We still had a couple of hours to go until kick-off though so we pressed on a little further before stopping for something to eat and drink a couple of miles beyond the stadium. When we returned at 5pm there were large queues at the ticket office and it took us fifteen minutes to buy our nine thousand won tickets.

It seemed as if the entire crowd was in the queue.

Once inside it was a pleasant surprise to discover that the game hadn’t yet begun. I doubt that the start was delayed specifically for us, but it would have been a shame if we had missed the kick-off after setting off more than six hours in advance.

The game was ok, Seongnam were dressed up as Watford, whilst Busan were wearing Poland strips. The playing surface was poor though. Every time a player made contact with the ball sand would spray upwards from the pitch. My suspicion is that the Moonie-owned club has been holding too many mass weddings on the pitch.

A chance that came to nothing.

The East Stand was quite full and I’d have estimated the total crowd at about two thousand.  Seongnam were missing Dzenan Radoncic who might have made a difference in a goalless first half. Cho Dong Cheon broke the deadlock a few minutes after the interval to put the home side a goal up and it was quickly followed by another from Hong Chul a couple of minutes later.

This wasn't one of the goals.

And that was it, a two-nil home win that lifted Seongnam up to tenth and left Busan one place off the bottom. We decided that it was probably wise to take the subway back to Seoul.

Posted in Football, Hiking | 13 Comments »

Seoraksan Hiking, 1st April 2011

April 7, 2011

One of the things that I like about Korea is that I often get a day off work for what I see as no good reason. Last week, for example, we were all given Thursday off because it was the Company’s birthday. Perfect, don’t you think? Well no actually, perfect is when they give you the Friday off as well because it falls between two days when you are not at work. It’s known as a Sandwich Day.

With no sport to watch, I thought I’d use the two bonus days to do some hiking and I headed for Seoraksan National Park. Seoraksan is over in the North East of the country, not far from the border with North Korea and is home to the third highest mountain over here, the 1708m Daecheongbong. My plan was to tackle that one and spend a night in one of the shelters up in the hills.

I’d had a bit of a heavy evening on the Wednesday though and it was lunchtime before I got to the Express Bus Terminal. I caught the one o’clock bus to Sokcho and two and a half hours later I was at the seaside.

Sokcho

I did consider spending the night at Sokcho and having a proper look around but after half an hour of wandering around the beach area it seemed that the only entertainment was groups of teenagers throwing each other into the sea. There’s a limit to how long that can keep me amused and as half an hour exceeded it I decided to move on to the National Park instead. A fifteen minute taxi ride took me to the Mt. Seorak Tourist Hotel, which is the only hotel that is actually inside the National Park.

One of those rooms was mine.

The bloke on the front desk was extremely helpful as he explained that all of the trails from that end of the park that went anywhere near Daecheongbong were currently closed. This severely limited my options and as all I was left with were a few small hikes I decided to forget about overnight shelters and instead I booked in for two nights so that I could leave my backpack in the room the next day. I got an off-season rate of 65,000 won per night for a double room with a balcony and a view of the big hill opposite.

The hotel fella also pointed out that despite it being close to five o’clock I would still have time, if I was quick, to make my way to the Biryeong waterfall and back before it got dark. The trail took me through the woods for about two and a half kilometres, passing a couple of cafes that sold home-made wine. There was still a small amount of snow on the ground as I gained a little bit of height, but it wasn’t too difficult keeping my footing.  The waterfall was fairly unusual, long and thin, it would definitely be ‘white knuckle’ if it were a theme park log flume. As I followed the downward progress of individual leaves I did wonder whether some of the water molecules would eventually get more than one go on it and concluded that eventually they probably would. The best part of it all though was that there was no-one else there. The main entrance area to the park had still been pretty busy, particularly with school parties, but anyone who had wanted to visit this waterfall must have done so earlier in the day.

Bigfoot.

I sat around for about twenty minutes, enjoying being there without swarms of other hikers and then made my way back as the daylight faded. The hotel has a restaurant, so I had dolsot bibimbap for my tea before sitting out on the balcony.

The next morning I was up early as my plan was to make my way to the top of the 875m Ulsanbawi and I thought it would be a lot more enjoyable if I could do it before the crowds arrived. By just after seven I had passed the big Buddha statue and reached Sinheungha Temple where I paused for a quick look around. The monks must have still been in bed as the place was deserted.

Sinheungha Temple

A little further along I met four hikers who I presumed were on their way down after seeing the sunrise at the summit. They were the only people who I saw though apart from three blokes who were carrying stacks of boxes for the trailside cafes on their backs. Ulsanbawi is famous for being a bit of a slog with plenty of stairways providing easier access than would otherwise be available. It was fairly straightforward though and an hour and a half after setting off I was at the top.

Looking 'Northish' from the top of Ulsanbawi

The actual summit area was a bit of an anti-climax, being fairly small with the views to the West obscured by a tarpaulin barrier. The views to the other sides were ok though and again it was great to have the place to myself. I spent about half an hour at the top before making my way back down. The trail was a lot busier by that time with a few family groups and a couple of large school parties making their way up.

I paused for a cup of coffee by the side of the trail and watched as people trudged up one of the staircases that was visible from below.

Ulsanbawi

Next I climbed to the top of Gwongeumseong fortress, which isn’t quite as impressive as it sounds as a cable car takes you to within fifty metres of the summit. Gwongeumseong fortress isn’t actually a fortress at all but a rock that could only be said to resemble a fortress if fortresses were actually made of stone and lacked any of the features that you would normally associate with them. I scrambled right to the very top, although no-one else did, probably because it was quite windy and I had to time my upward movements to coincide with the spells when the wind had dropped, Once there, I was able to sit by myself for twenty minutes looking down in to the valley with my hotel and the monastry in it and Ulsanbawi in the distance.

It's all down there.

In the afternoon I had a wander along to Geumgangul Cave. Most of the trails in that area were closed and I had to check with a Park Ranger to see how far along I would be allowed to go. The routes to Madeungryeong and the Cheondang Falls were both shut until mid-May leaving the cave as the only option.

The cave is the thing that looks like a hole.

The cave is positioned part of the way up a cliff face, but with plenty of staircases it is easily accessible. At the back of the cave there was a small temple and at the front of there was a woman dressed up in monk clothes talking loudly into her mobile phone.

Not the biggest temple I've been to.

As I hadn’t seen anyone else climbing the staircases I’d been looking forward to enjoying the solitude upon reaching the cave. I appreciate that expecting a monk to be observing a vow of silence is probably a bit too much to hope for these days, but yapping away non-stop into a mobile phone? FFS. If it had been me doing that in the temple at the bottom of the valley I’d have expected them to go all Ninja on me.

STFU.

