Maisan & Jeonju: Our First Adventure, PART 1

 After being stuck in quarantine on the military base for 14 days, we couldn't wait to venture out into countryside.  Our first weekend we spent exploring Mt. Maisan & Jeonju's Hanok Village.

First, I have to say how much I have missed living overseas.  I love that I can drive 2 hours away and have a completely unique cultural experience.  There is always so much to look forward to!  The hardest part about living here is going to be making the decision about what to see when the weekend rolls around.  

Mt. Maisan

This is Mt. Maisan.  I stole this picture off the VisitKorea website because it was a little too cloudy to get a good picture myself.  Maisan means "horse ear mountain" which is a perfect description of these two mountains.  There is a main hiking trail that leads from the north side of the mountains to the south, passing through the crevice of the two mountains.  In the middle the trail branches out to the peak of one of the mountains, and to a cave on the other.  We parked on the south side of the trail so we could hike through the Tapsa Temple, one of the main reasons people visit Maisan.

Toward the beginning of the trail is this cute little pond with swan paddle boats for rent.  There were lots of families coming up to enjoy this part of the park.  

The hiking trail was beautiful!  I had to stop myself from taking a million pictures.  It was a little bit overcast and rainy, but it was still really pretty.

Here was our first real view of one of the Maisan peaks as we were getting ready to enter the Tapsa Temple area.  

The Tapsa Buddhist temple is nestled into this fun little crevice along the hiking trail.  

The Tapsa Temple is famous for its man made stone pagodas.  This is Yee Gapyong.  This statue was built to commemorate the work he did in this area.  

He came to this area around 1885 to meditate.  He lived here alone for 30 years, and during this time, he built over 100 stone pagodas by hand.  About 80 of these still remain today.  They are impressive to look at!  It is amazing to think about him lifting and moving all of these rocks.

We hiked on past Tapsa to the next Buddhist temple, Eunsusa.  

They were selling ice cream cones there for 2,000 won, so we stopped for one.  It was getting hot, so the ice cream was a welcome treat.  From there we kept hiking in between the two mountains.  That meant a LOT of stairs.

We finally reached the turn offs to the two different mountains.

We hiked up to the Hwanumgul Cave first...even more stairs!  After being in quarantine for 14 days and not moving much, this little excursion was a shock to our legs.  What we didn't realize was that we would be able to see the entrance to this cave from the other peak.  You will see this in some of the later pictures.  According to legend there are medicinal waters inside the cave that can cure infertility.  Luckily, we are done having children, so we didn't feel the need to try to drink anything.

This is the view from the cave of the female peak that we climb next.   

The hike up this peak was incredibly fun!  It started with simple stairs, but then quickly turned into slight rock climbing.  The pictures don't do the incline justice.  There were ropes along the way to hold onto though, so it wasn't dangerous at all. 

The views as we hiked were incredible. 

We were happy to finally reach the summit.  

This is the view looking back at the previous peak with the cave.  You can see it off in the distance.

We have a great translating app that we can use on signs like this one above that tells the story of the cave.  Most of the translations are pretty good.  This one, however, was quite funny!  I won't type all of it, but it started with..."A large rock appeared in the dream of a couple eager to have a very burnt old child, and a fire that rose steadily in between...."  We laughed.  I wish I could understand Korean better and didn't have to rely on translation apps.

This area is known for its ginseng, so on the way back to the car, we stopped from some fried ginseng.  I'm not sure what I expected it to taste like, but it was really good!  This just proves the theory that anything fried is delicious.

Our next stop for the day was Jeonju and the old style hanok village there.  That blogpost is coming soon!