Peak practice

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Striking skeletal shapes of Korean pae (pear) trees awaiting spring form the background on our four-hour yomp through the farmland south of Wonju. We eventually reached a couple of dragon-topped stone totems either side of the road, marking the entrance to the National Baegwoonsan Natural Rain Forest. Beyond are our closest mountains, Baegunsan and Keunbaramgolsan, the latter still topped with snow from a month ago. I'd love to tell you we hiked on, even further south, and off our map, reached ol' Golsam's shining peak by nightfall, and planted our Midtown South flag in exhausted triumph. Sorry to disappoint. (I was imagining the story at the bottom of page 4 of Saturday's New York Times: American woman in green Pumas and Briton wearing Adidas (one sneaker minus a lace) and a black leather jacket found barely alive nowhere near the summit of obscure South Korean hill. Neither carried a compass, the words North Face were found nowhere on their clothing. And they had the wrong map.)

Let there be green

We knew there was real beauty out there, just beyond Wonju city limits. In them thar hills. We'd read about it, and several eager-to-impress locals and expats have told us about it. It's just that it appears to have been hiding beneath a lot of grey wintery cloud since we arrived a couple of weeks ago. Late afternoon today, however, the gods of those low but perfectly formed mountains to the south of us decided to stage a little spring shindig and throw the switch that produced the impressive light show you see here. Ta dah! Welcome washes of olive green finally daubed among the brownery that many associate with the rural Korean landscape. This is the view from our apartment, and pictured in the distance beyond Dongbo Nobility Block 102 (extreme left) and our neighboring complex are Mount Baegunsan and, behind it, Mount Keunbaramgolsan, part of the National Baegwoonsan Natural Rain Forest, their ravined and wooded slopes illuminated for us for the first time. Now we just have to climb the things.