Today I wanted to get up to Mt. Mudeungsan, the huge mountain in within the city limits of Gwangju, for a purpose other than just plain hiking. I had planned on hiking up to one of the temples to post a prayer for a loved one, but the weather and time didn't allow for my initial goal. It was damp and cold, which made climbing the rocky path difficult, not to mention I didn't get there with my friend until around 4:30pm. The sun has been setting around 6:30 lately, and I didn't want to be stuck on a mountain in the dark.
Instead of hiking to one of the temples, we walked around the area at the base of the mountain trails where our taxi dropped us off (we seemed to wait on the bus forever and took a taxi when it didn't arrive). There were restaurants and hiking resting areas, and we even saw a few Jindo dogs. We saw a sign that told us the nearest hiking stopping point was 1.8km away, so we started to treck in that direction. The path soon changed from smooth-road-like-hiking to real-mountain-hiking, taking us up rocks and damp ground, so we took some pictures and decided to turn back. On turning back, I decided to still send a prayer, but in a different manner: I wrote it on a piece of paper, folded it up, and dropped it from a bridge into a mountain stream.
Afterwards, we saw what looked like a city bus and it turned out to be the elusive 1187 bus (aptly named because the mountain is 1187m above sea level) that we never saw earlier that we needed to take back home.
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