Day 149: Rafting, Take Two

We woke up early this morning and us three boys drove on out to the Hantang River, the same river canyon that we had visited with Maeve about a month ago.  Because Korea has been in the full swing of Monsoon Season, the river should be much higher and therefore rafting should be much more fun!

And when I say Monsoon, I really mean it!  An insane amount of rain has fallen in Korea over the last few weeks!  I knew that summer was the Rainy Season but they should rename it The Great Annual Deluge cause I haven't seen this much rain in a long, long time!  And it ain't no constant drizzle - when it rains it POURS and there's often huge thunderstorms along with it.  The thunder and lightning are cool but not when enough water to fill the Great Lakes falls on Korea every single day...  The weird thing is that despite all of this rain we're still suffocating in humidity here!  It's very odd being outside and it's raining cats and dogs yet you're still sweating buckets because the humidity is like 96%!  Crazy country!  :-)

When we got up to the river we were not disappointed!  The river was ROARING through the canyon and we could actually see real white water where rocks and boulders had been before.  Awesome!  Accompanying this were literally *bus-loads* of of Koreans who were arriving to partake in the same activity as us!  Looks like the three of us aren't the only ones today who though it was a good day for rafting!

Our afternoon cruise down the river turned out to be a total blast!  We had lots of great rapids and it was a completely different experience from just a month ago!  Before we kept getting stuck on giant rocks and having to carry our raft through rapids, but certainly not today!  A few times we were totally slammed against the water and all had to hold on real tight!  AWESOME!
It was a beautiful warm day and we did some swimming in the quiet parts of the river too.  It only took about an hour and a half to do our rafting run today - exactly half the time it took the first time!  We all had a great time and plan on doing rafting at least once more this summer (but we'll probably choose a different river next time, just for the sake of variety.)

After that it was time to head back into Seoul again - just a short day trip out for us.  Naturally traffic was backed up coming into Seoul and so it took twice as long to get back into the city as it did to get out.  Ahhhh, the joys of weekend traffic while living in a megacity!  I had a splitting headache though and my ears thought they were going to explode....  I think I got a bunch of water in my ears when we were cliff-diving and it was like how it feels when you're in an airplane and you CAN'T clear the pressure in your head.  Seriously, I thought my ears were going to bleed!  Finally about 2 hours later they suddenly cleared and I felt SO RELIEVED to have my hearing back, and for losing the desire to want to have my head run over by a squid truck!  LOL!

By the time I got back into Ilsan it was quite late and I was ready for bed.  Back to work tomorrow for my first full five-day week of teaching!