Sunday, October 20, 2013

In Which We See a Lot of Really Big Spiders

 So, yesterday (Saturday) we decided we'd go down to the south side of the island and do some hiking and see some things. We chose Olle Trail 8 because it passed by some cool lava formations that we've seen pictures of and wanted to check out for ourselves. Before I start, I'd like to warn readers that this post may be a little picture heavy. So, we jumped on a bus and headed down there. The first place we saw was called Yakcheon-sa temple, and holy crap was it cool. Now, we've seen a lot of temples. That's most of what we saw on our trip to Japan, and we've seen a couple here on Jeju, too. I'd come to the conclusion that, when you come down to it, the interior of pretty much every Buddhist temple is about the same. They'll have an image of Buddha or two, or sometimes they'll have a berzillion tiny ones, and maybe a few other statues. Granted, that's cool, but once you've seen one, you've seen them all. In the case of Yakcheon-sa, I was incorrect. The outside was really big, but not overly distinctive. However, the inside was fantastic! Here are some pictures.



Seriously the most ornate interior of a Buddhist temple we've seen so far!

Probably the coolest light fixture ever!


Just for proof that I was there.

This temple had a belfry AND a drumfry! How cool is that?
This temple, in my opinion, ranks in the top three of the temples we've seen. I think I still put Daigo-ji and Kinkaku-ji in Japan at one and two, respectively, but I think this temple falls at number three, though I guess the fact that I just learned that it was built in the 1990s makes it a little less exciting. It's easier to make your temple awesome when you make it in modern times and it hasn't burned down like five times, I guess. It's still pretty sweet, though. It remains number three in awesome, in my mind. I think the dragon light fixtures are what sealed the deal for me.

Something that we noticed almost immediately was that this may be the wrong time of year to do these trails if you don't like spiders. Holy crap there were TONS of them and the majority of them were HUGE! We're talking the body an inch long huge, and they were very brightly colored and had webs everywhere. Luckily a pretty good amount of this trail was on city streets and on the coast, so the spiders weren't as big of a problem. But we might have to wait for the dead of winter before we go into the forests on the island, because that's just gross.

Anyway, we saw some other cool stuff on this trail, too. We hiked along a cool lava coastline and saw some of Jeju's apparently famous Haenyo woman divers free diving for edible sea creatures, which they sell. They're actually a pretty big deal here in Korea, though I had never heard of them before I started learning about Jeju. Apparently they've made it so Jeju has historically had a matriarchal family structure, which is a big deal in Korea, which still has a fairly male-dominated culture (And yes, the feminists are welcome to chime in and say that America still has a male-dominated culture. Have fun.). At any rate, that was kind of cool. We also saw some rock formations called columnar jointed lava, which was pretty awesome. I'll show some pictures. We also got to go to Jungmun beach again, and see a pretty killer sunset. Also, the beach didn't have a berjillion people on it like the last time we were there, and even better, no Nazi-esque beach police. Overall, it was a pretty great hike. Here are some more pictures.

Orange groves! I'm pretty sure that oranges are one of Jeju's main crops, which explains why they're so cheap here.


View of Hallasan from the south side of the island. It looks different. We're planning on hiking to the summit next Saturday!


Cool lava formations.


Cool view down the coastline. Those floats in the foreground are Haenyo divers. You can see the one on the left's head.

Looking the other way down the coastline. That's Sanbangsan in the distance.

That's the Jeju African museum in the background. It's a replica of the Great Mosque of Djenna in Mali, which is the largest clay building in the world. (This one is a little smaller.) It's still made entirely of clay, though. It also made an appearance in the K-drama "Playful Kiss."

Columnar jointed lava! Pretty awesome looking.


Sea water running off of the pillars. I thought it was artistic.

Proof that my hair wings and I were actually there.


I thought this formation was pretty sick.

Then Nancy decided to look way prettier than the rocks.

View from the top of a hill (It was technically an oreum, but I don't really differentiate. I just like views.)

Nancy crossing the river.

Awesome picture of me on a bridge.

Sunset at Jungmun Beach!

We managed to be the only ones in the picture!
So, that's that trip in brief. It was pretty fun, and it was good to see more of the south side of the island, which has a lot more of the exciting things that people come to see. That's all I've got for this day. This is Captain Danger out.

No comments:

Post a Comment