The climb from the monastery had taken two days, a steady, breath-by-breath progression up through the woods under full packs. Suddenly, the path broke from the trees and we were on the exposed granite summit of mainland South Korea's highest peak, Cheonwangbong. To the north we could see the crooked spine of the Baekdu Daegan, a mountain ridge and watershed that runs the length of the peninsula.
I was there with my partner, Somi, who was brought up in downtown Seoul and had pushed hard for a couple of weeks on a beach in south-east Asia. Instead, I'd persuaded her to hike along this ridge, exploring the shamanic shrines and Buddhist temples that have been built along the Baekdu Daegan over the past 1,000 years. It might have been at the top of that first big climb that Somi began to look at me accusingly. Clouds of blame were gathering on the horizons of our holiday. Still, even she had to admit that this was something special. Down in the valley a Buddhist nun had shown us a stone idol of a goddess called Songmo Halmae – a kind of holy matriarch who had stood on this peak for hundreds of years, watching over the Korean nation, until she was hurled into a ravine by Christian fanatics in the 1970s. It was a primitive, archaic-looking stone thing, eyes fixed on nothing, dark with candlesmoke. I could see why she had frightened the Christians.
Not far from the top we found the ruins of the cairn that had marked Songmo Halmae's shrine, grown over with weeds. If this was still a sacred place there was no sign of it today. Fit-looking Koreans crowded the summit, kitted out in bright Lycra and Gore-Tex, filming each other on tablets and phones. A millennial tradition of pilgrimage had been displaced, almost overnight, by the cult of leisure. As Korea's great poet Ko Un put it: "Oh shit – a country with a crush on glitz."
After a few days in Seoul I'd been glad to escape the touchscreen slickness of 21st-century Korea. Too much magazine-shine and plastic surgery, too many LCDs scrolling and blinking for attention. The Baekdu Daegan might, I thought, take us back to an older, rural Korea and into an indigenous culture that was almost as alien to Somi as it was to me.
The ridge connects the peak where we now stood, Cheonwangbong, to another holy mountain, Baekdu-san, on the China-North Korea border. Koreans have long believed that a current of life-energy, or gi, runs between these two peaks, flowing along the spine of the nation, pouring from the ridge to bring fertility to Korea's fields and prosperity to its people. Drawn by this idea, believers from all of Korea's old spiritual traditions – Shamanism, Taoism, Buddhism – have built shrines and monasteries along the Baekdu Daegan, gradually transforming a geological feature into a kind of linear, open-air museum of the country's religious heritage. As we collapsed into our tent at the end of that day, Somi looked unconvinced by the fascinating geomantic theories of her ancestors.
Twenty miles later, even my own enthusiasm for the authentic Korea of the Baekdu Daegan was waning. Brutal, punishing climbs, many made possible only by fixed ropes tied to the trees, were followed by leg-snapping, mile-long descents across a chaos of boulders.
On day four we reached the mountain shelter of Yeonhacheon, where I slept on the floor, shoulder-to-shoulder in a row of exhausted Korean men. As I sank into sleep, I could hear them wincing and stiffening with cramps. When we got going at first light it was raining hard, and by the end of that hike – cold inside sweat-sodden clothes, drenched and blistered and utterly beaten – we decided to cheat. We'd reached a road at the northern edge of the Jirisan range, where we found a taxi and curled effortlessly down to a village called Nochi Maeul. In the back of the cab, scrolling through Korean blogs on her phone, Somi found a place called Umoni Minbak (Mum's Homestay).
Nochi Maeul is a cluster of 20 or 30 houses set among rice fields on the valley floor. As we hauled our packs from the taxi, Umoni appeared from a neighbour's house, beaming in leopard-print trousers and a red fleece, ushering us inside with a flurry of maternal fuss. I could not follow the Korean but the gist was perfectly plain. You're soaked through! Now get those clothes off and into the shower. I'll put the hot water on for you, and start the dinner. Just let me light the ondol.
Umoni was snapping armfuls of brushwood, kindling a fire in a low hearth. The flames unfurled through the stone labyrinth beneath our room, heating a granite-flagged floor that was topped with a layer of sand, a sheet of lino, and a thick cotton quilt. This system was the ondol. Clean, dry and barefoot, listening to the steady pull of the fire and the last of the rain, we stretched out on the quilt and felt the warmth and sleepiness soaking into our muscles. "This," Somi said, "is my indigenous culture."
An hour later, we joined Umoni in her living room, sitting on the floor to share the meal she had prepared: little bowls of warm purple rice, wild sesame leaves spiced with chilli paste, crisp sheets of seaweed roasted in salt and oil, and a kind of sweet, crunchy, fiery kimchi that had been fermented for a year in stoneware vats underground. Almost everything had been grown in the garden or foraged in the woods above the village.
We stayed at Umoni Minbak for three days, pottering around in our flipflops or sitting in the courtyard to help sort the chillies that had been dried in the sun to a dark, lacquered red. We also heard Umoni's story.
Her real name was Myeong Rae. She had been born in 1949 in a Korea still wounded by Japanese occupation and about to descend into a war that left a million people dead and the country in ruins. At 20, she married a man from Nochi Maeul and on her wedding day made the two-hour walk to her husband's village, where she has been ever since. And then, about seven years ago, Umoni's husband died.
"I was lonely and depressed for a long time," she said. "But I began to see walkers coming through the village. I knew how to cook and I had a spare room. So I opened Umoni Minbak."
Word of Umoni's cooking spread quickly. Photos of her kimchi were tweeted and blogged about from the phones of those hi-tech hikers. Umoni wasn't sure how all this worked but she knew that walkers were telling each other about her food: "A lot of people started to come and I began to feel more cheerful. When I cook, I sing. I think this joy goes into my food and that's why people say it tastes so delicious."
On our last day Umoni showed us a grove of pines at the top of Nochi Maeul protecting the village. There was an altar among the trees where each springtime Umoni and her neighbours laid out food, asking the mountain spirit to keep their children safe. Along the length of the Baekdu Daegan there were groves and altars like this: traces of a prehistoric cult of mountain worship that was absorbed into Buddhism centuries ago and is still flourishing in the age of Samsung.
For 60 years the Korean peninsula has been split by the east-west line of the 38th parallel, but the jagged north-south spine of the Baekdu Daegan belongs to another timescale entirely, and it doesn't stop at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). It climbs up beyond Pyongyang, oblivious of the cold war and of manmade frontiers, encrusted with the same cairns and temples, carrying the same current of meaning and memory. One day it may even serve as a thread to help stitch the two Koreas back together again.
Somi and I walked on for another week, stronger now, heading up into the wilderness of the Deogyusan national park. Before we left, Umoni sat between us on the steps of her porch and asked a neighbour to take a photograph on her Polaroid camera. She cried as she watched the image form on the paper, and then she hugged us and laughed at her own foolishness. "When I came to this village as a bride," she said, "we all knew that Nochi Maeul was on the Baekdu Daegan, and that this would bring us blessings."
Back then no one had thought of the ridge as a hiking trail. Umoni could never have imagined that its blessings would arrive on foot, tired and cold, in need of her welcome and her kimchi soup.
