Road Trip to Jeju-do

Josh and Ashley arrived last Friday evening safely and in good spirits. We began their stay in Korea with a trip to the DMZ 3rd tunnel on Saturday. This was a trip that Graham and Greta wanted to do before leaving Korea and had missed their scheduled tour the day before due to "technical difficultites" so, we decided to all go together on Saturday. It was quite interesting. You can check out pictures from that excursion on Graham's webpage as well as other pic's from their visit ( www.grahamski.com).

On Sunday we began our 7 day road trip to Jeju-do with Josh and Ashley. We camped our first night in Wolchusan National Park and caught the ferry first thing on Monday morning. Upon arriving in Jeju-do, we began our drive to the southern part of the island. We checked out a few beaches and finally found a great camping location at Oedalgae park. During our stay there we befriended the grounds keeper Kim, In-Soo who served as our tour guide for a couple of days. In Soo is a landscape artist/painter and a very unique person. He loved to say "Georgie Bush" as a sidenote to anything and everything he didn't understand or thought was stupid. He knew very little english which made traveling with him more than interesting (especially combined with his personality). He took us to Sun Dahl which is both a green tea plantation and Buddist Temple. It was absolutely beautiful. We did a short but steep hike to the top of a small peak just above the temple and then had tea with a buddist monk who loved American baseball. In Soo then took us to Donneko falls for a "mountain shower" (boys on one end girls on the other, of course!). After our showers we took off for a sushi lunch where we were able to view a Hanyeo (female diver) from the seaside restaurant. Keith was brave enough to eat the raw, LIVING sea creature but the rest of us politely declined.

The next day In Soo took us on a hike to the top of Mount Halla (Korea's highest peak). Many of the trails are closed due to over use, however In Soo convinced us that he had a license to be in the closed areas due to his varying landscape projects in the park. It was a nice clear day and the hiking was great. No one seemed to mind our presence on the closed trails with the exception of the ranger who yelled at us through a megaphone while on the summit ridge. We quickly moved back down to our selected trail and kept on hiking!

Once we were back on the mainland we enjoyed driving through an unpopulated area of Korea south of all major highways. Rice fields covered the landscape and farmers were hard at work planting rice by hand. It was amazing. We visited one of the most well known temples (Ssangwangsa) in Korea and went to green tea plantation in Boseong. We ended our week at the Korean Folk Village near Suwon. It was an awesome road trip! They have one more week before returning home and I am looking forward to all the adventures we will share before they leave!








































































Picturess from Sun Dahl temple/tea plantation.