5am is a funny time to be up and about at EV. It's still dark at this time of year but by the time we leave our apartment building at 5:45 the dawn is sneaking in. Everything is perfectly quiet. The lights are out, the speakers are calm, birds and frogs the only sound, until Jack the cat spots us and softly yowls for a scratching of ears. The night guard at the back gate is brewing tea in his little room, but his call is as cheerful as ever.
This time we're on our way to Seoraksan, a famous, mountainous national park on the east coast, via Seoul, where we meet up with the good folk of the Seoul Volunteer Centre. Unfortunately, being the furthest from the city, we are the last to arrive and the drive starts with a talk, in Korean, by the leader. Apparently all the other foreigners (we're the only native English-speakers) understand Korean, because they all laugh and turn to look at us. I catch "yong-uh" ("English") as she indicates the three of us huddled at the back of the bus like naughty schoolkids. When Bo Young - another leader, and a friend from the last volunteer jaunt - comes to our seats, I ask her to translate; she sums up a ten-minute speech as "We'll be stopping at a rest stop in 45 minutes."
We're the last ones on the bus at the rest stop too.
Oh dear.
When we arrive at Seoraksan it's early afternoon, and we're taken straight to Naksan-sa ("sa" means Temple) where we cross a bridge to the biggest Buddha I've ever seen. His grey bulk towers above a prayer platform where a child and his mother are bowing over and over.
Lotus flowers float everywhere in ponds and sculpted troughs but they're difficult to see for the tourists milling about (Korean and Western both). There's also the usual brightly painted wooden buildings which are such a feature of traditional Korean architecture. I especially loved a particular hanging fish - I want one for my verandah when I settle back home!
After Naksan-sa, it's off to the main Visitor's Centre for the National Park, where Cait, Leigh and I try to keep our hands out of trouble - surprisingly difficult with all the little buttons that make stuffed animals speak and little lights flash on a 3D map of the Park - but also understandable, as the tour is being conducted in Korean. We're slightly amused by the cameraman who's documenting this trip (Koreans love to film absolutely everything and then make mini-movies); the minute we stray from the main group, he's there, filming every movement. At the Centre we meet the rangers who will guide us over the weekend.
From the Centre we're taken to the campsite where we'll spend our first night, and where a group of very excited 6 - 13-year-olds are eagerly awaiting their first ever English visitors! They've been brought here by the Korean volunteer who teaches them English in their isolated village twice a month. We come bearing gifts: we're laden with E-Mart bags filled with the ingredients for three foreign meals, which we're going to teach the kids to make. (First we play games, but I'm glossing over that. As one of the first two to go out - I magnanimously give my winning place to a child - I am penalised and have to write my name in the air using my bum...) My team has chosen, well,
Bo Young has chosen to make jacket potatoes, and I, as the only 'Brit', am appointed Top Chef. We set to with gusto and despite never having made them while camping without any of the required equipment, they're a huge success, and my chief chef (Yun Bok, aged 12) is grinning from ear to ear as he delivers a quickly memorised speech to the judges on jacket potatoes and how to make them.
The judges, however, vote Team C's Vietnamese rice-paper wraps "winner". I definitely saw money change hands though.
Dinner is followed by entertainment; a boy plays a Korean flute, a ranger rocks the panpipes, three little girls sing a folk song, Cait dances to K-pop and Leigh teaches everyone a dance from a lesson at EV - the CHICKEN DANCE!!! It's awesome! :)
By the time the Chicken Dance has had everyone laughing and bouncing around, the kids are firm friends with us, clambering on our shoulders and pulling the hairs on our arms with amazement. One even falls asleep on a volunteer's lap! It's sad to see them go. Not least because it means it's late and time for a shower, and there's no hot water. Even better than that, there are no cubicles either. Cait, Leigh and I hover outside until the last elderly lady leaves with her towel, then we race inside to the big communal shower room and shriek and hop about under the showers, which are not just not hot, but are actually fed with icy mountain water.
The next day, after a noisy night in the luxurious tents set up for us, we're up at 7am for yoga with a pony-tailed teacher from a nearby temple. He seems especially taken with the three Englishes and comes to talk to us afterwards, accompanied by the video camera, of course.
It's soon time to say goodbye to the campsite - which is a beautiful place watched over by the foothills of Seoraksan. There's even a fresh spring next to the tiny shop, which is run by a wizened old couple who charge less than the markets in town for fresh vegetables and pot noodles. I wish all campsites felt like such a self-indulgence as this one.
Bar the lack of hot water, of course.
