Early Saturday Morning Hike along Mangusan, Yongmasan, and Achasan

Our children rode the rails to Daegu this weekend, leaving on a four-day retreat with relatives there, so my wife and I had a minor vacation and took advantage by rising early Saturday for a six a.m. breakfast before heading off around seven for an indistinctly three-mountain hike on a foggy, overcast morning on a high path past several medieval fortresses, or what's left of them, that once held the line between the Kingdom of Goguryeo and the Kingdom of Baekje . . . and I have to apologize for the photos below, for my wife does not appear, though due not to my narcissim but to her reticence.

Fortunately, I don't appear in every photograph in our hike along Mangusan (281 meters), Yongmasan (348 meters), and Achasan (287 meters), also called Mt. Mangu, Mt. Yongma, and Mt. Acha ("san" meaning "mountain"):


Those steps appear to be going down, but that's an optical illusion, for we had just come up and were recovering on a landing depicted by the next photo:


You see my unphotogenic self in this photo above as I cast a searching glance into the distance, imagining myself a watchman on a fortress outlook for the Kingdom of Goguryeo, intent on protecting the frontier against the rival Kingdom of Baekje, or perhaps contemplating an invasion to conquer that rival. But the next photograph illustrates the futility of my gaze:


As we see, there's a very foggy valley, the heavy haze -- or is it smog? -- obscuring our view, but we'll soon be descending a bit into that as we hike on along the mountain path between the 'peaks' of Yongmasan and Achasan:


Steps . . . and more steps:


Again, I appear -- this time perhaps on Achasan, though I'm not sure -- gazing once more into the foggy distance with a wise, discerning eye, as intimated by my stretched turtle neck, turtles being profoundly wise creatures:


I reckon I look pretty healthy for an old turtle. I just don't look very 'pretty'. At least, I don't look ugly, either. I'm in the middle: "pretty ugly."

Yet another photo of me, this time on the descent from Achasan, searching for sight of the annoying cicadas that infested the trees above. I've been told these critters come out every seventeen years or so, but they seem to me to crawl out of the ground and ascend the trees every freakin' year! Or maybe time just really does fly:


We now reach the end of our trek, at the very spot where most folks begin, the entrance, with its decoy stork:


And its decoy deer:


Afterwards, we wended our way down the hillside toward the nearest subway station, Achasan (Line 5), stopping for a lunch of blood soup for me and a variant on pork-bone soup for my wife.

A few beers were also imbibed . . .

Hiking in 'Uptown' Seoul . . .

Although we returned to Seoul on Friday afternoon, we continued our short 'vacation' through the weekend and yesterday chose to hike Buramsan (불암산), which could be called Mt. Buram in English. But it's also more correctly transliterated as "Bulamsan", i.e., "Bul-am-san," meaning "Buddha-Rock Mountain," not "Fire-Rock-Mountain," as I'd wondered . . . though I saw that it didn't look volcanic.

The mountain doesn't tower over Seoul, for it rises to merely 507 meters (1,663 feet), but its final hundred meters or so rise rather steeply, and the peak offers a stunning panorama. Here's a side shot from the distance:


We paused at several lookout points during our ascent. Here's one with part of Seoul in the background and a grouchy-looking fellow in the foreground. That's what I look like when I'm smiling. Actually, I'm having to squint like Clint because the day was brighter than it appears in this photo:


Sun-Ae caught me looking back, but the photo is actually intended to be of the rock that I'm standing in front of, a landmark called "Turtle Rock." Shortly thereafter, the ascent grew difficult for daytrippers like us:


For that reason, namely the steepness, the next photos were taken at the peak, as you can see in this upcoming photograph where I'm again spoiling the scenery:


Here I am once more, but this time actually enhancing the overall aesthetic effect of the not-unspoiled nature:


At last, we see my lovely wife, Sun-Ae, who has turned her face from the camera and hidden her identity despite being the best thing in that picture:


We finally finished our 'easy' hike some four or five hours after setting out not far from Hwarangdae Subway Station (Line 6), emerging near Danggogae Subway Station (Line 4), where we located a restaurant and enjoyed a bowl of ice-cold soybean noodle soup (kongguksu, 콩국수) and a plate of typically odiferous, hot-and-spicey pig intestines (gopchang, 곱창), the latter shown below:


I also drank some hard-earned and thoroughly deserved beer . . .