For our second full day in Jeju, Jesse and I planned an epic adventure of hiking and caving and assorted athletic shenanigans. Then we looked outside the window and discovered that it was a dreary, rainy day. It was also noon. Since you can't start up the Halla mountain hiking trails past 2 pm, we had to strike that off the list. Instead, we decided to wind our way east across the island to the Manjanggul lava tube – more a tunnel, really, considering it's massive and more than a kilometre long.
We once again put our expert navigation skills to the test by going to the bus station and boarding a bus that allegedly went to the caves. After an hour of rumbling through quaint seaside villages and rugged countryside that strangely reminded me of Scotland, the speaker announced that we had reached the Manjanggul stop. Jesse pressed the stop button, and we disembarked... onto the edge of an otherwise empty highway.
Before we could panic, a taxi rolled out of the fog (remember, the day was dreary) and offered to take us up to the caves, which are about 4km up a side road, for 4,000 won. That's expensive for Korea taxi standards, but Jesse and I were willing to pay the price. Walking, after all, is lame, especially on such a blah day.
After buying our tickets, we walked through a lush green area, whereupon the ground opened up before us to reveal the lava tube. Basically, Jeju is a volcanic island, and back when the lava was flowing underground, it carved out a massive tube in the earth. This tube was actually 17m at it's largest, and insanely cool – “cool” having a double meaning, as it was also very cold, by which I mean I froze. At some points you could actually see the rock ceiling melted from the heat of the lava flowing beneath it. The melty rock was definitely our favorite part of the tunnel, although just walking in a giant tunnel under the earth made from a molten hot river of lava was pretty neat, too.
It was only mid-afternoon by that point, so we grabbed some lunch at the lava tube cafeteria. The rain, which had been sparsely sprinkling up to that point, began to deluge, so Jesse and I ate as slowly as possible so that we would have an excuse to stay at our table, and therefore out of the rain. Then we hit up the gift shop to buy a few extra minutes, at which point the rain lessened to a more reasonable level.
There was a hedge maze maybe half a km down the road, so we opened up our umbrellas and headed down to check it out. It was... strange. The maze itself was great – tall, neatly trimmed hedges, convoluted pathways, and you got to ring a bell when you reached the end. The problem was the rain. Even though it had more or less stopped by the time we reached the maze, it had formed large puddles in the maze that we had to leap over. Therefore our leisurely stroll through the maze turned out to be more of a walk three steps, hop back and forth across a giant puddle, rinse and repeat. An unexpected workout, but enjoyable nonetheless – at least it was in retrospect!
We recovered from our maze ordeal with some cactus-flavored ice cream, then got the nice lady at the ticket counter to call us a taxi. One of the pamphlets I grabbed from the hotel was for Mini Mini Land, which is basically a small park full of tiny scale models of famous buildings. According to the map, it was somewhere close to us. Not quite.
First of all, the taxi ride was about twenty-five minutes, so the park wasn't exactly close. Second, our taxi driver was a maniac, and incapable of focusing on the road for more than five seconds without getting distracted by his tv or his phone. Since most taxi drivers in Korea have this problem, we weren't too concerned... until he hit a sheet of water, hydroplaned, grabbed at the wheel, and nearly drove off the road. I was about an inch away from yanking the wheel out of his hand, as he didn't actually notice the massive puddle until we were in mid-hydroplane.
Near-death-experience aside, we made it to Mini Mini Land intact, and proceeded inside. It was very amusing. They had miniature sculptures of everything from the Sydney Opera House to the Easter Island statue heads... although the Easter Island heads were actually quite large, now that I think about it. Jesse and I made a game out of seeing how many of the buildings we could guess without looking at the nameplates, and we did quite well. All that world travelling finally paid off!
Then we went into the mirror house, which was mainly amusing in that it had a mirror trick in which you could take a photo of someone where it looked like their head was sticking out of a table, with no body below. Woo!
We found a bus stop near Mini Mini Land, and returned to Jeju City without delay. Pizza two nights in a row seemed excessive, so we got some McDonalds, because we're just that cool. I tried the new Prime Burger, which was meh. Then we retired to our room to prepare for tomorrow's adventure!
August 3, 2011
For our last full day in Jeju, we went to bed the night before thinking, “Okay, tomorrow we have to climb Mt. Halla!” It's just the thing to do on Jeju, so how could we not do it? Spoiler alert: we didn't climb Mt. Halla. This is mostly because we woke up around noon, which somewhat destroyed our dream of climbing a mountain. Regardless, fun was still had in the magical land of Jeju.
We decided to go to Psyche World in the end, which Sean and Sacha recommended to us. It was conveniently located next to a Teddy Bear museum, which I will discuss later. Psyche World was... odd. Not at all what we expected, for sure. The brochure went on and on about butterflies, so Jesse and I were expecting some sort of butterfly conservatory. Not the case.
Psyche world is less of a butterfly conservatory, and more of a really weird collection of things, heavily featuring bugs. There's a little gallery inside which is entirely devoted to dead bugs. They have hundreds of pinned butterflies from all four corners of the globes. They have bugs re-enacting various literary scenes, like the Trojan Horse and the Odysseus and the Cyclops. They even had a Starcraft scene, which Jesse loved and made me take a picture of. It was actually really cool... in a somewhat perverse way.
Once you're done with the bugs, you walk through a small petting zoo – with a dozen adorable bunnies – and out into the park area, which has: a zipline, a castle-themed maze with paintings of Disney characters, a pond, and a mirror house. The mirror house was the coolest by far – they had a mirror maze so intense that you had to wear plastic gloves before going in, so that you didn't leave finger prints when you smacked into the glass.
Nonetheless, we persevered, and had a marvelous time. Following Psyche World was the Teddy Bear Museum, which Jesse did not want to go into. I wore him down, though, and in we went – the only condition was that I not tell his little friends that he went into the Teddy Bear Museum. Sigh.
The bottom floor was kind of lame – just a collection of stuffed animals in a jungle setting. Although I must admit that the variety of animals was quite shocking – who knew they made an anteater stuffed animal? The second floor was much cooler. It featured a gigantic, elephant-sized bear, as well as various works of art re-done with teddy bears. My personal favorite was the hall of Greek Gods, although the Vitruvian Bear and Bearth of Venus were close seconds. Like the ursine puns?
Since this was our last night in Jeju, we decided to give the black pork another go. We actually knew what we were ordering this time, so we weren't surprised when normal-looking pork came out, instead of the charred meat we'd been expecting last time. It was quite delicious, although also expensive.
We returned to the hotel with the intention of going to bed early, although that somewhat failed, as I couldn't fall asleep until nearly midnight. We had to go to bed early because, of course, we had a 7 am flight the next morning.
Waking up around 5 am, we got to the airport without much trouble, onto the airplane, and back to Seoul. From there we took the train to Pyeongtaek, since the bus system confused us. I had intended for us to go to Suwon fortress that same day, but Jesse informed me that “I don't do things when I'm tired”. Doing things now out of the question, we lazed around. I took a nap, Jesse played League of Legends, we watched movies, got some fried chicken and pizza, etc. Not the most glorious end to our Jeju adventure, but certainly delicious enough!
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