TravelBio

Last weekend I went on a Seoul Hiking Group trip to Seoraksan National Park.  The group is the same one that I took the trip to Jeju with, and I’ve also done some shorter day trips with them around Seoul.  Seoraksan is in the northeast, about a three hour drive from Seoul.  Our plan was to go by bus to the park on Friday night and start hiking in the wee hours of the morning on Saturday. Seoraksan is in the northeast corner of South Korea, not far from the Pyeongchang ski resort Matt, one of my co-teachers, also went along.  We were picked up by the bus near midnight in central Seoul.  I tried without much success to get a bit of shut eye on the bus.  Not long after my short nap started we arrived at the park.  There were two long hikes – one that Warren (the group leader) estimated would take 15 hours, the other at 11 hours.  The paths didn’t split until partway into the hike, so the group started out together.  We left the ...

This past weekend I took a trip to Busan, the second largest city in Korea.  Busan is located along the southeastern coast of the Korean peninsula (Seoul is in the northwest of the country).  It is definitely a smaller city than Seoul, but the metro area has probably close to 5 million people. Busan is basically on the opposite side of South Korea from Seoul, but the country isn't very large - not much bigger than Ohio! Central Busan with Gwangan Bridge A friend of mine from Seoul is a musician and was planning to travel to Busan for a music show.  Several other artists from the Seoul area were also performing, so they decided to rent a bus and drive down together.  All told there were about 45 of us on the bus.  We were scheduled to leave Seoul at 10 am, and the trip was supposed to take 5 hours.  We left a good half an hour late, and due to traffic didn’t arrive until 5pm.  The ride was quite fun though.  The organizers brou...