Day 8: Jeju-do

The tourist info person near the Jeju-si bus terminal was super-nice. Aside from patiently answering all of our many questions, she even told us about a haenyo (female divers) 'performance' and called to get the 'show' times for us. (I wanted to see real haenyo in action (requires waking up pre-dawn) but never read about such performances in any travel literature.)

Bus out to the Manjanggul lava tube cave stop took quite a while. From K's estimates, it seems that getting anywhere on the island will take quite a while (usually at least an hour) with the buses, which is the only transportation aside from driving. There's also scooters-for-rent, but K thinks they'll be too dangerous =/

From the bus stop, it's still a walk. A huge group of motorcyclists passes us along the way (the picture captures probably about a fifth of them)...


Stop at the Gimnyeong hedge maze. Somehow we managed to enter from somewhere other than the front entrance... though either way, the entrance to the maze itself is the same. We discover later while finding our way through the maze that those who enter correctly actually get a map of the maze! Though it didn't seem like those people with maps were doing any better than us hehe ^o^

From the times on my pictures, it seems that it took us a good 30-minutes or so to find our way out of the maze. A few minutes of that was memory-capture, but still...

Yes, it was a real maze! Lots of twists and turns and choices. And plenty of dead ends. Part of the maze...


They even make you think you made it to the exit at some point, but the 'fake end' just leads you back into the maze (actually, looking closely at the picture above, the platform in the far back is the 'fake end', the closer platform is the real end). The best part was passing people traveling in the opposite direction... who's going the right or wrong way? You just don't know. Oh, and there were a few signs in Korean throughout the maze. They looked like they might be riddles telling us the correct way... to solve if only we knew what they said =/

If I was by myself, I probably would have taken at least twice the time (bad sense of direction). Of course, I would bring a compass. But I had K ^o^

The map we never saw...


Manjanggul is supposedly the longest/largest lava tube cave in the world. It was really interesting at first, but I guess it's a little *too* long. K lost his enthusiasm half-way into the cave. I was actually plenty amused until a little after we got to the out-and-back switchpoint and started heading back out.

Inside the cave...


Now we had to walk back to the bus stop. Or hopefully see the sporadically-running shuttle along the way and try to wave it down. So, as we were heading out of the parking lot, up comes a shuttle-looking bus! We wave it down and run to it. The bus driver asks us where we're headed, and I tell him, we want to go to seongsan ilchulbong. The dialogue that follows is him saying a bunch of stuff, part of which I interpret as this is not the right bus, and me telling him that I don't understand the rest of what he's saying. After a bit of back and forth, he tells us to just get on the bus. Totally confused because he said it wouldn't take us to where we wanted to go. But ok. K's doubtful. But hey, the guy knows our final destination.

After a while and K following on the map saying ooh, he might be heading towards that direction, ah, maybe not, ooh, maybe... he lets us off and tells us to wait for the next bus and we thank him. K's still doubtful. Aside from the fact that we got dropped off by a bus, there's nothing else to indicate that that particular spot on the road is a bus stop! Not like all the other stops we've seen, which at least have a sign. Eventually I ask a nearby girl if the spot is where we wait to go to seongsan ilculbong and she confirms it. (I think I scared her a bit tho?... she ran off and didn't come back afterward.) Our final confirmation is, of course, our bus. Yay!

And, we manage to make it in time for the haenyo performance ^o^ All because of the random act of kindness from the bus driver.

Octopus caught...


The summit of Seongsan Ilculbong crater (we learned that even when you're tired, seeing lots of elderly-looking people climb up will provide ample motivation to not stop climbing)...


Wild bunnies at the summit that didn't seem to mind the tourists...

Day 7.9: Jeju-do

The baggage claim at Jeju... there sure were a lot of golf bags (golf clubs or bags with other golf stuff). Guess it's not entirely unexpected for a 'resort' island.

Unsure hotel reservation... the 'do you speak English?', 'yes', but then they don't understand what I say in English, so I had to resort to making the reservation in Korean. Somehow, unlike the Busan one, I actually made it through this call on my own. Successful? Well, it turns out... yep. Yay!

Apparently the island is known for it's tangerines. Sure enough, we saw our first tangerines at the hotel. A huge basket of them for guests to enjoy ^o^

After setting our things down, we inquired at the desk about getting pizza nearby and PC-bang for internet. The pizza was E's suggestion, 'you have to try pizza in Korea!'. And we were on our way with a detailed hand-drawn map by the desk person. She was right on target with it, too!

