3. One year on..[Part1]

2. ..and I wonder Why?

8^C

Overcast following some light rain during the night. Winters Coming!!

The village of Gurae in the Sandong district of Yeongwol, in South Korea’s Gangwon Province is the most peaceful place I have ever visited. It’s single lane street, sandwiched by a single row of dwellings and a mountain stream, winds along the bottom of a deep mountain pass. Almost from the back door of each dwelling, forested mountains rise vertically leaving only a narrow strip of sky visible above. At present as winter approaches, the mountains are alive with the red’s, yellow’s, brown’s and shaded greens of Autumn.

Chilli’s, white radish, cabbage, beans, onions and capsicum grow on every available inch of the limited horizontal land.
Tended mostly by elderly villagers squatting between the rows, and then laid out to dry along the roadside.

Relief follows the realization that an early morning wake up by a loud speaker announcement, from a white van patrolling the street, was not the warning of an imminent nuclear catastrophe,
Merely, the “veggie man” selling his wares, followed during the day by the “fish man” and the “garlic man”.

Drinking water is supplied from three large strategically placed stone turtles, constantly spurting water through their mouths, piped from the mountain streams high above, from which villagers fill their containers.
Crime is unheard of, doors are left unlocked, petty theft, graffiti, and anti social behaviours are incomprehensible. Ladies with spare time sweep public areas of fallen leaves, litter does not exist.

The village elementary school educates 31 children, including an English course facilitated by a dedicated foreign teacher.
The initial surprise of seeing foreigners in their village quickly changes to greetings and friendly gestures.
A group of road workers pausing for refreshments instantly invite we passing strangers to share their food!
The village café treats us as locals, shows us to our usual seats and cooks our evening meal at our table in front of us.
The local fuel pump attendant refuses to accept payment for hot coffee, even without the purchase of fuel, as does the store keeper and café owner.

During daylight hours in the most peaceful place I have ever visited, the mountains echo to the sound of unseen military aircraft high above.

Other men driven by other agenda’s.

And it makes me wonder why?

By Guest Blogger: Brian.

1. ..in theory.

17^C

Sun is shining, but I it's intensity is fading again..

This past weekend presented me with a unique opportunity. Thursday was the day this school opened back in 1939, yep.. that makes my little school 70 years old! Then Friday was the Korean version of Thanks-giving, so I went on a four day holiday.

The plan was simple; we’ve seen most of this province.. time to visit another. We’ve also seen the sunrise many times over, so we thought it best to visit the west coast to watch the sun go down. After talking with some co-teachers, I discovered this place called Taean; a peninsula city, more specifically we were in Anmyeon which is a National Park reserve.

Here’s where we were, just south of Incheon.

In theory this was the perfect weekend. In theory.

I went and surprised Cassie at her place on Wednesday night and then relaxed on Thursday, doing basically nothing at all while she was at work. We left at 10am on Friday morning and it took us just under five hours to get to Kkotji Beach, Anmyeon. Here is what the west coast of Korea looks like. Notice the lack of barbed wire and military personnel?

Along the shoreline there were all these tents, huge red orange and blue tents that were actually seafood restaurants. We decided that we should try one of them out and see how Koreans do fresh seafood.. on the west side! As we sat down and pointed to the prawns swimming in a large tank, she brought us something wrapped in aluminum foil. She placed it on our own personal little BBQ, and told us not to touch it for a while. Next she brought us a kind of soup that was just made of clear broth with green onions in it and some clams. As we devoured those, she came over and unfolded the foil package to reveal this..

We sat there eating fresh seafood for a while and watching the sun go down below the horizon.

That night around 7pm we still hadn’t set up camp and I was starting to feel a little queasy from the prawns. More than anything I didn’t want the hassle of camping that night.. what if late at night I developed food poisoning and had to run to the bathroom ever two minutes? The bathroom was a cool 2km’s away! So, to Cassie’s disappointment we headed to a motel about 5 minutes down the road. It’s ok to do that kind of thing here as fully equipped motels cost less than $30AUD per night. We decided that we’ll get up early on Saturday morning, set up camp and then spend the day on the beach. Everything was going well, the weather was perfect as can be, and we set out a picnic egg salad sandwich for lunch.

I have always wanted to lay a Lovo all by myself and I thought it the perfect time to do it now. So I had got everything ready and gotten extremely excited about the prospect of doing something for the first time ever.. and guess what?

It went off without a hitch! Man it brought back so many memories!! Here's how I did it: First I dug the hole about 50-60cm's down. Next Cassie lit a fire in there with some large rocks at the fires' base. We built up the fire, let it burn for an hour or so (depending on the size of the rocks needed to heat), and then when the fire died down, I lay down some chicken wire. On top of the chicken wire (or mesh), I put some green leafy branches, on top of that more chicken wire, then on top of that I put the food. I covered the food with more leafy branches and then placed a wet towel over that. Tucked in the sides so the sand didn’t get too close to the food and then we buried it. We left it for 3 hours, dug it up and enjoyed the smoked-earthy flavour of our food!

After we dug it up, it was still too early to eat, so we packed it away and went to explore the shoreline. About 3km up the road from where we set up camp was this:

When we finally arrived back from watching the sunset, we looked across the sea and saw lightening and dark clouds. Then when we couldn’t see the squid fishers anymore we knew that it must be a big one. So we tried to set up the tarp over the tent but that really didn’t work. Now we had about 15mins before the storm hit us. We basically ran around like headless chooks for a while thinking of what to do next, and by the time we tried to do anything the storm hit us. We salvaged what we could and put it in the car. Then we sat in the car with the headlights on the tent, watching it be subjected the abusive wind and lashing after lashing of rain. When one of the tent stakes came loose we knew there was nothing left for it.. we rushed over and as quickly as we could we shoved everything in the car. We sat there shivering with the heater on full blast and after a minute had passed, disheartened, we made our way to another motel. So ended our long weekend of ‘camping’.

The next day dawned beautifully! We had a five hour drive home and the weather looked like it would hold up. We went through Yeongwol as well and thought we’d visit Seondol again before heading back to Sangdong.