Saturday’s exploring was of a slightly different nature. Most of the places I’ve visited so far have been parks that, while they often have some historical and/or cultural significance – and signboards telling people about it – are really most important for their current purpose as a place for the community to be outside. Because the houses here have no gardens and most are apartments high-rise apartment blocks, the space for children to play and people to walk is crucial to the health of the community. The place I went on Saturday is different. It’s not a park constructed as part of the somewhat chaotic urban planning of the city. It can’t be. It pre-dates the modern city of Daegu by a very long time.
I’ve been scouting out places to see through tourist and travel information on-line. On Saturday morning (well, early afternoon), I headed off to catch the 401 bus to a whole new part of the city. Most of the places I’ve visited have been in the South or centre of the city. My destination on Saturday was to the North. Because of the bus system set-up (which I’m finally figuring out) it is difficult to find a bus that goes directly from South East to North East. Fairly logically, most of them go into town and then out again in another direction. This meant quite a long bus trip but the bus wasn’t crowded and the day was calm, a perfect opportunity to watch the world go by from the window of my bus. A blogger I follow intermittently recently wrote a piece on the terror of buses. I also have a love-hate relationship with intra-city buses. They’re terrifying because, in a city or even just an area that you don’t know, their routes are difficult to figure out. Also, destinations tend to be just off the bus route, so it’s always complicated to figure out where to disembark. At the same time, however, there is no better way to see the side-roads and suburbs, the ordinary places than by taking the same transport that local people use to get from place to place.
As the bus wound it’s gentle way towards the centre and then through downtown and back out towards the mountains in the North (as opposed to the mountains in every other direction), I watched the scenery change. Daegu is a city built around and in between geographical features, like hills and mountains. One of the things I often forget, is that several smallish waterways also wind their way through the city. The area where I live is mostly hills and high-rise buildings, so I don’t see the rivers all that often, and I’m always a little excited when I do. Of course, these are generally glimpsed from a bus window as we cross the many bridges but the sparkle of light on moving water always makes me happy. One of the prettiest bridges is towards the north and is lined with pink petunias and geraniums in pots all along the bridge. I keep meaning to stop there but I always seem to pass it on my way to somewhere else.
After a good half an hour or so, the bus passed the airport. This is the first time I’ve been past the airport (at least that I’ve been aware of) since I arrived there. It seemed larger and more modern in the daylight and without the fogginess of 24 hours travelling and fairly significant jetlag. Just beyond the airport, the bus drove along a road lined with flower-sellers. There are certain streets in Daegu where businesses of the same type cluster together. This is the place where all those who sell flowers, to flower-shops and arrangers, work side-by-side. The result is a street of flowers. Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture because I was, by this time, looking out for the next bus stop, based on the on-line instructions that said to get off just beyond the flower-selling area.
The problem with instructions like this is that it’s quite hard to make them clear in a city that doesn’t have street names (even in Korean) and where the reader is unlikely to recognise any of the landmarks. These ones said to get off and walk along the road until the overpass and then turn right. After walking two or three blocks I finally saw the overpass. Unfortunately, it was not situated at a road along which I could go right. Having reached the point where I’m now less obsessively tied to instructions than I used to be, I backtracked a little and took the previous right. I found myself walking along a suburban street. Suburban has a somewhat different meaning here. Nowhere are the white-picket fences (or in the case of Gauteng, 6-foot walls topped with barbed wire) surrounding gardens where children and pets play freely, and one or two story houses with curtains and windows looking out over trees and flowers. Houses are multi-story and narrow and cluttered together and courtyards open right onto the street. The streets don’t even have pavements out here. Walking along means walking between parked cars and moving aside for the moving cars that try to squeeze between those parked on both sides of what in other countries would probably be a one-way street.
At the end of the street-that-should-have-been-one-way, I crossed what looked like the road at the edge of town (it petered out into dirt not far away) and walked up a grassy bank towards the signboards about the Ancient Tomb park. Things looked a little run-down and like that part of any town where urban slowly fades into rural. To my right was a rather run-down place growing vegetables and with plastic replacing missing roof tiles. The grass was quite long. The paths that started on the other side of the little fence were worn down and eroded.
The paths, however, wound between two grassy mounds that I knew, from pictures, were the ancient burial mounds of the park. I walked past a granny and her granddaughter eating corn-on-the-cob just inside the entrance and set off to find the past. The Bullo-dong tomb park is a place where 211 burial mounds lie scattered across the hills like huge, ancient mole-hills. Over the years, they have excavated a few (1937 and 1963) and found pottery, iron weapons, gold and bronze ornaments, horse bits, arrowheads and items still used in local funeral rituals, such as shark bones. Bodies and other funeral items were placed in four-sided stone crypts and a large capstone placed on top, onto which dirt was piled, giving these tombs their distinctive ‘mound’ shape.
