day #17 2/09/16What exactly is a lava tunnel you ask? Well, I too did not know about this phenomenon until visiting Jeju Island. Jeju is home to Manjanggul Cave, a 8928m long lava tube; one of the longest in the world. Manjanggul was about 2 hours on the bus from my hostel and I hoped that it wouldn't be yet another UNESCO disapointment (see the previous post if you don't know what I'm on about). I set off with Julia, the German girl I met at the BBQ the previous night, 2 Argentinan sisters Clara and Cecilia who have been travelling for 2 years and have no intention of stopping and Hsiaochin (none of us ever really figured out how to pronounce this...) a Chinese girl who had come to take advantage of Jeju's duty free shopping. The first part of the adventure to the lava tunnel is the bus ride; our bus driver on this occasion managed to exceed all previous experiences of Korean bus drivers and we had no less than 5 near collisions on our journey. So yes sorry, you are all desperate to discover what a lava tube is. Well...as Wikipedia puts it: it is a "natural conduit formed by flowing lava which moves beneath the hardened surface of a lava flow". Basically it is a very long cave/tunnel which has wiggly patterns on the walls and floor due to the solidified lava flow (I would have been such an asset to the geological field I know). One of the highlights of the lava tunnel is that as soon as you enter it the temperature drops about 15 degrees. I found myself wearing a fleece in South Korea in the middle of August and it was wonderful. Only about 1km of the cave is actually open to tourists; the size and shape of the tunnel/tube/cave/whatever it is, constantly changes - from small passageways no higher than 2 meters tall to enormous open caverns 30m wide and twice as high. Unfortunately it is near impossible to take decent photos without a very good camera and tripod, having neither of these I have added some photos from google images to give you an idea of what it was like. When I could convince my companions to remain in the cold no longer we left the cave and headed back to Seogwipo, again narrowly surviving our ordeal on the bus. After constant meals of rice, meat and fermented vegetables (or more often, no vegetables at all) we all opted for pizza. The selling point of the particular pizza restaurant we chose was the unlimited salad bar; the staff seemed completely bemused that all of us were more interested in depleting their fresh lettuce stocks rather than order the daily special ''Shrimp Snow Time''. Sadly I have no idea what Shrimp Snow Time pizza consisted of but the photo did little to tempt us into ordering it. (All photos from Google Images)
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Who?Med-school graduate, aspiring graphic designer embarking on a quarter-life-crisis expedition to Asia. Archives |