Ulleungdo, Mysterious Island: Day 3

(Arrr, this was suppose to be Tuesday's post. I wrote most of it at school and was going to add the final bits once I got home, only I went home to a broken internet. I shook my fist menacingly and turned the modem on and off many times, but it remained broken and this is being backdated from school Wednesday morning. When it became apparent that the internet wasn't coming back before went to bed, I briefly considered running to the nearest PC bang to post it, but that would require putting on pants and braving the cold. I'm sure you understand.)


Haengnam Shore Walkway as seen from the Dokdo Observatory
Ulleungdo, day 3. Tuesday morning, our last day on the island, dawned bright and clear and there was much grumbling that we had to evacuate now that the weather had finally cleared up. We took advantage of the good weather and rode the cable car to the Dokdo Observatory. On clear days, the island of Dokdo, 54 miles away, is faintly visible from the observatory, but most days it's too hazy to see. There were, however, some spectacular views of the coastline. On the way back to town, Caroline and I stopped to explore Haedosa (Haedo Temple), a Buddhist temple in Dodong. It was tiny, just a few buildings, but it was new and all the paint was bright and fresh.

It was warm and sunny, with clear blue skies for the first time in WEEKS, and it was hard to believe that a storm was suppose to hit that afternoon, but half way through the three hour ferry ride back to the mainland, the sky turned gray, the sea turned choppy and by the time the boat reached Donghae Harbor, we had to duck our heads to the rain as we ran to the bus. By the time we reached the first rest stop, the rain was coming down in sheets. We were maybe an hour into the trip when I felt the bus start to hydroplane and then shake as we slid off the road and onto the shoulder. Everyone was sitting up, trying to figure out what had just happened, when the second bus hit the back corner, raining broken glass down on the passengers, and scrapped its way down the length of the bus until it too rocked to a stop. In the middle of the craziness and confusion and demands for explanations and bemoaning how late this was going to make us getting back to Seoul, someone looked out the window and realized there was a body lying on the pavement and I stopped worrying about anything as trivial as when I was getting home that evening.

As near as anyone can tell, there was a two-car wreck and the passengers were thrown out of their vehicles. Our bus swerved to avoid the wreck, hydroplaned off the road and was hit by the other bus. We spent an hour and half on the road side, waiting for the emergency services and tow trucks to show. A few members of the group had first aid and CPR training and were able to help, and the two men were taken to the hospital in critical but stable condition. One member of our group was also taken to the hospital with a concussion.

I got a call from a friend just after the accident happened, before we knew that the two men were still alive, asking something about a SnB lunch meet up and the rain and the subways not working? I had other things on my mind. Then later, once we were safely, albeit a bit jumpy every time the bus driver hit the breaks, back on the road to Seoul, Marie called me to ask if I knew anything about the flooding in Seoul. Both of us were out of town, but she was watching the news and apparently Seoul was underwater and the subways were closed due to standing water on the tracks. I groaned because, Lord, I just wanted to get home, but miraculously, when we pulled up to Seoul Express Bus Terminal, the worst of the flooding has subsided, most of the water had been pumped out of the subway and by some miracle, I was able to catch the last train home. Say what you like about the Korean work ethic, but it gets things done. Imagine the reaction if a major American city's public transit was shut down by flash flooding on the equivalent of Christmas Eve (assuming that Christmas Eve was also a national holiday) and workers were called in to get the subways running.




Top: Looking east towards Dokdo from the Dokdo Observatory; Middle: Buddha statue at Haedosa (left), Things Wot You Find On Ulleungdo: squid, dolphins, sea turtles, and a octopus that will cook itself into a delicious ojing-eo bulgogi (right); Bottom: Drying squid
More photos are here.

Ulleungdo, Mysterious Island: Day 2

Ulleungdo, day 2. On Monday morning, the group went on a bus ride around Ulleungdo. Ulleungdo is small, but there isn't a road the circumnavigates that island, so we drove most of the way around the island, and then turned around and drove back the same way. There are a number of rock formations that supposedly look like animals just off the coast and the bus driver took care to point out every single one in great detail. That rock is a turtle, diving in the ocean, with a baby turtle on its back and that right there is the baby turtle's man penis. This is the elephant rock and the small rock behind it? Yeah, that's the elephant's dung. Near the end of the tour, we drove through a natural stone bridge that is suppose to look like a vagina. Male drivers like to drive part way through, back up and drive through again. They also like to say, "I'm coming," as they drive through and sometimes hit the windshield wiper spray as he drove through. Stay classy, adjoshi.