Although I knew before I visited the park that there would be many of these tombs, and I even had an idea of their size – the website said 15-20 metres in diameter and 4m high – it was no preparation for seeing them. Most of the mounds really are quite large – like small hills – but they vary in size. Some are much smaller, perhaps those of lesser rulers or children, while others are really like little mountains all on their own. They’re big enough that, when walking between them, the view disappears. And there are so many. It’s difficult to visualise over 200 mounds that size until you’re there. There are hillsides covered from top to bottom with mound after mound, tomb after tomb. I walked for nearly an hour, up hills and along meandering paths between the tombs without reaching the end.
The tumuli or burial mounds are thought to be the final resting place of the aboriginal rulers of the area during the Three Kingdoms period, probably in the 5th and 6th century. Every information source I have found has pointed out that they are assumed to be the tombs of the aboriginal rulers. There is something humbling about walking through this huge area filled with the head-high burial mounds of what were obviously important and wealthy people, with gold and metal and enough strength in numbers to have burial places lined and topped with stone and built metres high and yet people whose identity and names are lost in the mists of time. All their wealth and strength and yet their children’s children are forgotten. Each tomb is marked with a number. Most of the markers are still intact, a few have broken off. The grass is cut regularly and the paths are there for those who want to walk around, but all that remains is mounds of earth. Families picnic between the tombs and children catch butterflies with no thought to the ones who were.
As I wandered around and watched birds flying and landing, I found myself wondering what my people – both in Africa and Europe – were doing in the 5th and 6th centuries. I wonder if they have burial mounds or monuments somewhere and children catch butterflies around them too. I wonder, too, if we in South Africa found a place with over 200 burial mounds, if we’d mow the grass and put up markers and info boards and then largely forget them. Korea is a country, like many others, that reveres the ancestors. Chusoek, one of the most important national holidays, is in a week’s time. During this harvest festival, Koreans travel to their ancestral home towns to celebrate the harvest with their extended families and participate in various celebratory meals and activities, including visiting and tending ancestors’ graves because it is a festival that shows reverence for family present and past. I wonder if anyone will be visiting these tombs.
As I started to head towards the exit, the funereal quiet, birdsong and sounds of insects and frogs were interrupted by the voices of children. I walked down a slope and came upon a group of women picnicking with their families. When I said a polite 안녕하세요, they asked me to join their picnic. I considered it but I was, by this stage, a little tired and rather introspective and didn’t relish the idea of trying to make myself understood and trying to understand others who didn’t speak English. I politely declined and walked on.
The exit I headed to is, it turns out, the real entrance. There is a smart Tourist Information Centre (closed on a Saturday afternoon) and an information board which, unfortunately, contained only the same information as the other boards I had seen. There was also a field of Cosmos. Cosmos always makes me think of my cousin’s wedding and of roadside flowers in Gauteng, on the road from the Airport to Pretoria or from Pretoria to Johannesburg on the back roads. It is starting to appear all over in Daegu at the moment. It appears Autumn is Cosmos season here.
I walked back to the bus stop, stopping on the way to buy a bottle of water at a small café. The owner told me the amount in Korean and I handed him a thousand won note. His eyes lit up when I seemed to understand (I’m finally starting to get a handle on numbers in Korean). He asked if I spoke Korean. I was almost sad to disappoint him and for some odd reason found myself wanting to say ‘ndithetha isiXhosa esincinci’. Strange how non-mother-tongue languages sometimes get confused. I was chatting later that evening to an American who speaks fluent Spanish and had been having a conversation with a guy from Peru she had met in the market and found the same problem, with her Spanish and Korean getting all mixed up.
The bus home was a slightly unusual experience. I have never seen a Korean bus overloaded. Sometimes buses are a little full when it’s just the time when all the schools are getting out but generally it clears out quite quickly and only occasionally you have to stand for a stop or two. This bus was more full than any I’ve been on since getting here. I am used to taking buses on routes that are very well served but this area has only one or two buses running and is the route to several popular weekend hiking spots, so it was completely packed. It wasn’t until after we reached downtown that the majority of people, most of whom were older Korean men and women in hiking gear, hopped off the bus and I was able to sit down and think about the things I had seen.