Juicy Jeju Island

We were very sad to leave Seoul and our wonderful guesthouse, but it was time to move onto Jeju. We hopped on a flight to the island off the south coast of South Korea with our hiking gear at the ready. Jeju is known for its beaches, juicy tangerines, volcanic landscape and is home to Mount Hallasan, Korea’s highest mountain, and a volcanic tuff cone known as Sunrise Peak. We based ourselves in Seogwipo, on the south of the island. 

Our first evening led us to a small local restaurant that had no other customers, but 4 women who seemed keen to cook something for us! We weren’t entirely sure what we had ordered, but we had an absolute feast. Having passed many tanks of HUGE eels outside restaurants in search of dinner, we were glad not to be eating anything that had wriggled its way onto our plates. We prepared ourselves for an early start the next day to climb Mount Hallasan. 

We boarded a local bus at 7:15 which picked up a few other keen hikers on the way. Again, we were amazed as big groups of middle aged and elderly Koreans in their brilliantly colourful gear hit the trail with us. We chose to ascend the easier side, as it’s the only place the bus brings you to (I was secretly delighted as I still had a horrible cough). The trail up, Seongpanak, starts out quite leisurely and has a few steep parts. The biggest problem was how crowded it was, but we manoeuvred our way through, stopping for some well deserved instant noodles at the main resting place. You have to reach this by 12 to be allowed to continue up to the summit. The view from the top was breaktaking, looking down at the clouds below from 1950 metres up! To our right we saw Baekrokdam, the lake-filled crater of this dormant volcano. We decided to descend on the harder trail and I’m so glad we did. Although a bit trickier in places, we saw far fewer people and the scenery of the peak was spectacular. 

Once we reached the bottom, some hours later, we had to walk towards Jeju city, a few kilometres away, to catch a bus back to Seogwipo. We decided to stop at the Gwaneumsa temple, home to two beautiful Buddha statues, one stone and one golden. 

Jeju still had more to show us though, and the next day we visited not one, but three waterfalls. The most beautiful being Jeongbang, which is the only waterfall in Asia to fall directly into the sea. We followed about 10km of the coastal trail and sat to watch the sunset at Oedolgae rock. 

Another early start the next day saw us hopping on a bus to Seongsan on the east of the island, where the sunrise against the volcanic tuff cone, Seongsan Ilchulbong, is a World Heritage sight and one of the most photographed places on the island. Unfortunately the bus doesn’t bring you there early enough to see the sunrise, but a climb to the top was certainly worth the hour long bus journey! As we were in the east coast, we decided to get the ferry to a smaller island called Udo, where we rented some bikes to explore. Our gearless rust buckets did the trick, as we overtook some of the golf cart type things that the Korean tourists were whizzing about in. 

There was plenty we didn’t get to see on Jeju and in the summer time, when the water is warm, it is supposed to be a wonderful place for snorkelling and diving. We’ll have to put on the ‘to return’ list. Armed with a bag of juicy tangerines, we headed for Busan. 

-F xx