Hiking at Soraksan National Park
Our last day in Sokcho started with a nice breakfast provided by our hostel, mixed with some stuff we raided at the convenience store around the corner.
Blue sky, no clouds, warm – perfect weather for hiking! We chose to take one of the local buses to get to the entrance of the Soraksan National Park. In the end it took a little longer as expected. Quite a bunch of people also had the idea of going hiking that day except that they were slowly driving up the hill with their car, blocking the way for the bus…
At least it didn’t take us long to get to the entrance where we bought tickets to enter. We could have also gotten tickets for the mountain railway but that would mean that we had to wait around three hours. It seems people call and get ticket reservations in advance. Well, we came here to hike and not to sit comfortably inside a railway ;)
We decided to take a route that would lead us to a big Buddha statue then to a mountain monastery, to Heundeulbawi a big rock that a person can put in motion and then to the top of Ulsanbawi.
Yeah…Koreans love to be super prepared for any kind of activity. Shops selling hiking clothes were also pretty popular in Sokcho and the entrance area of the National Park.
It was pretty crowded that day and we seemed to be only some of the very few non-Korean visitors.
This is the big bronze Jwabul statue, around 10m tall. In front of it people kneel down and say a prayer or offer gifts to the Buddha statue.
Next to the statue you can buy a tile and write something on it. I guess, it brings luck or so.
Along the way there are a lot of temples, somehow hidden.
The higher we got the more we could see how the woods here have already turned red. This is so different from European autumn!
I did not enhance the colours of the pictures, the leaves were actually really really bright red coloured!
At some point there was a little resting place with ajummas cooking Korean style pancakes and selling cold drinks. But of course the food does not grow on the mountain so there has to be an ajossi getting the supplies up there. What a hassle!
Whenever there was a little more of the landscape visible: picture time!
At some moments you really had to wait because there are some parts of the hiking route where you kind of have to climb up on a rope, so the mass of people had to queue. ugh.
The rock on the right side is the aforementioned “wiggling rock” Heundeulbawi. So far, no human could make the rock fall down, but we could indeed witness it wiggle around.
Nearly at the top! Btw. most of the Korean peninsula looks like this, mountains and hills everywhere the eye can see.
There we go! We actually just went to one of the 6 granite peaks. It’s quite windy, cold and people don’t seem to care if the handrail is really low and you could possibly fall off the top. Just take a picture to prove that you’ve been there √
The small town there is Sokcho and in the background you can see the Eastern coastline and the Eastern Sea/Sea of Japan/whatever you wanna call it.
Time to get down again!
This is one of the bigger temples we saw. At one of the entrance gates there were 4 Cheonwang statues, Kings somehow.
On the left: Damun Cheonwang with a lute and on the right: Jiguk Cheonwang with a sword.
Those are the other two Cheongwang, Jeungjang with a dragon and Gwangmok Cheonwang with a staff. They did look pretty angry though…and kind of Indian-looking, no?
These places actually have a lot of statues around the whole area…just like this retarded tiger @_@
…on our way back to the entrance! We just make it back in time to Sokcho to get our stuff and catch the bus to Seoul.
But you can’t leave without a full stomach, right? Chinese-Korean food. Jjajang-myeon – noodles with black bean sauce, veggies and meat, a kind of seafood soup and Jjamppong – spicy seafood soup which was not yet cooked when I took this.
Here we go. Spicy red and tasty clams inside!
After that we hurried to get some more of the delicious hoddeok from the street food stand.
Fun fact: Due to its geographical location ships from Russia (Vladivostok) come to Sokcho, so some of the signs are in Russian!
Bye bye, Sokcho!