On Tuesday morning, we met our cab driver, Ko, at 930 to begin our adventure day around the island. The hostel helped us tell him where we wanted to go and we settled on exploring the western corner of the island via the central mountain road.
We made our way out of Jeju city and stopped first to see some of Jeju’s famous horses – famous in the sense that if you spent more time reading about Jeju, you would probably know they had horses. Admittedly, I was a bit lazy by this point with book-reading and was happy to rely on the driver’s knowledge of the island.
The horses were soft and many were pretty friendly. The Jeju board of tourism had posted a sign about the different coats of the horse and how they were specially raised on the island for royalty, and they even included a few pictures humping horses in case we didn’t know that was how they procreated.
Fortunately, we didn’t see any humping that day, but we were able to feed some of the horses near the fence.
After that, our driver took us to the trail entrance to Mt Halla, presumably so we could pose for this picture at the trailhead like we’d just walked down the mountain 🙂
Even though we didn’t have too much in common in the way of language with our wonderful cab driver, he was a lot of fun, and offered to help us with photos, or proposed a lot of fun pictures for us.
From our powers of deduction, here are what we think are his hobbies:
Yelling at Chinese tourists to stop standing on stuff they shouldn’t stand on, or to stop walking the wrong way, or to stop smoking where they shouldn’t. He would gesture to them and go “Chinese. Chinese! >:(” a few times in the beginning so we got the gist.
He is really good at the word for jump, and taking photos at just the right second.
He knows his way around tasty seafood – he showed us how to cleverly remove the bones from our fish dish and helped the restaurant serve us food, and also got us a discount on all the fresh fish.
He was pretty goofy 😉
All in all, it was a pretty great day. Here are a few pics from the destinations around the island we visited…
Along the volcanic coast, there were a lot of fishermen (see picture above with Ko and the fish, and we also saw an old fisherman pee by a rock), and people who were eating the fresh, raw fish and seafood caught in the nearby tidepools. There were dozens of people camped out around little tables and a lot of little old ladies preparing them to eat.
It was along the volcanic coast above that Janessa became a party to murder. We were busy checking out the wildlife in the tidepools and she had found a particularly cleverly disguised octopus. Feeling like an expert octopus-spotter, she pointed out the octopus to a group of people nearby. The octopus looked like tasty dinner to them, so they flagged down one of the ladies running the various food tables and they proceeded to pluck the octopus from its tidepool and prepare it for lunch.
After all the hiking, jumping, inadvertent octopus-killing, and dodging other tourists, I think most of us slept in the car on the way back. It was a great way to see more of the island than we would have had we taken the bus. For our last night, we got beer and chicken that was absolutely phenomenal, and then we packed our bags to return to Seoul one last time…