4 Months in 1 Day!

In about 4 weeks we will be making our way to California for our National Lampoon's American vacation - I can't wait to go to Wally World! Realizing this it dawned on me that I need to do some catching up before our next adventure, otherwise the backlog might become a little overwhelming. So here goes with a captioned pictorial of what we've been doing lately.

For some reason I wanted a bit more of a challenge than walking over uneven terrain for kilometers at a time. So it seemed like a perfectly reasonable suggestion that I made to my friend Frank that we should climb Ulsanbawi rock. While it is only a 3.4km walk (one way) the kicker comes when you realize that the last 1km contains 800+ steps - a steep incline in anyone's language. We were obviously very pleased when we reached the top, only to have to turn around and come back down again.We have even had the opportunity to go inside a North Korean submarine. Not such a big deal I hear you mutter. Well it becomes a big deal when you find out this particular submarine beached itself in 1996 - that's right, only 11 years ago! Apparently the captain shot and killed the crew when they beached, and then he and 16 soldiers were on the run for 49 days, during which time they killed 17 South Koreans and injured 11.














Jenene and I use to ride the 98 almost on a daily basis when we lived in London, and here it is sitting out the front of a hotel in the middle of a national park in South Korea.



One of our favourite dishes is the 'Scillion Pancake' - full of spring onions, cuttle fish, and octopus. Yum yum!






Gotta love that dried cuttle fish as well - keeps you chewing for hours.






Whether it's hanging out in caves, relaxing by streams, or visiting Buddhist temples, we are enjoying every moment of it.

Reaching for the Top

Well after nearly a month of being on the go, I finally have a day where I don’t have to go anywhere! This means I now have some time to go back and catch up on what we’ve been doing during October.

At the beginning of October, during our Chuseok holiday, we spent a few nights in Seoraksan National park – a beautiful part of Korea on the North East coast. You might think that being a national park should mean not many people, not true. Even though this time of year is supposedly one of the quietest, there were still lots of people there. It took us about an hour to drive the last 2 km to get into the park where our hotel was.

One of the highlights was climbing to the top of Mt Seolag – a precarious peak which sits 933m above sea level. Fortunately there is a cable car that takes you the first 780m, and it’s not until the last 50m or so that it gets pretty demanding. There is a narrow path of sorts that leads up one side of the peak to the top. There are no guard rails or ropes to stop you falling into the valley, and the path is about 1m wide, with people going up and others coming down at the same time. We were smart enough to get there early, so the crowd was minimal and Harper and I had a clear run to the top.

When you get to the top there is a man there with a table set up that has different sized medals hanging off it. Depending on how much you want to spend, you can purchase a medal and have your name, age, and date that you climbed engraved on it. A bit tacky, but a good piece of memorabilia for the kids. The climb was a bit too risky for Promise, but Harper and I decided that she should get a medal anyway.

The kids were great, and I was amazed at how far they managed to walk each day. They had no trouble completing 5km hikes without complaining or stopping. These hikes weren’t well manicured garden paths, they were very uneven, rocky trails that were all uphill for the first half. I think the kids are developing a real love for bush walking – I can’t wait until they get a bit older so we can do our Himalayan adventure.