After the bus ride and lunch, a smaller group took the ferry to Dokdo. Dokdo is... it's complicated. Dokdo is comprised of two main islets and 35 smaller rocks in the middle of of a watery nowhere that is right smack dab in between Korea and Japan. Both countries claim sovereignty over the rocks, and while Dokdo is situated over rich fishing grounds and a possible natural gas reservoir, the controversy has less to do with economics and more to do with the 400-year-long feud between Korea and Japan and Korea's lingering resentment over Japanese invasions. This is Japan vs. Korea, round three thousand, and it has become a matter of intense nationalistic importance in Korea. While Dokdo is disputed territory, it is administered by South Korea and the only residents are Korean. There is a daily ferry between Ulleungdo and Dokdo for tourists, and after a year and a half of seeing adds about Dokdo, hearing songs about Dokdo, seeing kindergarteners dressed like the Korean flag dance about Dokdo and having tiny 4th graders beseechingly tell me, "Teacher, Dokdo is Korea," I wasn't going to pass up the chance to see the island for myself.

I've now been to Dokdo and, well, they're rocks. Rocks in the middle of nowhere, but if I have to choose a side, I'm on Team Korea. Visitors were restricted to the wharf, but Caroline and I clambered up the rocky sides of the island, and if we can't say we've stood on Dokdo, we can at least claim to have perched precariously on Dokdo. We played rock-paper-scissors since it was the most Korean thing we could think of besides kimchi, and neither of us had any kimchi handy.

It rained pretty much the entire first two days. From the sporadic rain Sunday morning (a rude awakening to my beach nap, let me tell you) to the pouring rain Sunday night which canceled the cable car trip to the light mist that obscured views during the bus ride, it was a wet trip, and while on Dokdo, I overheard some of the staff talking about a big storm that might shut down the ferries and leave us stranded on the island. Monday night, the Adventure Korea staff told us that due to an approaching storm, the ferries back to the mainland would be closed on Wednesday, Thursday and possible Friday and, faced with the options of either being stranded on Ulleungdo, five to a hotel room, during heavy rains or leaving a day and a half early, they had decided to cut the trip short. An extra ferry would be running the next day at noon to take people back to the mainland, and we had less than twenty four hours left on Ulleungdo.

One of the bridges along the Haengnam Shore Walkway crossed over a cove wide enough and deep enough to jump into. On Sunday's hike, part of the group had jumped off the bridge and gone swimming, but I hadn't wanted to finish the hike in a wet bathing suit, so I stayed on dry land and planned to come back later in the trip. Thanks to the change in departure, my only chance was to go that night, so after dinner, Caroline and I donned bathing suits and walked back to the trail to go swimming. At first we weren't going to jump on the bridge; it was five or six hours later than when people had original jumped, we weren't sure how the tide might have affected the water depth and the lights on that section of the walkway were out, so we would be jumping blind. We climbed down the side of the coast next to the bridge to check the water, and while it seemed deep enough, we discovered that the railing along the walkway was mildly electrified. We couldn't feel it when we were dry, but once we were wet, it stung like a bitch every time we touched the metal railing. Instead of electrocuting ourselves, we decided to just go swimming in the East Sea and, come time to get out, scare the bejesus out the Koreans dinning on the nearby dimly-lit beach by rising out of the waters like some 외국인 Monsters From the Black Lagoon. While we were swimming, a Korean family hiking along the pathway above noticed us and shouted out a greeting.

"Hi," the little girl shouted to us.

"Hi," Caroline and I shouted back, and immediately she launched into a torrent of broken English. Who are you? Where are you from? What are you doing? Do you like kimchi? I love Korea! At one point I asked her how old she was and her father, who was standing next to her, shouted back, "I am 41 years old."

We swam until we started to get cold, and then walked back to our clothes at the bridge. While we were drying off, the Adventure Korea staff showed up, a bit drunk, to go bridge jumping. Caroline and I warned them about the electrified fence, but since they were dry and couldn't feel it, they didn't believe us until after they had jumped into the ocean and were electrified trying to slither under the fence back onto the walkway. There was lots of shouting and swearing and laughing (from Caroline and me). After a few jumps, the staff convinced Caroline and I to join in, and I ended up jumping off the bridge once. It wasn't that high of a jump, or at least that's what I thought until I had climbed over the railing on the bridge and was looking into the dark ocean below and realized that, oh crap, I was going to have to let go of my death grip on the rail. It was a lot of fun, though, and worth that brief moment of panic.




