I Drank the Water

It's early in the morning of my second day in the Republic of Korea, and I'm sitting at my computer with a bowl of sweet potato flavored Special-K.

The total flight time here was 19 hours, which covered our flight from Jacksonville to Dallas to San Francisco to Incheon, Korea. The total travel time, however, was around 33 hours. The extra couple of minutes come from the layovers we had along the way, mostly in San Fran, where we spent 11 hours (between 11:46 PM and 10:50 AM local time) -- mostly sleeping on terminal benches.

Maria and I both would have liked to explore the area, but thought better of trying to explore the town in the wee hours. All told, the 33 hours flew by. It seemed like a very easy trip, though that probably because part of me was holding my breath the whole time, partly in anticipation and partly in anxiety. I've known I was going to take this trip for a long time now, close to a year and a half, but I was definitely nervous on the way, and that hasn't waned much at the precipice of day 2.

Radish Spirit

Still, I suppose that things have gone as smoothly as you could imagine. All our planes were on time. I ate about 3 pounds of spinach pastry in San Fransico. I saw a guy that looked exactly like the Radish Spirit from Miyazaki's triptastic movie, Spirited Away, which was interesting. There were sufficient escalators for me to give Maria no fewer than 3-5 heart attacks as I let my toes hang out near the spaces between the stairs.

When we landed in Korea, our bags came around the claim track, and when we pushed our luggage out into the lobby of the MASSIVE Incheon airport, which I read has won "best airport in the world" 10 years running now (come on America, get it together!), there was a guy from our recruitment agency (Opportunity Korea) who was holding a sign with our names on it. The nice-guy spoke no English, but he smiled and waved, and took Maria's bag-cart. I pushed mine after them through the crowds as we followed the man to a Kia minivan that looked like it had made this trip a few times before.

The whole area is still in monsoon season and had just sustained a heavy rain. First reactions walking out of the airport: SUPER hot and humid, and there was a thick fog hanging all around. I don't think that the temperature was as high as Georgia or NC, but gosh it's muggy.

Incheon is a good 45 minute ride from Sunae-dong, our neighborhood, which is in the city of Bundang (pronounced Boon-dong). Bundang is a quick subway ride from Seoul, though I can't tell you exactly how far yet because I'm still trying to not get lost on my way back from the grocery store. I imagine it's a bit like the distance and relationship that exists between a city like Tucker or Decatur and Atlanta.

The cab rolled up to our apartment (pictures to come), and we were greeted shortly by a woman named Molly, a Canadian who has been the head teacher at our school for the past two years. Molly brought us up to our apartment, which had just recently been her apartment, and let us put our stuff down (all 200 literal pounds of it).

Now, I am decidedly not a city guy. That's not to say I don't enjoy cities (though I do prefer small towns), but more that I'm still in that stage where all cities feel about the same to me -- crowded. Our apartment building is on a corner of a street that's lined with cafes and restaurants and all manner of businesses whose signs I couldn't decipher. We're on the 5th floor of a 12-13 story building (with roof access and sitting area!).

The place itself is great! I watched a lot of youtube vlogs and such prior to coming over, and was fully expecting a cell of a studio apt, despite the promising things we'd heard and seen about out apartment here. What we found when we got here was a small, but well proportioned apartment. The sleeping area is lofted, and separate from the living space below. We have a fairly large living room, which is connected to a spartan, but complete, kitchen, and a hallways that goes to a wall of storage compartments and our bathroom. The best part though is undoubtedly the GIANT window that fills the streetward wall of our living room and lets in a ton of light. I also think that, because of its view of our closet and bathroom door, it's going to acquaint me to the denizens of the building across from us very quickly, especially in the morning.

Molly walked us around town while we bombarded her with questions about the area and the school, which is a 10ish minute walk from our apt. Our school is supposed to be a total immersion experience for the kids. Once they pass through the doors, it's all English all the time, which is great as that's mostly how I've lived for the past 24 years. That means that we're not so much teaching them ESL (English as a Second Language) as we are teaching them reading and writing. The kids are young. I'll teach two classes of kindergarten aged children int he mornings and then middle schoolers in the afternoon. There will be co-teachers that speak Korean in some cases, but many of our kids will have a strong background in English already -- due to living abroad or what-have-you. So I'll mostly be teaching English like a normal elementary school teacher would in the States.

