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.

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.