Partook in my second hike with Warren yesterday. Warren of the-lets-play-hopscotch-across-the-peaks-on-Bukhansan fame. We hiked in Buyongsan and Cheongseongsan, about a 2 hour commute from Jamsil. The group was small and extremely multicultural. I represented the only American, there were 2 Canadians, a Pakistani, a Bolivian born and raised Korean, and Warren making his outrageous generalizations about Chinese and Japenese and everybody in between. We hiked in 90 degree weather for about 16 km but the forests were beautiful and reminded me of parks back home. It took several hours to complete but Warren kept us entertained with the two Michael Jackson songs he had on his cell phone: We are the World and Beat It, which he kept playing over and over again while hiking in honor of MJ whom passed away yesterday. We also attempted to bust the myth of fan death, discussed which language bilingual people chose to curse in, and I discovered that I have the option of suing my doctor for giving me a semi-outie belly button. We ended the hike with my first ever hitchhiking experience! Warren wanted food and mekju so we hitched a ride in the back of a truck to a restaurant famous for its tofu soup. The Han River lazed peacefully next to us for most of this hike, as lazy and fat as rivers come with lily pads and rice growing thickly on its banks. I'm sure we were just a few miles from Seoul but it felt so far, far away from the ant hill chaos that the capital often fills like. For a few hours, at least.

There's a myth on Jeju that people take their elderly parents and grandparents to the island, and return home without them, having left the older folks there to roam as they will on the biggest island in Korea, a way of setting them free in their old age. Jeju is to Korea like fertile fields are to retired cows and horses. Jeju is called by some as the Hawaii of Korea, but I never really saw the comparison. It just didn't seem fair to do that. There are farms just a few yards away from white, sand beaches and the hills bear more resembelence to the rolling nature of Irealnd than the tropical sexiness of Hawaii. Whatever one wants to call Jeju is a personal choice, for me I call it the best place in all of Korea. And I'm making that bold statement having just seen a handful parts of the peninsula. The 3 M's of the Kids College office set off together yet again, with plans to meet up with a fourth M, a guy called Matt whom I met at Polly's Tavern in Itaewon a few months back. An excellent tour guide, and a pretty good looking guy as well :) He was gracious enough to show us around his island and even though we only had about 36 hours on the island, I'm fully satisified with how enthusiastically we embraced it.
On Friday night, after a commute where more time was spent traveling to the airport than in the actual air, we got a room at a cheap love motel and had mystery meat tacos at a Mexican restaurant. We got some beers to drink on a pier made entirely from giant man made rocks that looked like pieces from a game of Tetris. On Saturday we headed to Seongsan for a leisurely hike up to a very green, very large, very windy crater. As soon as we hit the top of it we were blasted by a wind that immobilized skirt-wearing Maranda until Michele rescued her with a pair of capri pants. We got our first glimpse of haenyeo's-female divers who scour the ocean floor off the island’s gnarled coast harvesting conch, octopus, urchin, and abalone, they dive without tanks holding their breath for up to two minutes at a time. Pretty impressive. And by impressive I mean tough as nails and scary as hell to meet out of water. Coupled with Matt's spirit guide bird, the Blue Rock Thrush, I felt as if I met the most authentic inhabitants of Jeju-do. After the hike we headed to Udo Island, a small island off the north east coast, where we rented scooters and scooted our way around an island that was as picturesque and as homey as tropical islands come. Like the foolish girls we are,we underestimated the power of sun when behind clouds and we all three developed interesting tan lines. And by tan lines I mean intense sun burns. Early Sunday morning I went swimming in cold, cold ocean water with the girls, refusing to leave the water until my legs were literally turning blue. We had been bitten by the scooter bug, so we chose to spend our remaining few hours on Jeju scootin' some more before taking the ferry back to the mainland, saying goodbye to Matt, and heading back to the airport to catch a reluctant flight back to Seoul.

Subterranean, Amphibious Hiking? Madness!

Left Seoul and this time instead of going South and West, the two usual directions I seem to take when getting out of a city, we went East. And North. Michele, Maranda, and I went with a group through Meetup (my first time hearing about this social networking site) to Dootasan Mountain about five hours outside of Seoul. A first for me was meeting at midnight, taking a bus, "sleeping" on the bus, and start hiking as soon as we get off. I'm not sure anyone is actually capable of sleeping on a bus. Regardless, after resting our eyes and trying out every sleeping position possible when you're upright at a 105 degree angle while the person next to you is coughing, we stumbled off at our destination circa. 4:30 and were hiking before 5. It was only about a 12 km hike, but the first five km were straight up in a dense fog. I'm sure we missed out on some amazing scenery, but hiking in a cloud was so much fun. You see pictures all the time of Asian mountain shrouded by mysterious mist and getting to be in the thick of that was amazing. By the time we reached our first breaking stop we were all drenched. The summit must always be in this kind of weather because at the top we found pools of water with dozens of frogs hopping about and thick, heavy carpets of green moss grew on the surface of nearly every rock and tree. The way down was more painful than the way up simply because the wetness had turned the ground into a treacherous, slippery, slide of dead leaves and mud. There were pools of icy, spring water near the bottom but only Andrew was brave enough to actually take a dip. The rest of us just wanted to be dry and continued along familiar, rope railed paths. A giant Buddha welcomed us at the parking lot but I was so tired (and oh so dirty) that I gave it a nod of greeting, threw my back pack down, and took a nap.
We spend the night at Mang Sang beach on the coast of the Sea of Korea in a pension. The weather remained grey and foggy but I took great delight in hearing the sound of waves and smelling the fishy, salty air that hovers around every ocean town. On Sunday we made a pit stop at the park known as Penis Park where we wandered around phallic totem poles and masturbating statues. We found a gorgeous stretch of beach with some freakishly big sand crabs but couldn't stay long. Our final stop was in Samcheok where we traversed underground in some giant caves before returning to Seoul by 11PM. I returned dirty. I returned with hat hair. I returned messy, messy, messy. But I returned rejuvenated.

Pictures to follow as soon as Michele posts them and my nimble fingers steal them.