More of the same of Korea - March and April 2024 - Page 4

Daegu is the colourful city, they plant flowers everywhere. Here are some flowers.

The inside of the Daegu station is very good, in someways there are more stores and restaurants than even the main station in Seoul. Also it is attached to the enormous department store I visited a few nights ago.

A feature inside all Korean stores and stations are these air purifying machines. Probably a COVID invention someone got rich off. Most of them are not working. Here only one out of the three pictured is still working.

Here comes my train!

I got a first class seat for the 20 minute journey. Which cost about an extra $1.

Here is Gyeongju station. Now this will be confusing if you are coming here in the near future. Until recently this was called SinGyeongju station, Sin meaning 'new'. But they have since ripped the old station out of the middle of Gyeongju altogether, and renamed this one just Gyeongju station. Google does not know about this and still thinks slow trains run into the middle of Gyeongju city. They no longer do, and the city is over 20km away, hence you must take a bus. The bus is mainly on a freeway so it does not take long.

And here is proof that you need to take a bus.

For my first photo in Gyeongju, a market that looks like any other market in Korea.

On my 4 hour pointless wander I wandered to the most bland parts of the city.

Although the local burger king was looking pretty cool.

If you feel like being crippled in a creative way, Gyeongju has a plethora of options for tourists.

Imagine being on the news for being in a serious snoopy bike accident?

Photo taken to prove I was actually in Gyeongju.

Now for something historic. Funeral mounds!

Are they funeral mounds or Tombs? Well there is a museum, so I went in to find out. Also I do not know what the difference is between a funeral mound and a tomb anyway.

Inside the museum they have recreated the inside of one of the tombs. Which is rocks, wooden structures, and a central crypt.

The streets nearby are nice, and there are busy neon areas nearby that I will photograph later. This particular street is all tourist gift shops, and mostly closed on Monday.

I do not really know what this is, it is not a door, but it looks like those giant stone tablets that try to crush you in Mario Kart.

Here is the outside of my hotel. It is quite new.

And now the all important hotel shots. The room is large, there is a little table and chair off to my left not shown. Thet tv is the biggest tv I have ever sat in front of, and as I type this I am sitting one foot away from it. Also I would like to thank the previous guests who left their netflix account logged in, same thing happened at the previous hotel too. Oh and of course, wooden floor.

The bathroom is also huge. Separate bath. I am standing on a raised area inside the large bathroom, but the entire pictured area all floods when you take a shower, the shower does not go into the bath. At least the toilet is raised above the shower area in this one which is not always the case!
I think for dinner I will just continue to explore the local area after dark, my mindless wandering today has resulted in almost 30k steps!

Tonight will be mostly photos of nice looking streets. Here is one.

Here is another. There are temporary water pipes running above many of the streets and some are dug up. They must be replacing the water main. Reminds me of home where that has been going on for about 4 years now.

See, more elevated water pipes and some of the street dug up. Very quiet tonight.

Apparently this is gold street. There is a lot of interesting lighting along many of the streets.

Behold, the granddaddy of all funeral mounds. So grand that awesome trees grow out of it!

And finally, the cube steak dinner that crashed my computer. Note that the picture I ordered from did not come with chips, the rice was on the plate, along with vegetables. Instead I got chips and salad, and rice on the side. Still it was delicious, the steak was of a high quality and cooked in something pleasantly chilli infused.
Tomorrow may be a hiking day of sorts, I suspect the trail behind the main tourist attraction is currently cut short. I shall go and find out.

Bulkguksa is about 30 minutes by bus away from down town Gyeongju. The road there is completely cherry blossom lined, and goes around theme parks, historic sites, roller coasters and a big lake. The APEC summit is also here next year so there is a lot of work going on around the convention centre areas. This is just a typical street in the Bulguksa village, more on the other stuff tomorrow, probably.

The path up to the temple at Bulguksa was a total blossom fest.

A veritable sea of blossoms. People were gathering up handfuls and throwing them in the breeze.

I read that to enter the temple costs $6, but today it was free. This may be because of the typhoon last year that closed the grotto for a while. More on that below. The temple grounds are quite nice of course.

Behold, Bulguksa, with blue sky! Pollution free blue sky.

The temple is much like any other temple, apparently it has a lot of significance to Buddhists, but to me it was no more or less spectacular than the 100's of others I have seen.

