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| Students left on May 27th and I had planned a trip to Myanmar with a friend who was coming from the United States but she had to cancel. Therefore with a week off, I wanted to travel one more time. I wanted to see somewhere beautiful and so Onions found me a cheap ticket to Jeju-do a South Korean island. |
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| Onions found us a cheap ticket on China's ONLY discount no-frills airline out of Shijiazhuang airport. Being that I sometimes don't listen, I didn't know that there was actually a rail station at the airport so I took the train all the way to the city of Shijiazhuang and then had to race back to the airport, barely making the flight. |
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| Sunrise over Jeju |
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| Zach N. (a former student who happened to have some free time during his summer in China) picked a hotel on what turned out to be one of the few sandy beaches. |
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| Why so few sandy beaches? Turns out that Jeju is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for it's volcanic history. |
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| There are three major UNESCO highlighted sites. The first is Seongwon ilchulbong. |
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| It's an stunted volcanic crater. |
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| It's a 180 meter climb to the rim. |
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| Looking back from the rim of the crater, you can see that the island is dotted with these little lava mountains. |
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| The central feature of Jeju is Hallesan, the tallest mountain in all of South Korea. There is also a lake in the crater but it's a long hike and you need to be on the trail by a certain time to ensure getting down before sunset. We didn't have time. |
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| I thought this a funny site. Do they not have any colored cars? |
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| Yes, I ate some kimchi. But this was an interesting noodle dish. It came with ice cubes and you poured your soup to melt the ice cubes. |
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| Our second full day was rainy but we still got out to see the sites. Here is an interesting geological formation. The lava cooled in hexagonal columnar form. |
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| The third of the UNESCO sites are the lava tubes. Most of them are closed to the public, but 1 kilometer of this 7.5 kilometer tube is open to the public. |
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| Unlike caves there there all all the geologic formations this is just a big long tunnel. |
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| The streaks on the wall indicate that the lava flowed at different levels. |
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| Another lava dome mountain just in the middle of the island. |