It was a hazy day in June when our adventure began, in the midst of that great year that was 2006. We embarked upon a journey to travel the length and breadth of this nation, to stand upon the five highest peaks, giving ourselves only five days to do it. Why were we doing this? Good question – for the girls of course, the young ladies who reside in the establishment that is Sungbin Orphanage.

 

When the majority of these girls turn 18, they will face serious problems in terms of where they can live, where they can work and what they can do. Unfortunately, seeing as many don’t go to high school let alone university, finding a dream career is just that – a dream. In fact, without further education finding any kind of job at all can be difficult, and some end up in the types of seedy jobs one wouldn’t wish upon one’s enemies. To help fight this problem, money is required, and that’s where the mountain walk comes in. Last year, a small team of foreigners and I did a sponsored mountain climb to raise money for the cause. Halla Mountain (1,950m) on Jeju; Seorak Mountain (1,708m) and Gyebang Mountain (1,577m) in Gangwon-do; and Deogyu Mountain (1,614m) and the famous Jiri Mountain (1,915m) in Jeolla-do were the targets. Could we do it in five days? People questioned the physical feasibility of climbing all five peaks, others wondered whether five days was enough to travel so far, and as the sponsorship pledges rolled in I began to question what we had gotten ourselves into.

 

With an outstanding effort from the Speakeasy staff and the Gwangju community at large, the money-raised mark soon reached an unpredicted 4,000,000 won. This symbolized not only the generous hearts of Jeollanam-do’s foreign community, but also that there was no turning around; the only way was, literally, up – the 1,950 meters of Jeju’s Halla Mountain, to be exact.

 

What followed was five days of scintillating hiking. The time restriction gave a real sense of adventure that I hadn’t experienced since the imaginative days of my childhood. It’s quite a feeling to stand in front of your immediate destiny as a comparatively insignificant speck, especially when the pain of two or three days’ climbing makes you feel a foot or two shorter. Then there was the joy and satisfaction of reaching the numerous peaks.

 

The settings were mind-blowingly brilliant: the challenge had given us an excuse to travel from Korea’s farthest point south, Jeju Island, to one of the most northerly points in the country for Seorak Mountain. We visited small isolated villages where the sight of a foreigner was a rare occurrence and worthy of long drawn-out stares from children and passers-by; we saw field after field of countryside; we navigated the metropolis that is Seoul. We saw the ocean on two sides of the country and from those lowest points we traveled to the highest, each mountain uniquely different – from the almost commercialized climbing route of Halla to the virtually untouched rocky paths of Seorak, where other climbers were few and far between. Each peak offered a different landscape to idle over for a few precious resting minutes as we treated ourselves to a kimbab lunch before starting our descent.

 

We met so many people along the way, faces I’ll remember for a long time: from the motel owner whose seedy laugh I will never forget when our budgeting desires led us to ask if we could share a room – “Two men? One room?.…Ha, ha, ha, ha!!” – to the couple who almost adopted Sarah, the one female member of our group, calling themselves her mum and dad and driving us three hours to the next destination after a delicious meal of salmon.

 

It wasn’t all fun and games; five mountains is a whole load of up and down, and after mountain two, aches and pains start to set in – threatening the completion of the task. Tired legs demanded rest at regular intervals. In addition, no great drama is complete without tragedy – tragedy in the sense that the mission was left incomplete. On day five, disaster struck: due to adverse weather conditions, the park rangers prohibited our climbing the fifth mountain, Deogyu-san. Instead we climbed Mudeung, which was fine and in many ways nicely symbolic, as the mountain means so much to the people of Gwangju. Also, in terms of meters traveled upwards (seeing as starting points vary in terms of meters above sea level) we may have climbed farther; sentimentally, however, we failed to climb the five peaks we’d set out to.

 

The feeling of failure has left a lingering stale taste, a taste I aim to dilute this August when the Five-in-Five Challenge, Part Two, will occur. The idea is in its infancy, though there are a few variables that have been decided – the dates of August 19-24^th and the challenge the same again, though this time with a bigger team and the hopes of raising even more money.