Far From the Maddening Crowd, It Is Not

South Korea is a relatively small country filled with tons of beautiful mountains.  No wonder hiking is such a popular weekend activity here, but The Economist says there's something a bit sinister about it all:

"That could be a legacy of military rule. Park Chung-hee, the strongman who ruled South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, encouraged conglomerates to push their employees out onto the trails as a community-building activity. He also insisted on military drills not unlike those still practised north of the border. Corporate culture has become a little more relaxed since then, although an ambitious executive may still find it expedient to scale the occasional mountain with the boss.

A culture of long working hours and short holidays encourages efficient hiking. Mountain paths tend to head directly for the summit, and rarely feature the switchback turns seen in other countries. South Korea has a whole infrastructure designed to get stressed leisure-seekers to, up and back down the mountains as speedily as possible. The plan on Ms Kim’s bus, which sounds distinctly ambitious to anyone used to a more leisurely pace, is for the hikers to tackle Seoraksan’s highest peak before it gets dark and return to Seoul well before the last subway train heads for the suburbs."

Hiking is a definite must-do activity here in South Korea but, indeed, coming from doing some fairly rigorous hiking in the area of Bellingham, Washington with my dad, it is pretty shocking to notice that Korean trails go straight-the-hell-up, no switchbacks to be found.  As for "getting away from it all," hiking here is very much a social (noisy?  crowded?) experience and not at all something Thoreau would have appreciated.