September 4 until September 9

Life sometimes hurts

The Kim-Lee family takes care of us like we were their own children, or at least a substitute. In the morning they bring us coffee and bread, jam and some slices of 'plastic' cheese. Very sweet! As soon as the weather improves a barbecue is organised. We buy some food to repay their hospitality.

After three days there is a painful farewell, there are tears in their eyes. Just before we take off they pull two kilos of sweet potatoes from their garden and put them in a bag, next to the remainder of the grilled chicken breasts. We will not get hungry for some time to come.
We cycle in southern direction over the far too busy highway 7, pass dozens of grape farms, can't find the turn-off at the village of Okye and make quite a detour alongside the fenced in coast. We ask a grape farmer for directions and are forced, despite loud protests, to eat over a kilo of extremely sweet grapes.

Then we climb the mountain roads into the interior again, where we pitch our tent in a vegetable garden, out of sight and next to a clear stream. A large praying mantis looks out over the garden, softly swaying to and fro.

The day starts with a soaked tent and a long, 9% climb refusing to end. Many ascents in Korea end in a tunnel thrusting through the highest part of the mountain. Although the tunnels are dangerous and the reverberating noises of the speeding traffic hurts our ears, it means a lot less climbing. This road leads all the way to the top of the pass though, until our legs are hurting.
During the descent we whiz through an area completely covered in green cabbages. Below overhanging rocks traditional Korean bee-hives are placed: stacked stones wearing a hat. In Imgye we do some shopping, then look for a quiet place to spend the night.

This often proves to be problematic in densely populated Korea, where every inch of land is utilised and we aren't able to find a quiet, secluded place for the tent for kilometres. Against our wishes we start the umpteenth climb of the day, suffering, grumbling and swearing, until an unpaved side track offers salvation. It ends in a level grassy field, in the midst of forests and cabbages.
'This is a nice spot to encounter deer,' I sigh for the first time during our travels. We fill our water bag in a neighbouring stream and wash ourselves the old-fashioned way with washcloth and a bar of soap. The meal consisting of six kinds of vegetable and macaroni becomes us; the pumpkin makes it especially tasteful and smooth.
At night I wake up when I hear an animal sniffing around the tent. Suddenly the animal is startled by something and runs away, crashing into my bicycle which falls over with a lot of noise. The sounds wake Peter up, who crawls out of the tent. Of course he is too late to see what animal caused this racquet. Moments later the sad and angry burling of a male deer in pain sounds through the valley, for minutes on end. My 'deer-feelings' of this afternoon have become reality.

When we load our bicycles in the morning we find a large tuft of deer hair tucked behind a sharp part of my bicycle, of which the mud guard and stand are bent. So we didn't dream it after all.
It rains the entire morning, preventing us to see a lot of the beautiful surroundings. Luckily the sky brightens later, so we're able to hang the tent out to dry during our lunch break.
At a stall alongside the road, run by an elderly couple, we buy a pumpkin and get another one as a gift, as well as two kinds of potato and a corn cob. A little bit further a car stops to offer us two bottles of iced water. In the following climb the driver of a pick-up-truck offers to pull me up the mountain, an offer I graciously refuse. Korean people are so great to us.

We sleep next to a river near the village of Pyeongchang, so we can take a nice bath.

September 7 we fall into the ginseng area. Most hills are covered with low greenhouses covered with black cloth. The slowly growing root plant originates in the forest and needs shade to flourish. It takes six years for the roots to get some substance. Regularly harvests are lost because of bad weather or exhaustion of the land. No wonder the root is extremely expensive.
The most expensive though is the extremely slow growing wild ginseng, sometimes found in the forests by fanatic collectors. One of those roots easily fetches thousands of euros.

We phone Go Si Ho, one of Wooki's world cycling friends. He cycles towards us and together we peddle to his 'forest-cave' on a hilltop, close to the village of Sillim Myeon Sanlam Ri. The last four hundred metres to his miniature house are unpaved and horribly steep; we actually have to walk and push the bicycles in pairs, it is impossible to get the loaded bicycles up there on your own. The very last stretch really hurts...

Go Si Ho lives isolated from the rest of the world. For ten years he was a Buddhist monk, in Myanmar, Japan en Korea. During that period he did a thousand-day silent retreat, after which he had trouble to talk again: his tongue had unlearned it. When the monk’s life didn't give the sought after satisfaction, he stepped back into the world, started travelling by bicycle and translating Buddhist texts for a living.
We spend two days with him and sleep in the fantastic house built by his friend and neighbour Hong a couple of hundred metres further on another hilltop. The house, made from wood and natural stone, is beautifully situated on the highest point of the mountain valley. In the garden are several stupas built of smooth river stones and a number of fruit trees. A stream provides the family with fresh water.

Ho takes us to Wonju town, where we do some shopping. Peter also gets a temporary filling for a painful tooth. For free, because the dentist loves coach Guus Hiddink and all people from the Netherlands!

I write my diary and translate stories for the website, while Ho and Peter work in the forest. They cut dead trees and carry the logs to the house, up the mountain. They refill their lost body fluids with a 1.8 litres bottle of soju, the famous Korean rice wine. "By accident" they finish the whole bottle the same day.
Later that day we visit the Hong family, who notice the state the two men are in. To prolong the party, mister Hong opens the extra large bottle of rice wine especially purchased for Thanksgiving…
Peter doesn't remember anything about it, but the pictures show he had a good time...

With heavy and painfully throbbing heads Ho and Peter work in the woods the next day until they sweat profusely. Then Peter discovers a splendid piece of natural art in a tree: a giant wasp's nest which of course needs to be photographed. Thanks to the strong zoom lens of his camera he doesn’t have to come too near to the dangerous huge stinging wasps, but one of the aggressive soldiers has another opinion about the matter of distance. Like a rocket he takes off into Peter’s direction, Peter has no chance of warding off the animal and feels an extremely painful sting in his left cheek.

He will remember stirring up this hornet’s nest for a while to come…