Day 247: Downtown Spelunking

After a really nice sleep we left our super-fun hotel and headed out of town and further down the coast. It was another beautiful sunny day and it was so great just to be out on the open road, cruising down the highway with my friends, rocking out to Michael Jackson and old-school Madonna.

The one unfortunate observation about all of this coastal beauty is that most of it is inaccessible, barricaded off by a menacing barb-wire fence that stretches down the coast for hundreds of kilometers. It's to prevent/slow-down an invasion from the sea by North Koreans, and another reminder of the realities of living so close to a rogue, unpredictable state who sometimes acts out in random hostility against its southern brother.

We drove into the town of Donghae to check out the mysterious caves of Cheongokcheonyeondonggul (and yes that is its real name - try saying that one five times fast!) We had to put on hard hats before entering the cave and it was a good thing we did because in some places the spaces are *really* tight! Again, not a place for the claustophic types! But the cave was awesome! It was full of all these crazy-shaped stalactites and stalagmites (bonus points for whoever knows which go up and which go down) and other strange calcified limestone structures. There's supposed to be a huge bat colony in these caves but unfortunately I didn't see any (bats are way cool.) The funny this is that these caves are practically right in the downtown of this city and stretch for kilometers under the city. Not the location you'd expect to find something like this. It was fun to go spelunking through the caves, even if we weren't allowed to stray off the designated paths.

After the caves we spent the afternoon hanging out in Mureung Valley, which is generally known as *the* most beautiful valley in all of Korea. I don't know if I'd place it as NUMBER ONE, but it was pretty gosh darn beautiful. Again, it was really nice to just chill in the outdoors, playing around and climbing all the rocks and boulders in the stream beds. And once again the colours provided by Mother Nature did not disappoint us.
When it started to get dark we really didn't want to have to head back home cause we were having such a nice time, but alas, we had to leave otherwise god only knows how long we'll be sitting in traffic for.

The drive back home was long but the heavy volume of traffic actually moved along fairly smoothly. It took about five hours to get back to Seoul and we were rolling into Ilsan just before 1am. A late night but well worth it, after such a fantastic weekend. I sure do love these weekend away, and we had such a blast that we're planning another similar one soon. Long Live Roadtrips!