After work on Friday night, we caught a train with a group of friends from Hongseong to Guryo where we spent the night at a motel shattered after the four hour trip.
Early the next day, we dragged ourselves out of bed and caught a 40 minute bus from Guryo to the foot of Mt Jiri via the Piagol entrance. We spent the day hiking the Piagol valley and it was so beautiful. We were really lucky with the weather because by 9am it was warm and dry but not so hot that carrying our bags was uncomfortable.
The leaves were right in the middle of their change so we got some great reds, oranges and yellows too. The hike was pretty tough even though we opted for the valley route as the trail does a lot of ups and downs. Nevertheless the views were spectacular and the shots of the crystal clear mountain river were well worth the effort. We had some bimimbap (Korean mixed rice) before retiring to the motel. Of course, we had intended to spend the night on the mountain so took all our stuff on our backs... unfortunately, the websites we'd checked were either outdated or just plain wrong because the closest shelter turned out to be 22km across the mountain range. We probably did more like 10 km.I was mildly cautious of traversing a forest with wild bears (especially having found that they are fast runners, proficient swimmers and impressive tree climbers), however, the closest we came were the signs warning us not to feed the bears because it rots their teeth.
On the other hand, it was a very narrow path with a lot of avid Korean hikers (in full kits with hiking sticks and rope) who prefer to summit in large groups at high speed. Irritatingly, these human KXT nearly knocked us over a number of times!
The next day we went back into the national park to visit Hwaeomsa - the most famous temple in the park. It was certainly beautiful but nowhere near as spectacular as the scenary the previous day. After recharging with coffee, we started the long journey back to Hongseong to refuel on Lotteria burgers.
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