Lava Caves and Mermaid Waves

Lava Caves and Mermaid Waves
Jeju Island, Korea Rep.

Jeju Island, Korea Rep.

When we decided to go to Jeju we knew that it was South Koreas biggest island, but we had no idea just how big it was. We expected a little island with pretty beaches and a small town. What we actually arrived on was an Island metropolis 73km long and 41 km wide with a population of 580,000 and everything you would expect to find in a big city, including a huge modern shiny airport.

We struck gold with our hostel, Yeha City Hall is the sort of place that you hope every hostel will be, (despite the fact that the only room we could get had bunk beds) it was clean, had a lovely communal area, had the friendliest staff, English tours to book and best of all a feature that every hostel should have; Happy Hour from 7:30pm to 9:00pm when if you go into the communal area you are given a free beer to get everyone integrated and chatting.

There was one irresistible tour that the hostel ran each evening to one of the main attractions in Jeju, Love Land. En-route we stopped at another of jeju’s popular tourist attractions, ‘Mystic Road’ a road that is downhill but through an optical illusion makes it look like you are travelling uphill. Our driver put on his hazard warning lights, turned off the engine and let the car roll down the hill to give us the full effect. Sadly in the dark we probably didn’t appreciate it quite as much as in broad daylight but we got the idea, ha ha. Once again this blog needs to come with a warning that it is not for the feint hearted as Love Land is one of the strangest places I have ever been and it even makes the Penis Park look like a Disney attraction. Love Land is a park filled with rather large erotic statues. What more can I say??!! Apparently if Lonely Planet is to be believed, In South Korea business that run museums receive a tax break so that is why there are so many especially in Jeju, and why a Love museum? Well Jeju is a very popular honeymoon location and Love Land is therefore popular with newly weds looking to get frisky? Half way through the park there is a building with some even stranger smaller models and I suspect a very popular Ann Summers style shop. In true South Korean fashion no detail was spared with the arrows on the pavements being large penis’ to the toilet door handles being a pair of boobs and a large penis. This is one seriously odd place, but it was swarming with young loved up couples. Intriguing, I can’t see this business model working anywhere else in the world. South Korea is certainly a funny little place.

Moving swiftly on…..

As Jeju is so big the tours cover either the East, West or South coast with the main city and airport making up the North coast. The tours were not cheap so we opted to do the East Coast which covered most of the landmarks that we wanted to see.

Luckily the next day the sun was shining and it was a perfect day to see the island. Our first stop on the tour was yet another Trick Eye Museum. Not as big and busy as the one we had visited in Seoul but just as much fun, if not more fun because we were less rushed and could actually line up the photos properly without 30 people walking through the photo and as we were with a bunch of foreigners we were not a photo opportunity waiting to happen!

Next up a quick stop at Seongeup Folk Village, an old traditional village where people genuinely still live in the old lave stone thatched houses. We were sent to a funny little restaurant for a standard tour bus lunch of Jeju famous black pig pork for Tim and more vegetable Bimibap for me. The one problem here was that Tim didn’t realise that he had to cook the pork himself on a hot plate so sat looking at it for 10 minutes which then meant we were the last out of the restaurant so he could get every last scrap of pork down his throat.

One of the parts of this tour that I was so looking forward to was seeing the woman divers known as Haenyeo, in its prime in the 1950’s Jeju had around 30,000 woman divers, now there are just 4,500 most are in their 60’s. These women divers have been free diving since they were teenagers and can easily dive to 15 and 20 meters and can hold their breath for over 2 minutes whilst gathering octopus from the ocean floor. Sadly this old tradition is dying out and the youngsters are not following in their elders footsteps. The women divers show is not a real demonstration of the divers, more a show for tourists but nevertheless I wanted to see it. Annoyingly the tour we were on took us to the location of the woman divers show which is also Seongsan Ilchulbong more commonly known as ‘Sunrise peak’. This is one of the most iconic features of Jeju a volcanic crater which is filled with greenery and from above just looks magnificent. To get to the top there are 500 steps which take about an hour to go up and down. The problem with this was that the dive show started in 45 minutes. Tim looked at the stairs and declared that he would wait at the bottom for the show. I felt compelled to trek up the crater to see the view and still get to the dive show. About 5 minutes into this mission I was very tempted to turn around but I was on a mission, it was likely to be a mission to pass out from heat exhaustion and dehydration at one point, until I found a little stall half way up selling overpriced bottles of frozen water. Never have I parted with money so freely.

