In Which We Climb a "Mountain"

On Monday, which, randomly, turned out to be Memorial Day in the United States (something we did not plan), we took our last floating vacation day (out of all two of them that we got in the first place). Our director asked us to take it that day because right now there are extra teachers at the school, so they can take our classes and she didn't have to hire a substitute. We didn't really care when we took it, so we took it on Monday. We decided to go down to a place that I haven't been before, a "mountain" on the island called Songaksan. I put mountain in quotation marks because I'm not sure why they call it a san (which means, mountain). It would be better named as a bong, which means hill. I think it maybe goes 400 feet above sea level. Despite that, it's a pretty fun place and had some great views over the ocean. Once we finished with Songaksan, we followed the olle trail along the coast to Sanbangsan, and went around the Yeongmuri coast again, which is always pleasant. It's a really pretty place. Then we went along a rocky beach, which had quite a few seashells on it, something we've not seen before on the island. I'm not sure why, but most of the beaches here have almost no sea shells washed up on them. Then we finished at the Hwasun Golden Sand beach, one of the beaches from our list that we hadn't been to yet. The nice thing about going to the beach at this time of year is that it's the off season, so there aren't any beach police to tell you how far you can go out and where you can and can't lay out. Anyway, that's this trip in a nutshell. Here are some pictures we took.

Approaching the side of Songaksan.

View of Sanbangsan in the distance. Did I mention it was all sorts of hazy? Views would have been better if that hadn't been there.

Looking across the bay(?) to Sanbangsan.

Approaching the top.

Summit stone! We would have taken a picture of the one on top of Hallasan, but there was a line, and it was freezing. I'm still hoping to get up there again, but until then, this will suffice.

One thing I will say about this hill, it actually has a crater! Every single hill on Jeju is actually an oreum, or parasitic volcanic cone. However, most of them don't really have craters in them. The signs usually say something like, "There used to be a crater here, we swear! It's just filled in and worn away over the years!" This one actually has one, so that's cool.

Back to our starting point. The caves you can see down at the bottom of the cliff were actually dug by the Japanese during World War II. If those Japanese liked something, it was caves, I'll tell you what. 

Heading for Sanbangsan!

Made it!

Yeongmuri Coast. Much better weather than the last time we went together.

Stayin' alive.

Cool rocky beach.

Then we met these two! The baby turned out to be really friendly, and the mom didn't mind us playing with him.

He only tried to bit Nancy a little bit.

I petted him too.

Nancy using some seashells we found to protect her modesty.

Hwasun Beach. There was practically no one there. It was actually a little eerie. 

Proof that I went swimming.

So, that's another day out on Jeju. This place is awesome. I have to say, I'm really going to miss the ocean when we got back to the United States. I'm pretty sure I've said that before on the blog, but it remains true. That's all I've got to tell you about at the moment, so I'll make an end. This is Captain Danger out.