This past Saturday Kelly and I decided to hike some mountains. I have always had an affinity for mountainous terrain, and I have been desperately trying to stretch that affinity towards Kelly. Kelly has only been on two other hikes with me in the past, so I thought I'd start the "immersion" process here in Korea.
Bukhansan National Park is relatively close to our humble abode in Ilsan. From the minute we left our doorstep, the short journey on the subway, a quick pit stop at a very, very busy restroom and a ride with a very fast and erratic taxi driver took us roughly an hour. Of course, if we had the pleasure of owning a car and the sanitiy to drive in Korea, the trip would probably have only been 15-20 minutes.
Considering that we have never lived so close to a national park with mountains (less than 20km), we have always had Bukhansan on our list of things to do, but have always put it off because of the simplicity of going there (it seems a bit backward I know). Last week I finally decided that we have put it off long enough, and should go in the middle of July. For those of you who do not live in Korea, and are unaware of what a July feels like here, you wouldn't understand the insanity involved. Mid April or late May would have been perfect, yet we decided to go mid-July when you practically drown in humidity. I never knew I was capable of so much sweat and have likewise never seen a female sweat as much as my lady.
I will give a brief rundown of Bukhansan from what Wikipedia can give me. For starters, Bukhansan averages 5 million visitors and is/was/still is in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the national park with the highest number of visitors per square foot. It was evident on Saturday as well. There was a grip load of people there.
While Bukhansan National Park was only established in 1983, the activity in the area dates much farther back. This wall in the picture above, for example, has some foundational remains from way back in 132 AD. Most of the wall was rebuilt and expanded in the 12th century for protection from outside invaders. That's stankin' old and stankin' sweet.
The area served more purposes than just building walls that keep out the bad guys. There are also a lot of temples riddled througout the rough terrain, making very serene and surreal areas for temple getaways.
This was about 3/4 of the way up on our hike (some of the wall from 132 AD behind as well). We thought it was the top and only realized that it was a resting point, and we had about 45 more minutes to climb. You got to have a lot of persuasive skills if you have a wife who was not expecting to hike for nearly 3 hours in constant incline. She did great though and I'm proud of her.
The peak in which we climbed was called Baekundae and was the highest of the main three. It was sitting at around 836.5m (or 2,744 ft) and offered spectacular views of the park. It took us about 3 hours to hike up and about 1.5 hours to hike down. That was really nice. We left around 9a and got back around 5 pm, a great day of hiking.
This was actually the road that we walked on to get to the trail head. It was a really nice walk until we had to climb boulders.
There was this weird, village type thing that did not look like it belonged in the park, but it was there and it was cool.
There are more pictures available on our flickr account.