I was at the cave for about ten minutes and she didn’t even seem to pause for breath. You know that way in which Koreans sometimes drag out the “aaar” sound at the end of a word as if their Dad was a pirate and their Mam came from Somerset? Well, that was her.”Ten under paaarrr, hit by a caaarrr, boiled in taaarrr”. She would have been boiled in taaarrr if I’d had anything to do with it. Eventually I left her to her one-sided conversation and set off back down the trail, where my mood was lightened by watching a chipmunk eating it’s lunch.

I love my new zoom lens.

Back at the hotel I took advantage of the balcony again and as it got dark I sank a few beers beneath the mountains that I’d sat on top of earlier in the day.

Posted in Hiking | 5 Comments »

Songnisan hiking, 12th February 2011

March 3, 2011

With the weather starting to warm up a little bit I thought I’d better get some more hiking in. I’d been away to Malaysia with Jen for the Lunar New Year and had probably eaten and drank more than was good for me. Not all of the food was particularly healthy either and the nearest that I got to a piece of fruit was buying it to feed to the monkeys.

I didn't have any cigars with me, so had to give him fruit.

I got to ride an elephant too, so there was the odd bit of physical exertion.

It's as uncomfortable as it looks.

However, good as all that was, if you want to be fit to walk up hills, then you have to walk up hills. So, I set my alarm for daft o’clock and by 5.45am I was on the subway. Half an hour later I was at Dong Seoul Bus Terminal where I discovered that the first bus to Songnisan didn’t leave until 7.30am. I could have had an extra hour in bed if I’d been a bit more organised. Whatever. I bought my ticket for sixteen thousand Won and loitered in a nearby coffee shop for an hour.

The bus was just about empty and arrived at Songnisan National Park three and a half hours later. Songnisan isn’t one of the more popular hiking destinations and a couple of Korean lads even went to the trouble of asking me how I knew the place existed. That’s the beauty of the internet I suppose. On those brief occasions when you need a break from football message boards and porn, there’s plenty of information to be found on places to hike.

There is a small town just outside the gates of the National Park with a wide main street a few hundred yards long and then a couple of smaller streets running parallel with it. With it being February though, the place was deserted and most of the shops were closed.

Songnisan, not the busiest place.

I had been hoping to buy some gimbap or something, but there wasnt very much available in the way of food so I ended up with a fake snickers bar and a packet of chocolate chip cookies. There was a bloke selling chestnuts just outside the park gates so I got a bag of those as well. Inside the park was a little bit busier, mainly because there is a temple at Beopjusa that was attracting coachloads of pensioners. As I was passing I had a wander in myself and whilst the temple was pretty much the same as all the others in Korea, there was a big gold statue of someone or other. The biggest in Korea apparently.

Beopjusa.

The hike itself was tough going in places as the terrain seemed to alternate between ice where I would wear my crampons and rock where I’d have to take them off again. At one point when I wasn’t wearing them I slipped and with one leg either side of a steel railing post I was about 6“ away from having to accept that my procreation days were over. A few minutes later I stopped at a hillside cafe where I got some pajeon, which is pancake with bits of onion in. The first one that I ate had already been cooked when I got there. It was cut into pieces and seemed to be quite oily.

I should have eaten the chocolate chip cookies instead.

The next one was freshly cooked and was much better, I also had some soup with some small white wrinkly objects in it that I hoped were dumplings but suspected might have been testicles. I did wonder if they had been harvested from hikers who had slipped on the same bit of path as I had. I limited myself to a scrotums worth and left the rest.

The route that I was following took me to the Munjangdae peak, which is 1054m high.

Munjangdae from a distance.

At the top, the final section of rock would be just about inaccessible without the staircase that someone had kindly installed. There was also a fence around the peak, presumably to stop hikers being blown into the surrounding valleys. The views in all directions were good though and despite the cold I spent about twenty minutes at the peak.

The view from the top of Munjangdae.

I came down via a different route taking in the 1031m Munsubong peak on the way. The ground conditions were just as mixed and about halfway down I caught a crampon on a root and pitched myself over the edge of the path. Fortunately I only fell about six feet, rolling a couple of times before another path broke my fall. I couldn’t have fallen much further anyway at that spot but if I’d tripped at some of the other more exposed places then it could have been a whole lot worse. Maybe those railings aren’t such a bad idea after all.

Another view from the top.

I seem to be falling over a lot more frequently these days. Perhaps its an age thing. I haven’t fully recovered yet from a slip at the Paul McCartney concert that I went to in December when I ended up flat on my back whilst going down the stairs. I took a real whack from about three separate stairs, winding myself and for a moment wondering if I’d lost the feeling in my legs. My chest still hurts when I sneeze.

This was about halfway down.

Anyway, this fall wasn’t too bad with just a few bruises to go with the odd blister that I got from walking in crampons on rocky ground.

I got back down to the town and eventually found a hotel that was open. I’m sure the place is vibrant in the summer but out of season it was deserted. I might very well have been their only customer and to help heat the room up I had to resort to turning on the electric blanket.

There were more cars than staff and guests.

Going out for something to eat was equally difficult as the town seemed to be closed. Eventually I got some fried chicken in a place that seemed to be cooking box after box without anyone ever coming in to eat or collect it.  I left after a couple of beers and there must have been twenty odd full boxes lined up on the counter.

The next morning I planned to try a different peak, the 1055m Cheonhwangbong and I set off back into the National Park at about 8.30am. I passed a frozen waterfall early on and was about 2.4 km from the top when I snapped one of the straps on a crampon.

Impressive, eh?

I struggled on without the crampons for a few more hundred metres, alway conscious that getting down again is a bit harder in icy conditions than going up. A couple of stumbles later and I called it a day, wondering to myself how far you should go in packing spare gear. More than the one pair of crampons seems over the top but if one breaks and the paths are solid ice then you are going to struggle.

I managed to get back down again without too many slips and caught a bus around lunchtime back to Seoul, this time to the Express Bus Terminal. I’ll probably go back to Songnisan in the summer when the place will be a lot livelier and I can leave the crampons at home.

Posted in Hiking | 2 Comments »

Chiaksan Hiking, Sunday 9th January 2011

January 28, 2011

I had a bit of time off over Christmas and managed to get back to the UK. It was fairly eventful with amongst other stuff a couple of Boro away games, a Paul McCartney gig at Liverpool, my son’s twenty-first birthday and the birth of my first grandchild.  With all that going on I didn’t manage to get any hiking in, so on my first weekend back in Korea I thought I’d have a walk up a hill.

I’d read on the internet that there was an Ice Festival taking place in Hwacheon which is in the North East of the country.  I quite fancied going to that as well and reckoning that I should be able to combine the two I got the bus on Saturday morning from Dong Seoul bus station.

One of the things that attracted me to the Ice Festival was the prospect of doing a bit of ice fishing. I’d seen it done on the Ural river when I’d worked in Atyrau, Kazakhstan a few years ago but I’d never had a go myself.  There were too many stories going around of fishermen disappearing through the ice to make it seem a sensible way to spend an afternoon.

Ice fishing at Atyrau, Kazakhstan.

