Byeonsan Bando Day Two: The Daytime Trek

After a pretty much sleepless and cold night, with a little rain in the very early morning, there was a moment of hearing just the sounds of the crickets and other bugs, then BIRRRDSOOOONNNGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! About fifty million birds all started chirping at once, including cuckoo birds, which is still funny to think about.

We started hearing people now and then maybe a couple hours after dawn, and we got up at 8:30 to break camp. We had to do that before breakfast, just in case we got caught. Stopping off the trail for breakfast probably would have been more forgiveable than camping overnight. After everything was broken down and picked up, good ol' packaged oatmeal, and a can of pineapple. Then it was off toward Jikso Waterfall, only 2.9 km away. We were planning to take a leisurely hike (although me still working all sorts of muscles I never knew I had) to the waterfall, hang out, then hike toward another entrance booth and camp before we got to the end. That way, there would be less distance to travel to get back into civilization and onto buses home the next day.

The first half of the hike was a lot of staircases like this:





There were also a lot of steep and not-as-steep rocky, rooty, and a little muddy inclines, as well as one three-story metal staircase. With rail. That was nice, but man, all the climbing we'd already done by the time we got to it...

We had to climb across a few rock faces like this one:


I almost fell down on my back like a stupid turtle on one of them, because I forgot to keep leaning forward while I was standing on the incline. But Kent blocked me. That would have sucked. I was right near a cliff, too. Ooooohhhhhh...

At some point the trail started to lose altitude fast, and it was frustrating slash rewarding to know that we had to do all the climbing up and down to get to where we needed to be. I guess that's the nature of the beast.

Around halfway there we reached a crossroads with a way to the waterfall and a way to one of the entrance booths. There were a few groups of people here. By this time we had talked to a few people on the trail, including a Kiwi who stayed at the Naeso-sa Temple, an old Korean dude who used to live in the US who kept us from going up the wrong path (twice), and here at the crossroads, a group of Koreans who didn't really speak much English, but who were clearly asking us if we were camping at the park. These were really the only Koreans who seemed to understand what we were doing. Which reminds me, we met a Korean lady who spoke English at the Buan Bus Terminal who asked us if we were camping, and then told us "it's not that kind of park." Ha ha. Silly Korean noncamper.

And speaking of Korean noncamping, apparently many Koreans have a deep curiosity about the foam our sleeping mats were made of. Kent said that as he walked through the air base with them, a number of Koreans stopped to fondle it. And when we stopped for a few minutes at the crossroads (below-nice view, eh?), a Korean dude went out of his way to come over to me and touch the mat on my pack. Weird.




After that point, the trail became almost totally flat and easy, and when we were almost to the waterfall, we came upon a little waterfall flowing into a little river. Here's me after having climbed off the big rock crossing to get closer to the waterfall:



We had lunch on the rock I'm sitting on. That was probably the coolest place I've ever had lunch.

Here is the creek to the right of the falls:



And to the left:




Here's me sticking my feet into the dropoff in between the two last pictures. The water was pretty cold, like the ocean in Maine:



After lunch it must have been only about a half hour to get to the falls. The trail was totally flat by then, and quite easy. Toward the end of the trail to the waterfall, we started seeing some cool cliff faces:

And had to cross alongside one or two of them:

Sometime mid-afternoon, we reached the falls. To be continued...