It was our first night in Korea, and we went looking for food. As I've said, our street is lined with all kinds of coffee shops and restaurants (there's also a pet supply shop right next door to our apt., run by a woman with a huge golden retriever. I've seen a good many dogs walking around in Korea, though most of them are small breeds). One of the eateries is a semi-swank Italian joint, but we went for a small place full of Koreans (because, why not?). We walked in pretty brashly, I guess, and were greeted by a torrent of (wouldn't you guess it) Korean. There's a special kind of stupid and helpless that you feel when someone is speaking a foreign language to you, and, boy, this lady was speaking A LOT of Korean. We I spoke back in English, the woman pointed us to a table by the door. The place was pretty small, so all the Koreans in the restaurant were clearly looking at us now. Feeling very much like the new kid in class, we sat quietly at our table and tried to formulate how we were going to order. I had chosen the place because there were pictures on the walls of food, presumably food that was prepared and sold here, but when the woman who seated us returned to our table and I pointed to the picture on the wall behind us, she answered us in (should have seen it coming this time) Korean!

I stared at her dumbly for a few seconds, and then a girl sitting next to us, who I noticed previously because of her Micky-Mouse-Ears hat, come and helped us order. We were very grateful for the rescue. What we wound up getting was a pretty nice spread of something that I would call sausage soup with rice in it. It was pretty good! Hot, anyway. The meat tasted a bit like what you find in a beef wanton. Our translator prefaced out order with the fact that "not all Korean's like this," so I guess it's a bit derisive. I think that's just a cross-culture reaction to heterogeneous sausage in casing. I would liken the dark red/black links floating in the soup to "pudding," or "sausage puddling" back in South Carolina, which not all Americans have heard of and not all Southerners like. Maria was not really entertained with the soup, but I ate a helping or so. We also were served two kinds of kimch, some peppers, and a something that Maria and I called "baby shrimp sauce," because of the many tiny pink shrimp that floated in it.

I guess I should have taken pictures of all this, but I didn't want to look like a tourist making a documented freak show of Korean food. Didn't seem to be in good taste, but I'll take some in the future.

It looked something like this

After dinner, our long day, which was essentially 40 hours long, finally came to an end and we passed out.

The next day we unpacked and undertook a mission for groceries and other essentials. Pretty much anything you could need is in walking distance. The grocery stores look very much like they do at home. Many familiar brands are present. Things got a little dicey when we tried to pay and the magnetic strip on my card didn't work properly (it had worked previously that day, so I didn't think BB&T had shut it down). I attempted to tell/show the cashier to run it through the scanner again in a plastic bag, but that went poorly. Maria solved the problem a lot faster with cash.

We also picked up a European/Asian phone charger plug. I have a converter, but it wasn't working so far, which was a bit distressing. The plugs here have two long, round pegs spaced out like eyes. My converter was sagging in the socket and seeming to not get a good charge. I put to Maria that the female socket might be too loose or large, though she reasoned that the male plug might just be a little small. All that to say I got it working with some manipulation, and the electricity was flowing cross-cultural quiet nicely.

After going out, we were pretty tired, both physically and mentally, so we spent the rest of the day setting up the apt. Today we'll get our immigrant medical exam, and have an orientation at our school! The sun is almost up here, the neon lights on the building across the street have finally stopped their blue-red-green shutter-show, the sweet potato Special K was delicious, and, while I do miss you all back home, I think that today is going to be a good day.

Please forgive my typo's, and the scarcity of pictures. Take care!