It was really cold as I left Seoul, maybe -10 degrees and the sort of day where it’s tempting not to go out at all, particularly when you’ve had your apartment underfloor heating cranked up to the level where you need to wear two pairs of socks just to prevent your feet blistering.  It was starting to snow as well, with the fresh new flakes adding to the dirtier older stuff that had been there for a couple of weeks.  With it being so cold, the snow hadn’t really been melting away and the other night I’d watched a JCB scraping a pavement and depositing the snow onto the back of a lorry. I’m told that they sell it to the ski resorts.

The Han River was frozen over in parts and as the bus drove alongside I watched some kids playing football in the snow next to it. When I was a kid we didn’t let the snow stop us getting the football out either.  The novelty of throwing snowballs at passing cars would wear off after a day or so and three inches of snow just meant that the tricky ballplayers were less effective than usual whilst the rest of us revelled in attempting diving headers at every opportunity.

I got to Hwacheon at ten to two and asked at the tourist information desk for directions on getting to the Ice Festival. The woman gave me the dreaded crossed arms response and sheepishly pointed to a small poster on the wall beside me.  The 8th of January start date for the festival had been written over in black felt tip and now read the 15th.  Great, I’d travelled for three hours on the bus and the festival had been rescheduled to start a week later.

I couldn’t see a lot of point hanging about in Hwacheon, particularly if I was going to return at a later date for the Ice Festival and so ten minutes after arriving I was back on the bus and making my way towards Chuncheon, where I caught a bus to Wonju. I could have then got another bus and looked for a hotel at the base of Chiaksan, but by the time I’d got to Wonju I’d had enough of being driven around. I had a wander about, bought myself a pair of crampons and then checked into a hotel close to the bus terminal.

Wonju Hotel

I slept in the next morning and thought that rather than waste time looking and waiting for a bus I’d just get a taxi to the start of the trail. Twenty minutes and twenty five thousand won later I was at the entrance to the National Park. It was a fairly easy start to the trail and I was soon at Guryongsa Temple.

Guryongsa Temple

I’m not too impressed with most of the temples out here. They all seem very similar and this one was no different, just another big shed really. What did catch my attention though was a white rabbit sat nearby.  I’ve no idea if it was wild or whether it was fed by the monks, but it didn’t seem scared as I approached it.  I got to within about three or four feet of it and even then it didn’t seem bothered.

It was quite well disguised, really.

A bit further along I came to the Suryeom Waterfall. It is probably a bit more spectacular in the summer when there is actually water falling, but it was worth the slight detour to see it in its frozen state.

Suryeom Waterfall, it's probably better in the rainy season.

The trail got a bit steeper from this point and with the snow and ice underfoot I had to put my newly acquired crampons on. There were a few tricky sections where I had to haul myself up a rope or a railing, but there were also a few sections of stairway that made life a bit easier. The trail was probably one of the quieter ones that I’ve walked on in Korea, possibly the sub-zero temperature was keeping some of the hikers at home.  Almost four hours after setting off I reached the 1288m Birobong summit.

It was noticeably chillier without the protection of the trees and when I sat down to eat my lunch I nearly cracked a tooth on a Snickers Bar that had frozen solid.  My bottles of water had iced up too and by the time I came to drink the third one I had to push a plug of ice into the bottle. Even after giving it a good shake it was probably only half liquid.  The views from the top made up for the cold though.

Because of all the trees, you don't see much until you reach the top.

Birobong is famous for having three stone pillars that were built by a local baker in the 1960’s. I can’t quite see why he bothered, but a bloke needs a hobby and I suppose hauling rocks up a mountain is no worse than spending all day riding around on buses attending non-existent Ice Festivals.

Two of the three Chiaksan Pillars.

It took me about two and a half hours to get back down again, the crampons making it relatively easy. The rabbit had cleared off by the time I got to the bottom, but I suppose that it wasn’t really the weather for sitting about.

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FC Seoul v Jeju United, Sunday 5th December 2010, 2pm

December 14, 2010

Well, that’s it for this season. Nine months on from my first visit to the Sangam stadium to watch a rare home defeat for Seoul at the hands of Jeonbuk, I was returning for the final game of the campaign. Sadly Jeonbuk and Lee Dong Gook didn’t feature as their season had finished in the previous play-off round away at Jeju, so for those of you reading to keep up to date with the Boro’s best ever Korean striker, I suspect that he is away on his holidays by now. This game was the second leg of the play-off final with Seoul having managed to hold Jeju to a two all draw in the first leg four days earlier.

Normally I go to these games with Jen, but as the weather has turned decidedly colder over the last couple of weeks she didn’t fancy it. She’s from the deep south of America and I don’t think it ever drops below about eighty degrees farenheit over there. For those of you who need a bit of help with your geography, I think it’s the bit of America where True Blood is meant to be set and whilst there might be a vampire or two less in Jen’s town, I understand that the climate is similar to that of the tv show. In Seoul, during the summer when I’d have the sweat dripping off me within a minute of leaving my air-conditioned apartment, she would be debating how many jumpers to put on.

Last week we walked the final part of the Bukhansan Dullegil and to be fair, I did feel the cold a bit myself that day. There was a definite chill in the air that hadn’t been present earlier in the month when we’d walked the first two sections of the 45km circuit. Whereas normally I can just smell my breath, during that walk I could see it as well. The final stretch that we did was probably the most undulating so far though with plenty of steep sections to temporarily distract us from the cold.

We picked up the trail where we’d left it a fortnight earlier, somewhere after the Dullegil Trail Information Centre and we walked through the Seongbuk-gu area around to Seodamun-gu, finishing up at the Bulgwang subway station at the top of Line 6.

A bit of town and a bit of countryside.

The route of the Dullegil follows the edge of the national park and generally gives views of the hills in one direction and Seoul to the other. We passed a few interesting sights, including a couple of temples. I’m a bit bored with temples, to be honest, they all seem very similar to me. However, one of them gave us the opportunity to look down on to some of the housing on the outskirts of the city where one of the properties had a golf course, or at least a green complete with hole and flag, in its back garden. I can’t see that fella being too popular with his neighbours. Still, it will give the monks something to watch between prayers.

Probably a seven iron to reach the green from here.

As usual there was also plenty of outdoor exercise equipment near to the trail, along with a few badminton courts. One of the courts was hundred of yards away from the housing, high up in the woods. If it seemed an effort to get there for a knock-up, that was nothing compared to the measures that someone had gone to in actually building it. The available space hadn’t been sufficient and so the rock face had been cut away.

You may have to sweep the leaves away first.

I’d like to think that in order for a couple of housewives to be able to spend an hour or so gently tapping a shuttlecock backwards and forwards, someone had lugged explosives up the mountainside and blasted away a few tonnes of granite. It reminded me of that stadium in Braga, Portugal, where similar measures had been employed. Although I suspect building that one will have needed a few more sticks of dynamite.

