Nic Trips

We discovered quickly that most of the people in our little gang of Ulsan friends loved hiking and so we quickly set to planning our first hiking extravaganza. We had heard lots of good things about the beautiful sights and views of Gajisan, so we decided to make it our first destination of the year. We found out soon enough that is was a quick and cheap bus ride to the west of Ulsan, out near the KTX station, but we also found out that it's the tallest mountain in Ulsan. At  1,240 m (4,068 ft)  tall, it doesn't make it to even the top 50 tallest mountains in Korea, but it's still makes for the most intense climb I've ever done. It took us almost 3 hours to get to the top and more than 4 hours to get back down (because we took a different trail). Korean language lesson: "san" (or 산) means mountain, so "Gajisan" means "Gaji Mountain". It sounds weird (because it's double) if you say "Gajisan Mountain", but both "Gajisa...

Our final adventure on the first full day was to Beomeosa temple. It is bigger that Haedong Yonggunsa, but it was much less crowded. I assumed this was because rather than hiking DOWN to the coast, you had to hike UP part of the mountain to get to it. It was late afternoon by the time we go there, and the atmosphere was calm and magical in the slowly setting, summer sun, There were about 5-6 different, giant staircases that led us to the top and to the main temple. Each tier had another entry way or archway to view. Most of the paint and woodwork had been restored in the last decade or so, and everything was glowing with the intense colors. This part of the temple you had to walk underneath, up the 2nd to last staircase to get to one of the main tiers. You can sort of see underneath it how quickly the mountain goes down and into the distance in the background. Off to the far left side of the temple was an exit (or entrance) with two giant, painted ...

We used our first full day in Busan to go to the most famous of its temples, Haedong Yonggunsa. It has a beautiful location on the rocky coast, and the weather was gorgeous for the hike down. On the way down to the temple we walked past a row of statues representing the Chinese Zodiacs. So of course we all posed for pictures with our animal. Jarah and I were the only Monkeys. We arrived at the temple just as the first groups of tourists were starting to flow in. When we walked past these statues on the way in of "Budda for Academic Achievement" they were empty, but when we were leaving we noticed they were COVERED in coins. Apparently someone really needed some luck with their school grades. The pig statues I slowly started to noticed were everywhere in Korea. They eat a lot of pork here because it's one of the cheapest meats in Korea because pigs are easy to raise there. They don't have the space for grazing cows, so most dairy pro...