Trail of the Lion King

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.

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.