I like this stadium.

Overall, I’d recommend the Bukhansan Dullegil. The woodland paths make for a pleasant walk and the sections that stray on to roads and pavements took us into a few areas of the city that we probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise. The next section opens up in the New Year and I’m looking forward to having a wander around that as well.

Right, back to the football. I met up with Iain and James before the game outside the GS convenience store next to the stadium. Football tends to make me as thirsty as hiking does and so I got myself a can of Max from a woman selling them from a cart nearby. If drinking cans outside of a shop isn’t scruffy enough then drinking cans outside of a shop that you’ve bought from a street vendor probably takes it to the required level. It’s quite commonplace over here though and most of the corner shops will have a table or two outside of them just in case you don’t want to wait until you get home to drink your beer.

The crowd makes its way towards the convenience store.

We had a bit of a chat about the forthcoming match and as they both know a lot more about Korean football than I do they filled me in on the politics of the game. I already knew that Seoul weren’t popular amongst Korean football supporters, mainly as a consequence of them gaining their place in the K League by taking over an existing team, Anyang, and after changing their name, relocating to the then-empty World Cup Stadium in Seoul. We’ve seen it in the UK with Wimbledon being stolen from their fans and being re-launched as MK Dons, so I could understand the depths of feeling against the new club.

Bands, beer and bouncy castles.

It turns out though that Jeju has a similar story as well and after a few years of nomadic wandering around Seoul they relocated from Bucheon to the island of Jeju four years ago. That’s some move. I’d say we are looking at three hundred miles and either a ferry trip or a flight if you want to travel from Seoul to see them play. I’ve not been to Jeju yet, nor Bucheon for that matter, but I have seen a couple of the stadiums that Jeju had played in previously.  They played at Mokdong for four years up to the turn of the century and a few months ago I found myself looking at their former ground whilst at the baseball.

That's the football stadium in the background.

Before that, they had spent four years at Dongdaemun Stadium. There’s not much left of this one these days after the ground was knocked down to make way for a park.  For some unknown reason though, unknown to me anyway, a couple of the floodlights were retained.

It must be a little strange for fans to stand in the park and remember it as it was.

So, where as most games involving Seoul are seen by the neutrals as a fairly straightforward battle of good v evil, this one was more a case of northern evil against southern evil.  We went into the away end, just as I’d done on my last visit and lent our support to the baddies from out of town.

There was a decent turnout, or at least there was by the time everyone got in there.  People were still arriving well into the second half, but that’s not unusual over here.  A lot of the schools in Seoul had been selling half price tickets and this was reflected in a crowd of what must have eventually reached somewhere near the 45,000 mark.

View from the Jeju end.

The first half was pretty eventful. The highlight for me being when Seoul set off their fireworks behind the goal in celebration of a ‘goal’ that was then disallowed a few seconds later. In terms of real goals, Jeju got the first with a long-range shot that the Seoul keeper should have done a little better with. 

Jeju takes the lead.

 It didn’t matter though as within a couple of minutes Seoul were awarded a dubious penalty which allowed them a second go at the fireworks.

The equaliser for FC Seoul.

The disputed spot kick infuriated the Jeju players and we got a couple of flare-ups afterwards, one of which had the referee, both linesman and one of the penalty box officials in the middle of it trying to restore calm whilst the other penalty box bloke loitered by himself on the half way line looking like a shy new kid in the school playground.

It remained level on aggregate at half time, although had it stayed that way Seoul would have won on ‘away goals’.  The second half saw both sides pushing forward and Seoul got the winner from an Edilson header fifteen minutes from time.  I’d been surprised to see him playing as when I’d been here a few weeks earlier it looked as though he was on his way back to Brazil with a season ending injury.  There had been a centre-circle presentation to him on that occasion and the crowd had worn masks with his face on them. It was quite disconcerting leaving that game and being confronted by a crowd of  ‘Edilsons’ coming the other way.

Second half pressure from FC Seoul.

And so that was that. We got the music, the fireworks and the presentation of the trophy as the season finally ended.  I’ve really enjoyed it, the football might not always have been top class and the stadiums were rarely even half full, but it’s given me an excuse to travel around the country with something as near as I’m likely to get to a sense of purpose.  I’ve been to thirty odd games in the nine months since that first visit to the Sangam stadium back in March and it would have been a lot more if I hadn’t caught the baseball bug during the summer. Actually it would have been more if some of the games hadn’t been switched to different stadiums at the last minute without me knowing.  Still, thats the way it works over here and its all part of the sense of it being different that keeps it interesting.

I suppose they have three months to clear up the mess.

Next season starts in March and my plan is to carry on with more of the same.  There are twenty odd teams that I haven’t paid a visit to yet, each hopefully with something interesting going on in their town. In the meantime, I’ll be filling the close season with a bit of hiking and some trips to the races and the basketball.  Maybe even the odd game of badminton.  It would be rude not to after the efforts they go to in building the courts.

Posted in Football, Hiking | 45 Comments »

Samcheok v Gyeongju Citizen, Saturday 13th November 2010, 2pm

November 18, 2010

I haven’t seen very much of the third division whilst I’ve been here which surprises me a bit. If I’d had to forecast at the start of the season what I’d get up to I’d have thought my trips to matches would have been fairly equally spread amongst the divisions. But it hasn’t worked out that way and whilst I’ve been to almost all of the top division stadiums I’ve only managed to get to a single K3 game so far.

I had an opportunity to double my tally for the season last Saturday though as it was the first leg of the K3 Play-off final, with Samcheok hosting Gyeongju Citizen. Samcheok is quite a trek from Seoul and I remembered it from spending an hour or so there a few months ago when I changed buses on the way to the Hwanseon Cave.

Hwanseon Cave

But, you have to be somewhere, and whilst a four and a half hour journey each way to watch two poor teams contest a match where I had little interest in the outcome seems a bit of an odd way to spend a day, it does have its plus points.

Apart from enjoying watching live football, I quite like the traveling. The buses are comfortable with wide single seats and I tend to alternate between reading a book and looking at some fantastic scenery. This journey went through the mountains, where I saw plenty of graves in the hillsides and as I got close to Samcheok, which is on the east coast of Korea, I had some decent views of the sea.

As we drove along the seafront I did think that maybe I should have made this a weekend trip and seen a bit more of the area, but I’d already arranged to do a bit of hiking with Jen the next day. We’d walked the first fifteen kilometres of the Bukhansan Dullegil the week before and I was looking forward to doing the next fifteen or so. Actually, I’ll fill you in on how the hike went now and then get back to the football. I think these things read a bit better if they finish off with the match.

So, on the previous week’s hike we had ended up north of Sangbangjong, where the path turns to the east in the direction of Gangbuk-gu.

