25.09.2007: crossed (like a peninsula)

This is one of those rare 'travel journal' type entries I get to do from time to time, where I'm actually writing while in transit (at least until the battery on my laptop runs out). As I begin, I'm looking down at what I think are the Tian Shen mountains, a northern arm of the Himalayas that's traversed by the Silk Road. It's a pretty dramatic sight, I must say - the mountains are all crinkly and blue-grey in the moonlight, the higher peaks are powdered with snow, and the only indication of life is a distant orange glow in the north, smouldering through a circular hole in a cloud bank. I don't know what city the glow is coming from, or even what country, but I think it's somewhere in far western China. It's difficult to tell. All I can say for certain is that, as I near my destination, it really doesn't suck to be me right now :-)

So anyway, let's see ... what did I end up doing to amuse myself during my free days in South Korea? Well, it's quite a long story. Last night I had dinner with a former student (Hyeong Jung - the guy I tried to hook up with last Wednesday) in a funky mid-town neighbourhood called Jong-no. I also met a crazy, shaven-headed, wild-moustachioed and cigar-smoking Japanese guy called Takashi, who made me laugh quite a lot. That was a few hours after I'd returned from the faded resort town of Danyang, where I'd been visiting the enormous and beautiful Guinsa monastery. I'd spent the previous night in Danyang, because I wanted to see the monastery and also some nearby caves, which I did on Sunday. The night before that (Saturday) I stayed with the family of a former student in Cheongju, and the night before that I was in a fake castle hotel. In between, I managed to climb two mountains (one on purpose, the other by mistake), sing karaoke very badly, eat loads of amazing food and travel about 2/3 of the way across the Korean peninsula and back by bus. So it's been quite an eventful few days.

I want to share some of the highlights and details with you, but there's quite a lot to get through. I'll try not to ramble for too long. Still, if I were you I'd settle myself in for an epic ...

1: CHEONGJU

Okay: the main reason I singled out Cheongju as a destination is that two of my favourite former students, Seul Gi and Yuni, both live there. Also, I wanted to see some of the mountain scenery that various Koreans had told me about, and the Songnisan National Park about an hour from Cheongju seemed as good a place to start as any.

I arrived on Friday night, expecting Cheongju to be a large but fairly sleepy town, and instead found myself in a vibrant, youthful city. A bigger surprise than the neon and the nightlife, though, was the hotels in the centre. Nearly all of them were somewhat castle-shaped. And I mean that in the sense of European castles, with moats and turrets and the like. It was bizarre and cheesy and ... well, you've probably guessed by now that I couldn't resist it. So I dragged my enormous luggage off in search of castles and, with some difficulty, checked into the salubrious Motel Sting.

I was in for more surprises when I got out of the lift on the 5th floor. First there was the dim-yet-lurid red light in the hallways; second, the round bed; third, the porn that immediately leapt out at me when I switched on the TV to find out what time it was; and lastly, the free condoms and large box of tissues on the bedside table. Hmmm ... it seemed like I may have found myself in a part of town that serves quite a specific function. The brothelesque touches in my room also helped to explain what the expression "business club" could mean. I'd seen it written on signs outside most of the neighbouring hotels, but hadn't given it much thought. Now I found myself going "aaaahhhh!" with a declining intonation at the end, like a Korean student who's just worked out the difference between Past Simple and Present Perfect.

(Sorry - English teacher's joke.)

And so it was that I rendezvoused with my two lovely students in Cheongju's equivalent of a Red Light District. They seemed quite amused.

The story of how I met Yuni and Seul Gi is a slightly unusual one, and it bears explaining here because it will help you appreciate why I was so excited to see these two again. Yuni and Seul Gi are best friends who grew up in the same neighbourhood, less than a block apart. They've known each other for 20 years or so, having met at about the age of four. Last year Seul Gi went to Sydney to study English, and I met her while I was teaching at Holmes College. I immediately liked Seul Gi (or "S.G", as she was often called in Sydney), and I was really glad when she joined my FCE class, because it meant that I'd be teaching her every day for three months. And my instincts were right; as I got to know S.G. better, it became clear that she was an extremely big-hearted person with some amazing life stories to tell. (I've mentioned some of them previously in Ranting Manor - see my 'Been and Gone' entry from January this year.)

Meanwhile, six months after S.G. arrived in Sydney, Yuni decided that she'd like to study in Australia as well, so S.G. set her up with an agent and she enrolled at Holmes College. Unfortunately, the timing wasn't great: by the time everything was sorted out and Yuni was on the plane, S.G. had just four days left before she had to go back to South Korea. So, after having been apart for a year, these two best friends had four days together in Sydney before they 'swapped places', with Yuni becoming the o/s student and S.G. the friend back home.

