Ulleungdo

Last weekend, I finally made it out to Ulleungdo, a small island in the middle of nowhere in the Sea of Japan. The ferry from the mainland actually leaves only about 3 km from my apartment, so I should've gone a long time ago. However it's a 160 km fast ferry ride which takes from 2.5 to 3 hrs, and as I've had several bad experiences on fast ferries before, I was concerned about hitting rough water.
I was able to get a ticket on the Friday morning with a return ticket for Sunday morning, giving me almost 2 full days on the island. The ferry docks in the tiny village of Dodong-ri, and when I got off the ferry I was overwhelmed by all the Koreans standing around and just wanted to get away from it all. There was an information centre right at the port, so I stopped in to grab a map and ended up talking to them. They phoned a minbak (cheap family hotel) and arranged a room for me in the little village I was planning to end up in that night. I don't normally book hotels ahead of time, but I wasn't sure what time I'd be getting into town and as the place was so small I didn't want to show up in the middle of the night in November and have everything booked up.
With that taken care of, I started heading for the trail up Seonginbong, the highest mountain on the island at 984 m. The first section of the trail was fantastic, and I didn't see a single person for the first half hour or so. Unfortunately, it soon joined up with another trail, and on this trail was a large group of Korean men spread out over several hundred metres. Most Koreans I meet while hiking are great, but the flip side is that they're bloody loud. For some reason they feel this need to let out loud yells occasionally, perhaps in a misguided attempt at affirming their manhood. Regardless, it's bloody annoying when you'd rather enjoy the peace and quiet.
I tried to get ahead of them, but as I was carrying a heavy backpack and they had no packs and it was quite steep, I didn't have the energy to stay in the lead.
Anyways, I finally made it to the top, where there were great views around the island, as well as the rock in the picture above marking the summit.
I had a sandwich and a drink at the peak, and then headed down another trail to make my way towards the village of Nari-bunji, where I had my hotel reservation. I was pushing myself to go fairly quickly, as I didn't want to be going down the mountain in the dark. I ended up arriving around 5pm, with about an hour of light to spare. The village was literally a couple of little restaurants for the tourists and 2 hotels and a handful of houses. It would've been a nice place to spend a few days just hiking and wandering around, but I didn't have the time.
I got up the next morning and headed for the north coast. From there I headed east and then back inland in search of the Naesujeon Trail which I figured would give me some good views over the east coast. It was a very long, steep climb to get to the trailhead, but it was a very nice trail, and relatively flat until near the end where I started going back down.
When I got back to the coast I ended up in Jeodong-ri, a small fishing village a couple of kilometres from the ferry port. In the picture above, you can see a couple of giant penguins and apparently their "appendages" are used to load boats, although they weren't in use when I passed through.
I then took a seaside trail cut into the rock to check out the view from the lighthouse. It was a nice walk but none of the pictures turned out that well due to the lack of light on the rocks and the haze that seemed to hang over the island.
I then made my way back to Dodong-ri and headed to the information centre again to look for a place to stay for the night. As it was Saturday and it's peak season for the leaves changing colour, most places were full. The very kind woman working at the info centre called at least 15 different places on my behalf trying to find a vacancy. Even though my Korean is terrible, I understood enough of what she was saying. Every call went something like this:
"Hello. Do you have any rooms available? I have a foreigner looking for a room. It's okay because he speaks very good Korean...Oh. You don't have any rooms. Okay. Thank you."
I found it odd that it was even relevant that I was a foreigner, but she told every single place that I was. Anyways, she finally found a place for me at a hotel only a five minute walk up the hill and she also gave me some green tea while I was waiting.