Pound Family Adventures: Hiking The Fortress Wall

Things You Would Only Find In Korea-Part 4:
So I saw this in the bathroom. (Have you noticed a trend that a lot of my funny Korean things come from in the bathroom?) I'm not sure what it exactly is and I was to scared to push the button but I did make a pretty good educated guess.

I guess if you don't want others to hear what you are doing in the stall you can push this bell and it will block out the noise. Of course, I don't really think this bell would be much better then the actual noises.
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During Russ' 6 days off we spent 3 of them hiking in various areas of Seoul. One of the days we got a babysitter for the girls and Russ and I set off to do a hike on our own. Again it was very cold, and actually snowed a part of the time that we were out.

There is a huge fortress wall around the center of Seoul. Here is a description I found about the wall from another blog:

One of the most conspicuous remnants of Seoul’s ancient past is the Seoul Fortress wall (서울성곽) that still encircles much of the old city. First constructed in 1396 – just five years after King Taejo founded the Joseon Dynasty – the earthen wall was built to join the ridge lines of the four small mountains that surrounded Seoul proper – Namsan (남산) in the south, Inwangsan (인왕산) to the west, Naksan (낙산) to the east, and Bugaksan (북악산) in the North. Although much of the old fortress wall has been torn down, significant portions remain and others are being rebuilt.

The wall is about a 18.5 km circle around the central city and a while ago Russ and I found a map showing a hiking route around the entire wall.

The purple line is where the wall is actually still in existence in some form. We hiked from the top where the small H is in the circle to the very bottom where it says Namsan Mt. We live right next to Namsan Mt.

It has become my goal for Russ and I to spend one day and hike the whole wall. Russ thought it would be a good idea to hike the wall in small portions first before we set off to hike the whole thing. So on this day we took a 45 minute subway ride and a 20 min bus ride to the northern part of Seoul with the goal of hiking the eastern half of the wall and ending up near our house.

We were in very Korean country at the beginning of this hike. There were no forigners anywhere around us and there was very little English. Here, Russ is on the bus trying to figure out what bus stop we were supposed to get off at.

Thankfully, Russ had the forethought to print off the name of the stop in Korean and the bus driver told us where to get off the bus. We quickly saw the wall and these small little signs helped us to know which way to go.

These signs are posted fairly frequently through out the hike, which really helps because there are a lot of turns you need to take to stay on the wall trail. Sometimes it is obvious where you need to be as the wall is still intact along a lot of the hike.

This was at the very beginning of the hike.

We started on a mountain. It was a beautiful view.

The wall goes over 4 different mountains and has 4 main gates and 2 small gates. Since we hiked roughly half the wall we hiked over 2 of the mountains and saw 1 of the main gates and 1 of the smaller gates. At the time the wall was built it entirely encompassed Seoul, but the city has grown quite a bit since it's completion and now the city is on both sides of the wall and the wall often goes through small neighborhoods.

This was the small gate we passed by.

This was the large gate. It is right in the middle of one of the biggest markets in Seoul. It now has a major road that goes all around it. Russ and I commented on how awesome it is that the Korean's protect their history even as they build modern buildings all around it.

Thank goodness the sign was posted here. We never would have known to hike between these houses to keep on the trail.

There was a truck with eggs for sale in the back of it in the middle of this neighborhood. Now that is something you don't often see in America.

In this picture you can clearly see where the wall was destroyed and then restored.

Since the city was built around the wall, at one point we had to go down in a subway stop in order to cross the street and keep hiking. We made a short pit stop in the subway.

We hiked about 8.5 km on this day which is about 5 miles and it took us a couple of hours to do it. It was an awesome day for Russ and I. We got to spend lots of time together talking and taking in the wonderful sights of Seoul. The very last leg of the hike for that day was to hike straight up a mountain in the snow. That was probably the hardest part of the hike.