Well, one way has incredibly durable skeletons who can kill you in two hits, and another way has the same enemies that you fought in the tutorial... It's not that obtuse.
Of course once I went up it was obvious that it was where I needed to go, but I needed a tutorial to tell me there even was another way but down. The guy by the bonfire does mention something of the sort, but I thought he was referring to the ruins right next to the bonfire. When you spawn after the tutorial, you spawn facing the slope that goes down.