Beyond the end of the world (2 of 5)

a tale of 5 SKCs*

So, yes: after all, we made it! We felt happy and proud crossing the Empire from West to East, then ferrying South to Korea. Yeah! But while the whole journey to and through Russia had been planned and prepared quite thoroughly (bookings, dates, tickets, visas, places and such), the rest was a blank page in front of us. Walking out of the ferry terminal in Donghae, we had a vague idea of where we wanted to go and what we wanted to see. But we had no clue about how to, how long, how much or, just, how? It was the beginning of a series of exciting South Korean Challenges:

the Korean, analog Craigslist: you write it, you post it and you wait for an answer!

SKC#1: make South Korea smaller, one bus at a time!

From Donghae, our first mission was to get to Gangneung, about one hour North. And to do it by bus. It was supposed to be a bigger town with more services, nicer beaches AND "a great wonderful and free campground right by the beach!" This promise of "a great, wonderful and free campground" has been the most recurrent tale - or myth, or lie, or simply plain bullsh--, depending on how you want to look at it - during our whole time in South Korea**. The bus stop was just in front of the ferry terminal and we had been told that "all basses go citibass telminal". So we waved at every single bus that passed along until the fifth one eventually stopped and let us on. First mystery, first unanswered question: why this one and not the others? No clue. Be watel, my fliend.

one of many "citybass telminals"; note the slight overpopulation of  extinguishers.

In South Korea, you get on the bus at the back and down at the front. You pay when you leave, according to the duration of your ride. Logical. For this you need coins: many many many coins, to feed a machine located just by the driver. He has to look carefully so as to count all the coins you insert in the plexiglas box (just like a ballot box), before allowing you to go down (once you've thrown enough coins in). In case you fail to do that right away, he just stares at you awkwardly. But doesn't get involved, ever. Unless maybe by sighing loudly and making you feel miserable when you either don't have enough coins or don't insert them fast enough. public shaming is an efficient leverage to increase one's performance and the South Koreans do have it assumed. First similarity with the Japanese society: shame as a tool for social control, check!

SKC#2: read (or at least decipher) the Hangul alphabet!
Don't expect anybody to speak English (rare exceptions to be found here and there) out of the main cities (Seoul and Busan). Some stuff might be written in English here and there, but not out of the main cities (Seoul and Busan). So, if you want to survive in the country, you'll have to learn the Hangul alphabet. Good news is: it was created long ago by a wise king who wanted to get rid of the Chinese ideograms so as to raise the rates of alphabetization and the proportion of educated people. He had a smart guy working on a brand new syllabic system. And the smart guy came up with a brilliant one. One you can learn how to read and write with in about twenty minutes. True thing. One sign, one sound. Sounds are usually grouped by two (consonant+vowel), sometimes three (consonant+vowel+another consonant), in a way that allows you to easily and quickly recognize a whole syllable. Let's have a look. Got it already? Good!

Hangul alphabet 101: a consonant + a vowel = a sign = a sound. easy, isn't it?

Richer of this new and exciting skill, we deciphered (well, actually, Wallis did) the word "Gangneung" written on the big big analog board in the middle of the citibass telminal, understood the timetable and platform, then successfully bought our first intercity ticket. SKC#2: R.

We felt so happy that we ran into a café and bought two iced coffees with milk to celebrate. We then missed two buses headed to Gangneung - on purpose - before getting on the third one. At that point, we need to say the intercity bus network is very impressive. Stunning! At first, it seems you can go from any city/town to any other city/town with either one direct bus or a maximum of two transfers. At most intercity bus terminals, you'll find a vending machine with the cheapest coffee with milk (hot or ice and generally really decent), some average free wifi (almost always working and reasonably fast) and a waiting-room with aircond (in case you want to get a sore throat to spice things up a bit). What else could you possibly ask for? Just a few days from now, we'll learn that not any place is easily reachable by intercity bus and some Natural Parks are so remote it's all an SKC to get there. But hey! Let's live in the present and on that sweet illusion for a while, we've only just arrived. Summary of our pleasant bus ride: spent an hour day-dreaming through the window, looking at some green hills covered with forests and paddy fields with rice. There was, actually, a river running through it, but there was no fly-fishing Brad Pitt in rubbers to be seen. Maybe there's no such thing as Korean trout? Suddenly, we were in Gangneung, surrounded by buildings and concrete again. SKC#1: R.

a bunch of cool college students taking their inflatable-Dolphin break from class.

It was, indeed, a nice and busy city, full of students and high-schoolers enjoying the summertime. Mostly smiling at us, staring at us, laughing (at us?) and texting all the time on their smartphones. We won't reinforce the cliché that it's a similarity with the Japanese, because it's pretty much the same anywhere in the western world too. #it'snotthesame! So, okay, fair enough: the smartphone addiction, real world vs. virtual world, blablaba and such. Gangneung was also quite bigger than we thought and it took us another hour on another local bus (all the way to its terminus) to get to the beach area, quite difficult to miss:

To get to the beach? Oh, of course! It's fairly easy: follow the weirdos in swimsuits with a floating killer whale and a green doughnut!

