And now for something completely different....

Lindsey, Nicola and Candace - giving props to Iguide Korea

Last week, Nicola e-mailed me about a "Masai Marathon", a barefoot hike to raise money for ecological issues in Korea. Our friend Lindsey was coordinating a few people through Iguide Korea, and it just seemed like a fun idea. It had been a while since I had done something different here - like, my first year here, everything was new and wonderful, but my 2nd year here seemed to include a lot of repetition (went to Jeju... again, went to Gwangju... again, went to Seoul... again, went to Busan... again).

I was totally unprepared for how amazingly different this weekend would turn out to be.

Whatever I was imagining, and whatever you might imagine would be involved in a barefoot walk for the environment... well... it was completely off the scale of surreal and awesome.

Candace and Melisa on the bus

On Saturday afternoon, I found Melisa and Candace in Gwangju and we grabbed a bus for Daejeon, which is my new favourite city in Korea (actual urban planning??? Here??? Multi-ethnic population? Wide open sidewalks, bridges, clean clean clean?? WOW!)... We headed to the Daejeon Convention Center, where we found Nicola and Lindsey (fresh from 3 days of camping) and their friend Eddy. We knew that there was an opening ceremony, but we certainly weren't prepared for the BLACK TIE affair that it was (we were most certainly under-dressed).

Opera Singers

The evening included a presentation (all in Korean) about the benefits of walking barefoot, a pansori (traditional Korean singing) performance, a string quartet, a gang of opera singers, a full meal (where you sit down and are faced with more forks than are really necessary) and more well-dressed Koreans than you can shake a stick at. I started getting nervous when they were showing video and pictures from last year's run -- featuring full-on kitted-out long distance runners (one guy said that he had been training for weeks, running barefoot on a track, for this event... errrmmmm). What were we getting ourselves into?

Free Soju

Our sponsor, a soju company, provided each table with quite a few bottles of free barley soju, and I'm not ashamed to say that some of the cutlery may or may not have walked away from our table as well.

The next day, our bus picked us up from a university campus, where we were joined by a few other people, including some American guys who had stayed up all night drinking, and we found ourselves at the base of a mountain (we'd already complained our way up a kilometer before we got to the registration table), under a bright blue sky and absolutely surrounded by all sorts of people in all sorts of outfits - from marathoners to hikers to casually dressed folks like us - and of all ages.

Candace and I pretending to have a pre-hike cocktail

We started UP the trail, and finally, after another kilometre, crossed the starting line (we were running a bit late, so missed the actual start). We walked along, up (and up) the dirt path, between trees, with views of mountains and lakes... at every kilometre, there was a sign to tell us how far we'd walked, someone cheering us on, music (either live or recorded), sometimes water and snacks, photographers and cameramen (I did a TV interview at one point).

Not very ECOLOGICAL!
(we picked up litter as we walked along)

The view from the top...

Nicola and her ocarina joining with the pros

One thing about walking barefoot is that it really slows you down. With every step, you become aware of your foot touching the ground, and you aren't sure if the next step will be soft, prickly, hard, gravelly.... as you gingerly place your foot down. For the most part, the trail was soft sand (except for one memorable kilometre or two of hard prickly gravel bits).

Nicola and I - we've changed so much in two years, but we're still like sisters

Walking...

The art of dancing...

At the 9th or 10th kilometre, we had a huge pool of mud to treat our feet to (giving us orange feet for the rest of the day). With only a few more kilometres to walk, the skin on the bottoms of my feet was just hurting hurting hurting... my legs didn't hurt, my ankles were fine... but ow ow ow said the soles of my feetsies.

The mud! Yay!

We reached the end - about 3 hours after we'd started (the people who ran it were finished in about an hour), got more free soju, a certificate and a wooden medallion.

At the finish line... my time (3 hours, 14 minutes - but don't forget that we started late... so maybe, like, 3 hours is more accurate...)

This man gave me two extra bottles of free soju...

The donation for the event was 13,000 Won (about $15 Canadian), which got me a banquet, a concert, gallons of free soju, a walk in the sun with friends, a wooden medallion thing, a sunburned chest and a real sense of accomplishment once I finally crossed the finish line and thought, "Hey, that wasn't so hard after all!"