Reaching for the Top

Well after nearly a month of being on the go, I finally have a day where I don’t have to go anywhere! This means I now have some time to go back and catch up on what we’ve been doing during October.

At the beginning of October, during our Chuseok holiday, we spent a few nights in Seoraksan National park – a beautiful part of Korea on the North East coast. You might think that being a national park should mean not many people, not true. Even though this time of year is supposedly one of the quietest, there were still lots of people there. It took us about an hour to drive the last 2 km to get into the park where our hotel was.

One of the highlights was climbing to the top of Mt Seolag – a precarious peak which sits 933m above sea level. Fortunately there is a cable car that takes you the first 780m, and it’s not until the last 50m or so that it gets pretty demanding. There is a narrow path of sorts that leads up one side of the peak to the top. There are no guard rails or ropes to stop you falling into the valley, and the path is about 1m wide, with people going up and others coming down at the same time. We were smart enough to get there early, so the crowd was minimal and Harper and I had a clear run to the top.

When you get to the top there is a man there with a table set up that has different sized medals hanging off it. Depending on how much you want to spend, you can purchase a medal and have your name, age, and date that you climbed engraved on it. A bit tacky, but a good piece of memorabilia for the kids. The climb was a bit too risky for Promise, but Harper and I decided that she should get a medal anyway.

The kids were great, and I was amazed at how far they managed to walk each day. They had no trouble completing 5km hikes without complaining or stopping. These hikes weren’t well manicured garden paths, they were very uneven, rocky trails that were all uphill for the first half. I think the kids are developing a real love for bush walking – I can’t wait until they get a bit older so we can do our Himalayan adventure.