I'm Back!/Bijindo Island

Hi everyone, I know that it has been so long since there has been a post up on this site. I guess things got extremely busy before I left Korea. I thought it was better to do as much as I could while I still had time instead of sitting around and blogging about things I already did. Am I right?

So I guess you know by now that I have left Korea. It was a great and crazy second year with that trip to Vietnam, a visit from my family, lots of bungee jumping, new Iron Kimchi lineups, and then my case of walking pneumonia and then the ensuing broken rib due to coughing. Hahahaha. Good times. Anyway, I plan to clear my vaults of all the blog posts I have stocked up. This could be upwards of 10, so I recommend to keep checking back a lot because I have some time off now.

This post is about a trip that I made with a bunch of friends to an island off of the southeast coast of Korea. It was over a long weekend where we had Monday off due to Korean Independence Day, which was awesome. We don't get a lot of long weekends working in Korea.

To get to the island involved two bus rides, a taxi ride, and then a boat ride. We first rode the bus to Daejeon in central Korea and spent a night out with a few friends who live there. Of course we ended up staying up way too late, but it was OK since it was just bus riding the next morning. So we rode the next bus, which was over 3 hours, to Tongyeong, the port city with a boat that goes to Bijindo, the island. Before going on the boat, we had a pretty mad shopping spree at the department store. We had to buy supplies for 2 nights of camping since there areno real stores on the island. Our shopping lists all included a lot of food, water, beer, soju, and beer. I ended up carrying a box with 20 bottles of soju because my friend Nick Slater thought it would be such a great idea to have that many bottles.

Anyway, we made it on the boat where we had to ride about an hour. To pass the time, Kelsey was playing this game where you wrap a string around your fingers and then another person puts their fingers through and rearranges the strings or something. I don't know if this game has a name or not. She managed to get the two ladies next to us to play. One of them was a monk, which made for this great photo:

So that went on until they all got sleepy and needed a nap. Meanwhile, I made my way to the back of the boat to look around. There were islands all around us and it made for a beautiful tropical feel to the area. Here is one of my favorite pictures:

Our campsite was nice, and on a grass patch basically right above the beach. There were something like 18 people staying with us, and our campground looked like this:

One of the best parts was definitely the white-sand beach, which had a view like this:

And closer to sunset it looked like this:

Due to the lack of refrigeration or even ice on the island, we had to get creative with cooling off our beer supply. My friend Rob and I worked on burying his Heineken mini keg in the beach in order to cool it off a little. Anytime a boat went by, though, a large enough wave would wash up to knock over the keg and the rocks surrounding it. We got used to drinking our beer warm.

Aside from trying to cool the keg, we spent much of the second day making sand castles and other creations from sand. Lets just say that the other art we made from clay is pretty sexually graphic and I won't put any pictures of it on this site. I will also say that it was well constructed and a lot of other people wanted to get pictures of and with it.

After the sand building, I went for a walk with my friend, Nick Slater. This island is actually made up of two circular islands connected by a land bridge. The island opposite of our campsite had a mountain perfect for hiking up and coming back within an hour or two. Here is the mountain:

As we walked up, we enjoyed the interesting vegetation and the nice views of the surrounding area and other island.

So we started our hiking trip pretty late, and ended up at the top at around sunset:

Getting to the top of a mountain at sunset means that unless you are planning to spend the night at the top, you are going to have to hike back down in the dark. I was OK with it since I had some quality shoes to go up in. Nick somehow managed to go all the way up and down in some flip-flops with minimal injuries. Quite a feat.

After coming back, we were quite hungry. Our time on the island with only peanut butter and jelly to eat led me to create a pretty tasty snack. What you do is take a piece of bread, spread peanut butter on it, put a peeled banana on it, and then smother jelly all over the top. It's kind of like a vegetarian hot dog, and it's actually really good:

After that we did some more socializing and drinking with some Korean people staying on the island. Lets just say that Korean people are good at drinking soju and the helped us to finish our supply. Then, it was an easy trip back the next day with the boat ride followed by two bus rides.

I did come across one snag, though. I lost my key on the island, somewhere. This wouldn't have been that bad, but I lost my other key on a beach about three weeks before and didn't have anymore spares. This means I was heading to my apartment without anyway to get into it. I got ahold of my boss and he called a locksmith to let me in when I got back. It worked out well and it only cost me about $20.

The real problem came when I needed to change the lock on my apartment door. I had to leave my door unlocked until I was able to change it. Due to being lazy, I waited about a week to even buy a new door lock. After that one of the screws was stripped and I had no way to remove it with the tools I had at home. After finally borrowing a cordless drill from my school I was able to change out my lock and lock my door again. It was a period of about 2 weeks where I couldn't lock my place from the outside, but nobody tried to break in ever so that wasn't a problem.

Hoi An, Vietnam

The only stop on our train voyage through Vietnam that time allowed was in Hoi An. More specifically, the train stop was in Danang, and then we got a taxi ride to the ancient city of Hoi An, which is now basically a tourist resort. We only had 24 hours to spend, so it was somewhat of a quick stop.

The city of Hoi An is very picturesque because the buildings are so very old and have a unique architecture compared to the rest of Vietnam. It's pretty small, but I didnt' have too much time to explore the area:

One of the features of this town is that a river runs through it, making it even more beautiful. For some reason we witnessed a boat crossing the river completely crammed with motorbikes, bicycles, and people. I have no idea where it was going:

The river also included many entrepeneurs who offer boat rides for a cheap price. Kelsey and I caught a boat ride during the sunset, though it was overcast and getting dark so quickly. At least there was a nice pink hue to the sky for a while:

Me driving the boat:

The boat ride was nice, but we needed to refuel. Seeing a bunch of restaurants, we stopped at a random one and got an order of duck curry and duck rice. Here is my duck curry with a Vietnamese-style coffee on the side:

Our restaurant seated us very close to the street, so many street souvenir sales-people stopped by to greet us. This kid sold his small clay animal shaped ocarinas for quite a bit more than some places, but he was just so charming. He kept calling Kelsey darling, and she ended up buying a bunch of stuff from him:

I also bought a few things from him, as well as a few souvenirs from a girl raising money to put herself through school. Overall, the gifts sold in this town tended to be quite a mark-up from the rest of Vietnam. Hoi An did offer some great taylored clothing, though. Apparently a suit made in Hoi An is only half the price compared to Saigon or Hanoi. Kelsey used the opportunity to get a custom made dress. She ordered a dress at 8 something the night we got there, and they had it ready for her by 11 the next day. Pretty ridiculous, actually, for only about 20 bucks a dress.

We spent that night at a club with some other travelers and some ex-pats living in Vietnam. There were some interesting people from Russia, Belgium, Australia, the U.S., etc.

The next day was booked with walking through this market and getting breakfast:

This was followed by getting an hour long massage, picking up her dress, checking out of the hotel, and then eating lunch and getting out of town. It was a really nice place to visit, but 24 hours was a little too short.