---

Jeju Island

Wednesday


Alright... so it’s about time I wrote about our trip to Jeju Island, and our summer vacation. Our vacation was from Wednesday July 28th to Tuesday August 4th, a total of seven days. Our main destination was Jeju, which took up three of the days. The remaining four days were filled with lazing around our apartment playing video games because it was too damned hot to do anything else. That week’s temperatures were around the mid-to-late thirties... fml. But that didn’t include the humidity which made it feel probably somewhere in the fourties.

Our plane to Jeju-do left Cheongju at 7:30am so guess who woke up at 5:00am??? We got the airport, and got on the plane and had the most violent turbulence ridden plane ride ever! I was almost sick, Scott too! But after only one hour, which felt more like five, we made it!

We picked up our rental car first, and off we went to the dragonhead rock. Take a look at the photos; it does actually look like a dragon head! This is also the point in our trip when I discovered I had forgotten my camera charger at 5am. I don’t really blame myself though, I blame 5am. Anyways not much to the rock besides... well, rock. So off we went again.

We headed to Manjanggul a big lava tube, which is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was really, really cool! Cool as in really interesting but also cool as in freezing our butts off! You start by going down this big stair case and enter a large tube that is dripping freezing cold water from the top. Our Korean friends hated us for wanting to go the whole 1km to the end. But we saw some interesting things like lava flow lines which are the marks left when different levels of lava flow through. There were lava stalactites which are made when the hot lava fills the tube completely then the level decreases. Also, when the ceiling is not actually touched by lava it creates these drip formations which made a cool stalactite texture. We saw rocks that had fallen from the wall or ceiling and become melted to the floor. And my favourite was the lava raft which is when one of those rocks gets dragged along the floor, eventually stops and creates a bump in the lava tube. It looks like a little raft. The coolest lava raft we saw was called turtle rock, check out the picture. It was created like the normal rafts but then was carved away underneath when the lava level dropped. Continuing on we saw these rock formations called Lava toes. They are made by a creeping lava surge being pushed forward and slowly drying at the same time. As you can see... It is much bigger than my toe. The last sight of the tube was the lava column. It was really incredible! It was formed when lava dripped down through the ceiling (from a lava tube or passage above) and dried. Really, it was a beautiful sight. Unfortunately most of the pictures from the lava tube are of lesser quality... It was much too dark to use flash, and very misty and moist so even flash-less photos look a little blurry... apologies.

So after getting soaking wet and freezing our butts off, we left the tube and went to the condo that we would be staying in for the next two nights. We then proceeded to pass out for about 2 hours, getting some much needed sleep! Our stomachs roused us and soon enough we went to have a famous Jeju delicacy: Black Pig. They smoke the pig in a massive clay jar about the size of Scott. It was pretty good, very fat and chewy meat, but worth trying while in Jeju. The smokiness was quite delicious though. We were told by friends of ours that traditionally these pigs were fed human feces. As such the pigs developed a “unique” flavour. I’m pretty sure that type of feeding isn’t practiced anymore, but who knows...

Afterward we went and grabbed some drinks from the local grocery store, played some cards and went to bed.

---