Bukhansan Dullegil

Our plan for the second leg had been to get the 704 bus from Gupabal subway station back to where we had left the trail and then hike through the valley towards Gangbuk –gu. We would then carry on beyond the Information Centre until we found a convenient point to leave the trail having done somewhere around fifteen kilometres.  This would mean that we could complete the 44km trail on a third visit. Unfortunately plenty of other hikers had the same plan and the buses all seemed too full to even bother trying to get into them. We took a taxi instead and beat the crowds.

It was fortunate that we did get there before the buses as when we passed the Park Ranger Post we were stopped and told it was reservations only to go beyond that point. Again we were in luck as that day’s quota hadn’t been reached and we were given a slip of paper and waived through. Fifty yards up the road we reached another checkpoint, this time manned by a couple of soldiers complete with tin hats. They seemed content to let the Rangers do all the work and didn’t even come out of their sentry hut.

Some of the peaks that we saw from the valley were spectacular, with rocks on the top that looked likely to fall if given the slightest touch. Perhaps that was why we couldn’t see anyone on those hills.

Bukhansan rocks.

As far as wildlife went, we didnt see much. There were plenty of signs telling us of the various species that lived in the area, but all that we spotted were a couple of dogs that weren’t very wild at all.

Bukhansan wildlife

The section of the trail where entrance was restricted was a very pleasant walk, with far fewer hikers than we’d seen on the rest of the trail. The woods were close to a couple of military bases and it looks as if they had used the area for training. We passed a watchtower and a small parade ground and at one point along the route there were anti-tank defences.

Anti-tank defences. Or something.

Once we got to the other side of the valley the route skirted the edges of the city. Whilst I’m happier being up in the hills this did have its advantages, mainly that I could forget about the roll of gimbap that I’d packed for lunch and get something a little better. We went into a restaurant that specialised in mutton and had barbecued lamb chops instead. I can’t think of a single hike I’ve ever done that wouldnt have been improved by stumbling across a restaurant that allows you to barbecue lamb chops at lunchtime.

We did pass a few other restaurants along the route, quite a few of them having signs outside informing passers-by that they specialised in the combination of dog and duck. As The Dog and Duck is quite a popular name for a pub in the UK, I was amused by the prospect of a Korean visitor to the UK seeing the pub sign and popping in for some familiar food.

In the afternoon we walked on for about another three hours, passing a cemetery dedicated to the victims of the 19th April 1960 massacre of protesters by soldiers.

April 19th Cemetery

We couldn‘t get into the cemetery from the trail, but there was an observation point that gave us a good view of it from up on the hillside. I’m not quite sure exactly where we left the trail later in the day, but hopefully we will manage to find our way back to complete the final section.

Right, back to the football. I’d left the Seoul Express Bus Terminal at half past nine in the morning and I didn’t get to Samcheok until ten to two in the afternoon. The bus had about ten passengers on it to start with, but then dropped most of them off at Donghae, which is a town just along the coast from Samcheok and as it has a beach and a harbour it looks like somewhere worth visiting. Mind you, after four hours on a bus, even  places like Billingham start to look like they are tourist hotspots.

As we approached Samcheok I spotted the football ground on the outskirts of the town. A little further along the route I also noticed a banner advertising the game. The good news was that I’d got the date right. However I hadn’t been quite so precise with my understanding of the kick-off time. I was under the impression that it was a three o’clock start, whilst the banner had it down as 2pm. As it was already ten to two and I wasn’t yet at the bus terminal that wasn’t the best development.

It worked out ok though. When I got off the bus I was fortunate enough to get into a taxi whose driver knew where the football stadium was and I arrived at the ground a couple of minutes after kick-off.

Samcheok Football Stadium

It was free to get in and you just sat where you liked. Mind you, as the total attendance in the fifteen thousand capacity stadium was no more than about one hundred and fifty people, it wasn’t a fixture where much stewarding was required.

One of the teams was wearing a red strip, the other was in white. I had no idea which team was which and as the half went on I didn’t really get any wiser. I think that I was sat with the Samcheok fans, although as they weren’t wearing any colours and with most of them seeming to cheer everything that was going on regardless of who did it, I couldn’t be absolutely certain.

The chants were led by a bloke with a drum who appeared to have brought a class or two of schoolkids with him.As he banged the drum they would chant each players name in turn. Occasionally he would vary the routine by giving the drum a rest and by hitting an iron railing with a saucepan instead.

Samcheok supporters.

The stadium was quite typical of older Korean grounds. It was oval shaped, with a running track and with a small covered stand along part of one side. The remainder of the oval was uncovered terracing. Where it did differ from other places was the playing surface. It was grass, which isn’t too unusual, but it was yellow grass, which tends to be a bit rarer. Particularly as we are only a few weeks past an uncommonly lengthy rainy season.

Maybe a little watering might be an idea.

It was a fairly typical first leg, with both sides not wanting to give too much away. There were a few running personal battles between the players which were making the play a bit niggly and the number nine for the white team was spoken to a couple of times for not disguising the sly digs at his marker a bit more professionally.

At half time I nipped outside and after being given a free coffee I bought a hot dog in a bun that had been inserted onto a stick and then deep fried. It tasted as bad as you would expect it to. I decided I would watch the second half from the other side of the covered stand and so I made my way past the main entrance. I was surprised to see eleven brand new bikes lined up by the front door, hopefully they would be the prize for the winning team. I’m sure that they would be a lot more use than a medal. Back in the nineteen seventies I can remember the winners of the League Cup getting a tankard each rather than a medal, but a bike would be even better, although I’m not sure about the practicalities of doling them out from the Royal Box and then having to manhandle them back down the Wembley steps again. It would make the lap of honour that bit quicker though.

Bikes outside the main entrance.

As I took my seat for the second half I noticed that I was now sat with the other set of fans. I was fairly sure that this lot were supporting Gyeongju, who by now I had concluded were the team in white. Gyeongju is a town from a lot further down the coast. I was there a couple of months ago with Jen, after we had been to a barbecue out in the countryside nearby. It has some old tombs in a park that looks like teletubbyland and every second shop sells nothing but barley bread.

Gyeongju

The Gyeongju fans were as noisy as the Samcheok ones that I’d sat near in the first half. There were probably about thirty of them, although I did wonder if they had been expecting more when I saw the supplies that they had brought with them. Even though we were into the second half they still had cases of food and drink unopened. They looked a lot rougher than their Samcheok counterparts. Perhaps it’s a harder life in tellytubbyland. One of them, who I’ll call Tinky Winky, was leading the chanting. He didn’t have a drum or a saucepan, which is probably just as well, as judging from his looks I suspected that he was prone to smacking himself in the chops with a saucepan rather than banging it on the railings.

Gyeongju supporters

They had a chant that might have been “Gyeongju“, but it actually sounded more like “Dog Dirt“. I really hope that it was one of their players names.

Both sides had their chances, although I dont really remember either keeper making a save of note and the game finished up at 0-0.

View from the other side.

By this time I’d made a circuit of the terracing and ended up back where I’d started. In addition to the usual bowing I was treated to a salute from the Samcheok players.

