Gangwon-do: Geojin (거진)

Heading north up the east coast from Sokcho, our next stop was the small town of Geojin.  This was the furthest the the bus would take us, as Geojin is also the last town before civilization begins to quickly peter out on the final stretch to the DMZ, called hyujeonseon (휴전선).  Beyond Geojin lies several museums (Hwajinpo Marine Museum, Hwajinpo History and Security Museum and a DMZ museum) as well as a Unification Observatory and Unification Security Park.  In the end we would never make it to any of these, and while I don't know how grand any of those places were, I have to judge based on Geojin itself that they wouldn't be too large in scale.

Even during the bus ride to the town, the view of the beaches began to change.  High fences began to appear where the sand ended, topped with curling twines of barbed wire--the first visible signs of barriers to keep possible North Korean interlopers out.  A feeling of desolation settled over me as we arrived in town in the mid-afternoon.  The gray sky above probably added to some of that, but there was no doubt that Geojin was a town with a bitter past and a bleak present.  It's streets could hardly be said to buzz with life and a particular quiet seemed permanently clamped down over the whole area.  Rusted barbed wire fencing covered the sides of random buildings, some of them next to the sidewalk of the main street, and a few featured new barbs that had been twisted on recently enough to still maintain their silver gray color.  We wandered down this main street from where the bus had  dropped us and done a u-turn at its final stop and soon veered off towards the water.  A military ship sat at port in the chilly breeze and as I drew my camera to take a picture some young soldiers appeared off to our side behind chain link fencing.  "This is Korean Navy ship," one said in English. "No pictures."



"Really?" I asked incredulously (because of Korea's draft policy, many soldiers are not much older than some of my high school students.  The fact that we were currently in a town belied that these ones were almost certainly ego-tripping) and tucked the camera away again.

Further exploring the area we went down to the beach, which appeared pristine and sandy, with a strong surf pounding its shores.  Built further up the beach was a massive and posh looking apartment building, the only one of its type in the town, looking strangely out of place on the empty beach with no other buildings around it.  On the other side, back towards the small harbor, the shore was littered with rusting, beached ships and broken parts.  A few small boats bobbed in the waves and there was barely a soul in sight.  Soon the Navy boat I had been denied access to photograph pulled out of port into the water as gray as the steely ocean beneath it and the rain-threatening sky above.

A Korean Navy ship chugs out into the harbor, spewing exhaust

Framed by the ubiquitous barbed wire, rows of fish dry beneath blue tarp

We began searching for a taxi, walking past long strips of shops loaded with hanging dried fish and squid, more than it seemed the population of the town would be able to eat anytime soon, from what we had seen.  Adjumma (old women) sat inside and watched us pass.  Our search for a taxi that began to appear as if not to exist (despite that we'd already been told we'd need to take one to the DMZ observatory further up the road out of town) led us down near some docks close to wear the bus had let us off.  Many tanks of fish outside shops and small restaurants were located down here, some of the fish were ones not commonly seen in outdoor tanks, looking like grotesques drudged up out of the deep sea.

After having the run of the town we decided to backtrack to the Family Mart convenience store we had seen earlier to try and have them call us a taxi.  When we got there, to our delight, the young man at the counter, probably still a student, began speaking to us in English.  We explained where we needed to go and asked him if he knew any cab numbers.  He asked us to wait and went to talk to a woman at the other end of the store before returning.  "I'm sorry," he said.  "You can't go now.  You know the observatory is close to DMZ?  So it closes very early."  We thanked him gratefully for the information and left the store.

We both felt let down, though entirely at ourselves for not being more prompt during the day.  We headed to the main street bus stop to catch the next one back to Sokcho, but while we sat there talking decided that before we left we should go back to the turn around where we'd been dropped off to get some pictures.  When we had walked back there, we proceeded to head down the road (the one we had hoped to take to the observatory) a little ways and see what we could.  The fencing on the ocean side of the road was topped by spears pointing out towards the water (and anyone who might try to clamber over the fence from the other side).  Suddenly, a wooden stairway leading up the mountain on the left came into sight.  Intrigued we climbed it to find first a natural spring, and then higher on up a sign post pointing us through the hills in the direction of the DMZ.  Below us the surf pounded violently on the rocky shore and the highway had become a thin strip.  With our newly afforded view we could see the observatory sitting on distant hill top, but not too far distant--this path through the hills led in just the direction we'd hoped to go.

And so we ate up the last of the remaining daylight hiking along this path.  Along the way we found simple public exercise equipment as well as small pagodas, a mermaid statue, walrus and flatfish statues, and even statues of the animals of the Chinese zodiac among other things.  The hills had a serene, at times whimsical feel to them, and it occured to me that Geojin might be a town trying quietly to overcome its grim location and past that has left it strung with barbed and razor wire, and its road lined with spear-topped fencing.  I would quickly realize that the small mascot of the town is a man with a hiking stick, and put together that the very hills we were walking through were in a sense its main attraction.

 

A couple times we passed people on the trail who said greeted us nicely, but otherwise it was mostly deserted.  After a while of walking, when the observatory had drawn close, we came upon a building around a corner.  As we descended towards it we found a gate with a single soldier standing guard.  I greeted him, but he made to response, just stepped out and silently began shutting the gate with a wary look in his eyes.  We nodded, turned and made our way back to a fork in the road.  On the way an army truck passed us and a soldier in the back smiled at us unexpectedly and waved.  We knew that we'd been blocked from ever getting to the observatory, but that didn't matter.  In the end I feel like I had the experience that I really wanted trekking towards the DMZ.  We continued, but the sun had gone down far enough that we decided, after reaching the bottom of a hill where full military barracks, with milling soldiers, were visible up the road, that it was time to turn back towards the town.

We took a different route back, and the path eventually led us down through some homesteads and out into a parking lot.  Some children played nearby in front of the homes and the electric lights that had begun to come on seemed to infuse the town with a sort of life that hadn't been present before.  We caught the bus back to Sokcho feeling more than satisfied with our excursion to Geojin.

A beach on the edge of town left desolate by a war that never ended