Stupid rain

For Thursday and Friday Andy and I decided to do an overnight trip up to Seoraksan National Park. We caught a bus from Busan at 8:40 am and arrived in Sokcho (the town directly outside of the park) at 3 pm. We found a hotel right outside of the park and this was our view from the balcony.

I don't think these pictures do justice to the impressiveness of the mountains. A lot of the craggy peaks we could see look like they are covered in cloud and fog here (which they were). We went to the park information booth and looked around, but didn't do too much that night. Bought ramen in a cup for 850 won each (that's 85 cents) for dinner.

Friday we woke up early so we could get in a hike before breakfast at the hotel ended. It was only lightly misting out. Once in the park, it was more like Kings Dominion than a National Park, with restaurants and games set up everywhere. And the whole path was paved as well. The "hike" we were doing in the morning was a relatively easy one, about 3.3km one way and no major incline, according to the map. Let me tell you that Korean distances are a lot like Mortimer Miles, a lot longer than they say. The farther we were walking, the more it started to rain. We were only hiking for about 45 minutes when we got to a sign that said we still had another 2.5km to go, we were soaking wet and just miserable. So we turned around and decided we'll try again after breakfast, maybe the rain will have let up.

Sadly, the rain never really let up. We had breakfast, took a nap and were ready to leave by 11:30. At that time it was still raining, so we decided to head south to another town instead of hiking in the park again. It was a really hard decision because I had gotten my hopes up about the park and knew that no cave was going to be as interesting or beautiful.

We headed back to the bus station and caught a bus to Donghae. We took a taxi to the Cheonguk cave, which was pretty large. It cost 4000 won for both of us to enter. It was large and intricate and interesting for $4. But that was all we had time for. We had to catch a taxi to the train station for the train at 4:30. We were then on a train until 11:30 pm and took a taxi back to Kim's house.