we had this past friday off for memorial day, so ellie and i decided we were going to get out of seoul for the first time since arriving in korea. i pulled out my guidebook and found seoraksan national park (located in a mountainous region on the east coast of south korea). pretty photo + nice-sounding description + cheap hostel in the mountains = perfect destination for a weekend trip. perfect destination assuming you can get there, that is.
before i tell this story, you should know that ellie and i tend to have difficulty getting places in foreign countries. we are aware that we have this problem and laugh about it every time we think about our travels. prime example: going from london to rome when we were in europe two summers ago. we got off a plane that we were pretty sure was made of plastic at 10:00 pm in a military airport that wasn't even in rome, then took what we hoped was the right shuttle bus and ended up at rome's biggest bus terminal an hour later. we had directions from there to take a city bus that, as it turned out, wasn't running any more because it was too late at night. after a horribly confusing conversation with an italian taxi driver, we got in the backseat of a taxi that held us, our driver, and some random passenger who would be dropped off before we were taken to our campground hostel. forty-five minutes and fifty euros later, we finally arrived. it was amazing and completely worth the hassle in the end, but man, that was a rough day of travel.
somehow we failed to remember this and other experiences while we were figuring out how to get to a hostel in the middle of the mountains in a part of korea we'd never been to. our directions said to first take a bus from one of two places: a big shopping center/amusement park combo in jamsil, or a bus terminal called dong seoul in gangbyeon. jamsil is slightly closer to our apartment, so we figured we'd go from there. well, after wandering around for a little while we came across a tourist information booth and a helpful korean lady who said "oh, there aren't any buses that go there from here." right. so the adventure began...
we hop on the subway to dong seoul and find the ticket counter. the place for which our directions said we needed to buy bus tickets isn't listed in the choices of destinations, so we buy tickets to a city close (or so we thought) to where we were going. we've just missed the previous bus, so we wait three hours in the terminal for the next one. once it finally arrives, the ride itself is great--comfy reclining seats with footrests, barely anyone else on the bus. three and a half hours later, though, our bus pulls into a terminal listed nowhere on our directions. the next item on the directions? free pick-up from a terminal we're not at. so we've gotten off the bus in a city we've never been to, it's dark out and the information booth is closed. this isn't looking promising, and it's beginning to feel vaguely reminiscent of the night we got to rome. as we are standing outside looking lost, a drunk man weaves by on his bicycle and yells something at us. we look at each other like "nice. this keeps getting better." but then, out of the blue, relief: a korean man walking up the sidewalk says to us "don't worry about him, he's crazy." we look at each other and think english! he speaks english! and almost fall over ourselves to stop this man so he can help us. he's friendly so we hand him our directions, point to the address and say, “we need to get here. do you know where it is or how we can get there?” he doesn't. “well,” we say, “we've got this phone number but it isn't working.” he looks at it and informs us that we've been dialing the country code for korea as part of the number. [we're awesome.] so he calls and talks to the hostel woman, and then informs us that we'll need to take a taxi to the hostel. it's going to cost between 25,000 and 30,000 won (roughly $25-30 USD). fine, whatever. at this point we just want to get there. he kindly finds a taxi for us and explains our situation to the driver. after much jabbering in korea, the driver agrees to take us. we get in. he pulls down the road a bit and then wants the phone. turns out he doesn't actually know where we're going. so he has a conversation with the hostel woman, and soon we're en route to our hostel. twenty minutes of winding through the mountains later, the driver has started to slow down and start to pull off to the side of the road every so often. eventually he pulls into some random parking lot and asks for the phone again. he calls the hostel woman one more time, and after a brief conversation he drives under an overpass and turns onto a dirt road. at this point both ellie and i have the brief, frightening thought that our taxi driver has decided to kill us in the middle of the mountains in a part of korea we've never been to. oh-so-thankfully, he turns the corner and there stands the happy road guest house for backpackers. it is glowing beautifully in the dark, roughly eight hours after we bought our bus tickets back in seoul.
in the end, though, that ridiculous journey led to a wonderfully relaxing time in the mountains, complete with hammocks and a waterfall. we were the only foreigners at the hostel, which meant we could just chill out and do whatever we wanted to. there was no one to talk to besides each other and no pressure to talk to people just because they also spoke english. it was lovely. i needed a break from the city, and a day and a half with no clock or computer or cell phone gave me the relaxation and reflection time i'd been missing. and it ended up being a lot easier to get back—we bought two tickets for dong seoul terminal from a little old lady running a restaurant in the village, got on a bus that picked us up on the side of the road in a dirt parking lot, and were back in our apartment four hours later.
the problems we had getting there (and their subsequent solutions) made me think about two things. the first is how small, not-so-noteworthy occurrences might have a much bigger impact than we realize. take the drunk man on the bicycle. probably a fairly common thing, considering the amount of soju that koreans of all ages like to drink. but had he not wobbled by us while the english-speaking man (who also, coincidentally, was a bicycling enthusiast—though we think he was sober) was walking up the sidewalk, who knows how long it would have taken to find someone who spoke english, or if we even would have. the second thing i thought about is the kindness of strangers. for how cold and unfriendly i've found the average korean walking down the street to be, when i've needed help people have come through brilliantly. that man didn't have to help us near as much as he did. he didn't have to help us at all. but he seemed to want to fix our little pickle, and he did everything he could. there have been other instances throughout the two months i've been here as well, and it's helping to restore my faith in the basic goodness of people. working for any amount of time in any customer service job will kill that and the credit union was no exception. my amazing co-workers definitely helped to balance out the negatives; still, i came away from that job wondering if the majority of people on this planet really care what happens to those they encounter. i am not without fault in that area, for sure, but thinking about it has made me realize part of why i love traveling/living in a foreign country so much. it's because doing so is one of the best reminders of how it feels to be helpless, fully dependent on the goodwill of strangers, and how someone will come through for you when you could really use some help.
i hope this finds you all well and that you enjoyed the may photos. thanks to everyone who's been staying in touch—i appreciate it so much. miss you all!
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