Great Smoky Mountains

We hadn’t worn deodorant in 4 days on account of the bears. Sitting at the bar of the Thirsty Monk in Asheville over a pint of bacon, I began to wonder if the downstairs tap room was just slow this evening, or if there might be a more olfactory reason why the seats to either side of Kevin and me were open. My feet were bound up in two types of bandages. My left sandal was sticking to the bottom of my foot and dropping an odd drip of whatever foul liquid fills blisters. Both Kevin and I had hobbled to the bar like old men on calves stretched tight as drums. But like I said, we were over a pint of bacon, and that’ll turn a frown upside down right quick. The previous Monday, July 6^th, at around 8:45 in the morning, we tossed two carefully arranged packs in the Corolla, and left Decatur for the Great Smoky Mountains.

The drive to Fontana Dam was an easy one, some 3.5 hours away. The town sits just on the edge of The Dragons’ Tail, which is a road famous for having something like 318 mountainside turns in the stretch of a mile, and only one radio station.

The cell service cut out before we reached “city” limits, so sorry Mom for not calling before we set out (and for moving across the world and getting tattoos and almost burning down the neighborhood that one time). The town is a map-dot resort, but Lake Fontana is gorgeous. Hidden in what used to be an evergreen valley, the dam has piled the blue water up around the mountains’ knees and the result is a medium sized lake fed by the mountain springs.  There are a few green islands poking up in the middle of the lake that want to be swam to. The fishing must be good as I saw a good many boats patrolling the coast when we drove over the poorly paved dam. We took a couple pictures of the lake on our way out, but you know how those things go – seldom ever able to capture a place of any magnitude.

Backpacking in the Smokies involves a surprising amount of paperwork. Rather than having open wilderness areas like some national parks, you have to reserve spots at specific campsites for everyday that you’re in the park, planning your route in a connect-the-dots manner such that the ranger’s know where you’ll be and when – and for the most part you have to stick to the plan.

I’m sure they do this for reasons involving words like “safety,” “conservation,” and “money,” but the level of micro-management that’s exercised (for good reason, I know) in our national parks has made me favor the park service’s hands-off approach to stewarding our national forests – where it’s pretty much the wild west in terms of camping, fires, backpacking, and chilling. Pisgah National forest wasn’t far away (and it’s beautiful), and Nantahala was literally next door, but we decided on the Smokies. Bureaucracy be damned, there’s a reason the powers-that-be stencil the lines they do and call it a national park – the Smokies are incredible.

We parked the car at the Fontana Dam Trailhead, and hiked in about 5.5 miles to the first campsite. The first route Kevin and I chose left out of Bryson City, but was vetoed by the park service because of bear activity. Setting out from the trailhead, we saw several traps (and a few inexplicable cars), though we also heard the rangers were hunting a boar that they wanted to retag, so it’s possible they were hog traps—though none of the sort that I’ve ever seen. The route wasn’t long. The idea behind the trip was more a laid back fishing hike than a hardcore backpacking trip. The total millage was around 65 miles over 7 days (a daily average for a fit backpacker is around 10 miles), with the hardest day being about 10-12 miles and several days being in the 5-7 range. The first day’s hike was flat for a long while and wove through a lakeshore-valley area, and then cut up sharply to climb around 500 ft (to an average elevation of 2000) in the last quarter of it.

The site was at the mouth of a spring stream coming down from the climbs and had great views of the lake. There were a few other groups camping there, and the rangers stopped in to check our permits and to tell us that a couple weeks of frequent rainfall had swollen the Eagle River from a chipper mountain stream to something of an obstacle. A ranger wearing a tacticool black nylon hip holster for his sidearm, chest kevlar and somewhere between 3-30 knives informed Kevin and me that he had performed two swift water rescues in as many weeks since the rains had started. Excited by the prospect of a little more adventure than we had planned on in our quiet fishing hike and secure in Kevin’s training in river fording, we thanked him for the advice and sent him on.