Pizza in Korea *is* different! We'd seen the ad for a pizza in Seoul...


It's rare that the real thing actually matches the picture, but it did here! Lots of seafood. Pizza. Shrimp wrapped in fried potato strings. Sweet pastry crust. The appetizer, 'main dish', and dessert in a single pizza certainly did not disappoint. Yummy!


Like K said 'why aren't pizzas in the U.S. like this?'. We were only able to eat half of it and packed the rest to go. Haha, even the box had a picture of our pizza (guess it's their latest one) and our waitress went through the trouble of tying a ribbon around the box...


PC-bang was quite smokey. I was happy when we finally left there.

An interesting surprise when I took my shower. There's a tub, but the 'drain' in the tub just goes out to the floor! It's really just a hole. Then there's an actual drain in the floor. If you took away the tub, nothing changes (there's no shower curtain). It'd then be like all the other bathrooms we've encountered in Korea. I guess the tub does serve a function though... if you want to plug up the hole and take an actual bath.

Day 7: Busan

After nice long showers (perfect water pressure, but perhaps that was to be expected), we headed out. Almost. We returned our key and left our luggage with the 'front desk', the entrance to which was through the covered garage next to the lobby. The guy was really nice about us being silly travelers and I told him we'd be back around 2 or 3pm.

Jalgalchi fish market. The inside market is lots and lots tanks with lots and lots of seafood.


The outside market is lots of [mostly] ajummas selling seafood, hacking away at fish, and shelling fresh shellfish. If I had a kitchen here and we were going to stay longer, I'd be in heaven.


Clams larger than the size of my palm...


Seafood variety for only 5000-won (less than $4!!)...


We tried to take a taxi to Busan Tower, but the taxi driver refused to drive us, saying we should just walk because it was "really close". Argh, my measly bit of survival Korean was not enough to explain to the driver that we wanted to take the taxi because we had a plane to catch soon. "Really close" ended up being a 20-minute walk. The tower was a happy K-add-on though... no matter how many I see, every new city view is amazing in it's own way.

The being-spoken-to-in-Japanese thing again. I ordered a cup of coffee at the airport and the cashier told me the price *in Japanese*. So, obviously I don't look nor sound Korean. Does it mean my Korean sounds like how a Japanese person would speak it? Or do I look Japanese rather than Chinese? Or do they just get a lot more Japanese tourists and so that's the default? Hmmm...

After K got something to eat and I enjoyed my coffee, we decided to go to the departure area even though it was a still a bit early. Good thing we did. Both our backpacks ended up getting inspected more after the x-ray machine. Mine was due to my suspicious mini tripod. And K's was because I forgot to put our 'misc tools' ziploc in our checked suitcase. Eek! Leatherman swiss army knife. After some haphazard communication, we realized that they were going to check it for us! They put it in a little padded envelope and gave us a baggage claim ticket. In the U.S., it would have just ended up in the trash (how K lost his other Leatherman, flying shortly after they had just put the now-familiar carry-on rules in place).

Day 6.8: Busan, best value hotel

Was it this bustling in Seoul?

We should have eaten at the bus station but we didn't. (So much yummy-looking & inexpensive food!) We wanted to drop off our things at the hotel first.

I initially came across this hotel on a traveler's blog when I was actually searching for stuff about Gyeongju. At the time, I made a mental note to look at it in more detail whenever I'd get to planning Busan. With the couple's comment on their travel blog that it "was possibly the best value hotel we've ever gotten of all 51 countries we've traveled to" and seeing it in the Lonely Planet guidebook (probably also where they themselves had heard about it), I knew I just had to stay there.

LP gave the local number, to which I had to prepend the international code (011), the country code (82), and the 'area' code (forgot what it was). It took a couple of tries to get exactly right, but eventually I got through to a person. But I didn't get past '영어 하세요?'... 'do you speak Korean?'. After my third call, I opted for a different strategy. If I was in a better frame of mind, I probably could have successfully completed the reservation myself (at least I'd like to think so). But at the time, I didn't know the word for 'reservation' and I didn't know my dates, and, the little Korean I did know had been left to rot for six months (not that I knew much from the maybe two months of self-studying I did). Plus, the lady spoke so *fast*. All I could muster at the end was '죄송합니다. 감사합니다.' 'sorry. thank you.'

I emailed S and asked her for a favor. She probably thought I was a bit odd -- this hotel was a love motel, and I wasn't even sure if they took reservations. S says she thinks she was successful in making one.

