Wind Road & Flower Guest House

Windroad and Guest House N 37-35.069 E 126-59.786
Korea country code = 82 Office- (02) 6407-20123 ++++ Cell phone 010-5513-2012
1F 85-5 Myeongrun-dong 3-ga, Jongno-gu, Seoul, 110-812, Korea
서울 종로구 성균관대학 정문앞(대학로부근) - This is the Hangul for the address.

We're' making this post specifically for the Wind Road and Flower Guest House in Seoul Korea because of how awesome they have been during our stay.

Our initial introduction to the place was by wandering around Seoul looking for a place to stay and happening across the owner, Mr. Park. He ushered us to his guest house and while at the time it was a bit sketchy being led down alleyways by a random guy on the street, in hindsight its probably one of the best things that could have happened to us in Seoul.

The people we've met here have been great in letting us know where to go in our travels, not just in Korea but in China and the Philippines as well. Most of them are travelers or students that have spent an abundant time abroad. What we thought of as a grand adventure of 4 months abroad pales in comparison to the years that some of these people have spent traveling.

That's not to say that every time you come here there will be this wealth of world knowledge, but more likely than not, you will meet other travelers that can talk to you and give you advice on travel. Even if there are no other travelers there's still a ton of information about the Seoul area and Korea in general. There's information about temple stays and meditation sessions, shopping centers and museums, all you have to do is ask and be prepaired for a barage of "my meaning is..."

Now onto the meat of the subject, directions and info. We were navigating by GPS so we can start with that. The GPS location of the Wind Road and Flower Guest House is "N 37 35.069 E 126 59.786" Google map

Regardless of where you are coming from just find the nearest Subway station. All the ticket vendors have English instructions. You can just stop random people on the street and ask them "Jihacheol?" (subway?), They will point you the right direction. Basically, Hyehwa station is 2 stops away from "Dongdeamun history and cultural park" station on line 4.

Exit 4 empties onto an intersection, take a left on the street directly infront of you. Walk straight along that street, past the Movie Theater (on your right) to the end of the block. Hang a 45 degree right and cross the main intersection heading toward the Dunkin' Doughnuts on the other side. Continue strait past the Dunkin' Doughnuts until you see a "New York style" hotdog place on your left. Take an immediate left down a narrow street. About 10 meters down there will be a Family mart on your right. Follow the small street to the right, past the family mart.
You should be able to see the sign to the Wind Road near here. Click the Map below.

If you're taking a taxi just print out the address (in Hangul above) to show the driver. The main website is Here if you're lucky enough and staying in Korea more than a few months you might be able to volunteer to help at the guest house for reduced room rates, but don't rely on it.

Visa's Recieved

We got our Visa's to China today, we've pretty much decided to do a bit in China on the way back from the Philipines (see the updated Calender). A few of the other travelers here pointed us to different locations in China, we ended up choosing Yanshou. I can't add it to the google maps plug in b/c I don't have the program to do it but you should be able to find it if you look to the north west of Guangzhou. Its a rural area with, from what I've seen some decent scenery.
We didn't want to cut too much more time out of the Philippines b/c we have already lost 5 days due to the visa's so we will only be in China for about a week. Our Philippine time went from 42 days down to 31 days and we probably have to skip out on Shirakawagou in Japan (unless we can do the Pilgrimage hike of 140 Km in less than 10 days), but we get to see a bit of China so its a decent trade.

The first Hiccup

So... were stuck in Korea for a bit. We went to the airport to make our flight to China where we had an 18hr lay over before our flight to Manilla. Turns out that the particular airport we were scheduled to fly to requires us to have a visa. If we went to Beijing or Hong kong it wouldn't be a problem but the Guangzhou airport specifically requires a visa. Wish Orbitz would have mentioned that.

We spent about 6 hrs in the airport trying to figure it out. I can't believe how little those airport workers knew. You would think that the immigration office, or the information box, or the airline workers would know how we could go about getting a visa. Ridiculous. The airline told us to call Orbitz and Orbitz told us to talk to the airline. We ended up postponing our flight until the 30th because there's no way we could afford to buy new tickets that route us through Hong kong or Beijing (it would double the price).

We met some foreigner on the way out of the airport who was able to answer in 2 minutes what it took 6hrs of calling and talking to the airport people. So tommorow we are going to the Chinese embassy here in Seoul to apply for Visa's.

Will update you when we figure it out. Either way its going to be about another $200-$300 per person to get to Manila. Grrr @ China.

On the up side, since we are most likely getting Chinese visas we will probably just change our tickets and spend a week or so in China!

Busan to Seoul

So we left Busan by bus and headed to Taebaek to do, what we thought would be one of our most greuling hikes yet. Taebaek is the highest city in all of Korea. The weather report said that Taebaek would be -8 C @ the city. The mountain would be a lot colder. There is supposed to be a winter festival here and they are holding a guiness book event, the largest snowball fight ever.

When arriving we saw the city was getting prepared and lit up for the festival times. Our first task was to look around and get a sense of the cost of lodging, from there we could make the choice as to whether it was worth it to camp or not.

We ended up deciding to camp out the night and we hiked into the woods behind some condo's. We followed a frozen stream bed up the mountain. We kept passing these large mounts of what looked like snow covered hay sitting in the middle of these cleared out areas. We hiked as far as the trail would take us and then some, wanting to get out of view of the city.

We didn't manage to get far enough away for us to have a fire so we ended up cooking over our pocket rocket (butane burner) and went to sleep. In the morning when there was a bit more light we realized that all the mounds we had been passing must have been grave sites. Some had headstones and flowers by them. Nothing like sleeping at the foot of a grave to insight a good nights sleep. (Good thing we didn't know at the time - In the picture my pack is resting right on the headstone.). After silently apologizing to... whomever we walked back to the town to start heading for the mountain.

