I've Found Him

Repeat: I've found him

To everyone who knows Calvin, you're welcome. You can sleep knowing he is safe. To everyone who doesn't, I'm sorry if you thought this would be an interesting post.

"Dude, this guy just on sighted that five eight. Clean"

One of the best things about couchsurfing is that you get exposed to your host's hobbies. My host in Seoul, Danielle, is a big time rock climber.

So on Friday after she got out of work, Danielle and I took a train 4 hours south to Youngsa popo (I am almost definitely spelling this wrong), a waterfall in Korea with lots of good climbing around it. Instead of paying the $18 for the train ticket, we just sat on the floor of the cafe car, which is apparently a popular thing for frugal Koreans to do.

Most of these men were at least a little drunk when this picture was taken.
So was the photographer (that's me!). 

When we got to the station at around midnight, we still had an hour hike to get to our campsite. Hauling a pack with a tent, cooking equipment, ropes, and carabeners for an hour through the dark really makes you appreciate a place more. 

Sometime in the night her climbing buddies had arrived, but we woke up first. Danielle was anxious to get climbing, but didn't trust me to belay her, so I got the first climb of the day. This climb was a "lead" instead of a "top-rope" climb.

If you know climbing lingo
   skip the next paragraph
else
   keep reading
end

Top rope climbing is the one you do when you go to a rock gym and get in your harness and climb using the rope that is already there. This is 100% safe, because there is never more than a foot or two of slack in the rope, so falls are harmless. With lead climbing, the only thing that is already there are little bolts drilled into the rock face and it is your job to clip your rope into these bolts. The bolts are vertically separated by about 10 feet though, so you get quite a bit of slack in the rope when you are above one bolt but haven't et clipped into the next.

Anyways, this makes lead climbing way more intense and falling much more frightening. Luckily, I successfully completed my first climb without falling (it was a really easy climb though. A 5.8 difficulty level which is basically the bunny slope of rock climbing).



Coming down from first climb.

Her friends were pretty hardcore. They were climbing things that looked like vertical walls with only an occasional crack or bump to grip.

Badass.

More people showed up. We climbed, we ate Indian food, we drank, we had a jam session around the fire. We slept. Next day, more of the same. Climbers (well these climbers at least) are very easy to get along with.

Camping breakfast is the best breakfast.

We were riding dirty for the train ride back, but nobody asked for tickets again, so that was nice. A Korean woman and her 7 year old daughter (that's Korean years btw, so 6 year old by US standards. In Korea you start at 1) talked to me for an hour and wanted to see every picture in my camera.

Thanks for the candy Korean girl!

This was a great weekend. I am finding that I really don't care much about exploring big cities. I can't really appreciate the uniqueness of a city unless I've lived there for months, and since I don't really want to do that I think for the rest of my trip I will try to just duck into cities for a day or two and then head to the smaller towns as much as possible.

Except, of course, for Hong Kong.  Tomorrow I will fly to Hong Kong, and when I do I will be legally stranded on the island. Hopefully I will be able to quickly and easily get my visa for mainland China and then move on. But I am very excited to see Calvin and Nick.

Where the streets have no names...

I think Bono was talking about Korea (the streets really don't have names here). In fact, I think this song is about the frustration the singer felt as he wandered the unnamed streets of Seoul for hours looking for the Chinese Embassy, and how, once he finally found the embassy, read a sign that said "for Chinese Visa must to go to Chinese Consulate," and then how, after more wandering and eventually finding this consulate, he is told that the consulate no longer gives visas to foreigners so he must find a travel agent, and then, in the second verse the singer finds this travel agent who then informs him that as of July 1, 2010 it is impossible for foreigners in Korea to get a visa but luckily, the song's resolution comes in the last verse when the singer's former ticket to Beijing is rerouted to Hong Kong, where visitors don't need visas. This is the only correct interpretation of this song.

Interestingly enough, my travels have paralleled this song perfectly. Anyways, everything is all set now. I have a flight to Hong Kong on Monday where I should be able to get my visa for China without a problem. Oh, I also have a passport!

Page 51: a reminder not to be an idiot.

Two reasons for shortening the Korea portion of my trip. The main one is that I am not going to be able to get a job tutoring, which is what I had originally wanted to do as a way to replenish some of the money I spent in Japan. The second is that I am really excited for China, and want to go somewhere BIG where I can do some camping. So far my trip has been exclusively to islands and I'm ready for some mainland roaming (okay, Korea isn't really an island, but travel-wise it is. The North Koreans are stingy with visas).

But the place I'm staying in is cool. My couchsurfing host lives right on top of the US base here, which means wake up marches at 6am everyday.

The view from my host's balcony: US humvees and barbed wire.

This area of Seoul is an interesting little example of cultural positive feedback. What started (I'm guessing) as a small army base brought a small number of shops and restaurants catering to US citizens, which brought some tourists, which brought more shops... Now, anywhere within a 1-2 mile radius of this base you see as many white people as you do Koreans, even though only a very small percentage are with the army. From the little cultural seed of a small army base, a gigantic tree of whiteness has sprouted in the middle of Seoul. I don't know how I feel about this sort of cultural homogenization. Part of me wants to say its awful and we need to preserve all these cultural differences that make travel such an interesting thing to do, but I think I'm only saying that because I have the luxury to. For a Korean guy with a family, he is probably quite happy to open an English language bookstore if it means he and his family can live a bit more comfortably. I don't know, but it is still kinda sad, and it is this sort of thing that makes me prefer visiting the (so far) untouched smaller towns.

Anyways! My host is really into tattoos and I am going with her now to talk to the woman who has been named "The best tattoo artist in Korea" by some magazine that knows about tattoos. She is planning on spending $1000 on a custom-designed, full arm tattoo (called a sleeve, for those who are as unhip as I was yesterday).

Camping in Japan!

So my mom used to run the international club at Champlain College. When I was 9 or so I would go on trips with them to Boston and Montreal. Many of the students were Japanese, and they liked trying to talk to their advisor,s (I don,t know where the apostrophe is on this keyboard, so comma=apostrophe) shy son. 

Anyways, I got in touch with some of these students and, 14 years later, have spent the last week hanging out and staying with some of them.

There was something like 7 layers of mountains here.

Two days ago, a few of us hiked to the top of Mount Takao, where there were spectacular views and an all-you-can eat/drink beergarden. 

Cook your own octopi!

After the beergarden, we took the cable car down the mountain and hiked in the middle of the woods. We were the only people in miles from what I could tell. I taught the art of marshmallow toasting to Chiemi and Yoshiko.

Our campsite had a very nice bathroom.

SO, now the plan is:

1. Get new passport today. I hope it is ready.
2. Fly to Korea tomorrow.
3. Get Chinese visa, hang around Korea for a week or so. I was going to stay longer, but it looks like it would be really hard to find a job tutoring English. If anyone knows a Korean student who wants to give me money to talk to him, let me know.
4. Go to China. Stay for a long time.