Climbing in Bukhansan National Park

I was fortunate enough (this is quite a repetitive phrase with me, but I do feel I’ve been very fortunate all in all) to visit South Korea with my academic supervisor (who has a joint professorship at a University in Seoul) and a fellow PhD student from my research group the October before last… which makes it October 2015. I actually wrote a blog about this trip for my CDT’s website, but nearly two years on the above photo still brings me great pleasure as my laptop desktop screen, so I feel the trip is worth another reflection! During this trip we went to a conference on Jeju island… which apparently is where South Koreans go on holiday, so I can’t complain there! In my free time on Jeju I hike up a mountain called Hallasan – that was quite an unusual hiking experience for me! Firstly, compared to my experience of hiking in the UK, it felt like there were a lot more steps and hand rails. There were also some signs around saying something along the lines of ‘Smiling and greeting fellow hikers makes the experience more pleasant for everyone’, but to be honest, the sign was not necessary! Throughout my time in South Korea I always found people to be very friendly and approachable. When I was hiking in Jeju, a couple of times I was stopped for photos with people… see below for one example. I also ran part of the way while I was hiking since I was a bit short of time and I remember people cheering which I found quite funny. This happened when I was out running too and also when completing a route at a climbing gym I went to in Seoul – you don’t get that in London!



We then spent I think it was 2 weeks or a week and a half in Seoul visiting universities there to meet with professors and students. Meeting people with similar research interests is one of my favourite parts of working in science, especially when you get to see the same people again at conferences all over the world. The big extended scientific family union! So I also had a free weekend in Seoul, the capital city. The first free day I spent the first day climbing in Bukhansan National Park, the second I spent doing as much city sight-seeing as possible in one day: palaces/ gates, museums, markets and Namsan Tower. This was largely made possible by the very efficient and easy to navigate subway system there. It also had a really cute tune every time you reached a stop. I wonder how that would go down on the London underground…? But I’m going to focus on the climbing day now.



I’d gotten in touch with a local climbing guide (sangirang.net) before coming to Seoul to organise a guided climb with a local expert, and man were they! Che-yeoung (left) had been up Everest, done first ascents in the Himalayas and gets sponsored to go on exhibitions! It was funny watching him just standing comfortably or stepping up things I’d have to climb. Peter (right) was great too and had a really interesting background story. I’d been surprised by how ridiculously good his English was in email correspondence before the trip, it turned out he’d been adopted by an American family after the Korean war but came back to Korea out of curiosity to explore more of his heritage, met his wife and settled into life as a local mountain guide! I also found it really interesting chatting to Peter and the other people on the climbing tour about their interest in renewable energy (we had gotten onto the subject after I had said I was doing a PhD related to solar power research). What was really cool, was I learnt a lot from the chats we were having at the crags. I wasn’t that familiar with Elon Musk before, but Peter seemed to be quite a follower of his work and was particularly interested in a technology called ‘supercapacitors’. I’ve since read up more on supercapacitors and keep an eye on the field when I can as (one of the many!) possible future areas of research to go into. Supercapacitors store energy, a bit like batteries, and really if we are to truly enable efficient and widespread use of renewable energy, we need better energy storage. This is a major challenge in materials science. Supercapacitors don’t store as much energy as batteries, but release it faster. I believe Elon Musk (and I guess his less famous counterparts and scientists in the background) are aiming to do is use both batteries and supercapacitors in electric cars. As far as I’m aware, one of the major challenges for supercapacitors is energy density – i.e. being able to store more energy in less space in a supercapacitor so your electric car isn’t the size of a house.



But anyway, that made for some interesting discussions – you don’t have to be at a science conference to learn something new necessarily! Climbing doesn’t seem to be as big as hiking in Korea in general (the students at the universities we visited thought I was a bit mad when I told them I was doing it), but there were some other people on the crag we were at too. The climbing was great of course, we did a multi-pitch route and although the rucksack was a bit of a hindrance at first, it definitely came in handy increasing my third dimension while I was shimmying up a chimney! Not actually on the route we did, but on another nearby there is a spot where Koreans used to light fires to warn Seoul of Japanese invasions and you can see the whole city from up there – amazing! But at this time of year in Korea (Halloween as it happens – hence the fancy dress), it gets dark really suddenly, so we ended up abbing off in the dark, with the rather lovely view of Seoul at night as shown below.

Afterwards, we headed back to the climbing store where the guides were based and went to a nice local place for Korean BBQ (or tofu stew for me), beer and soju. The hosts were really accommodating. We then headed into Itaewon for some cocktails to celebrate Halloween. Halloween is not as big a thing in Korea as in say, the U.S. (this was actually why we were wearing Peter’s kids’ fancy dress his American parents had sent him, they weren’t really aware of Halloween!), but even so, Itaewon was packed! I've never known anything like that, streams and streams of people walking along the roads, almost like a parade. This is basically the party capital of Seoul, it was where the U.S. army were based during the Korean war and it seems like they brought the party with them! All in all, Seoul is an amazing city. So much going on, so high tech, awesomely close to mountains, but people still seemed to care for each other which is impressive for such a big, busy city and people were very clean and respectful with their litter, etc. When I visited the Korean war museum, I found myself thinking that this is a country that has suffered a lot, and perhaps that is why people care so much for eacch other. I feel that my experience in Seoul was largely why I decided to continue my PhD in London when I was given the choice. As a country girl at heart who loves a good mountain, I never thought I’d want to move to London but I was surprised to find that my knee jerk response to this choice when it was presented to me was – oh, something new, could be interesting. As amazing as I found Seoul though, it does have its problems too. Apprarently suicide rates amongst young people there is very high, there are a lot of social pressures and of course the country is essentially on the brink of nucelar war. I can’t even begin to imagine what living with that must be like. The students I spoke to there had done military service, but on the whole I’d say people didn’t dwell on it. I guess there’s plenty to distract yourself with in somewhere like Seoul. I hope for the best for the future of this incredible city and its kind people.