On Thursday and Friday of our vacation, we hiked. As we hiked, we had a nasty little habit of getting lost……okay so maybe “lost” is too strong of a term. We wandered around the mountains without knowing the exact destination.
On Thursday we stayed in Busan and went to a temple on one of the mountainsides. (I was actually surprised at how chopped up Busan was. It’s a huge city, but it’s scattered around the sides of mountains. On one side of the mountain is a city with skyscrapers, behind that mountain is the beach, and behind the mountain to the right is rural Korea. It was weird.) I’m not going to lie….when Mollee suggested going to a temple, I wasn’t that thrilled about it. I feel like seen one East Asian temple, seen them all. However, I’m really glad that we went because it was beautiful! The view down on the city was great. Busan was so close to us, yet up on the peaceful mountain, there were no loud city sounds or hustle-and-bustle. I saw a sign that tourists could choose to stay a day or so at the temple and learn what it was like to be a Buddhist monk. I think that could have been a cool experience, but there’s no way we had time to do that.
One thing that was super cool about the temple was that we got to walk around and see people doing the Buddhist prayers/chants. (UGH! There’s a word for it, but for the life of me I can’t remember it right now!) With the incense burning and the prayers being chanted, it was a rather cool experience to have. Another thing that I liked about the temple was the paper lanterns. There were thousands of colorful lanterns hung up over the walkways, and walking under them made me feel like I had been transported back in time to a magical kingdom.
After our time at the temple, we headed to the old fortress wall. Way back when the fortress wall surrounded the highest peak of Busan and was darn near impossible to penetrate. Thanks to reconstruction, part of it still remains. We knew that the trail up to the fortress wall began outside the temple, and after a short break, we hiked up the rocky path toward it. Since it was steep and rocky, we paced ourselves and took frequent breaks. We met a couple of other hikers along the way, and all of them wanted pictures with us….mostly we didn’t understand them, but we got the message of “not many foreigners come up this way, so we’re pretty surprised to see you here.” It was cold and windy on the plateau where the fortress wall was, so we didn’t stay there for very long.
We thought about hiking to the top of the mountain, but without packing a lunch or bringing enough water the decision was no. Instead we decided hike to the other end of the wall to see that gate. However, we somehow got turned around and never found it and ended up in a village on the other side of the mountains from Busan. It was around 4 PM at this time, and without eating lunch, the four of us were starving. We found a small restaurant. However, since we were far enough away from the main drag of town, there were no English menus, and none of us had the slightest ability to read Korean. We literally had to point at an item on the menu and cross our fingers that it wasn’t something crazy. Thank God that it turned out well! There were a few items that were just too spicy for me to eat, but Ian, Mollee, and Melissa gladly ate those.
After lunch, we took another bus drove by another crazy swerving bus driver back into the main part of the city. We were all quite exhausted and agreed to rest a while in a coffee shop before heading back to our hotel. While there are no shortages of coffee shops in Korea, we found a Starbucks and stopped there. I’m not sure how long we stayed there, but it was a lovely amount of time to sit, relax, and enjoy one another’s company while it started raining outside. Plus…bonus! I’m not sure if the employees had old cheesecake to get rid of or what, but after our first hour there, they came around giving everyone in the store free samples of cheesecake. YUM!
I originally was going to blog about this day and the following one since we hiked both days, but I feel like this blog is long enough to stand alone. So continue reading for the rest of the story!
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