A lot of plastic lanterns were in the process of being hung everywhere.

Last temple pic. The light was spectacular.

Here is a German tour group on the bridge getting in my way as I try to exit the compound.

Now for the path to the Seokguram grotto. This was only recently opened after a typhoon caused a landslide. I had read that even while closed, real hikers had devised a way around... and I was prepared to try that, but it seems it is all repaired and now a driveway followed by new staircase.

I am assuming this is the bit that was destroyed by the landslide. I feel as though it is just a matter of time until it happens again.

Cloud was rolling in, so I got a shot of the view back towards Gyeongju from about half way up. It does not even take an hour to get to the grotto and the path is never particularly steep. Despite that, the tripadvisor review talks about near death experiences and how the path is best left to Bear Grylls. There were Junior high school kids skipping along the path and plenty of senior citizens, so some people really need to re learn how to walk 2km.

I have arrived at the grotto area. I did not know what to expect other than a stone Buddha. They have a good quality toilet.

This is it! It goes back into the hill for maybe 30 or 40 metres, and you can go in and look at 100 or so people praying in front of it, but there are numerous no photo police in there, so no photo of the UNESCO world heritage Buddha.

It is good to see the monks support the rainbow revolution.

After a walking back along the path a bit, it was time to veer further up the mountain and start the ascent to Tohamsan. There were zero other people from this point onwards, despite that the path was still of great quality. No rock scrambling today.

Not as desolate as the other day, but still quite desolate.

I got to this sign and thought, here we go, the trail is cut. But I translated it and no, this is a sign telling you that it is illegal to consume alcohol on the summit area. OK then.

Today's helicopter landing pad. They would really struggle to land in the wind today. It was windy enough that taking photos was difficult, so no selfies or stance shot today.

I had the summit all to myself.

Here is the view, away from Gyeongju. There was no real view back towards the city from the top.

I imagine you can get a view from the top of the fire spotting tower, but the thing is covered in cameras so it is probably not worth the risk of climbing for a view.

Now for the great path down. There were other ways to go down too that would make for a longer hike, but I wanted to go back down and explore the Bulkguksa village area.

The path down was fast, smooth, and often lined with purple flowers. I ran some of it.

Getting near the bottom, and it is graveyard time. Not as grand as the funeral mounds in town. I imagine if we had these in Australia, kids on BMX bikes would enjoy them. Interestingly, some of the tomb stones have crucifix's engraved on them, I assumed they were Buddhist graves, or maybe its like Taiwan where they like to hedge their bets?

And then, as usual, I exited the path into farmland.

Not to worry, I was very near a golf course. This is a boring photo except for the autonomous follow me golf buggies. Everyone had one, it literally follows you, and you tap something on it when you want it to stop. I had never seen that before.

This is the first tee. Fake grass! The course looks very high quality apart from the fake grass tee. This is part of the Kolon sports resort, Kolon sports is basically Korean Adidas / Nike.

Now for a few pics of the Bulguksa village, every building here is made to look like ye olde style.

They still have new style old person exercise equipment though.

All the streets here are nice.

I am pretty sure this is a hotel. They had a wall so I climbed up on some rocks for the photo. OK, that is enough photos of Bulguksa.

Let's start with some tomb mounds. Here are some mounds with a pond.

A tomb with flowers. Unlike the ones from yesterday, you are not allowed to walk around these ones, you have to view from afar. Still some people were walking on the grass, which prompted angry yelling over loud speakers.

Double mounds and cool trees. I like these mounds.

Now for the streets of Hwangnidan. I think Hwangnidan is a specific street but the whole area of many streets is for toursists, and there is a huge amount of new old development going on.

If you are too lazy to walk, you can annoy everyone and get around on a golf buggy.

An example of a cafe. I did not actually see a starbucks, even though everything looks like a starbucks, only more expensive.

These are all cafe's and all quite new.

Another street view.

And still more. I imagine on the weekend it is hard to move around with the traffic going past.

Even tonight it was quite busy.

A rare empty block, soon it will be a new historic ice cream shop.

The alleyways were also quite nice.

Forget the golf buggies, I want to drive around in this!

An example of a new cafe, still under construction.

One last shot, looking directly into the sun.

And now for my dinner, pork and kimchi risotto gratin. Basically cheese and rice. Delicious.

If you were thinking about starting the day with a coffee, think about 12 noon, as that is when most coffee shops open. Also apart from the weird sign and spelling error, what does that slogan actually hope to achieve?

