Trip to Jeju

We heard that we have to hurry if we want to travel around the Korea when the weather is still warm enough to go to the beach and stuff, so we booked our trip to Jeju-island as soon as we could. We had a group of people and first we planned to go to Jeju by a plane. The plane trip takes only 1 or t2 hours and the price is approximately the same as going by a ferry. All the flights were booked already because we were too late booking our flights with a big group, so we just choose to go by the ferry. All the flights were booked already because there was a holiday at the time we wanted to go to Jeju. I think going there just for a weekend is not enough time to do all the things that you would like to do there... The ferry’s booking system on the internet was obviously in Korean, so Sangwan, our Korean friend helped us to book the ferry trip to Jeju.

In afternoon of September 4th our ferry was going to leave from Incheon dock. We took a bus to Incheon, but there was a huge traffic going on because of the holidays, so we almost missed the ferry. We were lucky and we made there in time, because we change the bus to taxi. We had also problems with tickets. Korean names are so short, that our names in the tickets were not correct because of the length of our names. We showed our passports and finally we were able to hurry to the ferry.

When we saw the ferry at the first time we didn’t know should we laugh or cry because the ferry looked like an old cargo ship. Inside the ferry there was one restaurant, one shop, and rooms were we supposed to sleep. In the restaurant, food was like in prison and cost something like 7000 won, so it was quite expensive compared to the quality of the food.

We had common cabin where we supposed to sleep. There were no beds or chairs in the room. We were sleeping on the floor with a blanket and something like a leather pillow. The ferry trip took about 13 hours, so we decided to play with cards and drinking beer that the time would run faster and the trip would not be so boring. After few hours the ferry started to move side to side because of the waves and some of us felt like seasick. There was also women’s arm wrestling competition, live music outside. People were dancing on the ship’s deck and singing with the guy standing on the stage. There was fireworks show too, with music, it was awesome. We had a plenty of fun time in there in the ferry, so it wasn’t so boring 13 hours at all. Only the sleep wasn’t so good because we hadn’t any beds.

In the morning of September 5th we arrived to Jeju dock. Our hostel was other side of the island so we took a taxi to the hostel. Hostel was really nice and the guy in reception spoke good English and he told us where to go and what to do in Jeju. In the roof of the hostel there was sun lounges, table, and chairs and like a little kitchen where we ate breakfast and just hang around.

Right away we arrived to the hostel, we tried to find a place where to rent bikes, but we had too big group of people to having enough bikes for us, so we planned go to beach just to swimming and lying on the sun. In the afternoon we went visit to Jeju sex museum. There was lot of funny things and very weird statues.

Art from sex-museum

In the second morning we went to hiking to highest mountain of Jeju. We took the easiest way to go up, because some of the people in our group didn’t have good shoes, and some of the people had a problem with their feet’s, because of lot of walking with bad shoes. So, they didn’t had any interest to go a hard way, but it was fine, the easiest way took still about 6 hours all together. The way up was about 3 km. The way we took didn’t take us on the top of the mountain, so it was quite easy to hike. And there was really good views! When we planned to go back, we chose the other way down. It was 7km and full of rocks and difficult paths, so I think that was enough hard for us, but not for Philip, because he decided to go there alone at the next day to have a hard way to the top of the mountain. We were leaving at the day after hiking, so he had to take all of his stuff with him. After hiking Noora and Maria went to take a nap, Phillip went to running (he is training for the marathon) and rest of our group went the beach to relax. That day there were good waves and we decided to try surfing. Sonja has tried surfing before, so she was pretty good at it. Surfing wasn’t that easy as it looks like! Tobi was the only one who got the wave! But what we learned is that the next time we try surfing we are going to use a shirt! We didn’t know that, so after surfing we felt awful pain on our skin, because of rough surface of surfing board and the salty water.

In the last morning in Jeju we planned to go hiking on top of the volcano. Going top of the volcano wasn’t hard at all there was stairs and going up takes maybe 20 minutes.

Trip back to Seoul by ferry felt faster than way to Jeju. Maybe just because we were so tired after hiking and at this time we also got more blankets, so the floor didn’t felt so hard. So at this time we actually slept almost the whole trip.