Hike East of Changwon with Bo Hwe.

From South Korea Highlights 2009 ~

Went hiking early this morning with my new friend Bo Hwe. She had one particular mountain in mind, Bieum San, which is locally known as the place to see the blooming purple Jindalrae blossoms (Korean for Azaleas). But the government evidently closed that trail due to forest fire danger.

So we explored the long, rugged ridge line that goes North and South, flanking the Eastern side of Changwon. Instead of tracing our steps back the way we came, we descended another trail to make a loop back to her car through town. This brought us right up next to a big sprawling shooting range (don't worry, there was never any danger).

Having long been popular in Korea, the local shooters were all out at the firing range with a good number of the folks shooting skeet. We looked into shooting ourselves, as you can evidently rent guns and buy ammunition (gun rental was surprisingly cheap, but the ammunition was pretty outrageous). I was also a bit offended that they had the nerve to charge foreigners more, so we decided to hold off on shooting till another day.

The whole place also appeared to be busy with some sort of international women's shooting competition! Dozens of vendors were hawking overpriced shooting accessories to uniformed teams from as near as China and Japan. Other teams journeyed from as far as Bahrain and Germany. Later on in the week, I heard many of the teams were here to prepare for the Olympics.