I walked through a park with some nice trees, trees with leaves.

Obviously, there were funeral mounds. Lots of entombed kings.

Historic relic #1, Cheomseongdae observatory, from about 600 AD. I thought the word Seongdae meant pig for some reason, but evidently not.

The tulip game nearby is top notch, and popular with cyclists.

I wandered into an enchanted forest, first up some old unmarked stone relic inside a mini shrine.

The actual forest here was pretty gnarly.

This is actually a covered bridge, much like the famed bridges of Madison County.

It was now time to ascend the fortress wall at Wolseong. I am somewhat surprised they let you climb on it because all the flat plain grass areas are off limits. The moat is new and about 30cm deep. I guess if you hate getting your feet wet it might be a deterrent to invading hordes.

More fortress wall. More blue sky today, also about 20c again, and no wind. Hence a bit more pollution but not too bad compared to previous days.

Blue plastic heralds an area of new ancient ruins on the process of being re-constructed. There is a huge amount of historic construction going on all across Gyeongju, perhaps to coincide with the upcoming APEC summit.

Unmarked tombs. With cool trees.

Now it is time for the Donggung palace and Wolji pond. These are not old buildings. The pond was pretty nice though.

A lot of blossoms floating in the pond. More blossompocolypse later.

OMG it is the convention centre where the APEC summit will be held. You can pay to go in and see the seats they are planning to install.

Gyeongju world. I saw no evidence the roller coaster was actually running.

Gyeongju world on the right, California beach on the left. I assume they are ticketed separately, or perhaps you can get a combo pass. I got neither.

A pagoda. Actually it is a hotel. Albo (Aus PM) will probably stay in the pagoda hotel next year.

This drain leads up to the edge of the mountains I was on yesterday. The main parts are off to the right, but a longer trail option I could have taken would have come down to here.

Now for some pics of the all but abandoned expo park. The main attraction is this tower with the cutout of the aforementioned pagoda hotel. Presumably there is somewhere to line up a photo to get the pagoda to fill the hole.

The other main attraction appears to be this vast concrete area with the re-creation of the observatory from earler, and another conference hall. I will never know the truth as I, and everyone else, refused to pay $20 to find out.

Instead I doubled back past California beach. There is no evidence the water slides are operating.

Now for a tour of the actual lake. Lake Bomunho, and its many blossom filled trees.

If you suffer from hayfever, here is your chance.

I crossed the lake on a floating series of bridges and examined the quality of the swan boats. They appear to have motors rather than pedals. Boooo!!!

It is no Hangzhou west lake (refer to my 2 visits there), but it is still pretty nice.

And then as I headed back to the road to find a bus stop, a giant water wheel appeared. Why you may wonder?

It generates this fake waterfall. It seems to exist to keep you entertained while you wait 5 minutes for a bus. So.. that's all for now! That was a lot?

I have seen this building across the road from my hotel and thought nothing of it. It turns out it is a multi level supermarket. As a connoisseur of supermarkets all over the world, this is exciting news.

I passed a new city gate and wall on my journey. So I climbed up it to investigate.

Other side of the wall.

Late afternoon sun makes for great drain photos, the same drain / creek I would cross later on those rocks you see below.

This is the former train track that ran through the middle of town, now ripped up.

Once over in the north eastern part of the city and high rise modern apartments are again a feature. There are not really any of these in the old tourist part of town.

The solo lonely funeral mound on this side of the city. Banished for eternity.

Here is an example of the hotels to rent by the hour streets that make up the designated tourist area.

Now I bravely crossed the raging torrent of water. I can report that I made it safely across and did not get wet.

I was surprised to see that a few places are still open in this market after dark, you never know when you might need blended fish guts.

This is the old station, now useless. Note the I love Gyeongju sign proudly boasts of APEC 2025. If it were to be cancelled for any reason, they may never recover.

And finally, my hot pot for one. It looks like a huge amount of food, but the vegetables piled high on top of the burner boiled down to nearly nothing very soon. It was all bean shoots, mushrooms and cabbage. So with the few thin slithers of beef, this was basically almost a healthy vegetable soup.
Tomorrow is a hiking day of sorts, I have spotted a path that takes in various abandoned relics on a mountain trail. It is hard to tell how long it is - I think the far end has no bus so I might have to double back.