White water rafting

Saturday 24th of June and the teachers from ECC Shingok embarked on an adventure through "Adventure Korea".

It began with an early morning subway ride to Hongik University station. Not too much of a struggle for Clare and I. It was more of a struggle for some others in our party who were out that morning watching the Korean's play the Swiss. A big game for Korea. They needed to win to make it out of the prelimnary pool. The subways on the way in were loaded with depressed half sober Koreans wearing their red shirts. The loss made me wonder what all the vendors in Korea were going to do with all the red t-shirts printed with World Cup 2006 slogans. "Korea Fighting". I am certainly glad that the annoying 'Champion' theme song won't be played for another four years.

We were lucky to have made it on the trip as we arrived 15 minutes late for the connecting bus. A miscalculation in how long it would take to get from Uijongbu made us a bit late. Thankfully, Dave was at the bus earlier and prevented them from leaving without us.

We traveled North towards the DMZ into some beautiful country. South Korea is very mountainous but if there is any flat land the Koreans are trying to grow something on it. Strips beside the road between pavements and buildings become pumpkin patches.

The area leading into the river had quite a few rice paddy fields. The first that I have seen. All the rice plants in perfect rows. Interestingly enough Korea cannot grow enough rice to feed it's own people. Hence, the tenacity to grow anything anywhere.

Unfortunately, our camera is not waterproof so we couldn't take pictures from the raft. We spent a good 2 and a half hours on the raft and went through some fun rapids. In the quiet spots the raft guide would show us games to play that usually involved me falling out of the raft. I swallowed a good portion of North Korean water. I hope that the radioactivity was watered down somewhat!

We stopped at one area and drank water from a spring. Across from the spring was a sheer cliff which during heavy rains has thousands of tiny waterfalls tumbling down.

After the rafting we had a buffet lunch and then went to a different river area to let about 15 people bungee jump. I would have gone except that the jump was about 1/2 the size of the one in Queenstown.

We hung out in pretty horrible heat. Unable to swim due to a 15 meter bolder trek, not really wanting to swim because there was visible scum on top of the water. Although, the scum didn't deter a few agashi's from fishing. It was a popular picnic spot with a different group of agashi's who cooked a lunch on makeshift stoves and drank soju out of the back of their car. It seems to be a common activity groups of older people hanging out on the weekends. They gather in parks to sing nori bang or to eat in the sun. I couldn't help but wonder how long this particular group had know each other. Whether they have lived in this area so close to North Korea for their whole lives and what they had seen happen in their life times.

The rafting trip wound up at about 6pm and we cruised back into Seoul. We crawled into bed with sore arms from rowing and some water in my ears. A few teachers sported nice sunburns to remember the day.