I met Yuni in April after I returned from New Zealand and resumed teaching at Holmes. It was just blind luck that she was in my first new class. Like S.G., she was an immediate favourite - just a lovely, intelligent, self-contained but friendly person, and an excellent student. I taught her in three different classes, and I always felt very happy and fortunate to have her around. However, at first I had no idea she knew Seul Gi. She told me about their lifelong friendship a few weeks after we'd met, and for a while I didn't really get it. When it finally sank in, I thought "Wow, what a spin-out" ... or something as eloquent as that.

I'm telling you this partly because I think it's an intrinsically interesting story - the thing about the two best friends 'swapping places' and all that - and partly to impress upon you how pleased I was to see them both in Cheongju. See, during that four-day period when Yuni and S.G. were together in Sydney, I was driving around New Zealand's North Island peering into volcanoes and thermal vents. So these were two people who I knew quite well, and I'd often heard/read them talking about their friendship. And yet, when they came to collect me at the Castle of Sleaze last Friday night, it was the first time I'd actually seen the two of them together. So when they appeared at the end of the street and S.G. called out "Teacher!", it was quite a moment.

Soon we were in a taxi heading for the main student/nightclub district of Cheongju, which was pretty damn lively. It was after 9pm when we got there, but there was so much light and colour it felt like daytime. It was a bit Shibuya and a bit fairgroundy (with shooting galleries and baseball practice nets and so on), but it also seemed distinctively Korean. We started out at a B.B.Q. restaurant and then moved on to a kind of restaurant/bar, where we planned our next day over kimchi* pizza and soju* cocktails. The plan: conquer Munjangdae, the rocky mountain peak at the heart of Songnisan National Park.

The ascent to Munjangdae was gentle in some sections, but there was some 'real' climbing involved, too - not the kind where you need crampons, but definitely the kind where you often require a good handhold to haul yourself up to the next rock, and where you have to place your feet carefully to avoid plunging great distances down precipitous slopes. We hiked for a little over three hours to reach the summit. The scenery was raw and beautiful, with forest canopies, giant mossy boulders, waterfalls and old stone bridges like the one pictured. (Yuni told me the inscription you can see translates as a question: "What's this bridge?" A difficult one to fathom, really, but I guess whoever wrote it hadn't actually been told what to call the bridge, or the name of the area where it's located.) The climb was challenging, sweaty, cold and mildly hazardous in some sections. But the surrounds made it a hugely enjoyable and mostly quite relaxing exercise.

I say "mostly" because the final 20 metres of the ascent literally takes you up an iron staircase with a sheer drop on either side, while fierce crosswinds send tiny pellets of ice slamming into your face and body. I'm a little afraid of heights, so this really tested my resolve. I had to have two goes at it. On my first attempt I got half-way up and couldn't go any further; I had to turn around, go back down the stairs and give myself a little "calm down, everything's ok" talk before trying again. Naturally, Yuni and S.G. found this all rather hilarious >:-[

After stopping for soup and fresh pears in a warm, rusty old shed near the mountain top, we hiked back out of the park and drove to Yuni's house, where she insisted I stay that evening. This meant I had to meet her family, which frankly seemed a bit daunting. Korean is a very polite language, and speakers must take special care to use the right words (and word endings) to show deference to people older than themselves. Add to that the special reverence for senior family members - for whom younger Koreans actually perform a ceremony of honour each year at the Chuseok festival, which is broadly similar to U.S. Thanksgiving - and it means that meeting an elder member of a friend's family requires all kinds of linguistic and behavioral observances of which I was largely ignorant. So I was a tad nervous about meeting the folks.

Of course, the only real problem was me being neurotic. I needn't have worried at all; Yuni's mum was about as sweet and kind as it's possible for a human to be, and her dad's cheerful, Italian waiter-like gusto was immediately disarming. Neither of them expected a newly-arrived foreigner to know the complexities of their customs, so the politeness thing wasn't an issue.

One more fabulous Korean meal, a few drinks, and a karaoke session (at which I sucked) later, I found myself retiring to bed at Yuni's place, utterly exhausted but with only about six hours before I had to be awake and on my way to Danyang. Fortunately, the whole family and S.G. pitched in with the "get Anthony to the bus station in time" effort the next morning. Yuni's mum made me a two-course breakfast, her dad helped me with my novelty oversized luggage, and Yuni and S.G. came with me to the station to make sure I could find the right bus and get my ticket - though not before a concerned Mrs. Yuni (actually Mrs. Kim) had given me some extra socks for the rest of my journey!

