Munchkin-wg.de

So, for the rest of my Chosuk-Break-Post

After we had been to Nam Won, we head out towards the mountains (well everything is mountains here) crossing the Jirisan National Park. But as it started to rain (or better pour down), we “watched” from the car. There wasn’t a lot to see in the dark, but still, it was nice. The Landscape is really beautiful here.

We had some trouble with a waterfall we wanted to see. the way there was a really small street (more a dirttrack) and when we tried to turn the car around, i couldn’t do it. I def. failed that test badly. The maindriver Olivier had to do it :(. The day was basiclly marked with trying to find our way. We tried to get a route through Jirisan, as we wanted to get to the other side. But in the end we just had to back-up a whole way and turn around (on some really really small mountain streets). Several hours later than we wanted to, we arrived in Jinju, a somewhat big City (I think somewhere around 600.00) where we had some food and got a motel. We had a great night out that night, we went to our first nightclub. A Korean nightclub is (in difference to a club) a place where you go in and “rent” a seat. You have to get a table for your group, which is somewhat expensive but includes the alcohol (beer, in our case) – the one we went to was 45KW (so around 40€) for 4 Persons for the beer, fruits (always food to the drinks, i like that ) and the seats. So, you can go dance on the dancefloor, watch the shows (they change from music to shows to slow music all the time) and can then just sit there and talk if you want to. It was a really cool expierence.

the next day started considerably later, and we went the harbor-town of Sansheon (first time we saw the sea in korea!) and checked out the “castle”.
Afterwards, some “braver” of us (4 guys including me) went into the water (it had around 18° outside and was raining, as usual) and enjoyed a swim in the “south sea” as its called.
We spend the rest of the day with driving around the islands of the coast and ended up in the town of yeosu at night. Another motel, another dinner (i think it was barbeque again) and another, not so nice nightclub. it was still okay, but not that great (as the first one).

The next day (yeah, it was still raining, what a surprise), we went on to see some more islands,cumulating to see a really nice buddhist temple (hey, my first one) on the tip of the furthest (southest) island facing east-southward, but out into the sea. It was a really nice setting, but the climb up there was also “nice”. Stairs – and lots of them. After that we drove of into the country, (it had stopped raining by that time), we wanted to hike the next day.

We spend the night at a really small town close to the NP we wanted to hike in (Wolchulsan) and slept in the smallest room so far.

The hike the next day was a lot tenser than thought. It started out with another temple, and then it got steep. And steeper. The 11 Km it was took us about 5 hours (okay, 4 without the breaks). it was a very uneven path, leading up and down over rocks and stones, with basically no even grounds in between. We did a total of 1000m altitude (up and down). The view from the highest peak (850 over NN) was really nice tho. But the way down (700m straight) was hard, as it was starting to get dark, we were all pretty tired and had to hurry quite a bit.

The beer at the end was nice tho
We spend the night in Mokpo, a harborcity on the Western seaboard, and slept in a JimJilbang. A weird mixture between a Sauna and a public sleeping place, were in one floor everybody runs around as in a sauna (naked, but obviously only same sex) and then on the next floor, there’s a hughe stone floor on which everybody sleeps. The floor is heated and a lot more comfortable than it looks. Although it still hurt (there was only a wooden Pillow between you and the stones) it was pretty good.

The next day, with bright sunlight got us back to the beach (this time it was the “yellow sea”) for about two hours and then back to Kaist.

It was very interesting trip, and i learned lots about korea!