ulsanbawi

so here is a picture blog of our latest adventure:
climbing ulsanbawi. ulsanbawi is a tall mountain thingy at the national park here in sokcho.
so of course we need to start with the obligatory picture of the HUGE buddah statue :-p

so this is where we are headed to. the map said it was going to be over a kilometer of "hard" hiking. yeah, we were in for a long day . . .the rocks of ulsanbawi are rather interesting. they are almost like a stark white when everything around them isnt. also there isnt any foliage on it, it makes ulsanbawi rather distinctivealong the way there were a couple of random temples. so we stopped and took some pictures. rather cool. this is about the coolest temple fountain we've seen . . .we think some random monks are interred in these . . .another random temple along the way . . .also, along the way was heundeulbawi. . . literally translated it means rocking rock. the goal is to push the rock off the ledge, even though its impossible. pretty much its famous for being a rock :-peven though there were stairs for part of the hike it was a literal climbing of a mountain. at many points the stairs were more like a glorified ladder then stairsthe rock above the stairs fell and is percariously perched above the stair case. it would be nice to think this was the first time we thought we would die along the hike, it wasnt, and it wasnt the last either :-pagain the rocks looked really coolthe coolest thing about the hike was at the top they set up a mini tourist trap! now the last thing you need after hiking for 5 hours are people trying to sell you stuff. about the most humorous thing up there is that one guy had a bull horn. what makes this funny? the top portion was only 10 feet wide by 30 feet long. if he just talked you would have been able to hear him :-p

tova was happy that we survived . . .i was ecstatic apparantley :-pand a view of our city from the top. thats pretty much our whole city. its tiny, but we love it
in total we spent about 5 hours going up (including stops for pictures, and random temple viewage) and two hours climbing down. it was pretty awesome. we had a great time, and we were sore for the next week:-p until next time . . .