Sunday, February 7, 2010

Caves, Mountains, and Streams

Lately Amy and I have had pretty heavy hearts. Questions of family health, colds, and the winter blues have taken there toll on the both of us. So yesterday I thought we might need something to take our minds of life for a bit. I came up with the wonderful idea of mountain hiking and some caves. So today we got up early and headed over to Danyang for some much needed adventure.

First up was the Guso Caves. Let me just start this out by saying neither of us was ready for the physical and emotion trials we would endure. As we were entering the caves Amy spotted a dead cave spider, and it was the first official spider we have seen in Korea, Amy was not very happy about it at all.

I was loving the caves it was very beautiful, and quite a hike as well, and than all of a sudden I saw Amy crying and was like what is going on? Well I guess this was her first cave experience and to be honest it was rather tight and quite humid and warm as well (60 degrees). She had a panic attack in the first 10 minutes of us being in the cave after we squeezed through a narrow opening. So I was like oh my goodness, what the heck do I do? So of course I resorted to my Signs training (thank you M. Night) and we fought through the panic attack. It was really scary because she was hyperventilating and I was just trying to get her to settle down and we were in the middle of this crazy cave. We hustled through the rest of the cave and blew through it in 15 minutes, though it should have taken an hour. Here are some of the pictures of the action.











After the craziness at the cave we moved on to find our hiking trail, and just like everything else it was harder than expected. Why does it always look so easy to find on Google Earth? We hiked our way through the countryside and we eventually came upon the entrance to Seoraksan National Park.



The mountain was absolutely beautiful. The trail followed a mountain stream all the way, and the stream was frozen over adding to the beauty of the mountain. It was so beautiful and so peaceful, we even heard birds chirping and the water flowing underneath the ice.


It was our first real experience in the mountains and we loved it. Though the mountain was laced with a layer of ice most of the way up, and there were so many Koreans at points it felt like a stampede. They hiked so quickly and came up on our tails and almost ran us off the path. It's like it was a race to see who could get up and down the mountain first, not a race I wanted any part in. This was especially welcomed as we trekked down praying that we could find one dry stone to rest our weight on. I bit it three separate times, and the last time I got some serious air, and some serious AHHHHS from the Koreans. They were telling me to walk on the dry side and I was. It was like that annoying person who states the obvious (and than one of them in front of us did the same thing... ehehheh).





















But we made it, though my back was about to tear open and my butt was very sorry from the thrashing it endured on the ice. Amy also seemed to sustain sore knees and a pulled muscle from the earlier panic attack. Despite all of this it was a blast, though I think next time we are going to find a mountain that the whole city doesn't know about! But it was nice to relax and enjoy God's beautiful creation, just what we both needed.

2 comments:

Karen said...

Beautiful photos, Ben! Sorry to hear Amy had a tough time but I'm glad all turned out well. By the way, we also have a critter in our wall at the Asthma Network office - maybe it's a relative of your wall friend?

Benjamin + Amy said...

I bet our critters are relatives! They are such little stinkers! We should have a critter bbq!