"Do you know Park Ji Sung?": Hiking

A couple of Sundays ago I was sitting in bed, talking to my parents on Skype when I felt like something was wrong on my stomach. A slight pain, but more of an irritant than anything else. I lifted up my T-shirt to find a tick stuffing it's face in to me in the hope of a three day blood meal. This caused ripples of excitement especially in my mother and girlfriend, who were very keen on burning the little bugger until it jumped off, with little concern for my safety. A look on the internet suggested that fire was not in fact the best way to extract it, and that it was better simply pulled off with a pair of tweezers. This was far more difficult than the internet made it sound - and it took me a couple of attempts at pulling, and then the tick snapped in half, exactly as it's not supposed to. Anyway, I don't seem to have caught Lyme's disease, or any other horrible tick based infection, so I think I'm OK.

Anyway, one of the things I love about my little town is that it's right on the edge of Odaesan national park, one of the most beautiful in Korea. With summer here I've been able to take a bit more advantage of it. Here's what I've been up to:

The above photos were taken when Linda and I went for a stroll in the park just before Buddha's birthday, hence the lanterns, which appear all over Korea at this time of year.

This set in from the Pyeongchang teachers' annual hike. Everyone in our county set off one afternoon to climb this peak. While it may look impressive scaling 1,300 odd metres, we actually set off from just 1,000, which makes it less of an achievement. The chap in the green is my high school principal, with whom I walked part of the way - he's a really great guy, and even speaks a little English which makes communication easier.

I did manage to commit a small faux pas on this trip though. My elementary school principal gave me her packed lunch to carry, and thinking she was in front of me, I proceeded to climb the mountain. Unfortunately she was behind me and so was left lunchless. I have no doubt that she was amply fed on the selection of chicken, pork, kimbap, snacks and goodness knows what else was being hauled up the mountain to aid flagging hikers. She was fine about it anyway, and a gift selection of roll cakes the next week made sure everything was fine.

These few are from our 'camping' trip to Odaesan last weekend. However, on arrival at the campsite we found it closed, possibly due to shamanism (yeah, me neither). Instead we decamped to a minbak (a kind of holiday home) near the park entrance, explored a cool abandoned building and then proceeded to eat 3.5 kilos of pork and drink an awful lot of beer. All in all, an ideal weekend.

That's all from me for now. I'll write again soon, especially as I might be off to dodge North Korean shelling on the West Sea islands next weekend. Until then,

I'd forgotten that I actually hadn't posted all of my summer holiday photos. After Nick had gone home, and I'd wrung out my liver and hung it up to dry for a few days, I headed off to Taebaek on my bike. It was about 90km and sadly I didn't make it all the way. I got about 20km from Taebaek and found myself on a monster road, and so decided to get the train the rest of the way. The following day I headed up to Taebaek National Park for a quick look around. This is what I saw.

These are shots from the top of West Mun-su-bong and Mun-su-bong, the two highest mountains in the park. Sadly I was hiking on a cloudy day, so missed most of the scenery. The peaks were notable though for a preponderance of dragonflies at the top, one of which I managed to photograph above.

Some of the local flora.

Altar at the top of Jangubong, Korea's "mother mountain". Water from here forms rivers all over Korea.

A big butterfly I spent about 5 minutes trying to photograph.

The following pictures are from the Taebaek Coal Museum, which turned out to be rather unexpectedly good. I only went there to kill some time too.

The fossil / precious stone collection was very decent.