On the first full day in Jeju, I awoke at the crack of dawn…before even the alarm clock set for way too early in the morning was supposed to go off. I don’t know about all of you in TV land, but this is a normal thing for me both when traveling and on the eve of my travels. Once awake I got a shower going on and then prepared an outstanding breakfast of leftover Italian food and cup ramen…oh and coffee too, but actually Jinhui made the coffee, not me, and I guess technically I didn’t make the pizza either since I just heated it up, but I did so without an oven or microwave oven for that matter so that’s gotta count for something.
Moving on, starting on this day Jinhui and I were going to be traveling as part of a tour group. So at early o’clock in the morning the tour bus came to our hotel and picked us up. From this point on the entire trip became a lot like the Magical Mystery Tour, only I was the walrus and there were a lot more newlyweds. Once all these couples had been picked up we headed off on our adventure.
The first stop of the day was 신비의도로 (The Road of Mystery) or as my wife and countless other people on the tour referred to it, 도깨비도로 (Goblin Road). Technically we didn’t really even stop. The gimmick of this site is that it’s a hill that things roll up as opposed to down. So the bus driver turned off the engine, but the bus in neutral and we rolled up a hill. It was kind of weird, but not as awesome as if there had been actual goblins about. At the end of the Road of Mystery, the bus door opened and some middle aged lady jumped on and grabbed the microphone in the front.
At first this kind of freaked me out since I had no idea who she was, and up until this point the bus driver had been serving as the tour guide, but apparently this lady was the real guide and the other dude was just a driver who apparently was super knowledgeable about roads and goblins so he got to be the tour guide for that segment. With the real tour guide now on board we headed to some venue to see some kind of circus show at 10:00 in the morning. “A circus at 10? What the deuce?”
So anyhow we saw the most randomest circus ever. There were no animals, but a lot of acrobats and people swinging on stuff that was hanging from the ceiling. People swung on long red ribbons, and people swung on metal deals, and they swung on other people…it was out of control. There was also a lady that did hula hoop with many hula hoops! She had at least 8 hula hoops going at one time with various different parts of her body! It was a little bit amazing since I can barely do one hula hoop with my waist and here was this lady doing many hula hoops with various different parts of her body. The hula hoop lady and people swinging around and also the Chinese girls that should have been in school but instead were in Jeju doing tricks with paper lanterns were all pretty good, but the most excellent of excellent adventures were the motorcycle guys.
“Motorcycle guys?”
Yes, motorcycle guys. This event had not been introduced on the tour bus as a circus, but rather as a motorcycle show show show (the tour guide had repeated the word “show” three times when telling us about it), so when we arrived I half expected some guys on dirt bikes popping wheelies and doing things one might find in the game Excite Bike. Howdy was I wrong!
No wheelies were popped, but seven men on motorcycles got into a giant metal sphere and raced around like madmen…or maybe Mad Max. Anyhow the awesomeness is just too awesome for me to attempt to describe with either English or Korean or any language of the mortals. I guess it’s a lot like the concept of Tao in that there’s no way for normal people to talk about it. Or something…awesome! So instead of writing it was awesome a bunch of times, check it out yourself!
Now I’m well aware that there are fewer than seven mens inside the ball in the video, but the stunts they did when they were seven strong were not as amazing (though the fact that there were seven men and seven motorcycles in the ball was amazing on it’s own) as the moves they did when there were less than seven mens…so that’s the video I elected to post.
Anywho, after the motorcycle show we got on the bus again and drove again until we arrived at a park filled with minautre models of famous monuments. So in an hour I was able to take pictures infront of The Great Wall of China, The Effiel Tower, and the pyramids. It was kind of funny, but my wife said that there was a similar park in Seoul that had a better set up so it was easier to take more realistic looking photos. This park was good if you wanted to take pictures that made you look like some sort of Godzilla enemy, which is pretty much what I am! Also there were statues of cosmonauts and football players and the seven dwarves, so that was there too. At this park we were also given some manner of free lunch which was buffet style Korean food, meaning there was rice and kimchi and soup made of seaweed and some other stuff too.
Following lunch we boarded the bus and headed off to a tangerine farm. Jeju-do is pretty famous for citrus fruit, particularly tangerines, so apparently a trip to a tangerine farm is a must for every tour group to Jeju-do. I was a little less than enthralled since I don’t really care all that much about where fruit comes from and care about it even less when the tour becomes a sales pitch for some sort of oriental medicine. But this is life in a guided tour…so I held my tounge, ate free tangerines, and took some pictures in an orchard.
After the boring orchard we got back on a bus and drove to a park where we saw a waterfall. It was pretty nice, but I was more impressed with the presence of phonebooths shaped like 돌하르방. Actually I take that back the waterfall was more awesome than the phonebooths, but the phonebooths were pretty radical.
With our time at the waterfall behind us we got back on the bus and literally drove 300 meters before we were made to disembark and get on a boat. This boat was pretty similar to the boat that goes up and down the Han River in Seoul, only instead of going up and down a river it went out to sea. And instead of getting to see a lot of bridges and building we got to see a lot of small islands that were made out of volcanoes. The cruise was pretty decent, and the dude (he wasn’t a sea captain, but he had a sea captain uniform on) that told us what we were looking at was a hoot (and yes, I just used to phrase “a hoot” to describe a humorous person inspite of the fact that I was not born in the 1930s). So that happened.
Then we drove to some hotel where they filmed a scene in the movie 쉬리. There was also a beach there and some other junk like palm trees and an ice skating rink. Suddenly it was super dark so we couldn’t take good pictures anymore. At this point the tour was over for the day. We were planning on going to place called Love Land without the tour group, but it suddenly started raining like a mofo, so we went back to the hotel and ordered Chinese food and drank wine.
Here ends the adventures that transpired on the second day. If you want to see pictures, then click this link that is located here.