We weren’t too worried about the river crossings (though the ranger said our route would cross the Eagle some 13-16 times), but the wet month did make getting a fire going a real challenge. Any fallen deadwood, bark or other fuel was drenched, as was the soil. At a lot of parks, especially those out West in dryer climates, open fires aren’t allowed in the backcountry. In anticipation of cooking all of our food on a little pocket-rocket gas stove, I left my ziplock of dryer lent at Kevin’s (dumb). By battening a few thicker sticks, we were able to come up with some good, dry kindling, but at the end of all our witling, battening, blowing and cursing we were only able to sustain a small flame that required our total attention. Water hissed and boiled out of the soggy sticks. The fire, feeble and exhausted, was just trying to go out and be done with it. Pretty frustrating, but we didn’t really need the fire and went to bed when night fell tired, but excited for the week ahead.

When we woke up our campsite had been overrun by bees! I know that sounds dramatic, but really, tons of bees. I hung a line for our sweaty clothes to dry out on the night before, and found that in addition to still being wet they were slowly being turned into stinking hives. There were probably 20 bees on and in each of my socks (Kevin’s were left largely alone, as were my other clothes – don’t know what’s up with that).

It turned out that they were honey bees and didn’t sting, though they did bite. After a quick breakfast we hit the trail again for our next site, and our first of the river crossings.

The rangers weren’t kidding about the river. I didn’t really have much of a reference point, but the Eagle seemed swollen and quick. The water at our first three crossings came up to my waist. We picked up some walking sticks, to help with the crossings. I’ve never been one to use a trail staff, but they really helped in the crossings, where you lean on them against the oncoming river and shuffle sideways to the exit point. Kevin says this is called the tripod method. It was pretty fun, and the river was beautiful with clear water and dark green, lichen covered rocks and limbs. A lot of thick birch and tall oaks, with young ferns springing up along the banks. All green and blue.

The second night’s site was on an island in the middle of the Eagle, and was gorgeous. The 4ish mile hike from the first site only took us around 2 hours and we spent the day walking around the island fishing. The temperature was probably somewhere around 80-85 degrees in the mountains and the swift river was cold and refreshing on my feet. Kevin say’s he saw a fish. I saw a few water spiders, and found a sharp stick to stab my foot on. I was told by the ranger station what the Eagle was good for fishing. I’m not sure if the rains had swollen the river and flushed the fish to the lake, or what, but suffice it to say that we ate freeze dried Black Bart Chili that night, which was good. After we practiced casting for a while, we occupied the rest of the afternoon finding new walking sticks and carving them up. Kevin spent a few hours scraping a piece of oak clean of bark and cutting a swirling design in it, and I fashioned a crude dragon head out of a stout piece of some sort of magnolia looking tree.

We also had some company by way of a solo hiker, a guy named Henry who was about our age. Said he was a recent grad of Stanford and about to start a fellowship in Germany. I can’t remember in what field. The ground was still pretty wet, but after a little voodoo we were able to get a decent fire going, and shared it with Henry. We talked mostly of Lord of the Rings, travel and how damnably wet the wood was. That night the river was so close and loud that you could hear it clearly all night. Sounded a bit like the ocean in the dark.

The morning of our third day in the mountains we said goodbye to Henry and started on what would be (if the topo map was to be believed) our hardest day on the trail. It was only 5ish miles to the next site, but the elevation climbed from 2250 to 4550 ft, with the last mile or so bearing the bulk of the rise and being pretty much straight up. The elevation we could see on our map and prepare for, but some obstacles are not so clearly marked. Perhaps 45 minutes in to the hike we passed over one of the many quagmires of limbs and trunks from stormblown trees that lay on the trail, and it was just about the time that Kevin had one of the dead trees straddled and was pulling himself over that we found that it was slap full of hornets. Kevin was stung twice on the legs and I got a good one just below the knee. It wasn’t 20 minutes later that both of us were feeling woozy, but a little Benadryl fixed us up. We were a little concerned that Henry would be not long behind us, and might be allergic. We resolved to wait for him at the next site (we knew he was passing that way).

The path still lead along the Eagle, and we crossed it probably 6 more times that day, though the river was not near as intense this high up, and we were mostly walking through spring fed tributaries. When I hiked in the Wind River Range in Wyoming, you could see the trout in the river as you hiked across. The fishing had been easy, and coming from that I was a little let down with the clear, barren river, but it was a constant companion in the first part of our trip and wonderful to hike next to, even if it was empty of fish. It’s possible that I’m just unlucky or unskilled, but then, it’s also possible that the Bengals will win the superbowl this year.

