Buryeong Valley

On Friday I took the bus a couple of hours down the coast to the small town of Uljin. There I caught a city bus about 20km inland to Buryeong Temple, which unfortunately, was under renovation.
The area is famous for Buryeong Valley, which is a beautiful stretch of river that heads back to the coast. Because there is no hiking trail that follows the river, I decided to just walk back down the road to town, figuring this would give me the best views.
The weather wasn't with me, though, as it was cloudy with a few sprinkles throughout the day. This was great for walking, but horrible for the pictures of the mountains. I saw these wildflowers on the side of the road when I stopped to take a picture of the river.
Although I would have preferred to have been able to walk the whole way along the river, the advantage was that the river was almost completely untouched.
There are lots of persimmon trees in the area, so one of the houses had strung a bunch up to dry.

Odaesan National Park - Sogeumgang

I finally made my first trip to Odaesan NP, which is just outside Gangneung, a city about 40 minutes north of me. It's actually the closest national park to me, so I'm not sure why I never made it there before.
I headed to the Sogeumgang area which is in the northeast corner of the park. It only takes the 40 minute bus ride to Gangneung, and then a local bus for just under an hour to the park entrance.
Unfortunately on the city bus there was a class from a boys' high school also going to the park so the bus was bursting and we were squeezed in like sardines, and it was probably at double the legal capacity. However there don't seem to be a lot of laws in Korea, only guidelines, so apparently it wasn't a problem.
The main trail in the region follows the river and so there are dozens of waterfalls along the way. Fortunately the main attraction is the first waterfall, and so most people just walk to that, take a few pictures, and then head home. That meant that there weren't too many people on the trail past that point.
The leaves have started changing colour in the last week or two, but they still haven't reached their peak yet in this region. However I definitely noticed more colour the higher I climbed.

Shimanami Kaido - Part 2

As I mentioned in the last post, the bike route has special paths for the sections leading up to the bridges. In the picture above, you can see a lane through a bamboo forest.
On one of the islands I came across this huge brontosaurus(?) on the side of the road. It seemed very out of place, and there was no sign (in English or Japanese) to explain why it was there.
On the second day, I awoke about 5:30 in the morning to a crazy thunderstorm. I'd heard the weather forecast that it was going to rain most of the day, but that didn't make it any easier to get up and get going. It ended up raining off and on all morning until I finished the trip in Imabari around lunch time.
On a nice downhill run after one of the bridges you can see this retired chopper from the Japanese Self-Defense Force (their military).
In Canada, you usually have to go to the beach to see crabs, but in Japan I've seen many crabs quite a ways inland from the ocean. I don't know if they've evolved to not need to go in the water or not, but it's still strange coming across crabs half way up a hill.

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.