Category: Hiking & Travel

About once a year, I make a trip out to Camp Edwards. It’s not far. I figured with Andrew here, it was as good a time as any to go look at it.

I was stationed at Camp Edwards, 296th Forward Support Battalion, Bravo Company, 2nd Infantry Division, in 1991. Camp Edwards no longer exists – the US Army closed it in the late 90’s. A few years back, when I went there, the buildings were still there but abandoned, but the last few times I’ve gone, it’s just a vacant lot with a fence around it.

From a block from my house, we got on the #600 bus and that dropped us right at the “front gate” of Camp Edwards, after a wending half-hour bus ride through Gyoha and Geumchon (neither of which really existed in 1991). This is the front gate, below. The bridge structure is the railroad track, now elevated. In 1991 it was at grade level.

We walked along the fence and I pointed out where the various features of Camp Edwards were located: the dining hall, the barracks, HQ, the warehouse, and the motor pool. Here is a picture of where the motor pool building was – I remember that spindly tall white-barked tree (birch?) that’s kind of in the right of center of the photo, as being in the motor pool’s “front yard.”

I spontaneously decided that I was feeling healthy enough to try to walk around Camp Edwards. I haven’t ever tried this. I’m sure we circumnavigated the camp at various times on PT exercises and activities back when I was stationed there, including things like our periodic off-post runs. But certainly I’d never tried it since.

So we set off northward down a country lane.

The country lane led to a farm.

And it led through some woods.

And we came to another farm.

And we saw a Korean farmer in his field.

Then we got a little bit lost in the woods. Although we ran out of road, we didn’t run out of abandoned chairs.

After tromping through the brush a bit, I decided I wasn’t up to cross-country hiking, so we went back along the road, and around a small hill and came to a gravesite (which abound in rural Korea).

We came to an area that I recognized, through 22 years of mental haze, as being the “back” of Camp Edwards. There was a small concrete wall with old machine-gun emplacements, and this gateway, where Andrew posed with his umbrella (it was raining at this point, though not hard).

We walked along the road, back south, now, having gotten at least halfway around Camp Edwards moving counterclockwise.

We came to giant “tank trap” of impressive engineering and dimensions.

I saluted Andrew from inside the tank trap.

Then we walked up the road and came to a new development called PalmSprings (팜스프링). 

We passed a Korean mini-mall with the parking in front, American-style. This is sufficiently rare in my experience, in Korea, to be notable, so I took a picture. I believe this is all on land that was formerly part of Camp Edwards.

Then we walked to Geumchon station and took the train back to Ilsan. In Ilsan, I wanted to wait for a package that was being delivered at KarmaPlus – even though KarmaPlus was closed due to the summer break.

So we stopped and had a very, very decadant lunch at “Burger Sharp,” a restaurant right next door the KarmaPlus building, that’s very popular with the students.

I swear, in 5 years of living in Ilsan and working in this Hugok neighborhood, I have only eaten at this place once or twice. But I figured, what the hey? I’m living somewhat free-and-loose with respect to my normal strictures, lately.

Then, due to a communication error, we waited for more than an hour for a package that was already there waiting for me. Ah well. I need to improve my Korean so I understand when they tell me these things.

Then we came home.

Ganghwa Island is a very historical place. It’s a large island approximately straight west from Seoul and also straight west from Ilsan, but there’s not really any direct route there from Ilsan. I took a zig-zaggy bus over there with my friend Peter, and we walked a 22 km route down the island from the bus terminal in the main town at the northern end all the way to a very historic temple complex called Jeondeungsa. It had a lot of tourists. We saw a lot of rice being harvested. We stopped at a hole-in-the-wall called “Mexican Pizza Chicken” and had some chicken (they didn’t have pizza, oddly) that didn’t seem very Mexican. But it wasn’t bad. Random strangers handed us fruit and nuts. Some of this, we ate. It was a good day, but now I’m very tired. Here are many pictures, starting with a googlemap of the route, in context west of Goyang (Ilsan – where I live) and Bucheon (where Peter lives).

So, without a detailed travelogue – perhaps just a random comment here or there – here are some pictures, in chronological order.

A farm house with a mushroom-shaped roof.

A cute dog in front of a very western style house.

