sybarites

Yesterday, we spent an hour standing on a hot bus full of old ladies while driving down twisting mountain roads. When we finally arrived we found that our “beach surrounded by dramatic cliffs” was a dirty strip of sand in the harbour more frequented by seagulls than tourists. At least we learned a few things about the local bus system in Samcheok.

Today’s bus foray was more successful—our destination was as described and we sat for the entire journey. Hwanseongul is the largest cave system in East Asia. We expected a lot more stalactites, but the grandeur of the spaces more than made up for it.

After walking 35 minutes uphill, we started to feel cool air flowing down the mountain from the cave. The hike was exhausting in the heat, but the 10ºC temperature of the cave interior quickly refreshed us. Of course, the cave took my mind off of any lingering weariness. I was looking around agog half the time.

A 1.6 kilometer steel pathway was build around the interior to show the caves most interesting sites and views. In the picture you can see the colored lights that lined part of the path. We were standing on top of a large rock looking down through the cavern. The stalactite in the upper right was dripping water onto the floor far below. Most of the floor was covered with pools, streams and water falls.

Each room that ventured of the main path had one ore more interesting features. This is just one 20 foot section of the wall above a small pool. We couldn’t get a good picture of the “bacon” formation which hung in a strip from the roof nearby.

Hwansoelgul would have made Korea worthwhile for me had we needed another justification.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 8th, 2006 at 1:35 am by Marc and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.