I’d heard these jets before, and assumed they were military. Yes, he said, there was a base nearby and they trained a few days a week – but other than that it was quiet here. For me, the moment was a rare reminder that this peaceful Buddhist country, with its huge American military and air force bases, was always on alert against attack from the North.
A woman who seemed to be one of the ‘temple family’ who looked after the place had been staring at me entranced. Now she asked if I had eaten. Not since breakfast seven hours ago, and I was starving. She led me through the kitchen, past a table covered with mushrooms drying in the sun, to a room with a television and an open door looking out over the fields. Here she sat me down in front of a low table and switched on a fan, went back into the kitchen and reappeared five minutes later with a large tray of different vegetable dishes. She packed a bowl with rice from the steamer, and sat down to watch me eat. I nodded and smiled at her as I ate, embarrassed but thankful, trying to express how good it all was. All the food was grown here, and it tasted delicious. Buddhist monks learned to live off the land when they were driven into the mountains, and clearly they had developed it into a fine art.
I went back outside to sit on the rock and chat with Chi-bong. He asked about my reasons for coming to Korea, what it was like travelling alone here. He had travelled with a backpack and tent himself in Europe with a friend, visiting Germany, Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy: he loved climbing mountains and ice, and had made it to the top of Mont Blanc. I wondered how a monk could afford to travel around Europe, but wasn’t sure how to ask. In the Koryo Dynasty, Buddist monks got rich from commerce, farming, wine making and even loaning money at high interest. In those days, Buddhism was a state religion, merging philosophy with political power. How did monks survive these days?
‘I know this is a personal question,’ I ventured, ‘but what work do you do here?’
He looked surprised, as he stated the obvious: ‘Meditate.’
He asked about my boyfriend’s job.
‘He’s a musician. A drummer,’ I said. ‘He plays at a big hotel in Seoul.’
‘Classical?’
I shook my head. ‘Rock.’
He smiled, and asked which hotel the band played at. I told him, and he said he’d visited the Hyatt one time with his friend and had a coffee. It was hard to imagine Chi-bong sitting in his grey monk clothes surrounded by designer boutiques and quarrelling funk musicians. Just then, three more young monks came by, looking like any other skinny lads in their early twenties, with baggy trousers and T-shirts and hats, and towels around their necks.
‘Today it’s too hot to meditate, so they are going swimming,’ explained Chi-bong.
The women brought watermelon, which I happily munched. As I prepared to be off so that Chi-bong could join his friends at the river, he said I could stay there for a night if I liked. It was tempting. I was getting along well with Chi-bong, enjoying his smile. But I didn’t want to take too much and abuse the monks’ kindness. While I’d have been thankful of a bed for the night if I’d really needed it, it was still only early afternoon and I had plenty of time to find a place to stay. So I gave Chi-bong my phone number, and told him to call if he came mountain climbing in my country. He seemed happy.
‘But will you remember me?’ he asked, smiling shyly.
Are you flirting with me, I thought, and brushed away the notion. I laughed, thinking of how many calls I get from Korean monks, and assured him I would.
Buddhist monks seemed to be guiding my journey as they welcomed me to their homes in these isolated places. Was it a lonely life here? I know how much I need company and love, but sometimes you need to remove yourself from the company of people who know you, in order to think about who you are and what you want out of life. Han Bi-ya, Korean author of Daughter of the Wind: Three and a Half Times Around the Earth on Foot, says she travels not ‘by herself ‘ but ‘with herself ‘ – that by travelling solo she has nurtured a dialogue with herself and learned more about herself and how to cope with difficulty.
The monks appeared happy. As I would read later, an important element of Korean Buddhism is that you can’t cling to happiness or sadness; you walk peacefully and freely towards enlightenment. Everything that happens teaches you something and you move forward, whatever is happening. The only way to be satisfied in life is to learn your true nature.
Chi-bong’s responsibility as a monk was to meditate. Meditation, according to Seon (better known to us as Zen) Master Daehaeng in her book Wake Up and Laugh, is not just about sitting. ‘Spiritual practice is done through your mind, not through your body.’ In this busy age, she says, living itself – eating, working, driving, loving, sleeping – should all become practising Seon. Even bungee jumping, climbing Mont Blanc. She speaks of gwan: mindfulness, observing, being aware. And of letting go things that are unimportant. We must search within ourselves to live with joy and freedom.