We head for the park where we split into our teams (we three make the token English in each team.) My group is handed a pile of plaques and we wander up the trail with a ranger, labelling pines and ginger trees. Korean hiking is unrecognisable to anyone with experience of Western trails. You know those winding, rocky paths in Cape Town, where you're not quite sure if you're on the right track until you suddenly come up against a bare cliff face and have to double back and find the hidden fork? Well, Koreans don't have that problem. Koreans have a wide deck with handrails which leads them up the mountain to the exact spot they're aiming for, with bridges over rivers and handy rest stops with benches and picnic tables. It's rather nice for a change... :) (Just kidding - give me the tough natural route any day!) So we set off down this "trail" for about 20 minutes, have a picture taken at a rest stop, and come back down again, via a bustling temple. Each of us has put up one plaque and had our photo taken while strapping it to the tree. That was the extent of our eco-volunteering. Yep. The guy had put up 500 plaques the previous week on his own - if he hadn't had to be explaining trees to 6 ignorant tourists, he probably would have put up a couple of hundred more that day...
The mountains themselves are beautiful. It's been overcast the whole trip, but here the dull grey fog transforms into white wisps of poetic mist, wreathing rocky crags. A cable car rises into the cloud, and this scene is what convinces me I must come back on an independent trip sometime. Unfortunately, we'd been told not to bring backpacks or cameras because of the strenuous hike we'd have to go on... but here's a photo someone else took so you can see what I'm talking about.
Later that day we bid our bus driver farewell for the night and climb into a minibus which races us through a perilously windy route over a river and along the sides of densely forested mountains, dropping us in a carpark in the middle of nowhere, apparently. Just around the corner, however, the forest conceals our third temple of the weekend - Baekdam-sa.
This is far and away my favourite part of the trip. To reach the temple we cross a bridge that spans a wide, rocky river bed - a small stream runs down the centre. The wide stony banks are littered with towers of rocks.
They are a form of meditation crossed with a wish. As you search for the perfect stones to incorporate into your tower, you consider the desires you have for your life and future, and the routes you might take to reach your goals. Balancing the stones on each other absorbs all your attention and suddenly you realise you've reached the pinnacle. You're then permitted to make a wish, although I think this is just a way of vocalising the wishes you've already been meditating on and setting yourself a goal, rather than a penny-in-the-well kind of wish. I built mine after a long day of rushing from place to place and it was such a pleasure to lose myself in the calm solitude of the temple - although there were plenty of people about, the river bed itself seemed to block out noise, and the concentration required meant I looked up from my finished tower and everything came flooding back into my senses - quite a shock!
Leigh, Cait and I spend almost all our free hour before dinner sitting on the banks, building towers and chatting about things. What a joy!
Our room is in an old building built on a platform around a courtyard, with sliding paper-and-bamboo doors. Shoes have to be left outside (as is usual in Korea) on the steps.
Temple life is far from luxurious and guests receive barely more than the monks themselves. We are sleeping in a room divided by a paper wall from the boys' room - 12 girls sleeping on mats squeezed up next to each other!
It's a restful night. Well, apart from the 3am call for prayer - a series of monks strolling through the compound beating drums and singing. We're up at 5:45 for icy showers (not for me, though. Cait and Leigh just have to deal with the smell) and breakfast, which we can't eat as we're all bibimbapped out (bibimbap is veggies on rice, cooked in a peculiarly Korean way), so we raid the little shop for pot noodles and coffee and sit on the river's edge. It's lovely to be up so early in such an enchanting place.
Forest animals think so too - we're visited by little chipmunks that dart close to our feet in search of discarded titbits, and a raccoon dog, which seems completely unperturbed by the humans invading his space.
We leave - reluctantly - at 9am for the Visitors' Centre where our park rangers await. They show us a movie of their duties and Leigh and I admit to goosebumps as we watch - they are firemen, policemen, paramedics, search and rescue, community pillars and teachers, rolled into one small Korean body. The photos of search-and-rescue missions in the wintry mountains convince us that we need to be back before the snow starts to fall - beautiful to look at, amazingly dangerous to hike in!
Then we're surprised with a little ceremony in which the director presents each of us with a certificate of volunteer work, encased in a bound folder that puts my Degree to shame. We each have to go up to the stage to receive them - very official. We feel slightly guilty for the very little bit we've actually done for them!
It marks the end of our trip. Well, of course, apart from the group photos outside with the specially made banner we've been carrying around all weekend (this is another peculiarly Korean trait - they make banners commemorating every group excursion, and take photos of themselves holding them). THEN it's the end of the trip, we're on the bus, and the bus is on the highway to Seoul. Amazing how fast 3 days can go.
I'm pleased I went, though, despite the language barrier and lack of actual volunteering time. I met some really awesome people from all over the world - hopefully I can keep in touch with them.
Well, I wouldn't want to pass up the offer of a free couch on my next big journey, would I?
;)
