San – A Hill In Korea

by NB Armstrong (October 2012)

The Hard Way

The Easy Way

The Restroom

The Mountain Road

Nearby is the sole entrepreneurial venture on the mountain. A woman of unimpeachable hardiness, though perhaps (and so what?) someone with no life off the mountain, huddles inside her three sided glass wind-protector, selling marked-up sachet coffee and juice. This impromptu set up presents three blue plastic stools to sit on, so harshly excluding groups of four. Nothing of man or animal kind has yet interrupted her knitting habit. If she was one day not there it would be one of those signs, you feel, like ten thousand whales besieging Manhattan as frogs fall from the sky, that something calendrically Mayan was in the offing.

Follow the Soft Green Road

At 200 meters:

At two hundred meters a defining view of the city is opening up back over your left shoulder. I know that it is exactly 200 meters because the distance is painted on the ground every 100 meters. Each successive kilometer is stage posted with a wooden sign. And the entire road has been turned into a 10km training track for the local marathon club. This is not conducive to getting away from it all. But the regular curves of the route entertainingly rotate the scenery, even as it is impossible to shake off the electricity cables and pylons which follow you up like an estate agent round a house.

At 300 meters

At 500 meters

At 600 Meters

You have reached six hundred meters.

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