Lunar New Year in January brought about my first
vacation. At one point, I was
considering a trip to Malaysia or the Philippines. Unfortunately, all of Asia was also looking
at those destinations, which drove the prices up. Instead, a friend suggested a trip to Jeju
Island here in South Korea through a tour company called WinK. The price was right, and I’d been interested
in visiting Jeju since I saw a back packing blog post about the beautiful
island. Here’s the link to the Wikipedia
site if you’re interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_Province.
Jeju is best known because it has UNESCO
World Heritage sites from its volcano. I
think it was recently voted one of the 7
Wonders of the World.
Traveling to Jeju was almost as much of an experience as the
visit to the island itself. We planned
to meet the group at the ferry in Mokpo since we were traveling from the East
and not the North. We left on a 10:30pm
bus from Daegu and traveled three hours to Gwangju where we discovered the next
bus to Mokpo wasn’t until 5:20am. To be
fair, we were expecting this to happen.
But still, waiting for three hours in a bus terminal in the wee hours of
the morning wasn’t exactly thrilling.
After failed attempts to store our luggage in a luggage locker, we
decided to head out for a walk and look for a place to sit and relax for a
while. We were rewarded with a coffee
shop that stayed open until 5am. Thank
you Korea for your caffeine addiction.
It wasn’t long after we settled in that we realized we had a full view
of the entrance to a nightclub next door.
I couldn’t have asked for better people watching.
After a minor language barrier with our taxi driver, we made
it to the ferry station in Mokpo. And
after we waited there for a little over an hour, we made it to the ferry
station where the rest of the group was.
In our defense, we were running on about 1 hour of sleep. On our way, Ashley and I had been musing
about what the ferry would be like…crappy or really nice; it’s usually one way
or the other here. We got to the rooms
to which our group was assigned and there was…(drumroll) a floor.
Even after living her for a combined total of 8 months, we had not
considered this option. So, we laughed
and tried to curl up and sleep.
Eventually, we spent most of the ferry rid in a café on the upper
level. I literally fell asleep on the
table three times. It felt like the
longest ferry ride ever.
Our guides were a dynamic duo. One was a pretty quiet and organized Korean
guy and the other was a crazy hippie Canadian guy. After we got off the ferry we got right on a
tour bus and headed to Loveland park, which is sort of a weird sex museum/park
thing. It was pretty funny. Then we stopped at something called the
Dragonhead rock, which looked very little like a dragon head to me. After that we headed back to our hotel. Luckily Ashley and I paid an extra $10 to
have a room to ourselves. It was clean
and had a basic double bed and a decent shower.
Dinner that night was traditional Jeju Island black pig bbq. The literal translation is “shit pig” because
back in the day these pigs ate up people’s poo.
Dinner was nice and I got meet some really nice people at my table
(Ashley was segregated with the other vegetarians). After we finished dinner we headed to a
noribang (karaoke room). Ashley and I
hung out with some of the people we’d met earlier in the day and met a few new
people. We also sang a well-received
version of Abba’s “Dancing Queen” despite some anxiety on our part.
I think we both passed out as soon as we hit the bed. We were able to have a leisurely morning
because we weren’t doing the scheduled tour that day. Unfortunately, the guides had to switch the
tour days due to some weather issues, so we missed the tour we actually wanted
to do. But shit happens, eh? Luckily we had a guide book with us and
decided we would head out to see a traditional folk village on the south side
of the island. With some help from a
friendly man on the street we got on a bus toward Jeju City.
I thought I saw a sign for the folk village (even though we
knew it was farther away) so we got off the bus and started following a sign to
the Jeju Folk Museum. When we got down
the little road, we saw what looked like an abandoned building. But a few seconds later a little old man came
out and started to wave at us to come up.
We were a little nervous about the situation, but we decided we could
take the old dude. He turned out to be a
sweet old scholar of Jeju folk culture who ran the museum. We paid about $2 and went inside. He had lots and lots of artifacts, ranging from
traditional clothing to money and games.
A good number of the placards were in English. The old man spoke English pretty well and we
talked a bit and took some pictures with him.
It was exactly the kind of random experience I love about traveling.
