Somehow I’ve gotten to the point of my trip where I’m a week behind in my blog posts.
We last left our adventurers in Seoul, preparing to head to Jeju Island. Some of them have started with some ominous symptoms that seem an awful lot like my case of Berg-itis the week before…I didn’t do it! It’s the Chinese pollution, I swear it.
Anyway, Jeju Island is about an hour south of Seoul by plane and is a popular place for vacationing South Koreans. The entire island is a volcano, Mt Halla. If you’re the adventuring sort, you can hike up it to view the crater at the top, which takes about nine hours.
We didn’t have too many hiking plans after our hiking misadventures last week. Instead, we had received two suggestions from friends living in the country: bike around U-do, and hire a cab for a day to see the sights.
When we landed, we explored around the island a bit. We were staying in the heart of Jeju city and went for a walk to explore the area and perhaps find a restaurant for lunch.
One of the island’s largest cultural festivals was coming to a close the weekend we arrived – the Tamna culture festival. Many of the native islanders have Mongolian roots and the language differs a bit from mainland Korean. I couldn’t tell you how, exactly – they all understood my three words of Korean and that’s really all that mattered to me.
The Tamna culture festival featured dances from ladies in traditional dress, performances, and displays about the island’s past.
As most of the displays were in Korean, my main interest was in the singing and performances on the mainstage, and various cheap foods on sticks.
We were the only foreigners in attendance at the festival, or at least the only white foreigners around. Our group broke off to explore for about an hour and Ashlee and I ended up getting flagged down by a very enthusiastic guy with a video camera who wanted to interview us.
The guy with the fancy video camera pulled us into a booth that was about uh…fishing, we think. First, they wanted to film us touching some stuff in the booth – a big hat covered with netting, and then they filmed us exploring all the pictures of things that we didn’t understand.
We made up our own story as we progressed through older pictures of the island’s fishing history: guy wears a funky mask and wetsuit. Guy goes into the ocean with other guys. A herd of old women chase them out to sea. Old women return with baskets of things and the guys in wetsuits do other stuff with fish. Someone makes a shrine out of fruit and then everyone eats fish!
We didn’t want to tell the film crew the story we made up for the interview portion of our ordeal, and they seemed disappointed with the comment that the display “was pretty interesting,” so we made up some other stuff in order to run off and explore some more.
If you see some derpy foreigners giggling and touching a netted hat in a tourism video for Jeju island’s Tamna Festival, that’s us. We are famous.
After our interview, the Famous White Girls of the Tamna Festival explored the seaside area a bit more with their companions.
Berg-itis began to wear on the others, so we headed in for an early night in hopes of staring out early the next day.
We did have grand plans of exploring the lava caves and biking on U-do (Cow Island), but sickness slowed us down and we left later than anticipated. We took one of the many island buses out to the east side of the island, which is where U-do was located.
The bus seemed like it took forever – it bumbled along on scenic ocean roads and through tiny little towns for over an hour and a half.
There wasn’t very much in the way of English near our stop, but with our basic powers of reading one word in Korean (Udo) and guessing at the word for ferry (this worked out REALLY well for us at South Gate village, so we tried this strategy again), we somehow bumbled our way into purchasing ferry tickets. Success!
Udo means “Cow Island” in Korean. It’s mostly a big rolling hill up to a cliff, filled with plenty of horses and other livestock, and plenty of cow statues.
We rented bikes from a shop near the ferry for a couple of hours. It would have taken the better part of the day to do the entire island, but we only had two hours, which got us about a quarter of the way around and back to the ferry port.
Udo was filled with craggly volcanic rocks, prayer cairns, and twisty, narrow roads filled with the possibility of death a la motorized vehicle.
Everyone else got lucky and had a bell on their bike, or perhaps I was just unlucky. It was a great ride, mostly flat, with great views of the beach and some great spots to stop and snap photos.
After two hours of pedaling around and dodging cars and other cyclists, we headed back to the ferry.
The ferry back was pretty busy and we discovered return buses to Jeju city were few and far between, so we opted to wander around the port area for a bit to kill time. Nearby was a nice view of Sunrise Rock. It was still pretty near sunset 😉
The return bus was packed! Some of us had seats, others were sandwiched near rude Chinese tourists who had shouty children. It was a long, warm 50 minutes, and reinforced my hatred of The Bus. Once back in the central bus terminal, we decided we were done with Bus for the day and took a cab back to our hotel. Fortunately, our next day would be a cab tour of parts of the island – no more bus! Ever.