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“Y ou cannot drive down the mountain road. Ever,” warned Mr. Lee, the owner of a Jeju scooter shop, as he used a red marker to highlight the treacherous, serpentine highway cutting through the middle of the island. It seemed this rule might be in our best interest. It created a quandary, however: Coming to Jeju and not hiking Hal- lasan is like coming to Korea and not trying kimchi. The experience just wouldn’t be complete without it. So we postponed our plan to circumvent the island on two wheels and caught a bus to the mountain. It took several attempts over the course of a few days to successfully scale the summit, either because we started too late or hit inclement weather; but the third time was the charm — we finally reached the reflective wa- ters of the caldera lake atop this 2-kilometer-high extinct volcano. What we think of as Jeju is essentially the settled foothills of Hallasan, South Korea’s tallest peak. On its slopes of basalt and cooled lava, a people have eked out a living over several millennia, a people that are as distinct from mainland Korea as their subtropical climate. The island was originally known to Koreans as Tamna, and it wasn’t until 1105 that it was brought under the control of the mainland. Amid its long-tumultuous relationship with dominant outside powers, Jeju has fostered a fiercely proud sense of local identity. In fact, the island culture is so distinct that its people developed an extreme dialect of Korean — some would argue it’s their own language. Called Jeju-eo, it diverged long ago from the com- mon progenitor it shares with the mainland, and has a markedly separate syntax and lexicon. Once used by some 600,000 residents, only 5,000-10,000 speakers remain, most of whom are over 70 years old. UNESCO declared the language critically endangered in 2010, one of the society’s many hallmarks being lost to modernization. This dialect, along with much else of what constitutes the essence of Jeju, is facing rapid erosion — its characteristic maritime religion, methods of subsistence, language and culture are on the brink of extinction. We sought to find the traces of this island culture before they slipped into history. www.groovekorea.com / August 2014 48 Edited by Shelley DeWees (shelley@groovekorea.com) COvER STORy