After that, we headed back to the main street and hailed a
cab. We got to the bus station and
bought two bus tickets to our destination.
The bus ride was a little over an hour long. It was so nice to see fields and farms as we
drove across Jeju. I hadn’t realized it
until we arrived on vacation but I desperately miss seeing farms and open
spaces. The scenery certainly made me
miss home, but in a nice way. The bus
took us right up to the folk village. I
believe we paid about $10 for our tickets and English language guides.
The folk village was pretty cool! It was a bit like Williamsburg. It was mostly reconstructed cottages and
buildings, some original but transported to the location. We learned all about life on Jeju. They had traditional Korean courtyard games
scattered around and some activities for children. They also had a booth where you could get
traditional marriage portraits taken. It
was really cool and informative. We
spent a couple of hours there, despite the freezing cold weather.
When we hopped on the bus back to Jeju City, we bumped into
two girls from the tour. We talked with
them a bit and then ended up going out to dinner with one of the girls. Ashley and I had it in our heads that we were
going to go to this Mexican restaurant we had read about. We got a taxi to the neighborhood where we
thought it was and spent about the next hour trying to find it (yes, we asked
some poor Korean family for directions).
In the end, we settled for a pizza place (which we found out later, was
pretty close to the Mexican place). We
decided to contact the tour guides and met up with the rest of the group to go
out drinking. All in all, it was a
pretty fun day and we made some new friends.
I think we got about four hours of sleep before we had to be
awake for the tour on Monday. First
thing on the agenda? Climbing on of Jeju’s volcanic crater’s, Sunrise Peak. I’m sure you can all imagine how the hangover
bit felt, now just add freezing cold temperatures and…snow flurries. You’re only young once, right? Luckily, the climb was only about 20 minutes
up and the view was really cool.
Then we headed over to Udo Island, which is a small island
with a resident population of about 600 people or something. We took a ferry over and then decided to take
the bus around the island rather than the moped or ATVs. First, we stopped near a lighthouse and a
couple of touristy shops. At this point,
we were starving. So we stumbled into a
restaurant and ordered their famous seafood soup. It turns out the tour company goes to this
place regularly and it was soon full of some of the other people on the
tour. The soup was hot and full of
noodles, mussels, crab and shrimp. I
have to say, crab here just isn’t the same.
After food, Ashley and I went to explore the black sand
beach nearby. Jeju and the surrounding
islands are all made of volcanic rock.
When we were heading toward the black sand beach we were able to see
rocks that looked like pooled lava. It
was really cool! The next stop was a
white coral beach. This would have been
cool…except the wind was howling and it was absolutely freezing. We did manage to take a picture of me in all
my winter gear “sunbathing” before we ran back to the bus.
After we got off Udo, we headed to the lava tubes. These are basically giant caves formed by
lava? Yeah, that’s about the extent of
my knowledge. They were big and pretty cool.
It’s a bit hard to describe, but it was neat to see. After the lava tubes, we headed over to a big
hedge maze, which was…pretty standard.
That night we went out for dinner and got some Indian before we went to
bed early.
The ferry on the way back was less fancy than the one we
took on the way over. Luckily we found a
small niche and were able to sit comfortably and read books with some of the
other people from our trip. When we
landed in Mokpo, we headed to the bus station with one of the guys we met on
the trip who was traveling to a town near Daegu as well. When we got to the bus station it was
PACKED. Almost everyone in Korea was off
work Monday and Tuesday for the Lunar New Year.
It was kind of like traveling the Sunday after Thanksgiving. We were able to get a bus for about 2 hours
later. Unfortunately it meant Ashley and
I would miss the bus we already had tickets for. With nothing else to do, we found a really
cheap buffet and sat down with our friend to eat and read and talk. When we arrived in Gwangju we went straight
to ticketing and were able to exchange our tickets for a ride on the last bus…at
9pm. So we had another four hours to
kill. Luckily, the coffee shop we
discovered before was open and we went and camped out there. The bus ride home was uneventful and despite
my apartment’s welcoming temperature of 5 degrees Celcius when I returned home,
I was happy to be thereJ