Attenshuuun.

After the players had left the pitch most people wandered down onto the yellow grass for a raffle where just about everyone seemed to win a scarf, ball or a bike.

Everyone's a winner.

After a while I left them to it and walked back into town. It took me about half an hour to reach the bus terminal and ten minutes after that I was on my way back to Seoul.

Posted in Dead people and stuff, Football, Hiking | Leave a Comment »

Suwon Bluewings v Jeonbuk Motors, Sunday 7th November 2010, 3pm

November 14, 2010

This week saw the final round of matches in the K-League and I made my way down to Suwon for the visit of Jeonbuk. With it being an afternoon kick-off I did think about setting off early and doing a circuit of the fortress wall that surrounds the old city. I’d walked it in a clockwise direction before Suwon’s game against Daejeon Citizen earlier in the season and thought it would be interesting to see it from an anti-clockwise perspective.

I didn’t bother in the end though. I’d been hiking with Jen the day before and we had finished up later on in one of those barbecue restaurants where you cook your own food. This one was slightly different though as in addition to the pieces of meat, you also got an assortment of shellfish, fresh from the aquarium. I made a bit of an error in putting some of the more explosive ones straight onto the grill rather than keeping them in their loosely wrapped foil, but injuries were minimal. Apart from to the shellfish, of course, but they gave their lives in a good cause.

The hiking was interesting. Or it was to me. You will have to make your own mind up. I’d read about a new trail that had opened in the Bukhansan National Park and that circles around the main peaks and goes through some of the small villages, across some newly installed skywalks and along paths that had been closed to the public for over thirty years. The entire Dullegil circuit presently consists of 44km and we thought it would be ideal for getting around on three separate days out. For the first of these we set off from Bulgwang subway station and walked clockwise in the direction of Yangju-si.

This is the map, although we didn't bother with one.

During the fifteen kilometres that we walked we saw exactly what we had expected to as we moved from wandering though small groups of houses to heading up into the hills where we often looked down upon Seoul.

Somewhere along the route.

We occasionally passed graves and for those wishing to delay their eventual burial, exercise areas, including at one point a couple of badminton courts deep in the woods.

The exercise machines proved popular with the senior citizens.

If I had a criticism of the route it would be that some of  it was along the pavement next to a particularly busy road. It’s a shame that these sections couldn’t have been replaced  by a trail, maybe a hundred yards or so away from the traffic. The route was also very busy at certain points, some groups of hikers seemed to have upwards of  fifty or sixty people in them.

Another quiet day in the countryside.

We stumbled across some sort of gathering in the yard of what might have been a restaurant. I’m a bit vaguer than normal because I didn’t really know what was going on. However what I can say is that it involved a couple of women in tradition dress and a whole pig wrapped in not so traditional polythene. It reminded me of a party that I’d once ended up at in Loftus after an afternoon on the drink and so we sensibly kept our distance.

Not too bad a bacon sandwich.

It’s a popular season for hiking at the moment as it’s the time of year when the leaves change colour and drop off the trees. It’s a big deal here, with different regions touting themselves as the perfect place to see the multi-coloured foliage. The Tourist Office even publishes tables showing the dates when the views will be at their most spectacular for each park. Back home we just call it Autumn. There was the odd bit of wildlife about and we saw a squirrel and one of those little chipmunk things, but didn’t manage to spot any bears or wolves.

Dead leaves. Whoopy do.

Anyway, the cumulative effects of the hike and the subsequent beers that accompanied the explosive clams meant that I didn’t get around to walking around the Suwon Fortress Wall. I’m getting better at making my way to Suwon though and in a rare feat of co-ordination I took the subway to Sadang and then got off it to transfer to a bus that dropped me right outside of the Bluewings Stadium.

I still had a couple of hours to go before kick-off and so decided to get some lunch. There was a chinese restaurant nearby that looked like the sort of place that would have photos on its menu so I went in there. It did have some very small pictures of the food but unfortunately they were no help at all as I couldn’t recognise what any of them were. They were quite expensive as well compared to the items that didn’t have photos alongside them so I suspected that they were the set meals. I didn’t really want to order dinner for five people, and so I just pointed at one of the cheaper menu entries and hoped that I had actually selected some food rather than chosen from a list of delivery charges to various destinations. One of the staff was then given the task of  repeating the same Korean phrase over and over again, possibly in the belief that I spoke Korean but was just being stubborn in not answering. I hoped that she was querying my order rather than informing me that my trousers were on fire.

I resigned myself to receiving a bowl of plain rice at best, or if things went particularly badly wrong, maybe some raw kidney garnished with chicken eyeballs. The chef even came out of the kitchen to gawp at the foreigner, which left me in no doubt that I must have ordered the first lark’s tongue omelette that he had cooked in a decade.

When it arrived though, I was in luck. I’d got a spicy noodle soup with bits of seafood in, a few mussels, some octopus legs, that sort of thing. Very nice it was too. Not too many lark’s tongues or chicken’s eyeballs at all.

I was meeting some people before the game so I got a few cans of that Japanese beer in the silver tins and made my way up to the stadium to wait for them. They’ve got a few sculptures on the grass on the way in and a toilet block in the shape of a football.

Just in case you didn't believe me.

I found a table outside of a cafe and drank my beer whilst I watched the crowd turning up. There’s a stage about a hundred yards away from the cafe and a band that were due to perform after the match were setting up and playing the odd number. It was quite a pleasant way to while away a bit of time.

The stage is behind those people.

I’d been there for close to an hour when the lads I was meeting turned up and by that time I’d worked my way through the Japanese beer and had replenished my stocks with Cass from the cafe. I knew them from a football messageboard, but it was the first time I’d met them in real life and the plan was for them to record a brief chat with me to use on a podcast that they do. I wasn’t wholly convinced about the wisdom of this as they seem to know their stuff about Korean football and I found it hard to imagine what I could possibly say that would prove either interesting or informative to their listeners. I just turn up at games, wander about aimlessly with a can in my hand and then drift off home at the end hopefully after managing to establish which team was which. I briefly provided a segment on Spanish football for an American podcast a few years ago and just about killed that show off after three weeks. Still, I consoled myself with the thought that as it’s quite new they probably don’t have many listeners anyway, so I wouldn’t be wasting too many people’s time.

We recorded about four minutes of gibberish, which will no doubt sound like they selected a bloke to interview without first enquiring if he knew what football was, before going into the ground. I thought that I might as well just go into the Suwon end with them. Suwon has the liveliest fans I’ve seen over here, so I’d be able to stand all game, plus in the convoluted play-off permutations I was hoping that Jeonbuk would lose and be overtaken by Seongnam so that one of the midweek games would be in Seoul and not Jeonbuk.

I picked up a couple more beers and joined in as if I’d been a Suwon fan all my life. I suppose a perfect result would have been a high scoring win for the home team, with Lee Dong Gook rattling home a few for Jeonbuk. As expected the Suwon fans were pretty good and led by a band at the front plus blokes with megaphones, they really got behind their team.

