Final Thoughts

I’m glad I did the trail.  It was a worthwhile endeavour and it gave me a goal to complete for the year.  It also got me out and exploring the country.  I learned a lot along the way about some of the history of Korea, from Japanese colonial times to the history of the country since the Korean War.

But…

If I were to do it again, I would skip some parts.

For me, there was very little redeeming value to the third and fourth legs of the trail.  I would comfortably skip from the end of the second leg to the very end of the fourth leg.  In between there is very little that I would want to see again.

Similarly, the seventh leg is a bit depressing.  Ulsan is quite an ugly city.  The first part of the seventh leg is pretty nice, but as it gets down to the harbour area and its vision of some kind of apocalyptic hell landscape, it would be a total skip for anyone who wants to focus on nature.  That continues into the first part of the eighth leg which provides a lovely view down over the hellish landscape that is industrial Ulsan.  Skip…

The first part of leg nine is past a big plant of some kind and is quite uninteresting, but from then on, the trail becomes quite nice.

Leg eleven is a bit frustrating as it’s not clear how to get past the closed part of the trail.  Otherwise it gets interesting as there is history to be learned and historical stuff to see.  It’s also past a lot of the industrial yuck of the southern areas and so it’s mostly just coastline, right up into Pohang.

After that point, I wouldn’t say there is much that is a pass.  There are bits that pass through cities, but those bits aren’t nearly as bad as Ulsan.  I might give a pass on the leg through Donghae.

And leg 37 was really just kind of annoying, but it had been advertised as closed.  Once it is all rehabilitated after the construction, it might be better.  But it is in an urban area.

Overall, I did enjoy the trail.  It was not as natural as I had thought it would be based on that very first leg in the middle that I hiked with a hiking club.  But it was informative, it gave me lots of exercise and allowed me to make and meet an activity goal.

I’m very impressed with myself.  You will be as well.

Good luck if you are reading this in preparation for your trek up the east coast of Korea.

The Signs and Markers

In order to follow the trail, the makers and caretakers placed a number of different types of markers to follow along the way.

At the beginning of most legs, of which there are 50 defined legs of the whole trail, there is a sign with a route map, as well at other information such as sights along the way and even accommodation suggestions and food recommendations.  These signs show where the leg goes and gives information about its length and how far from each end of the whole trail the leg is located.

On the trail itself, one of the two most common markers is an arrow sticker, orange for those headed north and blue for those headed south.  It seemed that most people must be headed north as there were many times when I would find an orange sticker with no corresponding blue sticker.  In the final stages of the trail in norther Gangwon Province, these stickers were not used.

The other most often used trail marker was a small cloth set of band-like flags attached to trees, fences, and other spots along the way.  They were always paired, one orange and one yellow.

The further north I went along the trail the more that the arrow stickers were not used, but tall poles with directional signs were used that seemed to make up for the lack of stickers.

Two other types of stickers were used, but irregularly.  One set was a round sticker, shaped like a sun.  They were orange and blue for north and southbound directions respectively.

The other set were larger rectangle stickers, again orange and blue, although the blue ones were relatively rarer than the orange ones.  These sets of stickers would be found on large stationary things like benches and bridge edges.  Again they were used far less in the northern parts of the trail.

There were square brown plaques with the Haeparang symbol attached at intervals along the trail.  They were not used much in the southern parts of the trail, but as they began to be used they would mark out roughly one kilometre intervals.

A final kind of route marker was on the ground.  They were directional indentations in concrete at some points.  They were rarely used, or at least rarely able to be seen.  They were not very useful as route markers, at least for me.

Many parts of the trail, particularly in the north, were quite well marked.  But at baffling times, when there were two or more possible directions, the trail makers seemed to lose the plot and not mark those spots well at all.  Occasionally a marker would even point in the wrong direction.  And it would sometimes take quite a distance beyond a choice point before getting confirmation that I was traveling in the correct direction.  It was a bit maddening and frustrating.  Having a photo of the route map on my phone or camera was at times absolutely necessary to be able to find the trail.

Good luck.

Leg 50: Unification and Security Park to Unification Observatory

After leg 49, I had hoped to get back to finish a couple of weeks later.  Christmas, among other things got in the way, however, and it wasn’t until early January that I got back to finish my trail.  It still left me with about a week and a half before the one year anniversary of starting, so I considered it a win.

