Ullengdo Island- Between Korea and Japan

Mysterious Island Ullengdo

A beautiful and peaceful tropical island lies between Korea and Japan. You’ve never heard of it before. It’s a small volcanic island called Ullengdo, population of 10,000. Located off the coast of the state of Daego, a 5 hour drive from Seoul, it takes a 3 hour ferry boat across the East Sea . With the tour group Adventure Korea, my co-worker friend and I hopped on a bus for an all night journey to a coastal city in Daego. Not being one for sleeping on buses, or any other kind of moving transportation ( I’m still working on that) I stayed up all night looking out the window into the dark mountains of the Korean countryside. It was the first time I had been outside the city. I almost forgot what forests looked like. I forgot what clean air smelled like too until I stepped outside during one of rest stops and breathed in the clean moist air of the mountains. We stopped often during the road trip, which is actually a common Korean practice; to stop every hour on the hour when road tripping and visit the huge rest stops full of restaurants and stores. (I think they do that to make their country feel larger!) The stares our tour group got during the rest breaks were amusing. I thought the stares I usually get on the subways would be the extent of my foreignness here, but in the countryside, where foreigners are a lot less likely to appear, we stuck out like sore thumbs and the Koreans at the rest stops would stop what they were doing to look at us and hear us speak our foreign language.

We arrived at the sea port and boarded an enormous ferry boat to begin our 3 hour journey to the Island. I had never travelled by commercial boat before, so I was in for a real treat. The ocean was calm on this particular morning, (the other boat rides were not so lucky) and the ride gave a smooth bobbing motion that rocked me right to sleep. (Success! I fell asleep!) Soon was jostled awake to see mountains jutting straight up out of the ocean and so high up that I could not see the tops of them from out the windows. They were green and rocky and had almost a misty reflection like the sunlight was bouncing back off of them. We walked off the boat, stumbled rather, the body still held on the bobbing motion, to see the mountains in full view.

The port was beautiful; the Pirates of Caribbean movies could have been filmed here. The water was so blue and clear you could see straight to the bottom for what must have been about a hundred feet. The mountains were covered in mist and the rock forms that boarded the water were painted by Salvador Dali. There was a foot trail that wrapped around the coast of rocks that boarded the ocean for miles and ducked in and out of caves and crevasses of rock. It was spotted with high bridges and stairs that twisted and turned its way around the rocks. I could not wait to get lost on this trail. Our tour group was lead through the town and up a hill to the hotel.

We passed countless rows of long squids that were flattened out and hanging outside drying on wooden rods. They were hanging everywhere, up the walls, on top of roofs and along the paved lots along the water. The smell of squid still lingered in my nostrils days after the trip was over. Dried squids, and get this- pumpkins- were the only two resources that this island produced. Luckly for this island, the Korean demand for dried squid will always keep this industry booming. Packs of dried squid are sold in every convenience store and subway stand I have been into since my arrival.

We checked into our hotel and dropped our bags off in our rooms. When I first saw the hotel room with no furniture in it I assumed that the beds were rolled in at night. There was nothing but a TV on a low table and a wooden closet on the side. The closet was full of blankets, pillows and bed pads and it was then that I figured out how hotels work in Korea.

There were never any beds, everyone slept on the floor, and you made your own bed and cleaned your own room and if all the covers and bed pads were all taken by your fellow roommates, make like a bum and sleep in your clothes with nothing much else. After finding all the amusements in the Korean hotel, (communal shoes in every bathroom that were both left feet) we had two hours of free time. I went right back to the trail I saw when I got off the boat and went exploring. I have been hiking in many places, but no hiking trail I have been on could compare to this one. It never went in straight line for longer than then 10 feet and winded its way through caves and passed long stone crevasses that went in so deep in the mountain the end of it disappeared while the water continued to dig the crevasses deeper. Stairs carved right into the rock went up and down the mountain as the trail continued on around the coast. It kept walking for about an hour, passing sea-side restaurants, countless bridges and caves and still never found the end of the trail. It must go all the way around the island. I went back to the hotel to begin our bus tour of the island.