Then came the inevitable moment of sadness, as my bus pulled out of the station and I waved goodbye to my two star students. The last day-and-a-half had been loads of fun, and quite possibly never to be repeated. But while I was disappointed to see Cheongju sliding into the past tense, I was aware at the same time of what a complete bonus it had been. I mean, looking around my classroom 12 months ago (when S.G. was in my class in Sydney), I couldn't have imagined that some day in the not-too-distant future I'd be visiting her in her home town - let alone that there'd be a third person involved, who by then had become a mutual friend. So the sense of "Wow, that was kind of an amazing thing that just happened" overshadowed the sadness of leaving.

2: DANYANG

Later that day, as the three-hour bus ride to Danyang neared its end, the landscape around me began to change. I mean, this was South Korea, so of course there'd been mountains poking up everywhere throughout my journey, but now they were getting steeper and more dramatic as the road wound further and further downwards. It felt, in other words, like we were heading toward somewhere very pretty. So it was with some disappointment that, when the town itself finally came into view, it was more or less charm-free. It had a look of "This might've been a lot nicer back in its Glory Days", but even that was only a "maybe".

It didn't really matter, though. After checking into my hotel, pumping myself full of anti-inflammatories and dozing for a couple of hours (because I had a screaming, nauseating headache), I ventured out into the afternoon glare and set off for Gosu cave. Walking across the bridge from Danyang to the mountains opposite, I looked back and took in the townscape from a distance. It was then I realised that, while Danyang was certainly no sparkling jewel, it had definitely been set in a crown. The lake I'd crossed was surrounded on three sides by mountains that began right at the water's edge. It was about the closest thing I'd seen to a fjord outside of ... well, Fjordland (in Norway) or Fiordland (in New Zealand). And once again, I had that sense of "Wow, it's sort of amazing to think that I'm actually here."

I found the missing sparkly bits in Gosu, billed as South Korea's finest cave and designated by the government as a National Treasure. Many of you will know that I've been a fan of caves for a long time, and I always try to visit them in foreign countries when I get the chance. So you'll understand that, when I say Gosu was one of the best caves I've ever seen, I've got quite a few others to compare it to.

As show caves go, Gosu is rather challenging. The geography of the cave confronts you with the full range of spatially-related head games, from claustrophobia to vertigo. I'm normally okay in small spaces, but in this case I knew for a fact that the cave contained several creatures that I definitely didn't want to meet, which changed the equation a bit. Outside the entrance was a sign showing (among other things) an enormous-looking black spider and a weird kind of scorpion-like beastie, with the semi-transparent skin that's common among creatures who live in environments that admit no light. Both of these guys struck me as wall-huggers, so every time the pathway narrowed and the limestone walls began closing in, I had visions of brushing up against something unspeakably icky as I passed.

Then there was the vertigo problem. The main chambers in Gosu plunge deep into the Earth and then climb back upwards towards another opening elsewhere on the mountainside. As a result, you get some spectacularly tall chambers with limestone formations adorning the walls from top to bottom. You also get stairs and ladders that travel through the centre of these chambers - in other words, essentially through mid-air. There are stairs, too, descending vertically down enormous sink holes, like the spiral staircase you can see in the photo. I'm not sure how high this is, but there were about 12 full spirals in it. What's that: maybe four storeys? I descended on legs that were visibly shaking, still wobbly from yesterday's mountain hike. I couldn't hold on to the railing, because there was a layer of cold green slime underneath it. All I could do was go slowly, concentrate hard and stop moving every time I was distracted by the incredible limestone shawls that went nearly all the way up beside the stairs.

And yet, while the spatial extremes of Gosu were quite formidable, I have to say they were also rather magnificent. This was a huge subterranean realm, dripping and glistening with calcite-rich water, and studded all the way along with formations matched only by those at Jenolan in Australia (which had kicked the arse of every other cave I'd visited up until this point). There were vast cavernous hallways, underground streams, motionless fountains of sparkling flowstone, majestic stalacmites and columns, networks of delicate straws - pretty much the whole set of limestone cave wonders, with the possible exception of the crazy little coral-like formations known as hellictites. (They might've been there, but I didn't see any.) I was almost tempted to go again, it was so beautiful. Probably would have, if my legs hadn't been so tired :-(

The other reason I'd travelled so far across the peninsula was to see Guinsa, a monastery near Danyang which was built into the side of a mountain in reputedly stunning surrounds. I'd been told the best way to get there from town was by bus, so for about the 50th time this week I did my "bumbling tourist with no more than a few words of Korean, making a hopeless attempt to ask where the appropriate means of transport could be found" routine. This time it turned out to be quite simple, and a short while later I was lurching along picturesque rural roads towards the intended target.