Suwon supporters.

Their team though, was a lot less impressive. Eninho opened the scoring for Jeonbuk from a free kick early on and Lee Dong Gook soon added a second. Luiz Henrique made it three nil before half time.

Eninho finds the gap in the Suwon wall for the opener.

It didn’t really seem to bother the Suwon fans though and in a way I could see why. They had recovered from a terrible start to the season which had brought about the sacking of their manager, Korean legend Cha Bum Kun. It’s a great name, but how much better would it have been if his parents had given him the name Daf instead of Bum. Whilst Suwon hadn’t made the play-offs they had won the FA Cup a fortnight or so earlier and qualified for the Champions League. This game then was meaningless and just a chance for the fans to have a bit of fun before packing away their gear for the winter. As the second half started they unfurled a giant surfer over our heads that obscured the view of the pitch entirely. Probably for the best, I think, and anyway, it meant I didn’t miss anything as I nipped up onto the concourse for some more beer.

A good time to nip to the bar.

Jeonbuk added a fourth in the second half, before Suwon finally got a consolation goal. Lee Dong Gook then rounded things off with his second of the afternoon and Jeonbuk’s fifth.

1-5, final score.

It all gets a bit blurry after that. I know I got some more beer from that cafe near the stage before we went to a restaurant,where I remember topping my glass up from the pitchers on the tables but had to be told the following day that I’d had chicken to eat. This was followed by a spell watching the band on that stage near the cafe where in addition to yet more Cass I mixed things up a bit with a bottle of Soju. Eventually the tiredness from the previous days hiking must have taken its toll though and I headed off home, falling asleep on the bus and having to be woken by the driver when it stopped at Sadang. If he had let me sleep I may very well have ended up back at the stadium an hour after leaving.

Elsewhere Seoul got the win they required to top the table, with Jeju finishing second and Jeonbuk in third. Ulsan, Seongnam and Gyeongnam filled the other three play-off places.

The K-League has a week off before the play-offs begin so next week I’ll probably pop along to see the first leg of the third division play-off final at Samcheok. I’ve been there before and it does strike me as a place where a whole pig wrapped in polythene wouldn’t attract a second glance.

Posted in Football, Hiking, Pigs in polythene | 1 Comment »

Cheonwangbong hiking, Jirisan, Sept 2010.

October 2, 2010

There’s a three day holiday in Korea called Chuseok where if it falls on weekdays, you get three days off work. My friend Paul had been keen to visit Korea and so Chuseok seemed an ideal time for him to nip over and for us to do the sort of hike that needed at least three days.

The hike that I had in mind was in a National Park in the south of the country, Jirisan. It has the highest mountain in mainland Korea, the 1915 metre high Cheonwangbong and there is a trail that follows the mountain ridge from east to west and vice versa. I’d recently bought an excellent book on the Baekdu-daegan trail, a 735km route that runs from the Cheonwangbong peak right up to the border with the North and beyond. I suspected that I wouldn’t ever get around to walking the entire trail, particularly the bit in the North, but the first section in Jirisan seemed ideal for the Chuseok holiday.

Jirisan - looks well worth a trip.

I’d been warned at work about the transport mayhem at Chuseok as Koreans head back to their home towns to honour their ancestors and I’d seen photos in the paper of the massive queues at the railway station for tickets. It wasn’t surprising then that when I tried to book rail tickets they only had standing ones left. Normally I wouldn‘t mind three or four hours standing on a train, particularly with a can or two of beer. Paul and I had done plenty of that when inter-railing around Europe twenty five years ago and it all worked very well then. But with a three day hike up a big hill to do, I thought we might just benefit from having seats this time.

That meant travelling by bus instead, which in Korea isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s a great public transport network and you can travel in posh buses that have wide reclining seats in them with plenty of leg room. The only drawback is that as a foreigner you can‘t book your seats online. Fortunately, the lad at the next desk to me is Korean and he very kindly made the arrangements. We were booked on an ’excellent’ bus from Dong Seoul Terminal to Jinju that left on the Monday lunchtime and if the Chuseok traffic wasn’t too bad we would be in Jinju about four hours later. The plan was that we would meet a couple of people from one of  my walking groups there, Connie later that evening and Matthew the following morning after his overnight bus journey.

I’d also booked some mountain shelters for the trip. That was a bit more difficult than the buses as they tend to fill up very quickly. You can book them fifteen days in advance on the Korean National Parks website and I was poised at exactly 10am on the opening day, refreshing the page every few seconds as if it were Mott the Hoople reunion tickets on sale.

At 10.01am the 135 place Jangteomok shelter was fully booked. Fortunately I had managed to get us the four spots necessary for our first night. As an alternative option I also reserved four places at the less popular Seseok shelter that was 3.4km further along the trail. That gave us the option of pushing on a bit further on the first day if we were making good progress and cutting down the planned second day distance from 23km to 20km. The next morning I successfully got us into the Nogo-dan shelter for the second night on the ridge. The shelters are pretty basic, you sleep on the floor or on raised platforms and are packed in like sardines.

Jangteomok Shelter - The solitude of the mountains.

So, to recap. The plan was;

Day 1 – Bus to Jinju, overnight stay in a hotel.

Day 2 – 6.30am bus from Jinju to Daewonsa, hike 13km to the top of  Cheonwangbong and then get to one of the two shelters, Jangteomok (1.7km from peak) or Seseok (5.4km from peak) that we had previously booked.

Day 3 – Get up early and make use of the twelve or so hours daylight and hike along the ridge to the next booked shelter at Nogo-dan, a distance of either 20km or 23km, depending upon where we had stayed the night before.

Day 4 – Swing north along the ridge and exit at Gogi-ri after 14km. Catch a bus to Namwon in time for our pre-booked connection to Seoul at 17.10.

And the actual?

Well, the bus to Jinju went pretty well. The Chuseok traffic was heavy but the dedicated bus only lanes meant that we made good progress and we arrived at Jinju Express Bus Terminal only half an hour behind schedule at ten to five. As the bus the next morning to Daewonsa departed from the Inter-city Terminal we walked the fifteen minutes between the two bus stations and found a hotel near the the Inter-City one. Naturally we selected the hotel on the basis of it having plastic palm trees on the roof.

Our hotel.

There was a festival due to start a few days later in Jinju that looked like it was celebrating the old television programme ’It’s a Knockout’. I was expecting to bump into Stewart Hall and Arthur Ellis, but obviously the BBC stay well clear of hotels with plastic palm trees on the roof.

If you look closely, you can see Eddie Wareing stood on the bridge.

We met Connie, went for some bibimbap at a cafe and then had a couple of beers at a bar that featured live music.

Mercifully, they took plenty of breaks.