The most annoying part of this climb is that there are no markers to tell you how far you have come and how far is left, so it is just endless steps with the odd gap in the trees providing an amazing view the higher you go. After a few breaks in what shade the stairs had to offer and one final push I made it to the top. I was sweating so much that my eyes were burning with salty sweat and it was pretty hard to actually take in the view. I just had time to take a few shots before I had to about turn and head back down for the show. I would like to say that the view was worth it, but it wasn’t, well it was ok. It was more about successfully scaling a volcano in the burning midday sun than anything else. At the bottom Tim was ready and waiting for me with a bottle of regular priced water and we made it to the divers just in time, boom, volcano conquered!

The Women Divers show was pretty much chaos, everyone gathered on the rocks on the beach, the ladies performed a traditional song and then they headed into the sea, flapped around in about 2 feet of water until one of them proudly picked out an octopus and waved it in the air. Call me a pessimist but I am pretty sure that octopus was in a fish cage waiting to be fished out. But don’t get me wrong this is a show and even if they were diving down to 20 meters we wouldn’t be able to see it from the beach so I have the upmost respect to these old girls. I can barely make 8 meters and I certainly would ‘t be able to catch anything when I was down there. It is something of an honour to see there ladies at work as it won’t be long until this tradition is just folklore.

The final stop on the tour was one of the main attractions of Jeju, the Manjanggul Cave Lava Tubes, a 7km cave system created by molten lava flow. You can only walk through a 1km stretch of the system but with the ceiling of the tubes 23 meters high this is something of an impressive feat of nature. As with all caves which have the obligatory stalagmites or stalactites that are meant to look like some creature, these caves had the usual turtle rock. It looked vaguely like a turtle if you squinted, but this cave really didn’t need any quirks it was just awesome. I have to confess that the water pouring through the roof and the huge piles of previous rock slides did make me a tad nervous and as much as I was enjoying the cool air of the cave I was relieved to be back above ground. Our tour was a bit delayed leaving the caves as we lost a fellow tourist for a while, turns out that she was just having far too much fun taking photos with her selfie stick to get back to the bus on time. The tour guide was furious as th
e delay meant that people were going to miss their onward buses and the company would have to fork out for taxis. Miss Selfie Stick didn’t give a damn, we were just pleased that we were the first ones to be dropped off at the door of the hostel leaving the drama to unfold.

Our next couple of days on Jeju were not exactly as planned, with this being the top Honeymoon destination we thought that we would be relaxing on the beautiful beaches and catching up on some lazing around. As it turns out the weather was not being kind and it rained non-stop for most of our stay, so we never did make it to the beach.

We did however manage a trip to Dragon Head rock which was alright, it was as described a rock that looked a bit like a dragons head. More interesting was that the rocks from where you got the best view of the dragons head had been taken over by some Haenyeo who had set up a little beach front ‘restaurant’ and were cooking up their fresh catch of the day. The weather was no rough these ladies were not diving, but their pots and gear was scattered around the restaurant so it was definitely a more traditional experience than the show we had seem.

As I mentioned before the best thing about staying on Jeju was staying at the Yeha City Hall Hostel, we just decided that this was a perfect place to relaxing, plan, chill out, play the selection of board games, add a Jersey Pound note to the currencies from around the world map and be the first Jersey folk to pin the English Channel where Jersey should be on their traveller map. A good or bad hostel can make or break a stay and we have had many experiences of both, but Yeha definitely made our stay and I would say it is easily one of the top three hostels we have stayed in on our travels. Keep up the good work Yeha!

Our last morning it was Tim’s birthday, I made a huge effort and made him a coffee, fake cheese on toast and even got him a donut with birthday candles. Sadly the donut was a bit squashed having been hidden in my camera bag but it still did the job. Sadly there was no time to relax as we were headed back to the airport to our final destination in South Korea, Busan.