An Unfit Person Climbs a Mountain

Last year when Autumn hit Daegu I was like a hyper wide eyed child. Everything was just so pretty. If you can say one thing about Korea it is that it knows how to do seasons and Autumn is by far my favourite. When we were given a long weekend by our schools we took it as the perfect opportunity to see those leaves. The trees still hadn’t changed in Daegu so we headed to the  place they chance first in Korea, Seoraksan Mountiain. Seoraksan , located in Sokcho is one of the tallest mountains in the Tawbaek mountain range. It is located in the Gangwon Province in eastern South Korea.
Lee and I luckily had a group of friends that shared our need to see some lovely foliage so the seven of us rented a car (and by seven I mean our lovely friend Amanda who has an international license) and hired a pension (once again, down to Amanda who has the best Korean out of all of us …..you can see a pattern forming here already.) We were all set to spend the long Korean weekend in the hills.
There were only a few problems with this plan and that was that we didn’t actually think about how many other people would have the same idea as us. Any day off you get in Korea means you will be faced with inevitable masses of people. When one of the most densely populated nations gets a rare day off work they of course all want to use it wisely. This didn’t occur to us until we were stuck in the mother of all traffic jams.
The trip to Sokcho should be about three to four hours. We were in the car for NINE hours. NINE! The fact that none of us in the small car killed each other in this time shows just how lucky Lee and I are with the friends we’ve found here. Apart from poor Amanda who had her foot pressed to the ground the entire time we actually had a lot of fun. Mainly by watching youtube clips of ladies slapping young men with Kimchi (which you can see here) and occupying our time listening to Prince.
After a long time in our small car we arrived to a dark deserted area of Korea. No neon lights, no blasting music and no convenience stores “We aren’t in Kansas anymore Toto.”
Luckily we knew this would be the case and packed more wine, gin and food than any human could ever need. When the GPS told us we had arrived we all cheered together . The main problem with this was that we were still on a dark and deserted road. Luckily as if the creepy horror movie gods were watching over us , a small shop loomed in the distance. We jumped out, stretched our legs and terrified the locals. We are quite scary as a group to most city dwelling Koreans so jumping out of car in the pitch black on a dark road was a sure way to give these poor Koreans a heart attack. Once they recovered they gave us directions to our pension and asked us questions about where we were from assuming, as many Koreans do that we were Russian (???). They commented on how tall Lee and our friend Ciaran were and did what all good Koreans do, invited us to drink with them. There are very few moments when I love this country more than when strangers invite you into their space and make you feel welcome. The boys used their knowledge of Korean customs and poured large glasses of soju to present to the men. The old men then poured even larger glasses for the boys. It was a great exchange of cultures even if it was through hard liquor.
We MADE IT! After far too long on the road we pulled up to our pension and poured Amanda a well deserved BOTTLE of wine. I keep referring to a pension but I have realized that I only found out what this mystical thing was when I moved here. A pension is a cheap Korean house that you rent for a lot of people. There are no beds but lots of floor space, blankets and pillows. You normally get a stocked kitchen and a bathroom. They are fantastic places to stay for a weekend to save some money. We only recently realized that Pension is the French word for a cheap hotel room. We are guessing that’s where it comes from.
We drank wine, ate good food including some delicious garlic bread made by the lovely Hazel (she is magic in the kitchen) and laughed into the wee hours. The next morning we awoke and got ready to climb. The moment when my friends looked at my attire for the mountain in disbelief and told me I couldn’t hike in jeans should have been the moment I realised we were embarking on a real hard challenge. Luckily I had some snazzy* Star Wars leggings to wear and we set off.
*(They aren’t snazzy)
We arrived in a typical Korean tourist area, bought some of the most expensive coffee’s I’ve ever had (7 dollars from a shack on a mountain!) and walked to the entrance only to find a angry Korean man shaking his head as we approached. “Mountain closed, mountain closed” he proclaimed. How can a mountain be closed? I can see it, it’s right there and it’s only 1pm! This again should have been another warning sign. When they close the mountain seven hours before it gets dark just in case people take that long to get up and down it you know its going to be a hard slog.
