Nic Trips

The biggest reason I planned my winter vacation trip to Beijing, China (to a place even colder than Korea), was because I wanted to cross off one of the things on my top 3 places I wanted to see most in the world: The Pyramids of Giza (Egpyt) Machu Picchu (Peru) The Great Wall of China  -  CHECK! We had a big decision ahead of us when choosing which tour to the great wall to do. There are several sections open to tourist in Beijing, and some are more famous than others. Badaling and Mutianyu are the most visited because they are the most restored and closest to the city (only an hour away). We ended up choosing Jinshanling, for a few reasons. Much of Jinshanling has been restored (like the other well known sections), but not as much as Badaling and Mutianyu, meaning we got to see a few sections of the wall that look original: old and crumbling. Also, Jinshanling is very far away from the city. It's normally about a 3 hour drive, so it attracts much few tourists. O...

Since last year I tried to climb this mountain, but wasn't able to finish it before dark, I decided to give it another try this year and start much earlier in the morning! Sinbulsan is not the tallest mountain in Ulsan, but it is one of the toughest mountains to climb in because it is so steep. The Korean word for hiking, "등산" (deung-san), literally means "mountain climbing" and this is one hike for which that meaning is as literal as can be. I mapped out our trail afterwards using Google Earth so you can see it in the image above. We started to the left and went around clockwise. Our base starting point was at an elevation of 70 meters (230 feet). The peak is 1,159 meters (3,802 feet). We hiked for 6.5 hours (4 hours to the top, and 2.5 hours back down), and only covered a distance of about 5.4 miles (8.7 km). The hike started of slowly and steadily, with a stream and a nice waterfall called 홍류 폭포 (Hong-ryu Waterfall). Shortly after leaving the...

From May 2nd - 5th, many of us had a long, 4 day, weekend because of the Children's Day holiday May 5th. So naturally, we left Ulsan in search of an adventure elsewhere in Korea. This time, we headed back to Seoul to explore some of the endless list of places we had yet to see. The first day of our small vacation, we spent most of the morning and early afternoon hiking Bukhansan ( 북한산). This is a relatively small mountain compared to others we've climbed in Korea at 836 m, but it was a great trek and offered an incredible view from the highest peak: Ba egundae. It ended up taking us about 3.5 hours to get up and back down again, but we spent a considerable amount of time hanging out at the top eating gimbap and taking pictures on the cool cliffs. The first great photo-opt of the trail was of a different one of Bukhansa's 3 peaks: Insubong. We had to hike around it to get to the trial leading up to Baegundae, but it was neat to see all the brave climbers...