The bus was overly crowded with ajumas in hiking gear, younger couples in matching winter outfits, and Korean tourists, as well as our group of foreigners. We got to what seemed like the area we were supposed to get off at, and everyone got off the bus. The traffic was frustratingly slow, but it was still moving faster than you can walk. But because my Korean was the best out of the people there (and mine is severely limited at best), we got off as well when we should have just stayed on. So we ended up walking several kilometers to get to the area that we were supposed to stay.
We made it to a rather busy intersection full of hikers, tour buses, traffic cops, and some of the fittest people over 60 I've ever seen. After trying to have a phone conversation with the Korean man who owned the minbak we were staying in, we were picked up in a car and driven about two blocks to the place we had booked the week before.
Generally, minbak means a home stay. So you are essentially staying in someone's spare room in their home, and meals are often included. However in the case of Minbak Row in Naejangsan, the street of minbaks was simply a collection of supposedly low-cost, low luxury places to sleep at night. Our particular two rooms were supposed to sleep 15 people, but the 12 of us were in rather close quarters. When we first arrived, there was some confusion as to whether we were even in the right place, as there were no bags in the room and half our group had come in the night before. It turned out that they had stayed in town on Friday night and left their bags at the police station so they could go hiking in the morning. So we dropped our bags in the minbak and went off in search of lunch.
We got about 200 feet from the minbak before we ran into a restaurant. This turned out to be the closest place to get food, and probably one of the more expensive Korean restaurants I've been to. We did, however, get to see a whole pig on a spit right by our table.
After getting lunch, we decided to try and find the rest of our friends. They said they were heading back from one of the temples on the mountain, and we should just walk towards the main entrance of the park and hopefully we'd catch them in passing.
The walk was long and crowded, but we did manage to see lots of fall colors along the way, and beautiful scenery was captured by careful camera framing. :)
We didn't see the other members of our group so much as hear them. Jess is loud at the best of times, and we could hear her talking long before we saw the rest of our group. They had been waiting by a rather beautiful tree so we could get the whole group photographed together. Of course we couldn't get a Korean to take a picture for us, so Sean volunteered to take a group picture with everyone's camera.
After wishing Jess a happy birthday, the five of us that had come that afternoon headed up the mountain to see what we could find.
One person dropped out after we made it to a temple, so there were four of us that made it to the hermitage that was up some rather daunting stone stairs.
At the top at the hermitage was probably the ugliest Buddha statue I've ever seen. It's a shame, too, because it would have made a great picture. As it is, this picture just seems comical to me.
It was starting to get on towards early evening, so the two other girls decided to head back towards the minbak. James wanted to make it to the top before sundown, and I wanted to keep climbing, since we had long left the crowds behind us at the temple. So James, being the mountain goat that he is, loped off towards the summit, and I had a pleasant hour's walk by myself in the woods at dusk.
It started to get dark around 5:30, and the mosquitoes were starting to come out, so I turned around and headed back down the mountain. James eventually caught up with me, and by the time we had gotten back to the minbak 2 hours and about 5 kilometers later, it was pitch black. We met up with the rest of the group and sat around outside the 7/11 talking, drinking, and playing card games. I headed back to the room around 10:30 because we had decided that some of us were going to take the cable car at 6am the next morning to watch the sunrise. I was exhausted from climbing the mountain that evening, and I knew if I didn't go to bed at a reasonable hour I wasn't going to get up in time for the cable car, which was a good half hour walk from our rooms.
We had asked the owner of the minbak earlier that evening to turn the ondol (under-floor heating system) off, since the room was stifling hot, and with 12 people sleeping in the room it wasn't cold enough outside to warrant any heating at all. Unfortunately, the ondol was turned back on around 3am. So with sleeping on a burning hot floor, getting bit by mosquitoes and ants during the night, and being awakened several times by others drunkenly returning to the room at all hours, needless to say I didn't sleep very well.
I woke up at 5am the next morning, and guiltily roused the few people that wanted to catch the cable car at 5:15. I didn't mind as much as I would have if people hadn't confirmed the night before that they wanted to be woken up. I'm not a fast walker, even when I have gotten a good night's sleep, so I headed towards the cable car a little earlier than the other five people who had decided to get up. We made it to the cable car at around 6:15am, and even though we were late, we were the first ones to use the cable car that morning. It was still dark when we got to the top, and we found the observation deck to watch the sunrise.
It wasn't the most amazing sunrise I've ever seen, especially since the actual sun was blocked by one of the mountains, but it was a pleasant morning nonetheless.
After getting a minuscule cup of coffee from a restaurant located on the edge of the mountain and having a rather amusing chat with a group of Korean hikers who were still drunk from soju, we headed back down from the top. The trees below us reminded me of some sort of weird cauliflower garden.
By the time we got back down to the base of the mountain an hour or so later, the line to get on the cable car had about 200 people in it, and probably would have taken at least 45 minutes to get through. We looked around the bottom, and I was fascinated by the persimmon trees, which were prolific and looked like something out of a Dr. Seuss book or a Tim Burton movie.
By the way, if you've never eaten a frozen persimmon, I highly recommend it. It's like a fruit slushy in a peel.
Then the six of us headed back to the minbak, because our train left around noon and we needed to pack up and catch the bus back to the train station. We took the scenic walk on the way back instead of the more crowded and open trail.
We did notice on the way back quite a few Koreans who all seemed to have the same super-expensive camera with giant zoom-lens and tripod who were all taking pictures of the same thing.
But the walk was nice, the colors were more vibrant that morning even though it was overcast, and we just barely made it onto the bus back to the station as it started to rain.
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