I am not the fittest person in the world, nor do I enjoy voluntary exercise usually. Therefore many of my family and friends were surprised when I told them how I spent a cold Saturday in January.
After teaching all week I was going a little bit stir crazy. I love my job and most of the time it is a lot of fun, but my new schedule is killing me. I also prefer my regular schedule because then it doesn’t feel like all I do is work. So to cut a long story short, after not really seeing any day light or fresh air this week I decided to take matters into my own hands, and head up a mountain.
As I’ve mentioned in this blog before, I am not a city girl…not really. I like having the world on my doorstep but I also value my peace and quiet, my fresh air and my own personal space. None of these you can really get in the middle of the 3rd largest city in South Korea. I was subsequently elated to be on a bus heading out of the city once more. This was once we had found the right bus, we had been misinformed that the bus we needed was the 104, and it was in fact the 401. To misquote the late great Eric Morecambe “I had all the right numbers, but not, necessarily, in the right order!” but thankfully there was an English speaking tourist information so this did not cause too much of a problem.
Buses in Korea are amazing. You can generally get anywhere you want to go for very little money. Last weekend a 70 minute bus ride was £3, and this 40 minute ride was about 75p. They use a system very similar to the Oyster card back home, you top up a little plastic card and off you go, the city is your oyster…maybe that’s why it is called the Oyster card…how clever.
After a reasonably uneventful bus journey, the only incident on which being we had to change buses as ours had a cracked windscreen, we were deposited at the bottom of the track up Palgong Mountain. Palgong Mountain is part of the Taebaek range that runs the length of Korea adjacent to the Sea of Japan. Portions of this mountain were made into a provincial park in 1980 and it is home to a number of temples, shrines, rivers and other natural heritage sites. The purpose of our visit today, was to go and see Gatbawi, the Buddha with the stone hat.
Gatbawi is, as mentioned, a stone Buddha. This one is particularly famous because of the fact it has a hat. It sits 850m up on Palgongsan, is 4 meters tall and its hat is 15 cms thick. To quote Wikipedia here
“This single granite sculpture was made up by Uihyeon, at the top of the 850 meters high rough Palgongsan and is surrounded by a screen-like rockwall as its background. It is said that Uihyeon made it in order to appease his mother's soul in the 7th ruling year of Queen Seondeok of Silla Kingdom. The legend says that a big crane flew in to guard him every night while he was making this Gatbawi Buddha. It is reputed to be a miraculous Buddha stone, which makes a response to prayers if the prayer prays for it with his or her whole heart.”
We were quite excited to climb the mountain, initially. We read on a sign at the bottom that it would be 2km to the top. We scoffed at this, especially once I had converted it into miles, it seemed hardly anything. Nowhere was there a sign that said “Beware Way-gooken (Foreigner) It is 2km vertically!” So off we set. The beginnings of the walk weren’t bad, they were steep but there were plenty of opportunities to catch our breath, joking about how we should perhaps go to the Gym more often. It was after the temple half way up that things became difficult.
I had read on the many tourist sites about Gatbawi that “many people climb the stairs to pray to the buddha” but I don’t think this had registered with me that there may be a fair few stairs to climb. A fair few is putting it lightly. Very lightly.
After we left the temple the stairs began. Fairly spaced out at first, still making it difficult for me to keep going for long periods of time but nothing I couldn’t handle. But then they became closer together, as though they were a flight of stairs, a flight of increasingly vertical stairs. Had I been able to breathe, I may have had the foresight to count how many, my guess is way over 1000. Each one a different shape as they had been fashioned out of rock. Thankfully there were a number of resting points on the journey.
For some reason my face turns red at every opportunity. When I was climbing up to the Sacre Couer in Paris this summer by the top I had a face like a raspberry, and today was no exception. I am usually a source of entertainment for the locals, today it seemed more so because of my magenta face and my inability to breathe. However, being the well brought up girl that I am, I ignored their blatent laughing and staring and instead smiled, bowed and wished them good day in Korean. This they were not expecting! A polite greeting and a show of respect seems to go a long way because now they were extremely friendly. I tend to find Koreans amiable most of the time anyway, but there was a real comradely attitude in the air as we all attempted to get up the mountain.
Whenever I was out walking back home you would say hello to whoever you met, this is something I had not yet encountered in Korea. But yesterday I found it. Once I had been abadoned by the boys as I was going slowly (I was attempting not to fall, any opportunity and I will go a** over tit) Everybody wanted to be my friend. I met one man who was very excited I was from England, he had been there himself apparently. Another older gentleman offered me his water as I was choking attempting to catch my breath. With most people I exchanged a glance of “Why are we doing this to ourselves?” About an hour and a half later we reached the top.
You may think taking an hour and a half to reach the top of a 2km walk is a lot, and I would agree with you. But my excuse, and I’m sticking by it, is that I had to keep stopping to admire the view, and it was breath taking. You could see for miles down the valley, all the way back to Daegu. I likened the whole area to being Narnian. The snow, the silence, the random lamp posts (see pictures) the place was stunning.
The view from the top was even more amazing, well worth the climb. You can see for miles and miles in every direction. Gatbawi itself was also worth the walk on its own. Well perhaps not the statue but its significance to the people who obviously believed he would be able to grant their prayers. The air was filled with chanting, there was a strong, intoxicating smell of incense, hundreds of paper lanterns lighting the prayer area and enclosed in a glass case around a thousand lit pagoda candles.
Carefully encircling the praying Koreans I wandered around to the other side to take a look at the reason I had nearly killed myself getting up this mountain. It may not have been the tallest buddha I had seen, it wasn’t even the tallest buddah on the mountain. But his evident significance to the people around me meant somehow he was more impressive. As the saying goes, Size isnt everything. It is well documented that Gatbawi grants a prayer to all those who visit him, if the prayer is made with their whole hearts. Pregnant women climb the stairs in order to pray for a boy, teenage students climb up there to pray for good exam results and the families of people who are ill pray for their speedy recovery.
As an ardent agnostic, I believe that as long as you are not hurting anybody else you have the right to believe in whatever you like. Also who is to say that Gatbawi does not grant prayers to those who come to see him, they have definitely earned it after climbing all that way! I find the Buddist faith intriguing as it is so different to my own Christian upbringing, but there is more than one way to skin a cat!
Walking down was possibly more difficult than walking up, with the steep incline and the ice on the steps. But as ever, slow and steady won the race and I made it in one piece. Would I be tempted to climb a mountain again? Perhaps, if I can take time to admire the view ;)