It takes a while to navigate the flaky directions and find the place. White with a poem on the side of the building ('How do I love thee?'). Through the beads in the entrance with our luggage and up to the little window that the guy opens, bends down, and looks through. 'Um. 예약 있어요.' 'I have a reservation.' The guy pulls out a little post-it from next to him. '메리사?' 'Melissa? (phonetically)' Of course, it must be the only reservation for the night. He tells us the price (a whopping 30000-won for the night... less than $25), we pay in cash, and he gives us the key. But, we do need a place to store our luggage the next day after we check out, so I ask him about that. Silly travelers.

Is it the best value hotel in all 10+ countries we've traveled to? Maybe. Siem Reap in Cambodia would be a close rival. At a little more than $30 a night, our Siem Reap hotel had both a bigger room and bigger bed. Is that what the extra $5 accounts for? But this hotel has a nicer bathroom.

It doesn't really look much different from a normal nice hotel room. Some nicely tinted windows, a small table with some tea, and a bathroom separated from the room via glass (even the door itself was glass). Ok, maybe the bathroom was a bit different. It did have fully-functional curtains within the bathroom itself though. For the shy ones. Oh, and there were some amenities for freshening up... packaged toothbrush kit, comb, lotion, razor, etc. Oh, and condoms. Also, some videos next to the elevator.

K went out to look for some food, while I stayed to rest. And lucky me, this was the only time during our stay that love motel 'noises' came through. Some ceiling shake. Furniture-moving sounds. Other sounds. I continued scribbling away in my little journal. The excitement exhausted itself shortly before K got back. There are certain possible risks one must accept for that best-value-hotel.

This was the first time we got robes/pajamas/yukatas as part of the room on our trip.

Busan, at least this particular section, had even more flashy buildings than what we saw in Seoul...

Day 6: Gyeongju

Wake 8:30am. Our room, from the inside...


It's a traditional Korean-style room with heated floors (ondol). Heated floors feel *really* nice in the morning. Looking up, we notice some of the wood 'beams' are quite curvy...


All the rooms have bathrooms, which is not typical. K hypothesizes the bathrooms were later additions. Incidentally, all the bathroom sinks in Korea seem to be quite low...


Our room, from the outside...


The door in the back right side is the door to our bathroom. And yes, that really is all our luggage, one small-ish suitcase + 2 backpacks.

Bus to Bulguksa temple. As we get off the bus, some lady comes up to me and asks something a few times, to which I reply 'I don't understand' in Korean, shake my head and walk away. But I do know what she's saying, or rather, I know that I *should* know what's she's saying but I just can't decipher it. It's only after we walk away that I realize she's asking　'にほんじん　です　か'... 'are you Japanese'... but in *Japanese*. The whole time I was trying to decipher *Korean*. My expectation was to hear Korean, Chinese, or English but it wasn't any of those. The being-spoken-to-in-Japanese thing occurs a second time before we leave the temple.

Yet again, more kids. But there seem to be a bit less of them today. Back in our middle school days, we had small disposable cameras or maybe large film cameras. These days, digital is all around...


After Bulguksa temple, K talks me out of hiking up the mountain to Seokguram. So we end up taking the bus. Very windy road up the mountain. Definitely would have been a strenuous hike. It's a bit of a walk up to the temple building itself from the bus stop anyways...


The Buddha statue is impressive. Unfortunately, no pictures are allowed and it's behind glass, so you can't go in and actually see it up close, and we don't even get a glimpse of the supposedly dozens of guardian statues surrounding it. Somewhat of a disappointment.

The views down are nice though...


K talks me out of hiking down the mountain back to Bulguksa. So we take the bus again. And then another bus back into the 'city'.

An interesting building (the pagoda outline goes all the way through the building)...


Supermarket stop. It takes some time to make our choices, but we finally walk away with some late lunch / early dinner goodies (the same aloe drink I buy in the U.S.!)...


Eat back at Sarangchae. Say goodbye. Grab our stuff.

Taxi to the intercity bus terminal. Some short exchanges with the taxi driver, ticket person, and info person to figure out which bus terminal we want -- intercity bus terminal is it, not the couple-blocks-apart express bus terminal because, if I correctly interpreted what the taxi driver said, the intercity one has more frequent trips to Busan.

Bus to Busan.

Day 5: Gyeongju

7:40 am train out of Seoul today. We managed to grab a taxi, get to the train station, and make it on the train just a few minutes before departure. It's a good thing I asked the ticket lady yesterday where the boarding platform was.