Hiking back down towards the park’s entrance, I found a shop where I bought a bandanna with a map of the park on it. What a clever idea. There was also a sign with information about the places I’d been. When I started copying some details into my notebook, the shopkeeper came out and gave me his last tattered copy of an English-language booklet. He seemed proud that I would spend all day hiking in his national park.
Eventually, it was time to leave Seonunsan and find a nice place to stay the night. Pyonsan, according to my guidebook, had a beach, Pyonsanbando. I decided to try to get there.
CHAPTER TWELVE:
OUT WITH THE BOYS IN PYONSAN
The Korean peninsula at its very north has a long border with China; Korea looks like a spur off China’s north-east coast. Archaeological evidence shows Chinese pottery spread from China to Korea as early as two millennia BC. During the Three Kingdoms period, the Koguryo Kingdom started to extend into Manchuria (China) at around the time the Paekche Kingdom was forging links with Japan. The Sui Dynasty of China saw Koguryo as a threat, and sent huge armies in, but the Koreans were well-trained fighters and the result was a truce. The succeeding Tang Dynasty of China teamed up with the Shilla Kingdom to defeat the rival Koguryo finally in 668. Shilla developed a close association with Tang China, and imported Chinese medicine, astronomy, music, literature, administration and laws.
Buddhism was imported from China, and so was Confucianism. Confucius lived in China from 551 to 479 BC, but Korea is said to be the most Confucian nation in Asia. Although we tend to think of Confucius simply as a wise man (Confucius he say...), Confucianism is a strict and complex system of ethics that reveres education, respect for elders, deference to authority, male superiority, etc. Rules govern every type of social relationship, subjecting them to a hierarchical structure. The information you learn when introduced to someone determines how you behave towards one another.
I referred to the monk’s handwritten directions and caught a bus to Kochang, then from Kochang to Puan, and from Puan to Pyonsan. I was falling asleep on the bus in the still-hot late afternoon as I saw what looked like Pyonsanbando fly past the window.
Jumping out at the next stop, I asked a group of teenage lads the way, and they pointed me back in the right direction. As I was making my way along the road, one breathless skinny boy caught up with me and said he wanted to help me. I declined his gallant offer to carry my pack, but happily agreed to have some English-speaking company on my walk. We continued along making pleasant conversation. His name was Oh Jung-seok, and in fact he wasn’t a teenager at all but a twenty-two-year-old student of Hotel Management at Cheju University. He had an endearing way of apologizing abjectly for his English, which was actually pretty good. I was the first foreigner he’d ever seen in Pyonsan, he said. I felt honoured.
At Pyonsanbando, Jung-seok found me a cheap room in a guesthouse right on the beach, with a window looking out to sea, the curtain billowing in the breeze. Perfect. Leaving my bag, I went back out for a cold drink, offering to buy Jung-seok one for his kindness. Nice as it was to be mee
ting people, I was really tired, badly needed a shower, and didn’t have the energy to chat. He said he’d be pleased to show me into Inner Pyonsan next day, and waved a smiling goodbye. I took my beer down to the beach, where the sun was setting, turning orange, then pink as it sank; there were islands silhouetted grey. I hadn’t heard waves for some time, not since Tokjokdo.
Back at the deserted minbak (guesthouse), I found the shower at the end of the corridor. The facilites were small and basic but clean: concrete floors, cold water and buckets. I opened the door of my room and stepped up barefoot onto the raised floor. There was a fan, quilts laid out on the linoleum for bedding, a pillow. The cell-like simplicity and the sound of the sea outside my window were calming.
Down the road were a few quiet restaurants. A friendly wave beckoned me into a place that looked expensive. But the people spoke English and understood when I told them I had little money. They cooked me a fantastic meal of steaming, spicy instant noodles with egg and green onion, and side-bowls of rice, kimchi, tofu and potatoes, and charged the tiny amount of 2,000 won when I left. In fact I didn’t have change so they asked me to drop in next day to pay, and waved goodbye, calling ‘See you again!’
