South Korea 9: The trip to Jeju and walking up the Seongsan Ilchulbong volcano crater

Yesterday morning we left early for the airport.  We were flying with Air Busan and they wouldn't allow online checkin.  We arrived with so much time left that they asked if we wanted to take an earlier flight.  QWe ended up arriving an hour and twenty minutes earlier than scheduled.  The flight took about forty minutes.

We had to take a five minute bus ride to get to the area where we could pick up our rental car.  It is a Kia, which is a Korean car company that I believed was going bankrupt and then was bought out by Hyundai, another Korean company.  We left for our first hotel, in Seongsan, located in the northeast corner of the island.  It took much longer than I expected before we saw any rural landscape.  Jeju is not similar in any way to how rural Yakushima, Japan was.  There are tons of people on this island.

After settling in to our hotel, we went to climb Seongsan Ilchulbong, a volcanic crater topped mountain.  It is pretty much a straight walk up, not taking much longer than twenty minutes.  The view from the top was nice, but I found the view behind us to be nicer.

This is a bad picture that I took from the mountain after we had hiked it.

We took our time on the way down because I kept stopping to try to take pictures of the nicely colored butterflies.  Unfortunately, it was too overcast to get much.



We walked to about five convenience stores in town, but I couldn't find a single sandwich that I liked, unlike in Busan which had tons readily accessible.  Most of the local restaurants in this small town are seafood related, which I don't eat.

One building is strangely labeled "Hotel and Chinese Restaurant," which I found amusing.



I also took this picture of the lake in town, featuring the highly coveted soul of a shoe in the foreground. 



In the hotel, we encountered our first Bible of our trip, both in Korean and English.