2. More Relo's!

Another amazing weekend just flew by. But first, I have news! Pritika Mousi and Navin Mousa arrived last week on Saturday night (12th)!! I went to pick them up and after the astonished comments relating to how clean everything was and how they never expected Korea to have a Starbucks in the airport, we went to Incheon city to stay the night. On Sunday we travelled back to my place and then after staying there Monday and Tuesday they left for Japan early Wednesday morning.

Anyway, now I’m alone again until tomorrow (Tuesday) when they come back. The plan after that is to leave for Chuncheon for some Ddalkgalbi on Thursday night and then Seoul all day Friday.

Now back to last weekend. Since I have the car now (Cassie gave it to me for a couple of weeks while the Mous’s is here) I drove to Yanggu on Friday afternoon after Korean class. On Saturday we decided to go for a road-trip to the east coast of our province. We’ve seen everything else there is to see on the east coast so we decided to go up north to see what we could find. We had our camping gear packed so there was no need to worry about accommodation or anything like that. Another great aspect of owning a car over here is that we could stop anywhere we’d like. Like the many reststops along the way..

.. and this great little retreat by the highway. One of the most relaxing picnics I've been on!


Then after plain after plain of rice paddy's and a lot of twisties..


.. we discovered Hwajinpo Beach..



..and Aquarium!


Now you might be wondering about the barbed wire and the little bunker and look-out; see, being just 12km away from the DMZ means that all the beaches are secured by the military. Not only that, as far as I know South Korea has barbed wire and posted lookouts all the way across the east coast! It didn’t stop us from setting up camp on the beach though! I remember lying on the beach realizing how far I’ve come from just a year ago.. listening to the waves endlessly crashing, the crackling of the multi-hued driftwood fire, the scent of the salty ocean breeze, and Cassie’s warmth as she lay beside me.. all this under a blanket of a thousands stars. Something that also surprised me was the smell that the fire was giving off.. there were many pine trees around and so we used pine cones and fallen pine needles as fuel.. the aroma was better than any incense stick I’ve ever smelled.

..that, was until 10pm. They chose that time to come and tell us that we couldn't camp on the beach. They didn't speak English too well, so when we played dumb, they pulled out their machine guns pointing and saying "North, South, fighting, HERE". We had to pack everything up and relocate to a grassy area in the carpark. I thought it would be a huge pain, but only 30mins later we were set up at our new location!

The lights you see on the horizon are actually squid fishermen. Hundreds of megawatts of light is used up each night, attached along the trawlers to lure the squid to the surface of the ocean. These lights are so bright that they can be seen clearly from space. In fact, when seen from space during peak squidding season; the sea of Japan is almost as bright as Japan itself!

The next morning we woke early to see the sunrise. We were still really drowsy and bloody freezing, so we got up and sat in the car with the heater on full blast to watch the sun come up. Finally at around 6:30am, it showed up. Here are some pictures I took after I worked up the courage to get out of the car..



We had nothing at all planned for the day so after waiting for the sun to dry out the tent, we packed up and went for a little drive. We saw a brown sign with the words Unific Ovserv. on it.. as in Oz, brown sign’s usually mean tourist attractions.

After finding the place we acquired permission (10,000won) to go up to the North/South Unification Observatory.



Once we got there we saw these gigantic statues. One of Bhudda and the other of Mother Mary.



North Korea itself really just looked like the rest of Korea. Except for one thing.. the mountains we saw looked dry and desolate. I have a theory that before the Southerners agreed to the unification observatory, they bombed the living hell out of those mountains to make it look as though North Korea is really a third world country full of nothing beautiful. That’s just my own mini conspiracy.. If you would to read more like more, such as: North and South Korea: allies against the world! Please subscribe to my newsletter.

Here is the view into North Korea..



To top it all off, we went to war memorial type place at the foot of the observatory. After guiding us through the many faceless people who had died in wars and how many nations united together for the Korean War.. we found this solemn room.. It made our day!

That's all for now.. Hope all is well with you, where ever you are!

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