“Hurry up!” Heju urged impatiently. “We better be off the mountain by dark. I can’t see the path at night.”
We were about three-quarters of the way to the summit when we were afforded a slim view north, out over a swath of alluvial plain, into which were carved out thousands of small, orderly, rectangular plots bordered on the north by a low wooded mountain. Today’s Ganghwa was formerly four separate islands, but over time and after millions of tons of silt and mud have been washed along the Han and Imjin Rivers to the Yellow Sea, the space between the four was filled to form a singular island, thirty kilometres long and fifteen wide. Ganghwa’s narrow plains, scattered between the low mountain ranges, contain rich soil. It was an arresting view. We pushed on.
About ninety minutes after starting out, we reached the summit. There was a helicopter pad there. We were met by a stiff southerly wind that whipped over the bending tree boughs. The view was south, and wow, what a vista! A haunting, deep purple sky rimmed by the setting sun’s silvery outline. For thirty or forty kilometres a vast expanse of mud flats spread out until it met the grey, hazy islands and shallow leaden sea. Along the country’s west coast, about 1,800 square kilometres of mud and tidal flats are exposed during low tide. They seem to stretch forever, and indeed they reach as far as thirty-five kilometres offshore.
As I looked through my binoculars, I spotted a Korean Airline passenger jet on its southbound approach to Incheon International Airport, located on Yeongjong Island, off Incheon’s coast. The plane seemed to hang motionless, as if suspended in mid-air.
My thermometer read nine degrees Celsius, but the biting wind made it feel much colder. Exacerbating matters was the fact that light whispers of cold rain had begun to fall as the remaining streaks of twilight began to fade. The inclement weather didn’t bother me: I was from Canada; today was merely a late fall day there. But Heju was cold and morose, and her exuberance had been replaced with silence. She removed a thin wool shawl from her backpack and wrapped it around her head.
“You look like an Afghan nomad,” I kidded buoyantly.
Despondently, she said, “I’m going down. I can’t see at night,” and she started back down the trail.
“Hey, wait for me — we’ll go down together,” I called, but she was already disappearing behind a large boulder.
I walked along the ridge and found the altar, which Ganghwa guides claim was erected about five thousand years ago but some experts claim is of much more recent construction. It is called Chamseongdan, which roughly translates to “An Altar to Worship the Stars.” It is the size of a small house; larger and more impressive than I had expected, it is constructed from thousands of small rocks that have been carefully piled up to form a circular wall with a roof. There is a graceful symmetry and beauty to it. A wire fence encloses it, but twice a year — on January 1 and on Chuseok, or Korean Thanksgiving — officials open the gate and permit visitors to enter.
As I turned and began to make my way down the path, my phone suddenly rang. I had to dig through my waist pack, which was stuffed with a wallet, notebook, mini tape recorder, camera, compass, and the kitchen sink, to retrieve it.
It was Heju. “Are you coming?” she asked, sounding exasperated.
“No, I’m going up,” I told her facetiously.
“Be careful. It’s slippery,” she warned, ignoring my comment.
“I know.”
“I don’t care about you. I just don’t want my camera to get damaged,” she deadpanned.
“Don’t worry. I tied it to my ankle. It’s dragging along the path,” I joked.
“Hurry up. I’m waiting,” she demanded, brushing aside my attempts at humour.
Yes, my lady. I’m a mere plebeian, at your beck and call, my life’s mission to serve you.
I trekked as fast as I could without slipping, and about a third of the way down, caught up to her in the dark grey shadows, as she sat on a stone step on the path waiting for me. We made it back at the car in about forty-five minutes, just as darkness enveloped us.
* * *
Back at the West Gate Inn, we watched TV and feasted on sandwiches. We had stopped at a small supermarket and a bakery and bought a long baguette and a package of sliced ham and processed cheese slices. This would be our standard diet on the trip. There was also bottle of orange juice and a couple of apples for dessert. It was much cheaper than eating out at restaurants every night, and saved us time, as we didn’t have to stop for meals; Heju, though, preferred the long sojourns at restaurants.
We found ourselves watching an episode of World’s Most Shocking Moments: Caught on Tape 2. One of the videos showed monks hurling items from a building at hundreds of riot police below. A cherry picker, with six men inside, was raised up beside the building. As the bucket got to the fourth floor, it suddenly flipped, sending the six men hurtling like limp rag dolls to the ground. When the host announced the video had been shot at a Jogye Buddhist temple in Seoul in 1999, I snapped to attention.
“We’ve got to visit that temple to find out what happened!” I announced excitedly.
After the show ended, Heju, who had been unusually sullen, launched a verbal barrage that caught me off-guard. I accepted the fact that, on occasion, Heju could be a bit moody. Mostly, I had taken her mini-combustions with a grain of salt (as most Korean men do if they hope to remain in a relationship with their wife or girlfriend).
“This trip’s WORK. It’s a boot camp. It’s not travel!” she erupted.
I was gobsmacked. My immediate thought was that this could be highly problematic. We had only just begun the driving part of the trip, and still had about another hundred days or so to go. If she was upset now, what kind of mood would she be in three months from now? I also failed to understand exactly how being driven around in a car constituted “work.”
Heju had seen me preparing for the journey and had scanned through “The Bible.” She knew I planned to stop at a long list of places each day. I think, though, that she had erroneously envisioned us being on a bit of a semi-vacation, leisurely motoring through idyllic countryside and enjoying long, languorous meals on restaurant patios overlooking rivers and contently shouting “Tallyho” through the car window as we purred along in our Bentley. Instead, we were bogged down in long days.
Heju and I were a bit of a Yin and Yang. She was sociable and gregarious, and relished her leisure time. I was intense and driven, and was deriving satisfaction from checking off the list of places we were seeing and gathering facts and information. I didn’t consider what she and I were doing to be work.
“Taxi driving is work. Construction is work!” I retorted heatedly, recalling short stints I had undertaken in both jobs in Toronto when I was younger. “Sitting in a car is NOT work … it’s travel!”
“It IS work!”
“So, do you want to be carried around in a chair like a queen?” I shot back sarcastically.
For a moment I feared she might answer yes, because Kim Heju on occasion will proudly ascertain that she is the 34th generation descendant of King Gyeongsun, who from AD 927 to 935 ruled as the fifty-sixth and final king of Korea’s Silla Dynasty.
Heju continued tersely: “And we’re spending too much time in Ganghwa. At this rate we’ll never finish the trip on time!”
She had a point. We had been on the island for three days and had yet seen only a museum, two forts, and ascended one modest mountain, which even my mother could have hiked up. Even I was mystified at our slow progress. But I was also royally irked. “If you want to pay for everything — motels, food, car, and gas — you’re welcome