Seoul Grand Park

We took the long subway ride to Seoul Grand Park one sunny afternoon. We didn't really know what was there...we had heard a lot of different things. We ended up being both disappointed and happily surprised.

The entrance of the park had a lot of beautiful flowers and a very fierce-looking tiger. His growl was much worse than his bite!

We were overwhelmed by how natural the park was and also by its' size, but we were a little sad that it was more of a zoo than a park.

One of the good views of this enormous park. The hills in the distance are where many people go to do a little hiking.

In the far distance, you can see the amusement park....which we were both too scared of to go anywhere near!

This is the gondola that we rode up through the park. We thought that we were going to be able to see lots of animals from here but we could only see the lions. We were thankful though not to have to walk both to and from the zoo! It would have been quite the hike.

The gondola gave us a good chance to checkout the spectacular arial view of the park! The triangular shaped object in the center is the bird habitat (more pictures of that to come).

The lazy lions: shot from the gondola.

This little guy and a couple of his friends were putting on a great little show for us, swimming in circles and coming up just in time to take a peek at us! Maybe it was their fist time seeing pasty people too!

You can't really tell from this picture, but this guy was huge! Perhaps the largest sea lion that California had to offer. Anyways, he was massive and everytime he came out, water poured over the sides of the tank!

Yes, that's an elephant's butt! And..who knew that pheasants came in colors...the golden pheasant is especially radiant!

Some kind of goose and a herin, I think, hanging out in their cool home (shown below).

This place was soo cool that normal everyday birds, that didn't belong in a zoo, would sneak in to fly around and eat some free food!

Pelicans are hands down the best bird that there is. Pelicans sure look like the birds that deliver babies, are we sure that it was storks?!

And here you can see that even muir cats have jobs. Clearly the one at the top left is a soldier and maybe the bottom one is a disinterested massage therapist?!

There were a ton of giraffes and they were pretty close to the fence, so good for close up pics but bad for personal giraffe space:(

Sadly, in this picture, you can't tell, but we learned that when these pretty pink birds are running around frantically, they have to move their wings up and down for balance. So, it looks like they are going to take off but they can't. Maybe you had to be there but when a bunch of them do it at the same time, they look really funny.

Us taking our chances to get a close up with the very intimidating plastic tiger

with razor blade teeth.

Jirisan

We have a friend named Shawn, who's from Newfoundland. He writes for a local magazine, but above all, he's a mountaineer. We've been able to go on hiking trips with him a few times now.

The three of us bright and early at the top of Jiri after sleeping in the very cold and dusty shelter all night with a bunch of drunk middle-aged Korean men.

Last spring, the three of us hopped on a train and headed to the southern end of the country. We ended up in a town nearby the mountain. Shawn got us a taxi and we payed the driver to take us about 30 minutes to a small restaurant at the foot of Jiri mountain. We had a cool traditional Korean meal of bipimbap, rice with fresh vegetables pulled from the mountain at this outdoorish restaurant. There was a small dog that was very interested in us and kept coming close to get a look at us and an occasional petting.

Once we got the little dog to stop following us, we answered a few trivia questions that were on the side of the trail and then we headed up a little valley with this river and its huge rocks.

As amazing as this mountain is, there was still garbage left behind from time to time. So we took some pictures of it for Shawn's website. He runs an organization that goes to the mountains of Korea and cleans up the garbage. Korean's aren't very big on garbage cans, so Shawn and his crew are very busy. Still, 99.9% of this mountain was absolutely gorgeous.

This sign pointed us in the direction to the shelter we were gonna stay at.

We'd stop to take a breather time-to-time. A lot more than we needed to, it was just too beautiful.

Shawn said the water was clean enough to drink. He drinks it whenever he hikes this mountain.

Ricky caught Tiff while she was getting lost in one of those moments when you forget that you live in a city with cars and fast food.

Seriously, with a view like this, being able to see all of this in one place, you all are lucky Ricky even wants to come home at all. Just kidding, he's counting the days.

We loved this pool and wanted to jump in so bad, but there were millions of little tadpoles swimming around. They told us to back off.