The site we had reserved for the third night of the trip was a shelter just off of the Appalachian Trail, and there were allegedly to be 12 hikers staying the night in the big log lean-to (complete with a fireplace and pre-stacked kindling that appeared to be dry as a bone). Kevin and I got there around noon, and had the place to ourselves (Henry showed up soon after us. He had dodged the hornets. A lucky thing too, as he hiked shirtless). It took about 15 minutes for us to eat lunch, hang our clothes line, and figure out we’d made a mistake.

Our hiking segments were way too short. Getting on the trail around 9 and hiking the 3-8 miles left us with the entire afternoon to sit at camp and stare at each other. This was done somewhat intentionally with a good deal more fishing in mind. Don’t get me wrong, our time in the sites was peaceful. We both brought good books, though I had chosen The Old Man and the Sea and finished the 125 page novella the second night of the trip. Coming from the super saturated, instant gratification world most people live in nowadays, it’s nice to be able to unplug – get off the grid. It wasn’t that Kevin and I were bored with our route as much as stir crazy.

We’d finish our day’s hike in a snap, and because of the strict reservation policy of the park, find ourselves trapped – sitting at camp with a full tank of gas and wanting to tear off onto the trail, but having to wait until the next day to hike our little portion of trail and start the waiting again. If we just kept going we could potentially find ourselves in trouble with rangers for sleeping in a site we didn’t reserve (and no one wants to pay the park service an extra $100 to sleep in a lean-to). All the same, we were going stir crazy. The trip, while relaxing, wasn’t looking like quite the adventure we wanted. So we changed it.

Looking at the trail map, we saw that Spence Field, or current site, was just a few miles from a large run of the AT that would link up to the Fontana Dam trailhead, which by this route was some 16ish miles away. I hadn’t hiked really any of the AT, and Kevin had only hiked a bit, so the prospect of slinging on the iconic run was pretty exciting. What’s more, because we would be diverging from the plan we gave the park service, we wouldn’t have any campsite reservations on the new route and would have to keep moving. We would have to hike through the night, which neither of us had done in a major way before. That would bring our millage from that day up to 20ish (nothing to sneeze at carrying gear and with elevation change considered), but all of this appealed to our sense of recklessness and we were eager to start.

We left Spence around 4 and came to Molly’s Ridge (the site where we were set to stay the next night) at 7. That was around 5 miles of up and down, and not a particularly easy jaunt after the hike up the Eagle, but still, we were flying. The shelter was still empty at 8ish after we had eaten dinner (some kind of spicy pork situation), and that’s really too late for most backpackers to come in on a site, so we figured it would be deserted for the night. That was good as we were pretty spent, and still had around 10 or so miles of AT ahead of us. We decided to nap, and leave in the middle of the night. This was partly because we were tired, and partly because the pace we were setting would put us back at the Corolla around 1-2 AM, which, in addition to being an inconvenient time to do much of anything, didn’t really line up with the all-night hike we had planned.

We slept until around 12:30 AM, and set out from Molly’s into the dark, wanting to go by star and moonlight at first, but finding the trails too heavily wooded to see by extraterrestrial sources – our headlamps served us well. The night hiking was everything we wanted it to be. Exciting in its newness. Cool in the dark. A little bit freaky and edgy, which was fun. We saw a couple freshish piles of bear scat along the way, and a guy we met at Spence said he and his son had jumped a black bear that day, so it was enough to get the blood up when you heard a heavier noise off in the black of the wood.

