A little piece of heaven I like to call Jeju

Eighty-five kilometers south of the Korean peninsula is the volcanic island of Jeju, a province of South Korea that Koreans like to say is famous for rocks, wind, and women. It also has nice beaches and tons of citrus. Most of the close friends that I made when I first arrived in Korea moved to this island in August and so I've been meaning to visit for awhile but haven't gotten the chance until F-bright flew us down to the island for a conference this past weekend.

Thursday afternoon I flew from Gunsan airport with three of the other F-brighters that live in Hongseong. After an hour we arrived in the cleanest Korean city I've come across and the capital of the island, Jeju-si. Its amazing how fresh the air on the island feels right now compared to the mainland, with spring yellow dust storms pummeling it from China. The first night we visited a famous rock that is shaped like a dragons head and watched as people sat on rocks and ate raw seafood that old women had just fished from the sea in front of us. Close by the dragons head was a gorge/ sea-inlet where governors used to picnic. I would love to post pictures of all of these things but unfortunately I ran out of camera batteries and didn't have a chance to get new ones the whole weekend.

That night I stayed with my friend Tom and his host family, where we made cookies with his host mother. I fell asleep early and while Tom was off to school for the morning I took a bus to the southern end of the island to look at Sanghang Mountain before our conference began. I enjoyed the bus rides almost as much as getting out and looking at things. The island is lush green right now, the cherry blossoms had just bloomed and lined so many of the roads, and all of the land is broken up by fences made from volcanic rock. Sanghang mountain was a wide, rocky pinnacle that sort of just jutted straight out of the ground and then leveled into a relatively flat top. While I wasn't able to hike up to the top -- its not really possible without gear -- there was a set of steps that led up to a pretty amazing cavern where Buddhists had built a large Buddha statue. I was about to leave to catch an earlier bus but don't called and convinced me that I should walk down by the water. I'm glad I took his advice -- the waves eroded the rocky shore line away so that it was a bunch of pock-marked rock faces. Old women sat with tubs of raw fish and soju for anyone that wanted to stop for raw seafood and drink alcohol.

From the mountain I took another bus into the southern town of Seogwipo, where our conference was being held in a nearby hotel. We had conferences throughout the afternoon and caught up with each other. That night we went to a western-styled bar that played a good mix of 90s American r&b and had decent but overpriced red wine. The next day we had more conferences and then traveled to a village with traditional Jeju houses and then to an extinct volcano named sunrise point. We were able -- maybe illegally -- to walk through the center of a big crater that dotted the center of this volcano. It was a pretty amazing sight -- a solid, grassy field with rocky peaks at every corner. When we got to the far edge of the crater, it looked over a 200 foot or so drop to the ocean where rocks jutted out from clear blue water. On the outside rim of the volcano, people rode slabs of cardboard down the grassy, but slick hillside and did somersaults to the base. We caught a bus back to the hotel where I drank too much rice wine and wandered around a garden path that wove around our hotels property, next to the shore.

I woke up with a bad hangover, three hours of sleep to add to the previous night's five, and the biggest mountain in South Korea to climb at 9 o'clock in the morning. With my friends Rosie, Laura, Emily, Amber, Ariah, Jeremy and Jen I climbed the 1900+ Halla mountain. This was by far the best hike I've had even though it rained, half the mountain was covered in snow, and I developed a large boil-like sore on my back from lugging a pack poorly on my hips. Maybe because Jeju wasn't bombed heavily during the war and because its warm enough year-round on the island that people don't need fire wood, the island has large trees and tons of seemingly undisturbed plant life. On Halla I saw the biggest pines I've ever come across in Korea, but the interesting thing about the mountain was how quickly the flora changed as we went up. Eventually the flora gave way to a bare peak and a stair case the last few dozen meters to the top -- a nice reprieve from the snow. Usually, you are supposed to be able to overlook a huge crater lake with tons of odd forests surrounding it, but we were in the clouds and the fog was too heavy to see. Nonetheless seeing the louds swirl and dip down along the bare top were worth sitting at the top for a few minutes.

By the time we came down the mountain we had done a 7 hour, 20 km hike. We took a bus back to Jeju city and I waited for my flight to Seoul, where I stayed in a bathhouse with Rosie, Laura, and Emily until we could catch a flight back to Hongseong at 5:30 the next morning. With another night of 3 hours of sleep, I was picked up from the train station and taught a full day of class.