So on the 29th I headed south down to Mokpo. It is a small city on the southwest coast, and it has a large port for ferries to different Korean Islands.
When I first arrived I walked all along the shoreline. These men were out enjoying the evening and the fishing.
This boat was just sitting there -- but I thought it was pretty cool looking.
This little town is right on the edge of the city of Mokpo and was really cute. To one side of the road was a mountain in the middle of the city and on the other side was this.
Mokpo is a city full of museums. They had a maritime, natural history, local history, cultural and jade museum. So I spent some time visiting those, and saw some cool stuff.
This is a Jade inkstone. The work in the jade museum was unreal. I have never seen stone work so beautiful. The woman at the museum spoke a fair amount of English and she told me that the teacher there, who made all the stuff in the museum, was ranked as number 1 in the world. She said he specialized in making animals with balls in their mouths and doing double chains. The work was unreal and it is a really good thing that I didn't have my visa on me -- or I may have spent a lot of money that I don't have. I also learned that jade comes in many colors, green, white, brown, yellow, red and black!
This anchor is by far the largest wooden anchor that I have ever seen. I cannot imagine how many people it would have taken to lift it.
Mokpo also had a natural history museum. It was pretty basic, dinosaur bones, stuffed dead animals and the such -- but this butterfly mosaic was pretty cool. The museums were also good places to get out of the heat.
The Koreans love putting rocks on a base and calling them art. Some of them are really cool, others not so much. One of the galleries in Mokpo had many that were really cool -- including this peacock. These rocks are natural and not carved.
After Mokpo I got on a high speed ferry to Heuksando (black mountain island -- because the trees make it look black) It is about a 2 hour ferry ride away. This ferry ride was not too bad -- I have been on some here that are awful -- but I don't get motion sickness very easily.
Once on the island I got a taxi tour -- it is what they do on this island. It is one of the islands that is a part of the Dadohae Maritime National Park. It was very beautiful as you can see in the pictures from the top of the mountain. This was a pretty relaxing part of my vacation.
I thought these were funny, army ships docked on this tiny island, but that I get. the funny part was the laundry -- notice the pink shirts (they are a bit hard to see in the picture). I know a lot of Korean men wear pink, but in the army -- that is a bit funny :)
This was the view of the coast at night. It was a really nice night -- there were a few clouds moving between the peaks of the mountains which were fun to watch.
The boats in the ports made for a few nice pictures, especially when the sun was behind them and as it was setting.
In the morning I got back on a boat and headed back to Mokpo -- I had seen the island (it was not that big) and I still wanted to climb the small mountain in the middle of Mokpo before going to Wulchulsan National Park so that I could hike there the next day.
This is Mokpo from the top of Yuldalsan in the middle of the city. It was a short hike, 200 and some meters, and very worth the view.
The final part of my vacation was Wulchulsan, a national park famous for a bridge that is over 50 meters high. So that evening I hoped on a bus to a nearby town and got a motel room to spend the night so I could go hiking in the morning (I wanted to start early to avoid the business and becuase of the heat I wanted to be on my way down by 10 am -- which I was)
This is the bridge that Wolchulsan is famous for. It has recently been redone so it is not as scary looking as it is in some older pictures.
The area around the park is all rice farms -- it makes for a very nice view, and I'm glad the the clouds cleared so I could see the things around me.
This waterfall was very nice near the end of my hike -- I basically showered under it. It is a million degrees in Korea in the summer and really humid -- so a hike at the end of July is not always a good idea. By this point I was soaked so I figured a bit of clean water was a good idea.
I have now done enough hiking in Korea to be prepared and when I finished I changed into clean clothes and washed my face before the bus rides home (one to Gwangju and then to Osan). I got home in the evening on Saturday the 29th so I was able to relax and cook on Sunday before another week of classes started.
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