This was perhaps my favorite day of our whole trip, for we climbed Hallasan (한라산). Though it wasn’t quite the departure from civilization as other hikes I’ve gone on, it was enough to feed my soul some of what I had been missing surrounded by the towering buildings of urban and suburban Korea. And the snow-encrusted trees transported me to the worlds within my imagination.
But before we made it to the mountain, we journeyed in search of a bus in the shadowlands. And that journey didn’t start until after my wife and I had called our parents on their Christmas. I enjoyed being able to say hello and recounting some of what we had done so far. Yet the time soon came for us to say farewell and set off to find a bus.
We wandered toward a traffic rotary in the northern part of Seogwipo, since that is where a bus was supposed to be, though once we found the rotary we had to figure out where the bus actually stopped, as it wasn’t at any of the bus shelters lining the sides of the rotary. Fortunately there were some Koreans who sort of comprehended our English. They pointed us a little south of the rotary to a bus “terminal” (it was more of a parking lot with a ticket booth nestled against a building). We managed to find a bus that would take us to Jungmun, which was in the right direction.