Freezing Water Buddha Hike

You know it is cold when...
1.  When you look at the daily weather forecast, see that the high for the day is 28 degrees and think to yourself "Oh good, it is going to be a warm day."

2.  When you walk outside and the hairs in your nose freeze immediately.

3.  When you are hiking with your family and the water bottles you are carrying in your backpack freeze.

All of the above things happened in the last few days.  It has been so cold here in Seoul.  I heard the temperatures were the coldest in over 50 years throughout December and so far it isn't looking to warm up any in January, which is usually the coldest month of the year.

Like I said in an earlier post, we did a bunch of hiking over Christmas break.  We were told about a very cool mountain hike about an hour away from our house to a gold Buddha.   We had great directions to get to the mountain, but our directions once we arrived at the mountain on where the Buddha was were a bit sketchy.  We decided to venture out one day to see if we could find it.

Lucy is all bundled up and ready to hike.

Again, on this hike we were in very Korean country.  (Seoul is massive and there are a ton of foreigners in it.  There are areas of Seoul that no matter what time you go you will see a foreigner, the area we live in is like this.  Russ and I like to try to venture out to the areas that foreigners don't often get too.  It makes for some fun adventures and good experiences.  We have also found that the locals are very excited to help us in these areas because they don't see foreigners very often.)

We took a 45 minute subway ride then a 20 minute bus ride to get to this mountain.

At the entrance of the mountain park.

Remember what I said earlier about us not buying a bunch of Korean hiking gear and just using what we had?  Well, after 2 hikes in the freezing temperatures in my snow boots I ditched that method and Russ bought me real, waterproof hiking boots.  They are awesome and made a huge difference.

Showing off my new boots.

We were told that it was a simple hike to the Buddha and we had printed off a picture of it to show people to ask for directions.  It always sounds so much easier then it is in reality.  When we got there we realized that not only did no one speak English, but they had no idea where the Buddha was either.  We soon got cold, frustrated and family morale was very low so we just set out to hike in a random direction on a path and decided we would call it a "learning experience" for the future.

Our Buddha directions told us to hike to the 2 small houses then walk on the path between them and go up the mountain.  You can imagine our surprise when we were hiking in the middle of no where and all of the sudden came upon these 2 small houses.  With a very small path between them.

It looks like we are heading into their house for dinner.

At this point, when we showed the picture of the Buddha everyone knew what we were talking about and pointed us in the correct direction.  Knowing we were "close" shot family morale back up high again.  They pointed these signs out to us and told us to follow them.  I don't know why we didn't do that before.  It is so obvious that these signs lead you to the big, gold Buddha.

Like I said at this point we thought we were close, but we really weren't.  This path was not very well traveled and we had to hike over a small, snow covered mountain.  Everyone else that passed on the hike had these little ice clamps on their shoes that would help them grip the ground.  When they saw us coming, the girls with just snow boots on, they would freak out and point at our feet.  In hindsight, we probably should have purchased some of these ice clamps before we set out on this hike, but we didn't have them and we had made it this far so we weren't turning back.

In the sun it wasn't to bad...

...but in the shade it was freezing.

The "family morale booster".  He usually carries some chocolate in his pocket to start giving out when morale starts to take a dip.  I'm not joking.  He is a smart man and knows that if my morale is high the entire families morale is high.  Chocolate instantly makes my morale go up, so he keeps some handy at all times.

Picture taken right after he had given me some of his chocolate.  Man, I love him.

 We saw some beautiful mountain views.

We had to cross this rickety old bridge.  Who knows how old this thing was.

Finally, we saw it.

Russ and I try to expose our girls to all sorts of different cultures and all that goes along with them.  During our hike to the Buddha and especially on the way back we had some very good family discussion about what we believe and how it differs from what many Koreans believe.  In the New Testament, Matthew 5 calls us as believers to be a LIGHT to a dark world.  We try to give our girls a better understanding of what this means by exposing them to things that we encounter in the culture we live in. 

All around the large, gold Buddha, in glass cases were thousands of these small, gold Buddhas.

Then underneath in very small cases where these even smaller Buddhas.

We were at the top of a ridge with mountains surrounding us.  It was beautiful...

...and very cold.  We didn't stay long.  We walked around a bit and saw that there was a really old bell and a small residence up there, which we assumed was for the monk who did the upkeep around the area. 

It looks like the bell is coming out of his neck.

We took a quick family picture before we headed back down the mountain.

It had been our intention to eat our lunch, picnic style, when we reached the Buddha, but we were all way to cold to stop.  So we ate as we hiked down the mountain.  This is when we realized that the water in our water bottles had frozen as we hiked.  We had some nice, refreshing ice water to wash our sandwiches down with.

Eating, walking and freezing. 

This is the part where we needed the ice clamps.  It was really slippery through this part.

Can you tell Taylor is cold in this picture?  This is just about at the end of the hike.

Finally we made it back to the subway and got warmed up.

Overall, it was a great hike.  We will definitely go back and hike in that area again once it gets a little bit warmer.




As a side note--I write this blog for our family and friends back in America to read and enjoy.  I don't in any way intend for this blog to be a travel guide through Seoul.  For that reason I don't include travel directions or subway information in my posts.  I also don't worry if I don't get every detail perfect.  It is just a fun, family blog.  It would be my preference to have it password protected, since I often share personal family information and pictures on it, but I tried that for a while and I was the only person that could see the blog.  Great security but not really very fun if I'm the only person that can access it.  So I took the password off.  I recently had an anonymous person post a comment on one of my blog posts.  It wasn't in anyway offensive or anything rude, but it did get me thinking about how anyone in the world can access the blog and then post comments on it.  So, since the password thing didn't work I did the only other thing I could do.  I tightened the security settings for who can post comments on the blog and I also have to preview all comments before they are posted.  So if you comment and it doesn't show up right away that is the reason.