The weather was fabulous today, a Sunday, and we decided to make a day of it with a trip to Mt Shinbulsan. The Mountain is listed as another of Ulsan’s 12 Secenic Sites and in all this time I’ve not been there before. The tourist brochures list it as the “Four Seasons of Mt. Shibulsan” and rightly so as each makes a very distinct impression. The fall season, one might think, would be the changing of the leaves. But then, thinking only the mundane and forgetting that in Korea things are just different, one could be, well, quite wrong. During Autumn, the reed plains of Shinbulsan take over. The reeds, really tall grasses with 6-foot willowy seedheads, cover an entire mountain side and bring almost as many Korean hikers, although those are somewhat smaller in stature.
The reeds cover the flank of this mountain wherever there aren’t rocky outcroppings or paths, both of which are many.
We drove up with MyeongHee’s good friend, UnZung, and her guy pal, Hye Da. Hye Da drove his car and it was nice to sit in the back for the ride through the mountains. It’s not quite peak color season, but it will be soon. We plan on going to a “pension” or “min-bak”, ( a Korean guest house) with them and a few others in two weeks I hope the color is really hitting it by then. In the meantime, the reed plain was well worth the arduous journey.
Driving through the heavily forested mountains, one is afforded few vistas. Once we got to the end of the road, we could see the wide plain, nestled in a saddle-back ridge between two peaks. Below us, the valley, villages, and small towns dappled in sunlight and cloud shadows. Shimmering in the distance, Ulsan. Above us, the surrounding peaks with hoards of hikers and several hang-gliders.
Paths upwards onto either of the peaks teemed with people out enjoying the weather and exercise. I was immediately struck by the resemblance of the paths, most of it rough-hewn wooden stairs, to the Great Wall at Badaling, near Beijing. Although its a little difficult to see in this web-sized picture, the stream of people goes to the top, and the outlines of many people are visible along the upper ridge. In the foreground, another hang glider prepares for liftoff.
Being the energetic young lad that I am, I took my dog and bounded up the trail for a better look at things. We stopped at several of the outcroppings along the way to catch a view of the view. On our east side, the hang gliders dominated the air.
This is the same guy I saw earlier about to take off. He swooped in and around on the currents for a long while. When he came overhead, SaTang barked at him. They really excited her and she, in turn, freaked out the Koreans walking hear us, a good percentage of whom I now know are afraid of dogs.
Most everyone I saw today hiking was outfitted in the their best technical gear. No cotton for this crowd – only the best polypro shirts, hiking boots and other acoutrements. Many of them get all duded up in the gear, complete with pants tucked into socks and professional walking sticks – with usually only a stair-step trail or just a road to hike on.
Check out the ladies in orange and in pink mid-way up the stairs in this shot – they’ve got two walking sticks each, so you know they’re serious about their sports.
After hiking, its common to get a snack. Conveniently, plenty of places are nearby to satisfy a hunger and thirst. Some are just beach-umbrellas put over the Korean equivalent of a hot-dog stand. Others are full tents. We went to both. Our first snack was Pa-Zang, or green onion pancake. That just wasn’t enough, so we got some O-Deng, or fish ham. One hasn’t experienced Korean culture until eaten O-Deng at a roadside umbrella stand.
O Deng fish ham, is made with – you guessed it – ground up fish, rice powder and sometimes little veggies. It’s kept in a big pot of hot fishy broth and eaten off the stick, while standing, sometimes dipping it a soy-sesame-pepper sauce. It’s tasty, but you probably don’t ever want to know how its made. I don’t.
That wasn’t enough either, so we stopped at one of the tent-style roadside stands on the way down the mountain. These places serve any number of things, but are known for their traditional Korean food rather than any fads.
They all have the simple wood-burning stove for winter warmth, but that can also be taken care of with soju. We had dong-dong-ju, a rice punch that punches back and a table full of kimchi, radish greens, tofu and minori leaves. Toilet paper napkins hang by each table, but Hye Da wanted to hide them so he stuffed them up in the rafters of the tent for this shot. He almost managed to hide them all.
Both up and down the mountain on the roadway we encountered problems. Like many rugged mountain roads around the world, this one was only a single lane. Should a driver come upon another driver headed in the opposite direction, the proper thing to do is try to find some way to resolve the head-on conflict. Not Koreans. Rather than backup or back down (both literally and figuratively) they would sit in their cars and wait. And wait. Wait like Samurai for the other to blink and reverse and allow them to pass. While this goes on, other cars come up from behind in both directions and further compound the problem. Sometimes, like this idiot, he simply got frustrated and left his vehicle.
When I came up on these cars, I had gotten out of Hye Da’s car to walk up and see what the traffic jam was all about. I saw almost 20 cars in each direction stopped. The woman in the SUV in the foreground could not back up for the cars directly behind her and the sedan kept gunning his engine and running up as if to ram her. Of course, he had nowhere to go either, so both stayed put. I had gone along and convinced the drivers in the rear to back up and park to make room and then I back the other way to do the same. The sedan driver simply abandoned his vehicle until he was done with his hike. No one was moving for a long time. Several times along the way up and down from Shinbulsan I got out of the car to negotiate a way out of their Mexican standoffs. Many understood and complied, but one old man refused to budge. I was about to yank him from his car and do it myself when his wife smacked him and he pulled over.
Despite the minor annoyances of the drivers, the day was awesome. Beautiful mountains, weather, scenery, buffoonery made it a pretty damn good day.