Chuseok

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Now, it sounds like something your dog might do, but Chuseok is actually the Korean thanksgiving day, and luckily for us it meant a 5 day holiday. So me and a few friends rented a car and went on a bit of a road trip. As you can imagine, driving in Korea is slightly different to driving at home, but I really enjoyed the style of only worrying about what is in front of you and letting whoever's behind you deal with everything else! Just pull out of a junction even if there's a car coming, they're expecting it...well, most of the time! So we drove all day along the southern coast from Busan, taking in the views on Geoje-do, until we stopped overnight in Tongyeong. The next morning we took the ferry to a small island called Bijin-do. It's a cool little place, basically two big hills connected by a small strip of land, so we set up camp in some trees on the beach. We headed up one of the big hills to watch the sunset, but unfortunately the trees were all on the wrong side so we couldn't see it, would have been much better off just sitting on the beach! We had some food and a bonfire on the beach that night, and noticed a weird blue glow coming from the sea. I'd heard of this before, but had no idea it happened in Korea. It's a natural phenomenon, caused by bioluminescing phytoplankton, that glow neon blue when disturbed. It's really cool, and I spent ages kicking water around to watch what happened. The next morning I woke up early, and went up the other big hill to watch the sunrise and quickly realised that I couldn't see that either because the trees were on the oppsite side and completely in the way again, unbelievable!

We continued on our road trip, driving further along the coast road to Namhae, where we stopped for the afternoon at Sangju beach to chill out. That evening we headed up north to Jinju to check out their annual lantern festival. The city is covered in thousands of handmade, lifesize lanterns of traditional Korean people, dragons, trees, you name it. They are all everywhere, but the two main areas were the fortress and the river. It was pretty spectacular, really lit up the whole city and the work that must have gone into making these things was amazing. Check out the pictures as there's no way my limited vocabulary can do it justice!

During Chuseok I also went with some friends to the cultural capital of Korea, Gyeongju. This is the ancient capital, and so there's a serious amount of history here, and plenty to do. First off, we headed to one of Korea's most famous temples - Bulguksa. As autumn was beginning to set in, the leaves were changing colour, and there was some beautiful scenery. But I've seen so many temples by now that it didn't really do that much for me, especially as a large part of it was being renovated at the time. A bit higher up the mountain is a grotto called Seokguram, where a huge stone Buddha has been carved inside the mountain. Now this was quite impressive, I haven't seen anything like that before, and there were some amazing views towards the sea from up there. Every time you go to a temple in Korea, you will find a huge bell that is just begging to be rung. I have always dreamed of pulling back the massive log and making a huge 'gong' reverberate around the mountain, but not wanting to annoy every monk in Korea I have always refrained from doing it. At the grotto however, they let you do it and so I managed to fulfil my dream. Although I think I always wanted to do it only because I wasn't supposed to, so paying to have a go did seem like cheating! We also checked out Anapji Pond (famous for the pagoda's reflection in the water), the Cheomseongdae Observatory, and the Daereungwon Royal Tombs. A busy day but we didn't even cover half of the area, there's plenty more to do there!

Anyway, I'm not going to write too much about all this, I'm being a bit lazy so will let the pictures do the talking!

Ross x

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