Annoyed and deflated we formed a plan, we would arrive tomorrow at the crazy time of 4am and hike this mother! We hadn’t sat in a car for nine hours only to turn back now. This did obviously bring with it one problem (apart from being up at an ungodly time) …What about all the booze?
We decided to have an early drink and dinner so we could still get a good rest. Did the option of just not drinking cross our minds….don’t be silly.
As you can imagine a quiet drink quickly became a raucous affair. ‘I have never’ and ‘kings’ were played and all the gin was drunk.
When the alarm went off at 4am I wanted to cause someone physical pain. We ate breakfast in hushed tones so as not to disturb our hangovers and headed out of the pension.
Once we were in a moving car it quickly became apparent that people were a lot more hungover than we’d thought. We got to the mountain and started, what I was still thinking, was a our leisurely hike. Lots of Korean people were already at the mountains base with enough hiking gear to require a Sherpa. I mocked their walking sticks and hiking boots…but how wrong I was.
This was no easy hike. This mountain was the quickest and steepest way to the top. In fact it is listed as the hardest hike in Korea. About 10 minutes in and I was already dying. It was at this point that half of our group had to head back to the car. The gin had won. As they left Lee, Amanda, Emmett and I we all felt bad for them. They had traveled and missed a chance to trek. Little did we know that they were the luckiest buggers around.
I won’t go into every detail of the actual hike but its safe to say that the journey to the top was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. This achievement was quickly smashed into oblivion when a new record was created for the hardest thing I’ve ever done three hours later when getting down the bastard mountain.
We managed to walk through every season and every weather condition. We saw blossoms and greenery turn into oranges and beautiful reds which quickly turned into the dead lifeless branches at the top of the mountain. This 5km walk felt like 1000k. This would also be a good time to point out that most of the water and food we’d brought had been in the bags of the people who left. We were climbing without supplies.
When we started to reach the top friendly Koreans coming the opposite way would shout encouragement ‘fighting!’, ‘you can do it!’ and ‘almost there’. It was a good inspiration to keep going, especially when people would stop to tell us about the stunning view.
The problem with wanting to see a view from the top of the mountain is that you actually need to have the weather to see it. When after three and a half hours we reached the top we were in a thick fog that meant you could barely see the person in front of you. We stood at the top in the freezing fog looking at each other disparagingly. We begrudgingly posed for a photo and headed back down the mountain. We weren’t on the top for more than a minute.
Silence fell on us as we headed down the steep mountain. We would pause only for a second as we needed to reach the bottom before we all went insane. Our knees hurt, our feet bled and our hangovers raged on.
The first time I felt a flicker of hope was about five hours in when we heard the faint sound of traffic near by. “Emmett. Amanda!!!” I stated to scream down the mountain “listen!”. We all fell silent for a second just in time to hear the familiar honks of cars in the distant. Jubilation was felt all around.
We made it to the bottom, kissed the flat even floor and set off on our 7 hour drive home. A little better without so much traffic but still a hell of a long time.
Would I recommend hiking Seoraksan? Yes but maybe an easier trail and definitely not if you are lazy and unfit as Lee and I seem to be. It makes me feel slightly better that our friend Amanda, the marathon runner and Emmett, the avid bike rider also found it hard but Lee and I still need to get to the gym more and stop eating so much Korean BBQ.
What did we learn? Well we learnt that we definitely aren’t hikers. We also learnt that the ambitious itinerary we had for our big South East Asia trip has to be relaxed since 19 hours in a car over 3 days was hard going. Our Asia trip had a few too many twelve hour trains. Overall we learnt a lot and had a great time.
  The best part of the trip, as is almost always the way, was the people and the spectacular sights.
Korea definitely knows how to do Autumns. Cloudless mountain peaks…not so much.
Have you climbed Seoraksan or any mountains? Do you have any tips for training to hike or any recommendations of beautiful mountains to climb in Asia? Let us know.