Most people recommend listening to music or carrying a bear bell when you night hike in bear country to spook anything unsavory that might be in your path, or at least let them know you’re coming. We didn’t have any of those things, but we did have an audiobook copy of The Fellowship of the Ring on my phone, so we cranked that to 11 and rolled with it – shouting into the woods at odd intervals or when we heard something crunching about. We may have run into something bear sized once, but it was more than likely a group of deer, or a toad, or nothing. The dark does weird things when it’s late and you’re tired. Still, it was a lot of fun to trek through a high wooded trail to the Tolkien. We happened to be at the part where the hobbits are making their way through “the dark forest,” and encountering Barrow Wights, which lined up nicely and made the miles melt.

Luckily, we didn't run in to this guy

When the crunching in the woods was loudest, we would stop and shout in to the dark for a time. It’s known that black bears are more docile than their grizzly cousins, and will usually get out of your way. If you have an encounter, you’re to hold your ground and shout while trying to look as menacing as possible. If you’re attacked, you’re to fight like the devil and hope that the bear backs down. That contrasts with grizzlies, with whom you’re to hold your ground and then play dead if charged (when I told Brian this, he asked if a bear these rules). When you’re on the trail, and your night vision is shot from the beam of your headlamp, the woods are as black as pitch. Shaking our walking sticks out at the noises, imaginations running wild with sleep deprivation, we might have thought there were ten bears out there – all armed with chainsaws and tomahawk missiles. It’s funny the things you’ll yell out at what could very well be a 600 lb. North American black bear. I like to believe it’s the intensity that matters, and not so much the verbiage, so when I let rip a Tuscan raider yell that would give a kryat dragon pause, I don’t feel too silly, and you’ll notice I’m here to type this up with both of my hands – so you can’t say it didn’t work.

Somewhere around 4 AM we came to Shuckstack, which is a high point on the mountain where the rangers have set up an enormous firetower. It may interest some of you to know that as we were humping it up to the tower on the hill, Strider was making his was up to Weathertop with Frodo and the gang. I have to tell you, after hiking 16 miles of trail, the best of it through inky night, rolling up on a giant metal tower creaking in the wind on a high hill was pretty dramatic – exactly what we were looking for. Pretty beat, and getting a little delirious from sleep loss, we elected to climb the tower and pass a few hours there until the sun rose.

I didn’t realize Kevin was afraid of heights until we had reached the top of the 100 ft. tower, but when I started stomping around the 7x7 particle board observation box at the top and pushing open the rusty windows, he made his feelings pretty clear. It was chilly in the night and the wind, and I wasn’t able to get much sleep, but the experience of passing part of the night in the tower was one that I won’t soon forget. It felt very post-apocalyptic. Like we were the only ones on this whole range, and this was some relic left for us to find. Truthfully, it was a little worse for the wear and the initials and scribblings that are ever present on totems like this from hikers long past went back as far as 1985.

When the sun rose, it was an incredible scene. I took a few pictures, but they could never do the scene justice. The tower gave a great view of the park, and especially Lake Fontana, which had a low and thick cover of clouds hovering over it that were slowly filtering into the mountains. They looked very smoky indeed. We ate a brief breakfast in the top of the tower, listened to the birds come awake, and hiked out as the lake-fog rolled in to the hills.

The last few miles went quietly in the early dawn. There’s a special kind of joy that comes to a hiker when they reach the trailhead again and catch that first glimpse of their car – partly out of fatigue, but mostly because abandoning your car in a sort-of marked off trailhead for a few days is a little precarious. Coming back to find a car or two in the lot with busted out windows isn’t unheard of.

Even though our trip through mountains finished a good 3.5 days ahead of schedule, we didn’t feel like we skimped. The unexpected journey through the night had been the adventure we were looking for – now we just wanted a serious portion of breakfast. It took us another hour to find a place open in Fontana Dam (the town), and after breakfast we decided to go to Asheville for a day or so. There’re hostels there where you can stay in a bunk for $30 or so, which my far-flung friends tell me is enough to travel in Asia for a week on, but for Asheville is pretty good.

The road to Asheville was sunny, and I found a guy selling bags of boiled peanuts for $5, so we were content. My feet were ruined and Kev’s legs were shot, but it was a satisfying kind of hurt, one earned.

16 days until I move to Korea, and the adventures roll on!