I strolled down the beach, the sand soft underfoot. Campers were sitting around fires. Others were walking or sitting together, sharing a drink. A woman sat on a wooden bed, massaging her feet. The beach was beautiful, a bright moon shining on the waves and the stretches of flat wet sand where the tide had gone out. Out at sea were the lights of fishing boats, and above were stars. I went home and fell asleep to the sound of the waves, waking to the same sound about ten hours later. The best night’s sleep in memory.
Mist covered the mountains but the sun was heating a hazy sky. I went for a swim, then walked along the sand. Two ladies wearing cotton gloves and headscarves were clearing litter into bags. At the end of the beach there was a campground, but only a few tents – the season didn’t officially start until next day, 8 July.
Busloads of children of four or five started pouring onto the sand, kept in line by teachers with megaphones. Each group had its own bright uniform, including matching hat and daypack, in yellow or blue. One group, discovering crabs for the first time, was shrieking and running about wildly, limbs flailing. A teacher showed the children that crabs were harmless, calming them for a few minutes. The moment she stepped away one of the kids set them all of shrieking again. Their giddy excitement was infectious.
The mist was gradually clearing and the mountains were calling me. I set of walking. The coast road was hair-raising, with speeding buses and an inordinate number of concrete mixers en route to some big construction project, and I was glad to turn off it. By contrast, the road which wound inland and gradually uphill was silent and passed through dark green hills and beautiful farmland, fields of tobacco and onions spreading away to the hills, and tiny farm buildings at the roadside with garlic hanging to dry under the eaves. I stopped to cool off in the shade of every tree I passed.
When I reached the entrance to Inner Pyonsan National Park, the heat was intense and I truly began to question my sanity for being out in the midday sun. A warden was lying under a thatched shelter taking a siesta, but he woke when I arrived and, although surprised, gave me a helpful map in return for the 1,000-won entrance fee. The closest peak, it seemed, was Ssangsonbong, just over a kilometre away, so I thought I’d give that a try.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that this kilometre was an almost vertical one. But it was peaceful alone with the crickets in the forest. Eventually I came to a rock on the edge of the mountain, with a breeze and a breathtaking view of glistening forest sweeping from the ridge, 400 metres above sea level, all the way down to the valley where the farms began. The breeze smelled of heat and pine. The wind blowing through the trees sounded like the sea.
I spent the whole afternoon wandering the pathways. At one point, I emerged from the trees to the jutting edge of the mountain where a helpful sign read ‘Danger – Falling!’ Standing amidst massive boulders on the cliff edge, I could see all the way across to a sea inlet where an island seemed to hover in the mist. There was a small blue-green lake at the foot of this mountain. I scrambled down a steep, shingly path for an hour, and finally found myself overlooking waterfalls. My legs ached, my arms and shoulders were smarting with sunburn. I stood knee-deep in a pool surrounded by crystal-shaped rocks covered with moss, and poured cool water over my head.
When I finally reached the farther exit of the park and bought a cold drink from its shop, the last bus was leaving, but going in the wrong direction, so I started out on foot for the road back to Pyonsanbando, not much relishing the idea. I’d come much further inland from where I’d started out. I was weak, having eaten nothing all day except two small yellow melons for breakfast on the beach. It was silly to have left so much to chance, to plan so poorly.
I’d got as far as the main road when I saw a farm where a large group of people were sitting on newspapers around a barbecue. They waved me over to join them. After confirming that I was travelling honja and indicating that I had been hiking in Nae (Inner) Pyonsan all day, I was promptly treated to slices of barbecued eel fresh off the grill, slathered in hot red sauce with sesame seeds, wrapped in a lettuce leaf, and washed down with a shot glass of clear ‘Korean whisky’, or soju. Sure, I was hungry, but it all tasted amazingly good. I would have loved to stay, but dusk was already beginning to fall – and I had far to go.