I got out of work early on the Friday and headed out midafternoon to Seoul and then to Sokcho.  It was really nice to get somewhere early enough in the evening to actually be able to walk around for a bit and then get a good night’s sleep.  I thought about heading up to the border area, about 40 kilometres away that night, but figured I was close enough, especially when I found there was a city bus that would go all the way.  I wouldn’t to do any transfers and all the rest.  Just catch a bus.  I wasn’t sure how long it would take to go in and get out of the unification observatory area, so I thought it best to go early.  When I looked at the schedule that Google Maps had for the bus, there were a couple of early buses, between 6 and 8 in the morning, but then nothing until 11.  That meant an early morning.  But it would give me plenty of time to do the final leg and get back to Seoul.

I did get up early and got some breakfast, then got on the bus for the roughly hour and a half to the end point or the route.  The bus driver did a double take when I told him my destination.  What?  Do people not often take the bus for an hour and a half?  Ha ha!!

I got to the unification observatory registration area around 9 and went in to get it all figured out.  The registration area had a spot for people who were in tours and those who had a car.  They directed me to the car line.  It wasn’t a big deal because I was the only person there at that point.  She told me about the fee for the car and driver.  She was a bit taken aback when I said I had no car, and told me that I couldn’t go without a car.  When I told her that I had been told I could get a taxi in, she said it would cost 50 000 won.  I knew that.  So she called and told me to wait.

When the taxi driver arrived, he was a really nice-seeming guy, probably mid-60’s.  He got a paper for me to fill out.  They needed my name and age, presumably for identification purposes should something go wrong with North Korea while I was in there and all hell were to break loose.  It wasn’t something I expected, but those were the rules.  And then we were off.

The driver got us through the check point at the security perimeter and we headed off on a really nice clean road… that is practically unused.  I have a couple of photos of the area, for the driver slowed down and had me take a couple of photos of the check point and such.  However, I suspect that because he was a bit surreptitious about it, and it being a secure area, it would be a bad idea to post those photos in any way.  We passed by the DMZ museum, and I hoped to go in later.  Then we came to the train station.  There are only a few transportation routes into and out of North Korea from the south.  There are a couple of roads and, I found out on that trip, a second train line into North Korea.  The other is north of Seoul.  Both these crossing points have a shiny, functioning train station.  And both train stations are ready to go… when the north and south are reunited as one country.  Unfortunately this is not looking likely any time soon.  So for now, they sit forlornly at the border, empty, lonely buildings without anyone in them.  At least the train station north or Seoul has visitors who go there on tours of the DMZ.  The train station at the eastern border crossing is behind fences and with guards around it.  I have a photo of it, that my driver stopped and had me take, but as we were leaving there was a bit of sudden and frantic seeming activity in the guard house, so I suspect that that is also a verboten photo.  Instead, this is a photo of the Dorasan train station near Seoul.  It’s very similar to what I saw at the unification observatory.

My driver then took me up to the observatory.  It’s just a small spot on a hill, looking north to the border and beyond.  There is a fair-sized parking lot, but my driver slipped over the edge of it.  Then he waited until nobody was looking and slipped past the moving guard rail things and into a spot that said not to driver there.  He conspiratorially put his finger to his lips and swore me to secrecy… not that it was beyond the notice of anyone who was looking.  It would be hard to miss a taxi parked in a place it shouldn’t be.  But clearly, I had gotten a good taxi driver to take me around.

We parked in the other lot and he got out and dug around in his trunk and presented me with binoculars.  He took me up to a viewing platform and pointed out all the mountains and hills north of the site.  He pointed out especially, the little kind-of-island here.  That was apparently the border.

The DMZ is supposed to be 4 kilometres wide with the actual border at the midway point all the way across Korea.  That didn’t look 2 kilometres away to me.  But the guard houses that were clearly visible on two hills on either side of the valley leading to the half-island were obviously from the opposing sides.