A rice-harvesting machine, cutting rice.

A country lane.

Fall colors.

A sign to a tomb of Leegyubo.

A farm house with a strange but interesting design.

Exploring Lee Gyu-bo’s tomb site.

Caveat: I find dumptrucks exciting. Because… of the blog name, y’know? [UPDATE: I liked this orange dumptruck so much that it later became the “brand” image for this blog.]

Mexican Chicken!

I went on a really long, multi-modal journey today. I walked to Daehwa station and met my friend Peter who works in Bucheon. We walked (yes, walked) together to Geumchon (about 15 km), to make a visit with the old demons at Camp Edwards – the US Army base in Paju where I was stationed in 1990-1991. Camp Edwards no longer exists, having been abandoned by the US Army in the late 1990s, I think. In the last year or so, the old, decrepit buildings have been torn down – the place is now just a vacant lot and in a few more years it will likely be a housing development.
After that, we caught a number 92 bus to a town called Jeokseong (적성면), which is near the northern tip of Paju (Paju being the northwesternmost city/county in South Korea, up against the DMZ at Panmunjeom. From Jeokseong we walked up a winding mountain highway to a monument to British soldiers fallen in the Korean war, where we had a picnic lunch, and then we walked a few kilometers more to 법륜사 (Beopryun temple), on the flank of Gamak mountain. We had been intending to hike up the mountain, but my legs were feeling sore already from the walk to Geumchon, and so I wimped out. We hung out at the temple for a while and then walked back down to the highway and caught a number 25 bus to Yangju, where we got on the number 1 subway line.
We went south into Seoul and in the Russian neighborhood near Dongdaemun we went to a Russian restaurant for dinner – I had borsht (which was good) and a chicken thing called “a la Moscow” that was not-so-good. But it was interesting, anyway. Then parted ways with my friend Peter, and I took the subway home. I was tired.
Here are some pictures.
Peter saw a cloud, near the Unjeong Sindosi (New City), on the way to Geumchon. He said, uncharacteristically, “That looks like an American cloud.” I laughed, as I wasn’t sure what a specifically American cloud might look like.

A few kilometers farther on, beyond the Sindosi, we found a very run-down, rural looking area, and this very un-Korean-looking truck on a junky-looking farm. It had a rather Appalachian feel.

A mere hundred yards from the Camp Edwards front gate, I saw this contrast of an old-style Korean house with a modern school building behind it.

At the front gate for Camp Edwards (now unlabeled and unguarded – the military-related nature of the location has been erased by history, which keeps on happening), I mimed standing at the non-existent guard shack showing my ID to exit the base. I lived here for a year in 1991, and I have many vivid memories. But the barracks buildings and shops are torn down now.

At the north end of Camp Edwards, I took this picture of the pastoral scene.

After a 45 minute bus ride, this is the quaint town of Jeokseong.

And the town has one of those unfulfilling Korean rivers in it.

A few kilometers south of town, there is the “Gloster [Gloucester] Valley Battle Monument.” The battle was in 1951, during the Korean war. Many British soldiers died against the Chinese. There were many Koreans here having a Chuseok Sunday picnic. I don’t know why – it was a pretty good location for a picnic, I guess.






After our own picnic lunch, we continued walking down the highway (well, up the highway, climbing higher into the mountains but southward. We saw chicken and some geese at a vacant lot. I don’t know what they were doing there – no one was around, there was no house or farm. Peter commented that it was the world’s worst petting zoo.


We finally arrived at the temple, after a hard slog up a very steep road.






One of my favorite aspects of the typical Korean temple is the panel paintings on the outside walls of the buildings. I took some pictures of these.







I looked in the temple door. No one was there. The place was mostly deserted, except for a few hikers passing through. The monks had better things to be off doing on a Chuseok Sunday – Chuseok is not, per se, a Buddhist-related holiday – it’s connected, rather, with Confucian ancestor-rites and what you might call Korean native religion. I suspect Chuseok weekend is a slow one for the monks, and many of them go visit relatives or suchlike.


The view down the valley from the temple was pretty spectacular.

We walked down to the main road, partly along a little stream.

After the bus ride to Yangju, the train ride into Seoul at sunset induced me to take a few blurry pictures from the train.


Borsht!