I got my arse kicked!

Was I in a bar fight with a stout Korean woman over a piece of man-meat?
NOPE!
Was I subject to unbearable ridicule by my students and then lynch mobbed?
HARDLY!
The one who made me limp for 2 days was a formidable adversary. She loomed above me like some great, craggy monster out of myths of old. This monolith's name is Wolchu and she's 809 meters tall.

This past Saturday 15 native speakers (and around 5 billion Koreans)decided to undertake the journey of Wolchusan, a mountain in the small county of YeongAm, which is famous for its jutting rock peaks. While it's by no means the tallest mountain around, it's rumoured to be one of the more difficult treks due to the terrain. "Difficult" is an understatement for inexperienced hikers such as myself.
Previously, my "hard-o-meter" for mountains was based on my life-altering experience hiking Mont Albert in the Gaspé region of Québec. Mont Albert is around 850m high and the course was 17km long. It took a good friend to talk me to the top of if, because I didn't think I could do it. So far, no mountain in Korea has trumped that experience for me...until now. Although the course we did was only 6.5km, it took us over 6 hours to finish and the going was infinitely tougher. Thankfully, I never had an "I can't do this" moment. I just kept going.
The interesting thing about this mountain is that there are a lot of steep sheer rock that are pretty much impossible to climb, so sometime in the recent past people have installed staircases that are so steep at times that they were really more like ladders. Stairs, ladders, railings and ropes. I wondered why anyone would want to "hike" a mountain if they couldn't do it without installing man-made devices. Then I got to the peak and I understood.


I'd like to say that after the tough climb up the trail down was a piece of cake, but alas, it was equally as grueling.
Throughout the entire hike we ran into many, many Koreans who were so friendly and welcoming. They were also WAAAAY better at hiking than we were. Honestly, there's nothing like having a 50 year old woman breeze past you as you are gasping for air to remind you that you should hit the gym every now and again :D

Anyway, as tough as it was, I still consider it an awesome day. My leg muscles were screaming at me for a few days afterwards, but all's well now.

For more pics from the mountain, click on the link, dudes!
Wolchusan