The Jones' Korean Adventure

Our second day was "Hike Day". We had been told, by Mr. Park, that there were tons of ancient buddhist relics along a trail on Namsan Mountain, so we headed out to see what we could find. On our way, we stopped at "historic site #1", an old royal pleasure ground. The palace isn't there anymore, but we saw a cool water canal that the kings and nobles used to float their drinking cups in while they wrote poetry. Next stop on the way to the mountain, a temple, where we saw 3 buddhist statues, and spoke briefly with a monk who was trying to learn English (he gave us each a free postcard of the site...very nice!). Then...the mountain! JoJo now says that we were trying to kill her that day, but Sam and I had NO idea how intense the hike was going to be! We call it our "treasure hunt hike" because every half an hour, or so, we'd come across a cool relic. Some things we saw: a headless Buddha, rock carvings of Buddha, a statue of a cross-legged Buddha sitting on a lotus leaf, and an old hermitage (like a temple, but extremely removed from society). The trail was pretty intense...lots of steep parts and lots of rocks to climb over. We had been told that there was a large Buddha carving in rock at the top of the mountain, however, so we pressed on. The view from the top was well worth the climb (JoJo agrees!!), and the large statue at the top was cool to see.

After we made it to the top, the next challenge was getting down. We didn't want to go back down the same way we had come up, because frankly, that's boring. So we set out in search of an alternative path down. Well, we found one: I will herein refer to the trail down as "the death path". Let me first say that none of us had good hiking shoes on...we were all wearing sneaker-type shoes with no tread. The path down was incredibly steep! JoJo and I were slipping and sliding all over the place, grabbing on to trees for dear life (Sam did a bit better then us girls). There were even parts of the trail where a rope was provided and we had to repel down the rocks...very cool! We eventually made it down, and headed back to our guest house for a brief nap. That evening was taken up by a visit to more royal tombs (we were allowed to enter one, and saw the cross-section of how they made it), and a trip to a park to see part of a Korean opera...interesting costumes, but it got a little boring since we had no idea what was happening in the story. After the opera, we had a fabulous dinner of dalk galbi (spicy chicken stir-fry), and then went home to rest our weary bodies.

JoJo and I in front of the headless Buddha...one of our first finds on the trail.