The train is a KTX samuel express train and it'll take us five hours to reach Gyeongju. Most of the trains to Gyeongju are samuel but there are a couple of slower ones -- they take 11+ hours -- so the choice was an obvious one for us. We slept most of the way, but I did look out and admire the colors of the countryside zooming by for a bit...


Gyeongju - a capital during the Silla dynasty (the dynasty that 'unified' a bunch of the Korean peninsula) back in the 7th-ish century. On a cursory glance of being an old capital, I'd liken it to Nara in Japan, which we'll be visiting in a few weeks. Interestingly (to me, when I compare it to Chinese history), there were only two ruling dynasties after Silla, Goryeo and Joseon. Joseon's the one that used the palaces we visited back in Seoul.

Upon our arrival in Gyeongju, we stop by the tourist info booth for a bit and then take a taxi to our hotel. It's not really a hotel, but it's not a hostel either since both terms sort of carry a certain image in most people's mind. I guess I'll just call it a yeogwan, a traditional Korean-style hotel/motel/hostel, even though I'm not sure if it is. The entrance...


The courtyard with rooms surrounding it...


It even had a well, though we're pretty sure they no longer use it...


The landlady is really nice and gives us directions to a convenience store. We head there to buy some goodies for lunch before we start exploring. Ramen bowls, which we eat back at Sarangchae (our 'hotel'). Somehow I manage to pick the spicy one whereas K picks [the only] one that's not, so we switch our sauce packets with each other. The convenience story lady is also really friendly. She seemed surprised when I asked her for a bag (to carry our ramen bowls) in Korean, even though my pronunciation is off and I'm pretty sure I'm using the wrong word for 'bag'. So she asked if I spoke Korean, to which I responded 'only a little bit'. And then she inquired into our nationality (born in China, but live in America) and our relationship with each other hehe. It's these sort of friendly exchanges that makes me want to always learn at least a little bit of the language for wherever we travel to.

Let's start exploring! Walk to Tumuli Park. When K heard it was a park of tombs, he definitely didn't expect all these grassy mounds; I had a slightly different image in my mind as well. Some of the mounds were really huge! We didn't see any signs saying we couldn't go up on the mounds, but we didn't try either.


Lots of schoolkids on field trips, especially near the one tomb that's open for people to enter. A *huge* line, but we followed the suggestion of the nearby park info booth and asked the main 'teacher'/'coordinator' at the front of the line if we could skip ahead of the kids and he said yes.


Aside from there, it was mainly peaceful throughout most of the rest of the park.

It seems all the electrical boxes here are covered pretty well...


Walk walk past Cheomseongdae astronomical observatory (just a stone structure) and then to Anapji pond. Lots of flowers lining our path...


We managed to have one of the guides-for-hire ask the entrance guy if we could use our ticket now and then return later at night and use the same ticket again. After some explaining, the guy agreed. Woohoo! Mandarin was useful here; there were no English speakers.

Like Tumuli Park, there were way too many schoolkids on field trips, which I find a bit annoying and K entirely dislikes. It would be semi-ok if they were young and cute little kids; unfortunately, they were beyond the cute age.

Walk to Gyeongju National Museum... lots of history and art from the Silla period. More schoolkids. Pretty cool steps...


Walk to Bunhwangsa Temple but we reach it after it's already closed =( It's supposed to close at sunset which apparently means 5:30pm these days. We did enjoy a semi-quiet road along the way that was lined with [what we think are] rice patties...


After being on our feet for so many hours, they're no longer being so cooperative. We wait for a taxi to take us back to Anapji pond, but to no avail. Finally, we decide to walk and hopefully encounter a taxi along the way. And at the next intersection, we do -- yay! (though by this point we've already traveled 1/3 the distance) Incidentally, taxis are amazingly inexpensive in Korea. In Seoul, we sometimes took taxis because it would end up being cheaper than both of us taking the subway!

We didn't think there would be many people at the pond at night, but we were wrong. Very wrong. Whereas the day crowd has middle-school-aged kids, the evening brings groups of teenagers on their school field trips, even worse. We do find some spots of peaceful quietness to admire the lights though...


Dinner... ssambap... meat wrapped in leaves of various types and lots of side dishes (of which you could get more). They gave us lettuce, cabbage, seaweed, and other greens. Too bad we liked maybe only a third of the side dishes though...


Back at Sarangchae, we fell asleep very early... well, earlier than usual for us (before 10pm).