Jeju: Horseback Riding & Sunrise Peak

Date: 12/25

After Trick Art Museum we went horseback riding.  This was the only part of the 3 day trip that was disappointing.  I had read in some travel guides that you could ride a horse on the beach.  This is one of the things on my "To Do" list for LIFE so I was really excited.

The "ride" was maybe 7 minutes total.  We went up, did a photo shot, and came down, looped the carrol twice and were done.  I understand that there were 40 of us, but really, it was sad.  But!  There was a really cool/hot Korea who was on horseback--and let me tell you--that's how I passed the 30-odd minutes of waiting after riding on the horses--watching him!

Hot Korean + Pretty Horse + Actual horseback riding skill =  Merry Christmas Maggie!

We piled back on the bus and head over to Sunrise Peak (or Seongsan Illchubong in Korean).  This was an impressive piece of geography.  Basically Jeju is a bunch of peaks of volcanos, and this volcano just happened to have exploded and left a giant crater at the top.   I just looked up the Korean for Sunrise peak and saw that the technical word for Sunrise Peak is a tuff cone--just in case anyone was interested!

These statues dot the Jeju landscape.  They are called Hollabong (which, I think, ironically is also a type of orange that is native of Jeju).  As you can see, the left statue has his left hand higher--which means scholar.  The right statue has his right hand higher--which means he is a warrior hollabong.  You always see these guys in pairs so that the scholar and warrior balance each other out.  

Hiking in Korea is not like hiking at home--which I wasn't expecting.  I mean, how different can hiking up the side of a mountain be?  Well, you're not really "hiking"--you're stair mastering!  No joke--the whole walk up the mountain was a giant stair case.

The whole way up!

Even though it was cloudy, it was still a beautiful view from the top.  It was right prior to sunset, so the colors really were pretty.

At the Summit!

Group Shot at the top!

We went back to the hotel after this...tired and hungry!  And they had a wonderful dinner prepared for us: TURKEY!  Granted, it was mix dinner--both Korean and Western food, but they had Turkey and cranberry sauce so they made me happy.  I think I had 3 plates full of turkey and about 2/3s of a cranberry sauce can.  It made me so happy!

This was the start of my "I'm away from home on Christmas" rough spot.  Which can really be expected.  But, they flipped on the kareoke machine, turned up the christmas tunes and we started singing away.  Well...I didn't.  The place we had dinner at (a room attached to the hotel) had two floors and on the top floor there was a piano that kinda looked over the center of the bottom floor.

General baffoonery insued:

I have no idea what Scott and I were doing here...but we were laughing and that's the point!

Sarah and I proceeded to drink a little bit too much wine and sing at the top of our lungs along with the people who were noraebang-ing (Korean kareoke).  I think at some points we were actually louder than the people on the microphones.  We got a couple shout outs, that's for sure.

See Sarah and I up top?

By the end of the night, though we had enough wine to give me (Sarah had already sang a couple songs on the mic) enough confidence to go down and sing along with everyone else.  For the last 45 minutes, a group of like 15 of us sang our hearts out.  It was a great ending to Christmas Day.  (Along with the news that the 8.5 hour hike the next day had been cancelled due to dangerous amounts of snow).