Before I even reached Guinsa, I was sold on the location. First the road climbed up into the mountains, giving me some breathtaking panoramic views before winding back down to follow the river for a while, then branching off into the mountains once more and snaking downwards toward the foot of the ranges. Scenery-wise, it was all a bit bloody impressive.

When I finally arrived there, Guinsa certainly didn't disappoint. It was absolutely massive, encompassing something like 55 structures built to house no less than 10,000 monks. All of these buildings were decorated in the distinctive danch'eong colour scheme and arranged in concertina fashion along either side of a giant 'crease', so to speak, in the mountain's southern slope. Each new tier was several storeys higher up than the last, effectively hiding whatever lay above/behind it. There was no point at which you could see the whole monastery at once; several times I thought I'd reached the highest point, only to find that if I detoured around the back of the building whose porch I was standing on, I'd find a path up to the next level. This was a bit frustrating in terms of trying to find the big panoramic photo that would make you all go "oooohhh!!", but it was fun to be there and wonder what was going to greet the eye at the top of the next staircase.

Some of you may remember me raving about the temples of Kita-Kamakura (west of Tokyo) two years ago, and how I got a huge and unprecedented spiritual 'rush' from going there. Well, the rush was absent from Guinsa; I didn't really 'connect' with it in the way I did with, say, the Kencho-ji temple in Kita-Kamakura. What I did feel, though, was that Guinsa is very much a working monastery - sort of the Buddhist 'coal face', so to speak, where thousands of people whose lives revolve around their spiritual beliefs base their daily operations. The evidence was everywhere that, for them, this was a complete world-within-a-world, where they could walk the path of devotion and piety that had presumably led them to choose the monastic lifestyle in the first place, but also eat, sleep, shower and generally live from day to day.

In the inevitable Guinsa gift shop, I saw some photos of what the monastery looks like when it's lit up for evening ceremonies. The images were nothing short of stunning. The splashes of violent colour from the monks' costumes, and the sea of candle-light bathing mysterious effigies in a warm orange glow, reminded me of my youthful experiments with pagan rituals (especially those MC'd by the theatrically trained Tim Hartridge). But the rituals of Guinsa were wrought on a scale I'd hadn't seen before. I wished I'd had time to stay and participate, or at least observe in quiet awe from some ornately-carved portico. Maybe that would've given me the rush I was craving. But I couldn't hang around for too long; I had to get back to Seoul, where a student was waiting to take me out to dinner.

3: CHUSEOK

Seoul, when I returned, was in the grip of Chuseok (the Thanksgiving-type thing I mentioned earlier). It was weird. It seems that everyone in South Korea gravitates toward the family home during Chuseok and stays there - be it on the other side of town or the other side of the country. As a result, Seoul becomes what must be the world's largest ghost town for a couple of days. I couldn't quite get my head around the quiet and the (relatively) empty roads. They made the hot winds more noticeable, and they just seemed wrong somehow. After experiencing Seoul as it normally is - where your actions all get swallowed up in the epic urban ballet of it all - now it seemed as though every sound or movement I made was uncomfortably amplified and conspicuous. In that regard, it was a bit like walking around Sydney during a Christmas bushfire. That's the only other place where I've experienced the same feeling of disquieting quiet, when it feels as though a whole city has suddenly run out of things to say.

If we skip foward about 12 hours from wandering through the strangley muted Seoul, we end up back where I started this rant: sitting on a plane above the Tian Shen. And what an experience that was! In truth, though, I've been chipping away at this instalment of Ranting Manor for some time, so I'm here in my new home now and I've had a week or so to get my bearings and settle in. It's going reasonably well so far, with the good outweighing the bad in most respects (although I'll definitely be doing a Happy Dance on the day the hot water returns to my flat). But hey, that's a whole different story.

Hope you enjoyed the armchair trek through South Korea. I'll be darkening your inbox again soon with more mindless detail about ... well, somewhere else. Until then, take care and stay off the moors :-)

Da svidaniya!

Anthony.

* Kimchi & soju: two of the finest things I've ever put in my mouth. The first is a tapas-style dish of fermented cabbage with loads of chilli, and if you haven't had it, your taste buds haven't lived. The second is Korean rice wine, variously flavoured with sugar, citrus, spices etc.