Decompressing in Daegu

Daegu, South Korea's fourth-largest city, is perhaps not a natural tourist destination and some of the stuff I read online while researching suggested it was not worth the trip to go there. But needed somewhere to decompress after the Olympics, a town to aimlessly wander where simple things like finding food would not be an issue. Daegu fitted the bill.

I found a nice-looking guesthouse to stay in – a former shrine and Confucian teaching hall with a welcoming family as hosts, close to one of Daegu's biggest markets. Finding the guesthouse when the taxi dropped me off proved harder as it's in an old area of pedestrianised alleyways. At one point in my 15-minute circular wandering, when I thought I'd found the right route, an old man insistently pointed me in the other direction. I'm not sure where he thought I was going and he wouldn't let me show him on my phone. But the nice man in the convenience store drew me a map and eventually I got there.

My guesthouse

The market close by had a night market thing going on where lots of little food trucks open up and sell street food at reasonable prices; mainly Korean but with a few other options. There was so much choice I went there twice!

After a long sleep I spent the first of my two days just wandering with the help of a tourist map, using the suggested tour routes as a rough guide but mixing them up as I felt like it. I liked the little park surrounded by ancient earthen ramparts, but disliked the free zoo it contained with some very unhappy-looking exotic animals including a lonely Asian elephant and a bored tiger. Not one for animal-lovers or indeed anyone with a heart. 

Daegu, like other Asian cities I've visited such as in Vietnam, clumps its businesses into districts. I walked down Sewing Machine Street, Hardware Street and Motorcycle Street and at the end of the day came through the oriental medicine 'market', which isn't a market at all but one long street that is predominantly shops selling things like bits of bark tied into bundles, roots marinading in jars, and other mysterious natural substances to cure all your ills. There's a free museum devoted to oriental medicine too although pretty much all of it was in Korean. My translation app came in very handy!

Daegu also has pockets of gentrification, including a former market to the east of the main modern shopping district which has a whole alleyway of street art devoted to the late Kim Kwan Seok, a pop singer. It seemed very popular as a location to take pictures of your friends on smartphones; every piece of art had a Korean teenager posing for his or her (mainly her) companion in front of it.

On day two the forecast was rain and it was cloudy when I woke, but dry. So I put on my hiking boots and headed out to see the Gatbawi Buddha, a statue of a Buddha wearing a cool stone hat on the top of a mountain. It was a long bus ride (the local bus 401 terminates at Gatbawi) and the bus got quite busy in the middle, but by the end it was just me and a bunch of middle-aged Koreans in hiking gear. We all piled off the bus and I followed them up the path towards the mountain. 

There are two routes up to Gatbawi and I wanted to do a loop if I could. I managed to take the longer route without many stairs up, and came back down the endless flight of steps which I think most people use to ascend. 

Essentially there's a small flight of stone steps on your right near the beginning of the path, which, if you choose, leads to a narrow track (you can also access this a little further up the main path). About a kilometre up both the wide, main track and this right-hand narrow track you reach Gwanamsa Temple, which was pretty in the cloudy weather. From Gwanamsa the main path on the left hits the steps and there is no let-up until the top. On the right of the temple, the alternative path also climbs but without so many regular steps. There are a couple of forks with signposts; just keep bearing left and climbing and eventually you reach Gatbawi. 

The plateau has an area for praying covered by some lovely colourful lanterns but it was windy and cold, so I didn't hang around long after I'd taken a few pics of the hazy view. Going down the steps was fairly tough going on my knees and it was good to reach the bottom. 

Instead of going back to Daegu I changed buses, to the express #1 (it is red, to distinguish it from the non-express #1 which I tried to get on by mistake) and went up to Donghwasa Temple via a restaurant for a bowl of bibimbap. By the time I got there it was pouring with rain so I didn't spend as long wandering the grounds as I otherwise might have done. Donghwasa is very much a living temple, with monks wandering around and a bunch of old ladies sorting fruit for offerings in the main prayer hall, and it would have been nice to sit and contemplate the peace. Instead I braved the deluge and the wind to see the giant Buddha statue and the various buildings and then got out of there, heading back to the guesthouse for a warm shower as the rain hammered on the roof. 

It was a pretty good couple of days, completely different from three hard weeks of work, and a good way to start my little trip around Korea before heading home.