SKC#3: find the "amazing free campground by the beach"!
With many facilities and services, the beach looked nice and clean. It was crowded, but not too much. We quickly located a couple of convenient stores for rice balls, instant noodles and more coffee with milk. But we also quickly realized the narrow strip of pine trees between the first row of shops and night bars and the sandy beach was this "great wonderful and free campground right by the beach". No kidding! There was absolutely no way we'd pitch a tent on this ten meter wide garden patch where small groups of people were spending the afternoon in the shade... Maybe in winter, or with a typhoon, one might be able to stay there overnight without being noticed, chased or fined. But at the end of August, it was impossible: with our super big and heavy backpacks, just walking around already made it clear we were looking for a place to crash and camp. The feeling was (did I say it already?) clearly a "no way" feeling...

the infamous "Petate con patas" (two-legged rucksack)... levitating without legs!

We decided to stop, relax, change clothes, take turns to go swimming and to go hunting some food at the convenies. Even though it was only around 5:00pm, the question of "where the H--- are we gonna camp tonight?" was slowly becoming a trending (and urgent) topic. So yes, the water was delicious, the rice balls (let's start calling them onigiris if you don't mind and although it's a Japanese word) and coffee with milk too, and it was really nice to be chilling in the shade of some pine trees by the beach at the end of August... But the trending topic was progressively becoming a source of argument.  SKC#3: £ it's a fail!

We packed and decided to go and explore the park around the lake, just a mile away from here, or so. There was supposedly an "auto-campground" somewhere. As we soon discovered, "auto-campground" does not only mean that you get there with your car and pitch your tent by your car. It also means that you're not allowed to get in and camp unless you have a car. We thought of trying the "indeed we do have a car, ma'am! Only that we've left it home today. But we own one, true thing!" We then reckoned this kind of humor wouldn't get us very far in South Korea. Well, it never got us anywhere in any country. But we'll keep trying and we'll let you know about the results!

SKC#4: invent a B plan, set camp and cook dinner before it's dark!
Now let's talk about a REAL challenge... walk our way across this beach suburb of Gangneung between the sea and the lake, eventually running into a supermarket, then finding a neat, flat, hidden, remote-but-not-too-much place to spend the night. At some point, we were there: some woods (well, at least some trees) could be seen not too far away. There was a supermarket round the corner. It was dusk already but not night yet. In a few words: we were doing great!

between the sea and the lake: civilization everywhere and getting darker...

Back to the shore of the lake, we found a bushy area by a temple but the trail we were on was a dead end and there was a strange lady on a weird bike, talking on the phone. She kept looking at us, then finally came and spoke to us. Apparently, she understood we were looking for a place to spend the night (sick clever, the lady!). She allegedly had cycled thousands of miles around the world with her German husband and was blessed with so much generosity and hospitality in every possible country back then, that she wanted to "pay it back to the universe"... and we happened to be her cosmic coins. So she wanted us to stay at her place, to enjoy a warm shower, a Korean dinner and a comfy bed. Wow, taking un(t)raveling one step further, here! So she called her husband to ask him to come pick us with the car, while she'd ride her weird bike home. She talked to her husband on the phone for quite a while. Her body language was some kind of a torture. It looked like he was not that eager to pay back all this generosity to the universe. Well, at least not tonight, Josephine. He apparently had a bridge night with clients or some beers with friends. Or something. She was a bit uncomfortable but instead of hospitaliy, she gave us the URL of their website. Call it an acte manqué, we lost it and are unable to share it here. She smiled too much and left us in our dead end trail. After her weird bike had disappeared, we came back to the temple, found a lovely spot with a rain shelter where we cooked and put the mattresses and sleeping bags. We slept a first short bivy night sharing the place with mosquitoes, then with early joggers: at 6am we packed and hiked back to the beach for breakfast. SKC#4: R.

After arguing a little bit about a plan, we decided NOT to walk another 6 km to another beach with another amazing free campground by the beach. We're fast learners, I know! (Thank you, Wallis) Instead, we'd go straight to Sokcho, farther North, to go hike the famous Seoraksan Natural Park, the first and most famous of the country. Here came the:

SKC#5: get back to the citibass telminal without a won and with the ATMs refusing our VISA!
This is another fun fact about South Korea and another similarity with Japan: they have a "different" micro-chip standard for credit cards and therefore do not accept most of the international ones. Ha ha! What a fun fact! Hilarious. Especially when you discover that at 12 km out of the city center and away from the bass telminal and don't have a won left after a luxurious breakfast at a 7/11.

mystery ferry: is it a boat on the hill alla Fitzcaraldo, or are we below sea level?

