Mount Palgongsan Natural Area

     

When we decided to move to Korea we were very excited about the chance to see ancient temples, colorful, old asian buildings tucked into small flat spots high up in the mountains with grand vistas. Long before coming to Korea, or even meeting Carolyn, I dreamed of hiking in Nepal and Tibet, encountering Buddhist monks in their element, and smelling the sandalwood incense burning in their temples. Last weekend’s adventure at the Daegu arboretum made us think we should try and venture a little bit farther out of town this week. We took the subway from Daegok station to Dongdaegu station and found the Daegu City Tour, a bus trip with on-off privileges that goes to some of the main sites in the Mt. Palgongsan Natural Area.

About 45 minutes by bus later, we found ourselves at Gatbawi, a site with a temple and a giant Buddha. The brochure for the tour said that we would have about a 2 hour round trip hike. We figured this would be easy enough to do and still make it to our prime directive, Donghwasa Temple. As we started the hike we noticed that the trail was fairly steep. About 45 minutes later we found ourselves outside of an operational Buddhist temple. Other hikers were doing their prostrations in front of the statues of Buddha, and beautifully carved dragons adorned the many buildings of the complex. I was particularly excited to see a funeral bell for the first time, and all of the lanterns had prayer cards hanging from them. It was absolutely stunning.  I felt a bit like I imagined Nate Drake would have felt as he entered the Tibetan village that was being ravaged by Lazarovic’s troops in Uncharted 2…well…without Lazorovic’s troops and stuff. We continued towards the giant Buddha for a bit, but realized we would need to summit the mountain to find him. A quick look at the verticality and distance of the  remaining part of the climb, and the remaining time before the last bus we could catch, and we decided to head back down the mountain. It was a gorgeous climb, and we will go back and finish climbing the mountain soon.

Gwanan Temple

Gwanan Temple

Dragon at Gwanan Temple

Carolyn at Gwanan Temple

Funeral Bell at Gwanan Temple

Donghwasa Temple

Dongwhasa Temple

Donghwasa Temple

Donghwasa Temple

After we got back to the base of the mountain we hopped on the tour bus and rode over to Dongwhasa temple. This temple is famous because it has the largest Buddha in all of Korea, or so we heard. The temple was absolutely beautiful, and I once again thought about how much I felt like I was “living the dream” of trekking through Nepal and Tibet, even though I am far from those places. Obviously the mountains here don’t look anything like the Himalayas, but it’s still surreal to be immersed in something as exotic as a Buddhist temple and monastery on a day trip. That’s going to take some getting used to.

We both felt great after such an awesome day out sightseeing. How cool is it to go out and see stuff like this? It’s FREAKING AWESOME. Anyway, that’s about it for now. We have TV shows to download, photos to post, and all sorts of other internets business to attend to.

Climb Ev'ry Mountain!

Ah, I’m a bit late in updating the blog after a fairly eventful weekend, but the unreliable nature of being a waygook with no personal internets (soon, SOON!) has made it difficult to sit down with a connection long enough to blog for a few days.

When we left off in this odyssey, I had just attended the middle school band concert, where raucous Koreans went wild for Mamma Mia. The next morning we woke up, headed down to the coffee shop for super slow internets and downloaded some American TV shows. You have no idea how comforting the soothing voice of Tyra Banks and the America’s Next Top Model girls can be until you’ve lived overseas, I’d venture to say. Anyway, we weren’t there merely to download crappy TV shows, we were also there to meet our friend Laotia (she’s Laotian, and in case you haven’t noticed I try not to use real names on the blog) so that we could all walk over to the Daegu arboretum together and see some of Korea’s nature. Well, we walked through the arboretum until we found the back gate and found a muddy trail. Of course when life gives you a muddy trail, you should follow it.

Out the back of the arboretum we headed, along what looked to be an ancient dirt road. There were many Koreans out with their top-of-the-line hiking gear, but we thought we’d be just fine in our jeans so we braved nature anyway. Korea is quite mountainous, and soon the dirt path we were following took a steep incline. We continued onward, intrepidly braving the harrowing cliffs what must have been (we are in Asia after all) Mount Everest, or K2, or some other peak with a name. It was a pretty good workout for us, but 70 and even 80 year old Koreans were zooming by us on the trail. These people are FIT. As we neared the peak we noticed more and more people. As we reached the summit we noticed…even more people…nearly all senior citizens, and every one of them was on a piece of workout equipment. THEY PUT A FREAKING GYM ON TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN! Not only did those old Koreans pass us on the way up, but they WORKED OUT when they got there. Not surprisingly, THEY PASSED US ON THE WAY DOWN, TOO!

On the way down, we stumbled across a gravesite of some kind. It was really serene and picturesque, with a view of mountains in the distance. What a calm place, I can see why someone would want to be buried there for eternity and whatnot. It seems like the kind of place where you could just rest. Once we found our way back to the trailhead we headed back into town. We live one block from the mountain, so that wasn’t a very long walk. We were famished, so we continued one block past the house to the BBQ Chicken, a chain restaurant with awesome Korean Fried Chicken. We ate the entire box, and then cracked open a couple of bottles of soju.

Soju is an easy way to get intoxicated, it goes down smooth and hits hard. In my experience it also upsets the bottom end of your digestive tract. Pretty much immediately. The next morning Babehoney and I woke up and headed to Chilseong Market. We heard this would be a good place to look for furniture, but we really didn’t see anything we liked. We did see some authentic looking places to buy food and stuff, especially seafood, and found a neat stationery store. We stopped to do some grocery shopping on the way home (also always an adventure), and finally made it back to our comfortable little place in the sun.

That was the whole weekend in just under 700 words, wasn’t it?