Taean Haean National Park

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I think we left around 7:30 and we drove for a couple of hours. We arrived at Taean and headed to the beach. We went to Sambong Beach. It's a nice beach and I had been here previously, last summer when we came to Taean and Anmyeon-do. We had good weather and we spent about an hour to an hour and a half wandering along the beach. There were a few people on the beach, but it was really quite empty. We walked along the beach, looking at all the little crabs that were scurrying about, I'm sure I accidentally scrunched a few under my boots, sorry little crabbies! There were also some beautiful shells and

The walk was going well, until we hit a spot of water that was flowing down the beach to the sea. We tried walking further up the beach as the water looked shallower there. However, that was a trick of the light and it was just as deep. We had to admit defeat and take our socks and shoes off and roll up our pants and wade through. It was a bugger on the other side though as we didn't have a towel and I walked along the rest of the beach barefoot. We came to the end of this stretch of beach and I had to brush all the sand off my feet to put my socks ad shoes back on. I did a pretty crappy job, as there is still sand in my socks two washes later. We took a path up to a viewpoint, where we could look out over the ocean and see the coastline in both directions, too. It was really pretty and we sat and ate our lunch, resting on the benches.

We were meant to walk back to where we had started our walk along the beach, but we didn't really have enough time so Warren called the bus driver to pick up up from this beach instead. However, when we got to the car park by this beach, our bus had sunk in the sand. Some of the others on the trip helped push our bus out of the sand and we drove back to Sambong. Some of the others went for lunh, but since we had eaten our kimbap, we sat in the sun chatting with an ice cream. Then we went for a little wander down to a different part of the beach, but it was a bit too chilly to stand still for long.

We had an hour's drive to our next destination, Daecheon, the home of MudFest. We didn't go near the beach and instead headed inland. We reached Seongju Rereational Forest. A lot of the group were doing paragliding, brave souls. So we spent about half an hour watching some of them take off. It looked amazing the wind just picked them up and off they went, floating into the sky. It was a bit hazy though. I think if I were to do paragliding, I would like to do it somewhere with less pollution. Then we left the rest of them to it, and set off on our hike.

The hike was pretty leisurely as it was mainly all downhill. We wandered through the forest, it was lovely and peaceful. It was nice to start at the top of the mountain/hill as it saved all the hard work of getting up there. We saw some interesting looking and we headed to a waterfall. The waterfall as a huge disappointment as it had dried up. There has been barely any rain this year. Some monks had left bowls of water as offerings by the waterfall. Maybe, it was to try and the water to flow again. There was a small hut with a kitchen inside. Maybe it's a small restaurant in the summer months or for the monks to cook up offerings. It looked like it had been used fairly regularly as there were old tins lying around that hadn't gone to rust.

We hiked a bit further down and we were meant to come across a temple. That was under construction, I think it was more like a hut, than a full on temple. There was a shrine on a rock instead. We reached the bottom of the trail and we were in a tiny village. We wandered through the village and had to cross an old school style railway crossing. There was a man sitting in a little hut beside it. He must of been there to make sure people don't go over the crossing, when the barriers are down. Back on the bus, us hikers drove to Daecheon city and we were dropped in front of a restaurant.

We headed into the restaurant for a dinner of shabu shabu. I'm not a fan of shabu shabu, however this meal was delicious. Each table was given a hot pot, which we boiled cabbage and thin rolls of beef in. We also had a big plate of veggies, salad and kimchi. The hot pot was surrounded by a small grill, which had some mandu, cheese filled ddoek and duck grilling away on it. What made this shabu shabu so special (and nice tasting) was that instead of just eating the meat and veggies and then rice or noodles after. We were given rice paper to soak and fill with the beef, cabbage and other veggies. There were also three lovely dipping sauces to dunk our rolls in. Mmmm, it was so good! I just wish there had been more, I could of eaten mountains of the stuff.

Back on the bus, we headed to pick up the paragliders. One good thing about not paragliding was we got a proper feed instead. The paragliders were all starving when they got on the bus and had to wait until we came to a rest stop before they could eat. The journey home was fairly quick, and bar one spot, the traffic wasn't too bad.

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