Then we got to the shelter. A man named Mr. Ham (pronounced like "mom") decided 40 years ago to live in the mountains. He's been living there ever since. He was really nice and funny, too. He wore a beret (Shawn said he always wears it) and he has a goatee. He was married when he decided to be a mountain man and he has stayed married the whole time. His wife was apparently cool with him being gone a lot.

He has stacked up rocks to bring his home closer to heaven. Visitors have contributed as well.

He has almost everything he needs at his shelter. 24 hour running water from the stream for drinking and washing. He has a small garden where he grows his dinner. There's even a bathroom. He only charges the equivalent of $10 to stay there. His goals are only to live a peaceful life in the mountains and to provide a shelter for fellow mountain lovers.

Here's a peek into the living quarters. He provides heavy, warm blankets. Nobody freezes there.

There was only one pair of house slippers, and Mr. Ham said, "Ladies first!" and gave them to Tiff, leaving Ricky and Shawn in their socks.

The next morning we got up and said goodbye to Mr. Ham. Then Shawn took us on a serious hike to the top of Jiri mountain. We love to hike, but hiking is what Shawn does, and he didn't take it easy on us at all. But this mountain was remarkable, so it was okay.

When we got to the top, we did some ridge hiking. It was nice, not so steep.

Shawn said one of his favorite things about this mountain is that, from the top, all of the ridges look like veins. He was right, it was awesome.

A creepy tree: Ricky took this.

Beautiful pink flowers: Tiff took this.

Our friend Shawn, the active environmentalist mountaineer from Newfoundland.

Jeju Island: the first attempt

Ever since we got here, we've been told all about this beautiful island called Jeju that Korea is so proud of. So last spring, we decided to go check it out. We'd been told it was a small island, so we could see everything in a few days. We felt up to the challenge.

Our first big goal was to climb the great Halla mountain. It's apparently the highest mountain in Korea. It's also a volcano with a gigantic crater/lake in it. So we set out early on this epic hike. We looked at a map of the mountain and chose the best possible route for the time we had. There were some nice views and we even ran into some small mountain deer. We kept looking at the top, thinking about how worth it this looooong hike would be in the end. But alas, hours later, we came to a place where the trail we chose ended...

Ricky likes to look on the bright side, but today the trail to the bright side was closed.

(That's the top in the background)

Lucky for Ricky, Tiff was there with her sunshiny smile to lift his spirits and motivate him to not give up.

So we did press on. And somehow, we immediately found ourselves at the top of mount Halla. It was amazing. As you can see, we were able to take a breathtaking picture from above the massive crater. We were very proud.

Then we got bored and left.

Being a volcano, we saw a lot of volcanic rock. Bet you didn't see that coming.

There really were some great views along the way. The vertical picture here shows a part of a fun Korean legend. Some believe that these points along this ridge are soldiers from hundreds or thousands of years ago. We don't really remember the whole story, but basically there were hundreds of these men and they all had the same grandmother. Yada yada, a few things happened, and she ended up eating them. Not sure how, we think it was an accident.

Speak of the devil. Here's Tiff with said grandmother. She's kind of cute for a cannibal of soldier grandsons.

And this is the most famous and highly regarded of all traditional Korean figures. Dol-harubang, they call him. He is the grandfather of Korea and he watches over the people.

We were at a park that had a big waterfall. This wasn't it, but Tiff is really good at finding beautiful scenery.

After being asked dozens of times to have our picture taken with loud teenagers, we found the waterfall. A really nice security guard offered to take our picture with the waterfall.

Along the coast, we found another waterfall. This one falls right into the ocean.

That evening, we went to a place known as Sunrise Peak. It was enormous and amazing, but it was foggy, so we didn't get many good pictures. But fortunately for us, a very talented senior picture photographer was there to take our senior pictures. What do you think? We're no actors, but we did what he told us to do and we were pretty happy with the results.

After we paid the man, we hiked the steep path to the top of the Sunrise Peak, where we would see the natural beauty that lie inside of it's also famous crater. Clearly, mother nature was on our side and we walked away with the most amazing pictures. We can't show you any of them, they're too good.

More adventures on Jeju Island to come...