29 November 2022
Short grey hike
Inwangsan
Last full day in Korea that does not end in sleeping in Korea, allow me to explain. My flight home is 11:15pm tomorrow night, so tomorrow is also a full day in Korea, with the exception of 45 minutes during which time I will be above Korea, hopefully.
I will rant about how long that day goes for tomorrow, but I hate late night flights.
For my last full day, I did not expect to go hiking, but yesterday was a short hike, then rain, today is no more rain, but grey, so another short hike, something like that anyway.
For my last short hike I went to Inwangsan, where I have been to before. It is the city wall that is lit up at night that loops up and around the main palace. During good weather, it has excellent views of the city, see my pics from 2019 for that, today was all about the grey.
While I am on a continuous dribble of non humorous updates, time to discuss the weather. I thought it would be colder this morning, but it was not, still 12c, and the rain stopped at 6am as predicted. Tomorrow is still forecast to be very cold though, for my all day wandering aimlessly until I can go to the airport day.
Now for some very grey pics.
Korea lost their world cup game against Ghana. Around midnight local time my phone started going crazy with messages from the emergency broadcast system which is a sim card level service the government abuses here. I presume all the messages were about not starting a riot. Thanks for that.
To do the very short, very developed hike up Inwangsan, follow the road past the palaces around until you get to these tunnels, then just turn right to go up the hill.
The wall starts almost immediately. You do not always walk along the wall itself.
Low down view. We will do similar to yesterday, same view multiple times.
Given that the ground was still damp, I was happy to have some good sturdy non slippery steps for most of, but not all of the journey.
Flatter sections have the nice hessian rug.
More of the view, this time with the wall, and some wires. Lots of wires up here due to the military posts, which did not have soldiers standing guard at them like they did last time. I do not think they check passports at all anymore here. I was not carrying mine but I think the checks were racially profiled anyway. There was an assassination attempt on the South Korean president by North Korean spies from here in the 60's.
Higher up view, more wall.
Across there is the small hike from yesterday, which had nicer photos because of the sky.
The highest point of today's journey is up there. It gets steep towards the end.
Tree framed view towards the.. um.. east I think.
It is not all staircases, but the rocks were not slippery despite being damp.
The mountain range over the back is of course, Bukhansan national park.
View from the top. Slightly crooked I think.
Last time I came up a different way, joined the wall near the top, then went back down the way I came up today... Today I came up the way I came up today (yes really), and continued on over the top and down a different way. That leads to this very nice looking 'forest rest zone' which appears to have a library inside it.
The way down was similar to the way up, but with less view.
Some time after, on my walk back towards the city, I found myself in the musical instruments wholesale market. These days it looks like more of a retail market, but there are still hundreds of shops selling mainly Cort and other Korean brands. Although their are certainly shops with very expensive brands like PRS, Suhr too.
My ass. Actually this is a seat in the cafe zone of the musical instruments market.
There are multiple levels, they are kind of themed but there are generally guitar shops on all levels anyway, including squeezebox level.
And, sometime later again, I found myself in the Bank of Korea money museum, where they attempt to explain how important cash money is. I have not used cash money even once on my entire trip. However, here is how it gets recycled into buildings.
It is a very nice building, soon it will be amusing to kids who have never seen cash in their lives. That is all the pics for now, not sure where to go to tonight, but the sun is now shining.