We never thought getting cash from ATMs would be tricky (or just plain impossible!) and changed just about 20 euros at the ferry terminal the day before. Our VISA Premier (chosen for the travel insurance and for the allegedly premium services) proved useless in the three or four ATMs we found, including the one at the local post office. There though, a nice and English-speaking lady explained to us we needed an intelnashonal ATM and the only one was at one specific bank downtown. She told us to just take any bass headed to citibass telminal and to jump down when we'd see the bank". We answered that we didn't have enough money to take the bus, that was the reason why we needed an ATM so badly... So she stopped a taxi and said something to him. He took us onboard, drove us to that specific bank and waited there until we withdrew the cash and paid for the ride. He was nice, but left with our umbrella. It was sunny, so we thought "not a big deal". And we'd soon discover it was, indeed, quite the big deal. We got back on a bass headed to the citibass telminal (or so we thought) but after getting off Gangneung and passing along the airport, southbound, we realized something was wrong. Then we saw THIS and thought something was even wronger... Even though we couldn't see the sea, we knew we couldn't be lower than sea level. As a fake Chinese saying says (just made it up): "you need to flood the rice at some point, but high tide is not the answer". Getting lost was not a problem anymore since the bus was taking us straight to the boat on the hill and it was a purely, 100%, un(t)raveled situation. A bizarre place we reached by chance or based on a series of odd mistakes, not especially touristic, not famous at all and not even scenic: just plain weird.

the one and only love (boat) hotel on the hill, with Sergent Pepper's lonely hearts club band (watch your ears, ok?)

Second mystery, second unanswered question: how did IT get there? The big flood? Was it the one and only Korean Noah's arch? Was it pushed here by a tsunami? Taken up by an eccentric, visionary, opera-loving Klaus Kinski? Or built up this very hill on purpose? The answer is most probably the last option, as it happened to be a... love (boat) hotel! A fancy hotel for freak lovers and lover freaks alike. And another one we didn't stay at : at that point, the Siberian rain hadn't drained our intentions to sleep in the outdoors and the local one hadn't introduced itself yet. Soon, though...

Anyway, the love boat hotel was at the end of the line. The driver looked at us with surprise as we stayed sitted and smiled to him. He seemed to want us down his bus but we explained - with a lot of drama in our voices - that we were lost and needed to go to citibass telminal. He didn't dare to ask us to leave, not even to pay for the whole ride and opted for a very Japanese alternative: he ignored us from that moment on. As if we weren't here at all. We enjoyed the ride back into town and gave the driver our warmest thanks upon arrival at the citibass telminal. SKC#5 and last: R.

losing our dignity with a grotesque souvenir picture: the un(t)ravelers as Korean bears!

At that point, feeling guilty or embarrassed is innecessary, he already did for the three of us! It was already early afternoon, so we looked for the next bus headed North, to Sokcho and the fantabulous Seoraksan Natural Park. Sokcho happened to be another big "mid-sized" town by the sea, where we didn't stay long enough to really get a precise idea of what there was to see and what could be skipped. We skipped everything, from the lighthouse to the marine museum, to the XXth century catholic church, to the fish market. After another two hours to decipher the local bus chart, hop on the right one and ride it until the end of the line, we were at the entry of South Korea's most beautiful place, losing our dignity forever with a grotesque souvenir picture. Voilà! The rain extended its warmest and wettest welcome at us as soon as we stepped down the bus, the campground we walked to (about a kilometer under the pouring rain without the umbrella the taxi driver kept the same morning - he was probably a fan of Georges Brassens) happened to be full and, well, sometimes even the most beautiful place and mountain paradise suck when you've spent half the day trying to get there and all of a sudden it's the big flood again, your stuff is all soaked, it's getting dark and you don't really know where to start in order to make things just a little less terrible...

"But hey, we chose all this, right? We came a pretty long way and it took us a month, and it took us thirty something years and it took life billions of years, just so we had a chance to live this very moment... Right here and now, you know? So complaining is not an option. Say thank you to the universe and to the lady on the weird bike because she really wanted to pay it back... Oh, come on! F--k your cheap, positive, quantic, the-power-of-now soup, will you? Heavy rain when you're camping beyond the end of the world is NOT cool, regardless of the perspective you intend to adopt!"

It went on like that, with thousand of celestial voices speaking in our heads as the storm got bigger, roaring like crazy above them... no hell below us, above us only rain... But, you know: it's getting better all the ti-i-ime, a little better, all the time. I want to hold your hand. Is there anybody going to listen to our story, etc. In short: more of the same, soon!

_____________________________

* you'll have understood by now that the SKCs are South Korean Challenges!
** according to the myth, South Korea is full of amazing free campgrounds, everywhere in the mountains, in the countryside, on the beach, close to the towns... We couldn't find ONE single free campground and actually only wild-camped a couple of nights. Everything else were expensive campgrounds designed for whole families to enjoy car-camping with huge tents and tons of gear. See *** below for more about the "tons of gear".
*** Laetitia (our dear A's younger sister) had warned us long before we set foot in the country: "you'll see hiking is the national sport in Korea ; people LOVE hiking, they go over-equipped and they'll probably look at you as if you were going absolutely unprepared." Ha ha ha! How true she was. Oh, these awkward moments along the trails! We can only agree with her, except for one thing (that we shall repeat again and again): they apparently make a huge confusion between being equipped and being prepared, and between hiking and hanging around in hiking clothes!