Next morning we met Matthew at the bus station. He looked pretty tired after his overnight journey, but he had managed to get us tickets for the first bus to Daewonsa at 6.30am. The journey took an hour and with the exception of one other hiker we were the only ones to travel all the way to Daewonsa.

Rush hour.

We set off walking at 7.50am, making our way along a road initially and then passing a temple on the left.

Daewon-sa Temple

 After just over an hour we turned left onto the trail that leads to the Cheonwangbong peak. The signpost reckoned that it was  6.4km to the Chibatmok shelter, where we expected to be able to get some more water and then a further 4.1 km to the peak. According to the guidebook we were already above 800m, so we had a further 1100m or so to ascend.

A very useful map at the start of the trail.

I was fine in the early stages of the trail, where we passed plenty of signs warning of bears. The signs started off with fairly cuddly images, but the further along we got the bigger the bears teeth seemed to be. Fortunately none of us spotted any of the forty or so bears that live in Jirisan Park, although Connie did see a snake at one point. It was notable just how quiet the trail was. We passed maybe ten people in total all day, which is remarkable in Korea where quite often you have to queue at busy parts of the paths.

I was walking pretty slowly and it soon became clear that I’d been a bit overambitious in estimating the distances that I could hike on this terrain. It was steeper and slower going than any of the other trails I’d hiked in Korea and I clearly wasn’t as fit as I needed to be. A lot of the sections were scrambles and of those that weren‘t it was still a case of carefully placing your feet. I slipped a couple of times, which I think sapped my strength a little more. We reached the Chibatmok shelter at 1.40pm, with 4.1km still to go to the top and then a further 1.7km to the first of the shelters that we had pre-booked. That doesn’t sound very far, but I’d only covered 6.4km in the previous four and a half hours and was slowing down after nearly six hours hiking. It would be getting dark at six o’clock and I was doubtful that I’d make it to the Jangteomok shelter by then.

Matthew catching up on his sleep at Chibatmok Shelter.

We decided to revise the plan and stay at the forty person Chibatmok shelter for the night before pushing on to the peak in the morning. Fortunately the shelter didn’t take advance bookings and as we were the first people to arrive that afternoon, we were in. Five thousand won a head plus a further thousand to hire a blanket. I ate my peanut butter straight from the jar and had a tin of anchovies mixed with peanuts.

We had a chat with a Korean bloke who had been to Everest base camp. Not that morning, mind, that would have been impressive. He’d made his way to Chibatmok from over on the ridge via Cheonwangbong. He reckoned it would take us between four and five hours to get to the peak in the morning. It looked as if we had made the right decision not to have pressed on further that day.

By 6pm there were only six people at the shelter so it looked like it might not have been too crowded. There was a little bit of rain and a fairly strong wind and by the time it got dark at about 6.30pm we were happy to go to bed. Fortunately we were able to spread out a bit more than the markings on the wall suggested that we should. Each allocated space on the wooded floor was probably only about eighteen inches wide. We took the equivalent of two places each and hoped that there wouldn’t be a sudden influx of hikers. A few did arrive over the next couple of hours but fortunately not enough to make us bunch up.

The next morning I was up at quarter past six, just after sunrise. Apparently someone had been snoring pretty heavily in the shelter, but as I’d worn earplugs I didn’t hear anything and had slept quite well.

One of Paul's sunrise shots.

A cup of coffee and some more peanut butter and we were away by 8.10am. We made good progress in the first couple of hours as although the trail was steep in places, the conditions underfoot were quite good.

Pausing for a photo after about half an hour.

There were a few staircases to help with sections that would have required climbing skills and the odd rope to help with sections where installing stairs would have been impractical.

By about 10.30 we reached Jungbong, which at 1874m is comfortably the highest mountain I’ve ever walked to the top of. Hopefully, with Cheonwangbong only 0.9km away though,  I’d beat that record in the next hour or so.

Jung-bong peak, 1874 metres

 Unfortunately the weather wasn’t as good as the previous day and we had to contend with heavy rain. I had my waterproofs with me but because of the humidity and with my clothes being already soaked with sweat, I didn’t think that I’d be any the drier after putting them on. Paul put his on, which was probably the right thing to do.

Big jessie.

Three hours after setting off from the Chibatmok shelter, we reached the 1915m Cheonwangbong summit. The rain was still pretty heavy and the clouds were low which meant that we couldn‘t see much apart from Korean hikers posing for photos at the top. We did the same and as the wind was fairly strong, we soon dropped down a few metres from the top for a bit of shelter.

Cheonwang-bong peak, 1915 metres.

After about half an hour sitting around, eating and taking photos we decided to head off the mountain and make for the village of Jungsan-ri. The weather wasn’t really conducive to ridge walking and we would have been gambling on finding a shelter with spaces later in the day. If we got back down to Jungsan-ri instead we could get a bus back to Jinju where they had hotels with proper beds and beer. It wasn‘t too difficult a decision to make.

The route down to Jungsan-ri was one of the alterative routes up to Cheonwangbong that I’d considered and discounted before deciding to on starting from Daewon-sa. As we descended I was pleased that we hadn‘t used the route on the way up. It was only 5.4km and therefore a much steeper slog, with far more stairways to tackle. The scenery wasn‘t anything like as good as that we had encountered coming from Daewon-sa and it was probably twenty times busier.

It took about an hour and a half to reach the first landmark on the way down, Rotary Shelter, which was two kilometres from the peak. Again the slow progress was mainly down to the conditions underfoot which were extremely slippy due to the continued torrential rain.

Part of the Beopgye-sa-Temple next to the Rotary Shelter.

After a quick break for another snack at the shelter we set off for the final 3.4km down to Jungsan-ri. At one point on the trail, when I was walking alone, I could hear ghostly singing behind me. For a long time I couldn‘t see anyone and I did start to wonder if the singing was something that you heard just before you died. It wasnt though, it was a Korean women with a haunting voice and she passed me a few minutes later, still singing.

At the bottom of the hill.

Two and a half hours after leaving the Rotary shelter I got to the bottom. The others, who were walking a little quicker were already there and we went for some food, before catching the bus back into town where after a bath and a change of clothes I didn‘t feel quite so worn out. We ended up in the bar with the singers in again where at the end of the evening I fell over as I stood up to leave. I’m blaming it on muscle fatigue rather than the numerous vodka and oranges that I’d re-hydrated with.

The next day my legs felt as if they belonged to someone else. Paul seemed fairly tired too as I had to wake him in the afternoon by getting reception to ring every room on the floor I knew his room was on. Once outside, he was soon asleep again.

We were able to get a bus back to Seoul from Jinju late afternoon that even with the Chuseok traffic made it in under five hours. I was a bit disappointed not to have done the ridge walk as well but the reality is that I just wasn‘t fit enough to have managed the schedule that I’d planned, particularly in poor weather. Still, it was a mountain about six times higher than Roseberry Topping, so thats not too bad I suppose.

Posted in Hiking | 9 Comments »

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