The Hike the Brochure Did Not Adequately Describe

The trail description said five hours, somewhat strenuous. It was not five hours and somewhat strenuous.

Breakfast was a mayo egg salad sandwich with ham and ketchup, served by two women at a café so charming I ate half of it despite having what I can only describe as a deathly, lifelong, non-negotiable phobia of mayonnaise. A black cat literally ran across my foot on the way out. I noted both omens and boarded the bus to the trailhead anyway.

The path starts rocky — slanted shale with no flat footholds, the kind that immediately punishes a bad ankle. I laced up tighter and kept moving. An older Korean couple got off the bus with me and we spent the first hour leapfrogging each other up the ridge. When they caught me on a rest break, they immediately dug through their bag and handed me mini Snickers and some kind of fig candy. I took it as friendliness. It was actually concern. I should have read that more carefully.

The trail offers bypass routes around each peak or a scramble straight up. Every single time, I took the scramble. This is the kind of decision that feels correct at the time and reveals itself to be catastrophic about two hours later. By mid-morning I’d burned through most of my water, eaten everything the Korean couple had given me, and was down to half a mayo sandwich I absolutely was not touching on the grounds that losing what little hydration I had left in my stomach was not an option. The sun had come out hard on the exposed ridges. My legs were starting to feel like they belonged to someone else.

At one point, trying to get off a ridge and down to a bypass path I could see below me, I convinced myself there was a safe route down a crevice. There was not. I ended up face-to-rock, backing down on footholds barely wider than the toe of my shoe. The drop wasn’t dramatic. A slip and fall would have been. I made it down, sat on a rock for a few minutes, and kept going.

The couple — Mr. No (yes, really, that was his name) and his wife, from Busan — waited for me even when I told them not to. They’d slow their pace, stop just ahead, let me catch up. Eventually I told them directly: go catch your ferry, I will finish this, just very slowly. They looked skeptical but went. I don’t blame them for the skepticism.

Alone now, I was taking 20 to 30 steps and stopping. Then sitting on a rock every five minutes. Then I pulled out the hiking app I’d downloaded and looked at what was left. Three more peaks before a cutoff route down to my village. Not happening. I found the cutoff, sat down at a wooden rest platform in the shade with my legs up for 30 to 40 minutes, breathing deliberately, and then started down what the signpost called an escape route.

The sign at the top said 0.5 km to the road. That is less than a third of a mile. Under normal conditions, 15 minutes. It took me two hours. The path was as steep as anything I’d hit all day, one switchback after another into thick jungle, bugs everywhere, completely out of water except for a chunk of ice rattling around in the last of my bottles that I rationed one sip at a time. I’d take 10 steps, lean against a tree, take 10 more. The GPS tracker on my phone showed progress so minimal I eventually stopped looking at it.

When I finally hit the road, there was a coffee shop about 200 meters downhill with a cooler full of water bottles in the window. I went in, bought four, drank two before my shoes were back on, and immediately got stomach cramps. Then I walked the remaining stretch down through the village, up the steps to my room, and stood in a cold shower for 45 minutes. Every muscle in my legs cycled through cramps for the better part of an hour after — toes, calves, hamstrings, quads, then the other leg when I rolled over. I was not in good shape.

Dinner, though. A random chicken joint in the village, fried chicken in a garlic sauce and a spicy-sweet sauce, a tall beer in front of me, bones and all. After everything that day had thrown at me, it was the best meal I’d had in Korea. Some of the unidentifiable chicken pieces I ate without asking what they were. At that point I truly did not care.

The Morning I Nearly Left My Passport on the Island

The next morning I left Dandihoe Pension at 7:30 AM in the pension owner’s micro-compact, driven by a woman who treated every curve of Saryangdo’s coastal road — and it is very much the Road to Hana if the Road to Hana had more cliffs — like she was qualifying at Monaco. Sweetest person in the world. Absolutely committed to speed.

She dropped me at the ferry dock and drove away. I reached for my passport. Not there. Last I’d seen it was on my bed — I’d set it out the night before so I wouldn’t forget it, which is apparently the universe’s cue to make me forget it. My Korean eSIM, which I’d bought for unlimited data, did not allow outgoing calls. It also, I’d discovered the night before, didn’t allow incoming calls. So that was a fun purchase. It finally occurred to me I could swap back to my US SIM for $10 and get a working phone for the day. Why it took me that long to think of this, I genuinely cannot explain.

I tried the pension. No answer. I walked into the ticket office. Three people behind the plexiglass pieced together that I didn’t have my passport and called the pension for me. The owners were on their way. Three minutes later, the same woman who’d driven me there screeched to a halt in front of the ticket office, leapt out waving my passport overhead, and yelled something at the ferry crew. It had been on the car seat the whole time — slipped out of my shallow-pocketed travel shorts, which I should not have been wearing on a travel day. The ticket office had held the ferry. Every passenger on board was lined up at the rail watching this unfold. I was deeply, profoundly embarrassed.

I sent a translated thank-you message later that day. It felt inadequate.

Saryangdo is not an easy place to get to, not an easy place to navigate, and not an easy place to hike. The ferry schedule when I went in 2022 was hard to confirm online — check current departure times directly before you go, and don’t assume any blog post (including this one) has current information. Bring more water than you think you need for the ridge trail. Bring real food, not half a mayo sandwich you won’t touch. And if you’re on a travel day, for the love of everything, wear pants with actual pockets.

What stays with me from those two days isn’t the hike itself, though the views from the ridgeline — oyster farms spreading across the water in every direction, islands stacked against the horizon — were worth the suffering. What stays is the elderly woman at the bus stop pressing hard candies into my hand. Mr. No and his wife from Busan feeding me Snickers on a mountain and slowing their pace so I wouldn’t be alone up there. The pension owner running across a ferry dock waving my passport like a relay baton. None of them owed me anything. All of them just did it. That’s the thing about traveling well off the tourist circuit in Korea — you end up relying on the goodwill of complete strangers, and they deliver every time, in ways that make you feel a little embarrassed about how rarely you’d do the same at home.

Got questions about getting to Saryangdo, surviving the ridge trail, or navigating Korea’s intercity bus system without losing your mind? Drop them to the Ask WildWilliam AI — it’s got the full playbook from this trip and a few dozen others, and it won’t hand you a mayo sandwich when you’re not expecting it.