Top: Elephant Rock with elephant poop; Middle: Samseonam Rocks representing "the three fairies who were stuck on views here changed to those three rocks," according to the guide I picked up at the minbak (left), Seodo (western islet) of Dokdo (right); Bottom: 가위바위보! Dokdo is Korea!
More photos are here.

Ulleungdo, Mysterious Island: Day 1

Dodong Harbor, Ulleungdo
Over Chuseok break (yes, that was over a month ago) I went to Ulleungdo with Adventure Korea. I tried really hard to book this trip to Ulleungdo by myself, but Ulleungdo is a remote island and Chuseok is the most traveled holiday in Korea. I spent a long week in early September frantically trying to juggle bus, train and ferry schedules, but I gave up right around the time I realized that the only ferry from Ulleungdo reached the mainland a mere thirty minutes after the last train back to Seoul departed. Caroline emailed me that afternoon asking if I wanted to go on the Adventure Korea trip to Ulleungdo with her, and I said sign me up.

We left Seoul just after midnight on Sunday morning, September 19th, bound for Donghae City and Chuam Beach. The idea was to sleep on the bus, although I'm not sure how, since a) we were on a bus (other people seemed to have less trouble with this than me) and b) we stopped at a rest spot every hour, effectively waking most people up. We reached Chuam Beach at 4:30 in the morning.

"Good morning," our guide chirped over the loudspeaker, waking us up again. "We're at the beach, but sunrise isn't for another few hours, so you can keep napping.

The engined turned off, the AC stopped and the bus started to get stuffy. A few rows ahead of me, a man started to snore. Caroline looked over at me and asked, "Sleep on the beach?"

"Oh yeah!" I said. We walked down to the beach and I dozed off to the sound of the surf crashing against the beach and the knowledge that when I woke up, my bra would somehow have sand in it. Sunrise at Chuam Beach is suppose to be spectacular; it's even shown on the morning news while the national anthem plays, but thanks to clouds and early morning drizzle, there wasn't a sunrise. It just got progressively lighter and lighter until it was morning. Shortly after sunrise, a patrol of soldiers marched down the beach.

"Why are there soldiers?" asked Cameron, a fellow teacher who had just arrived in Korea two weeks earlier. "This is a beach!"

"North Korea," I told him. Donghae is only eighty miles from the DMZ, and many of the beaches in the area are lined with barbed wire and closed to the public. It's easy to forget since South Korea is so nonchalant about it, but the Korean peninsula is technically still at war.

Our ferry to Ulleungdo departed from Donghae at 10:00, and after sunrise, we left the beach and went into town for breakfast. It was before 8:00 on a Sunday morning, the weekend before a holiday, and not much was opened, but we eventually found a Dunkin' Donuts willing to open early for a chance to make money off a group of 90 foreigners desperate to not eat kimchi for breakfast. We drank our coffee, ate our donuts and were stared at by the poor cashier who really hadn't though her morning would be that busy, much less involve that much English. The ferry ride was uneventful; other people complained of a rough ride, but I slept the whole way. We reached Dodong Harbor on Ulleungdo by 1:00 and walked to our minbak, a Korean style bed and breakfast with a mat on the floor in place of a bed, for lunch.

After lunch, we hiked along the Haengnam Shore Walkway. It was a nice hike, meandering along the coast. Ulleungdo is a volcanic island and in many places, there were steep drops from the edge of the island to the ocean. The path clung to the side of the coast, starting near the water and then climbing high above the shore before dropping back down to the ocean, with bridges spanning small coves of startling clear blue water. The hike was suppose to lead to the Dodong Lighthouse, but when Caroline and I reached the end of the coastal walkway, the trail turned inland with no sight of a lighthouse, just a pier stretching out into the ocean. Turns out the lighthouse was another forty minute hike inland, but we amused ourselves by wandered down to the pier and climbed on the A-jacks forming the breakwater.

The group was suppose to take a cable car to the Dokdo Observatory before dinner, but by the time we made it back to the minbak, it had started to rain heavily. The Dokdo Observatory was postponed until another, hopefully clear, day and one of the staffers looked at the group assembled on the front steps of the hostel and said, "Well, I guess it's time to start drinking." Caroline trekked through the rain to the FamilyMart for soju and orange juice and we ended up in a group playing cards on the front porch until dinner.




Top: Soldiers on Chuam Beach; Middle: Waves crashing against the breakwater on the Haengnam Shore Walkway (left), Stone cairn along the Haengnam Shore Walkway (right); Bottom: Haengnam Shore Walkway
More photos are here.