Shimanami Kaido

A week ago we had Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving) so I ended up with 6 days off. I flew over to Okayama, Japan to see my buddy Trev and his family and a few other friends.
The humidity had finally dropped in Korea a few days before but when I landed in Okayama at 8 at night, I was disappointed to find out that it was still very humid there. Fortunately, it disappeared in the middle of my trip.
I had decided that I wanted to do the Shimanami Kaido, which is a system of 7 or 8 bridges that connect the main Japanese island of Honshu with the 4th largest island of Shikoku, by hopping over several small islands between them.
Apparently when they built it they took bicycles into consideration so it's excellent for biking. Most of the way you follow the regular roads on a dedicated bike lane, but they built special approaches to the bridges for bikes, which although longer, make the climb much more gradual (and manageable).
I rented a bike for about $25 for 2 days in Onomichi in Honshu and hopped the short ferry to the first island to start.
In the first picture above you can see the first bridge.
This is the dedicated bike/walking lane of the first bridge, that is underneath the car lanes. This is really nice because you're not sucking in fumes, however the flip side is that the view is very restricted.
Because it was September and midweek, I saw very few people biking the route. It took me about 10 hours total over 2 days, but I probably only saw about 20 people total biking it. Considering it's one of the more popular bike trips in Japan, I was expecting to see a lot more. I also only saw 2 foreigners.

Another English Diary Entry

I know I used this picture before, but I don't have any other diary pictures.
This is one of the kids' diaries I checked today. He didn't do this intentionally - I think he just made a mistake while typing the Korean food into his K-E dictionary. Here it is:

Today lunch is rice, pigback bone potato soup, eggplant, armpit and seaweeds soup. It's delicious.

Yeah, I bet.

Sepilok

After arriving at the airport at about 11pm, I walked for about an hour (because I was too cheap to pay for a taxi) to the cheap hotel I'd reserved. I got up early and walked back to the airport to catch my domestic flight to Sandakan, on the east coast.
Sandakan is the closest airport to Sepilok, which is famous throughout SE Asia for its orangutan sanctuary. However I wasn't going to the sanctuary because I was hoping to spot orangutans in the wild later in my trip.

I was spending a night in Sepilok to visit the Rainforest Discovery Centre, before moving on to the next stage of my trip. The Centre was built to help educate Malaysian children about the importance of the rainforest, and now it's a huge swath of rainforest, with several hiking trails and lots of monkeys and birds.
There is a huge elevated walkway several hundred metres long that allows you to see the monkeys and birds at eye level or from above. The monkey in the picture above was relaxing on the walkway while being groomed by another monkey behind him.

Although I'm not a birder, and know nothing about the different species, I still like seeing some of the more exotic species. I have no idea what this little guy is, but his colour really stood out. I also saw a few hornbills, but as they were quite far off I couldn't get any pictures.

Sabah, Borneo

Just got back from a week in the Malaysian state of Sabah on the beautiful island of Borneo. The food was great, the people were fantastic and the scenery was amazing - I'll definitely be going back.
I did a lot of hiking, some scuba-diving and saw a bit of wildlife. It was hot and humid, except when I was up in the mountains, but it was bearable. It rained a bit, but most of the time it was sunny or a few clouds. I had planned to go whitewater rafting, but due to time constraints, that didn't work out. However everything else I did more than made up for it.

Rafting and River Trekking

I went to the Inje area last weekend, which is up towards the North Korean border, to go white water rafting and river trekking. I went with a group of other foreigners, mostly Americans and Canadians, and we spent the first day rafting and then the second day river trekking.


The rafting was quite tame, but it was okay. We finished late afternoon and then headed to a pension in the mountains that we had rented. I went for a short hike there and saw many of these Oriental Firebellied Toads like the one pictured above. They are green with black spots/stripes on top, and then red with black on their underside. I saw a dead one that was all red and black, so I assume they gradually change colour.


The next day we hiked into a river and then walked down through the river about 8 to 10 kilometres. It was a blast. The river was pretty calm most of the way, but there were a few of these mini water slides like the one above.
The Koreans you meet while hiking tend to be quite friendly. At the start of the river, the man above grabbed my arm as I walked past him and started talking to me in a mix of broken English and Korean. He dragged me into the river with him, but because he was laughing the whole time, I was curious what he wanted so I went along with it. Turns out he wanted me to sit down in the river with him so his wife could take a picture of us.
He was a really happy/crazy guy, so when I ran into him later down the river, I had his wife take another picture of us. It's quite easy to notice our different attire. All of the Koreans I saw were dressed like this. It doesn't matter how long the hike is, they ALWAYS get dressed up like they're going on a multi-day expedition.

Widgeon Creek

When I was back in Vancouver last month, my buddy Fudge and I took my Dad's canoe out one day up to Pitt Lake.
As you can see, the weather was perfect, and because it was a Friday, there weren't a lot of people there, other than a couple of groups of school kids.

We found a place to pull over for lunch. I wanted to see how far we could make it up the creek, but unfortunately we had to turn around because Fudge had to head to work.
On the way back we decided to go in for a swim. Because the creek is mostly melted snow from the mountains, it was FREEZING!!! So we didn't stay in too long, but it felt great after we dried off.

Gangneung Danoje Festival

This festival is held every May/June in Gangneung, a mid-sized city about 40 minutes from my place. I went last year and it was okay, so I decided to check it out again today.
In the top picture you can see them performing a show/dance that was telling a story about farmers plowing the fields and planting rice.
There were four guys who played the roles of the two cows. I was hoping they were going to have a bullfight or do something exciting, but unfortunately they just walked around in a circle.
I've seen this look at other Korean festivals but I'm not really sure what it means. The performers dress up to look like a cross between a bum and a clown and they play the drums and sing.

Hanseom Beach

Hanseom is the closest beach to my place, being about a 15 minute walk. As it was sunny and in the mid-20s today, I decided to head down there for a while to enjoy the peace and quiet.
Officially, beach season runs from July 1st to August 31st in Korea, and so Koreans, following the herd mentality common in Asia, rarely go outside of this time. This means I had the whole beach to myself, even though I was there in the middle of the day and it's so close to downtown.
A month from now, though, even if the weather's exactly the same, it'll be packed and so I won't be going. So I'll just enjoy it all by myself in June and September.

This is looking out over the Sea of Japan towards southern Japan.