The following is Part 2 in a 2-part series about my trip to Daegwan-Ryeong (대관령) and Seonja-Ryeong (선자령) on 29-30 May 2010. In this installment, I discuss our trek along the Seonja-Ryeong mountain range on the afternoon of the 30th. I've intentionally kept the text to a minimum so as to allow the images to do most of the talking. Please see related post (Part 1: Daegwan-Ryeong Recreational Forest) for additional photos and comments.
After packing up basecamp, we drive a few kilometers down the highway to the Daegwan-Ryeong rest stop. From such inauspicious beginnings, we begin our hike, first to the peak of Daegwan-Ryeong. At this point, I have no reason to suspect anything.
About an hour later, we summit. An hour, which should suggest that "summiting" is hardly the appropriate word, but, nevertheless, we reached the top, so summit we did. While the view is nice, it's predictable. The picture that would have flashed through my head if someone had said, "Imagine, from the top of a small mountain, what the view of a small city and some scattered fields of farmland in the distance might look like...," that's exactly what it looked like. Thus, I still have no reason to suspect anything.
But then, we continue down the other side of the mountain, and then it hits. I'm suddenly thrust into a whole new world, like something out of a dream or a science fiction movie. Windmills are everywhere, above, below, ahead, behind, all around, endlessly beyond the horizons. We can touch them. The vanes SWOOOOOOOSHING directly on top of us, they turn with amazing speed but even more amazingly appear to move in slow motion because of their immensity, as if the mind can't accept the fact that something so big could move that fast. We can feel their energy.
Eating lunch, sitting on the grassy hillside, under the shade of a windmill, overlooking the valley, I am inspired t0 play the title track from The Sound of Music. I think it's a genius selection, but, sadly, no one else seems to get it. (Although they were surely familiar with the song itself, the melody, I now realize that they probably had no idea that the lyrics concerned hills and being alive and sounds and music and songs and and singing and thousands of years.)
As promised above, I'll cut the commentary short. I'll just say that it was a life-altering experience, and leave it at that.
After nearly five hours of what the others in the group referred to as "Teletubby Trekking" (personally, I didn't get the reference, never having seen the Teletubbies), deliberately avoiding roads so as to maintain the illusion of otherworldliness, but staying more or less on a northerly heading (aided by our iPhone GPS, natch), we eventually reconnect with civilization when we stumble upon the Samyang Dairy Ranch, entirely by coincidence. Talk about otherwordliness, they have ostriches.
We had to call for a convoy of taxis to pick us up at the ranch and take us back to our cars at the rest stop where we'd begun this 6-hour odyssey: 4 hours of walking, 1 hour for lunch, and a total of 1 hour for multiple breaks. Later, we estimated that the trek spanned a distance in excess of 20 kilometers, perhaps significantly more considering our trajectory was neither straight nor level (but none of us knew how to factor in those additional variables).
Finally, just to keep things interesting ex post facto, we ended up having dinner together at a restaurant specializing in raw beef--not the classic Korean dish known as yukhoe (육회), which consists of sliced raw beef and pears and raw egg yolk and garlic and onions and scallions and sesame oil and soy sauce and pepper--but just raw beef, dipped in salt. At that point, in contrast to the magnificence we'd witnessed earlier that day, everything else seemed... mundane.
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