Now, I want to put in a note about my taxi driver.  I don’t know exactly where to put this.  I think it might deserve more prominence, but I don’t know how to make it so.  As I said, he pointed out all of the local hills.  He knew all of their names.  And he knew them as though they were known to him.  That is not surprising.  This area was his home as a boy.  His home town, if I understood him correctly, was just north of the current border.  And his family was split in half when the final split between North and South Korea was completed after the Korean War.  He and his parents were in the south.  His grandparents and other parts of his family were left in the north.  When he told me that, I just quietly said that I thought that was sad.  He got quiet for a moment, and there was a look on his face, just for a flash, of loss.  And then his jovial spirit returned as he obviously took great pride in being from that area and being able to tell someone about the landmarks.  I didn’t learn his name, and I couldn’t probably pick him out of a lineup now.  But that probably doesn’t matter too much because he could be any number of older Koreans, who were separated from other family members when war they didn’t start, didn’t ask for, and probably didn’t want, sent parts of their families to different sides of a contested border, all on the capricious actions of governments supporting rival ideologies.  I can’t imagine that.  And for that realization, that observatory area was a bit sad to me.

 

After he pointed out all the landmarks to me, the driver told me I had 30 minutes to wander around the observatory.  I went up and found a stamp spot for the bicycle trail.  I had the stamp from the security park outside, so I didn’t need it.  But I decided that I would call it the final sign for the east coast trail.  It represented the official end of my hike.

There was also a mail box.  I couldn’t resist sending a postcard from this place.  It may be a highly touristy thing to do, but it was necessary.

There were also pay binoculars from the viewing area at the observatory.  Again, I clearly had a superior taxi driver/guide, a fact I realized again as I raised the binoculars he had provided to me and looked up at the North Korean side of the border.

And I was able to see a mountain from the observatory.  It was Geumgangsan, the Diamond Mountain.  About ten years ago, there was a resort operating around that mountain.  It was a joint operation between the North and South Korean governments to provide access to tourists from the south to see and do some hiking around that mountain, as well as providing some income to the North Korean government.  It was a project that was begun during a time of rapprochement between the two governments in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.  I had the opportunity to visit the resort on a trip organized by a tour company in South Korea.   Of course, shortly after that trip, a South Korean woman was shot and killed by North Korean guards, allegedly for being in an unauthorized area.  The resulting fallout of the incident led to the closure of the resort.  It’s too bad.  It was a nice place.  But seeing it again from the observatory gave me a feeling of coming full circle.

I came down from the observatory and looked around a little bit more.  It was an old building, and there was a bunch of renovation going on around it.  But it also seems to be a bit of a lonely building sitting just south of the border with the north, and without many people knowing it is there, at least not many non-Koreans knowing it is there.  But that whole area in the very northeast corner of South Korea is full of interesting historic and other sites that really ought to be better publicized.

I went back to the taxi and the driver took me out to the main parking lot, and got a stare from one of the military guys wandering around.  I hope he didn’t get in any trouble.  He showed me to another building, where one could get a sense of the war.  There was a tunnel with photos from the war and an attempt at atmosphere with camouflage netting and then a little theatre with a tent and sounds of bombs.  There was another room with living quarters, presumably that match the living quarters of soldiers who patrol the border today.

And there was a room that discussed how remains are dealt with when they are found.  Even though I couldn’t understand any of it because it was all described in Korean, the photos were enough to get the point of it all across to me.  It was sobering.

Back in the taxi, the driver started out of the area.  I asked about the museum, but he told me it would be a greater charge for his time… and it was a place for students and children.  I don’t know if that was just to soften the blow of it being more money and to make it easier to say it wasn’t necessary to go, or just because he didn’t want to go and was trying to discourage me, but in all likelihood the museum wouldn’t have been that useful to me anyway, as it would have been in Korean with little if any English information.  I agreed with him that it wasn’t necessary to go and he took me out of the area and back to the registration centre.

He asked me where I was going.  When I said that I was going to take the bus back to town, he drove me to the bus stop.  I had thought I might try to complete the part of the hike in the last leg that would be permitted, as I had stopped short on my last visit, but I didn’t want to retrace my steps back to that spot after being driven to the bus stop.  So I got on the bus and headed back to Seoul.

I don’t know if all the taxi drivers are as nice as mine was.  I don’t know if they all have the same connection to the area.  But I got a very interesting experience, as short as it was, and I don’t feel too badly about the money it cost to go in and finish my hike.