I hadn’t walked on for more than ten minutes when a truck stopped. The driver said he’d seen me earlier at the entrance to the park, so he knew how exhausted and in need of a lift I must be. Pyonsan turned out to be much further off than I’d thought. He dropped me off at the town and I had only a kilometre’s walk to the beach as dusk was falling. The people of Pyonsan were taking care of this errant foreigner, all because I’d taken the trouble to travel around their country.
On the sand, I stood in the waves, letting the cool saltwater soothe my aching feet. In the grey half-light, the sky almost melted into the sea. Between the dark, rocky promontories on either side of the bay, waves rolled in to shore, caught in the moonlight, casting shadows before they broke. I stayed transfixed, thinking of chance meetings and magical moments, until I was shivering.
The people at the restaurant had another friendly welcome for their least profitable customer, cooking me up a revitalising bowl of ramyun noodles with mushroom salad and other vegetable side dishes for a minuscule sum. As I left, feeling infinitely better, one inebriated man called out, ‘Do you want friend? I favour you!’ The woman who ran the restaurant laughed and waved him away, shouting, ‘Good night!’
Making my way back to the room I was accosted by a large, chubby young man who promptly told me he was thirty-five and known as Mr Che. A funny and rather charismatic character, he checked to see my accommodation arrangements were satisfactory, then commanded me to join him and his friends. ‘Drinking!’ he demanded.
Well, why ever not. It would be rude to say no.
So I sat at the table on the beach with Mr Che’s brother and friends, learning the etiquette of drinking OB Light. Mr Che instructed me how to tilt my glass Korean-style when he poured beer. To pour, you must hold the bottle with your right hand and touch or cup your wrist or forearm with the left. You do something similar when offering or receiving money. And when someone of ers you an empty glass, you hold it while they pour for you. He taught me how to shout ‘Kombae!’ for cheers, and encouraged me to taste the chewy dried squid, ochinga, they were handing round as a beer snack. He asked how old my boyfriend was. ‘Twenty-two,’ I replied. He pointed to a scrawny kid who looked about twelve, and exclaimed, ‘Mr Kim also is twenty-two!’ It was hard to explain the difference without of ending.
After I’d sat for a while chatting with the boys from Pyonsan, they decided to drive to Kyokpo, a village down the coast road. What is it about small-town boys that they always want to drive somewhere? I preferred to sit on the beach, but they
said it was only eight kilometres and that Mr Kim had stopped drinking OB Light after one glass so that he could drive. It seemed churlish to refuse, and we set of for Kyokpo, Mr Kim trying to demonstrate the television in his car and navigate the road at the same time.
It was a boring drive to a seaside resort town of amusement arcades, shooting galleries and rides, all still closed because the season didn’t start until the next day. There was nothing to do but stand around while the large Mr Che fed coins into a machine. He didn’t win the cuddly toy. We drove back in a subdued mood. I excused myself from going on to the coffee shop and had to insist rather forcefully this time on going home.
It appeared I had been altogether wrong about Koreans being unfriendly. The problem is partly that the happy, warm side of the Korean nature, the Buddhist side if you will, is countered by the solemn, serious Confucian side, which imposes strict rules of etiquette. Status can be determined by age, job, schooling, wealth, and that imposes rules on how to behave with those around you. It was now clear why people always asked my age. And it explained why Sean Kim said Koreans aren’t sure how to handle foreigners. Not that etiquette is always a bad thing – some might say we could benefit from a little more of it in the West. I escaped most of the requirements of etiquette, however, simply by being a traveller. I was a guest, female, travelling alone without much money. If I showed suitable respect, it seemed I would be looked after.
A refreshing morning swim was first thing on the agenda the next day, followed by a walk down the sand, watching the crabs bury themselves in holes. I’d slept soundly again, and my muscles felt stretched in the best possible way. Mr Che emerged from his house when I was preparing to leave. He made sure I stood at the right bus stop, buying me an iced lolly for the ride and giving me a goodbye bear-hug. While I waited for the bus, I watched a woman cutting turnips and cabbages into huge bowls for making kimchi. I wished I didn’t have to go back to Seoul; I wished Gav could come here instead.
Meeting Mr Kim Page 11