When we finally arrived at the mountain we were expecting an out of the way mountain freezing cold with only game trails to follow. Well we got the freezing cold right. At the base we could see them starting to set up for the festival and getting some of the snow sculptures in place. There was a line of people heading up the mountain and as we followed we soon found out that our "epic hike" was basically a day hike for the locals. About 600 meters up the path there were hordes of them having a picnic.

Regardless of how many people there were the further up we went the less we saw. We were on this mountain to live for a while so the closer to dark it got the less people were there as well. By the time we got to the peak I had shed my clothes down to a single nylon pants and a tee shirt. BTW -7 C is 20 F. Some of the other hikers were wanting to take pictures with us on the way up. The view at the peak was a amazing. These pictures to little to convey the beauty that we beheld.

The peak of the mountain was windy with an ice needle cold, enough to make you lean into it. It reminded me of my childhood in Greatfalls where everyone walked with a slant.

We back tracked down the path to a flat area to set up camp. We hiked off the trail a bit so we would be out of view of the main trail. Were still unsure as to the legality of sleeping on this mountain so the more inconspicuous we can be the better.

We found and set up camp with enough time to catch the sunset from the peak, by now no one was left on the mountain.

The next day it rained all day and we didn't leave the tent at all. It was just steady all day long only slowing near nightfall. It let up enough for us to get a fire going and dry some of our clothes. Well I guess I was the only one that needed to dry anything. This far up on the mountain was like sleeping in a cloud, not ON but IN. The fog rolled in so thick that our headlamps showed us about 2 meters ahead. The light of our fire illuminated the snow with an orange glow and the sliver of moonlight backlite the bare and claw tendrils of the winter trees around us. Behold the scraping fingers of those trees lay the entrance to purgatory. As though if we were to step outside the light of our camp we would be lost forever.

The following night brought with it freezing rain that gave way to snow encasing our tent. Many times throughout the night we had to shake it off the tent and in the morning we awoke to what you see here.

I walked up to check the trail and how deep the new snow was. By doing so I inadvertently created a new set of tracks that led groups of hikers right into our camp site. Most of them were amazed that we slept on the mountain and none of them were concerned with the legality of it so I guess that answers that.

From here we decided to head over to the temple that we saw on the opposite peak of munsubong (the peak from above). We took a trail that no one had broken the new fallen snow and as we approached we could hear echoing through the trees the sounds of chanting and our anticipation grew.

As we rounded the last set of trees the temple came into view and we were again met with hordes of people surrounding the shrine, the chanting was a recording over a loud speaker. While the temple was still worth seeing the wonder of it had faded significantly.

We headed off the mountain to find some accomidations until the main day of the festival. We found a nearby hotel and turned our room into a staging area to clean and dry our gear. We were lucky that the people at this hotel would exchange some money for us so that we could stay the 2 nights we needed to see the festival and head to Seoul.






The town had made some progress in its snow sculpting. The festival started on the 22nd and lasted until the 31st. From what we could tell they would continue working on the sculptures throughout the festival because even though the even had begun many of the sculptures were still being worked on. There was even an igloo the size of a house with a little cafe set up in it with ice tables.

We unfortunatly missed out on the snowball fight. One of the handicaps to not knowing the language. We were in town but apparantly that event was being held had some ski hill at another location. Oh well, its to be expected, we had a good time.

Right now im writing this from a hostel in Seoul with a plethera of travelers. Some have been traveling for 10 months or more just going from place to place, some are students. There's a very diverse group of people here. Should be a good place to stay and rest up before the next grueling part of our trip.... White beaches and blue oceans, life is rough.

Yokohama to Busan -Long post

Sorry about the last update. All Jeff could use was Nathans iPod so we couldnt write much of anything. We left Yokohama a bit later than we should have because we had to skip a few spots on the way to Iga. It was about 8 hours on the train. When I have the chance I will grey out what we missed. We arrived in Iga, pretty late on the 10th. The mountains were so surrounded by houses the only way we could get into the forrest was through a graveyard. The next day we went to the ninja museum and took in the show there. It was actually a lot of information and the little show we saw was hokey but amusing and worth it at the same time.

Our original plan had us hiking from Iga to Kyoto, we saw a few roadside shrines along the way, and found some interesting things along the side of the road. We made it to Mita shrine about part way through the day on the 13th and took a bit of a rest there. Most of the walk from Iga to the shrine was along the road. From Mita we started walking through the woods to get to Fudo waterfalls. the terran here is straight up and straight down with only the ridgelines as decent walking ground. Nathan started likening me to a bear as I found it easier to run strait up the hill on all fours (thats how steep the mountian side is -60 degrees or more). With me on all fours and a big pack on my back I suppose I must have looked like a bear. The other reason was that while Nathan is light and nimble enough to have the ground actually support his weight and be able to grab onto trees I, am not. Every tree I grabed, every log I stepped on snapped and shattered beneath me. I lumbered through the forest knocking down entire trees (Im not exagurating) and creating mini landslides.

The GPS location we had for Fudo falls was a bit off so we missed it by a bit, camping about 600 meters upstream of it. (we started using meters to get used to it because thats why they use over here) When we awoke in the morning there was a light layer of snow over everything. Even though it took us 3 hrs to go about 1.5 kilometers (our roadside pace was about 9 km in 3 hrs) the view with the snow lightly covering the dense forest was worth it.

The forest here is like nothing back home. It has a deep earthy smell, a kind of mix of lichen and fresh dirt. There are vines that stretch from tree to tree and slither along the ground grabing at your feet with every step. The hillsides, as i said are steep slopes, the kind that even game trails are rare to see and the ground is littered with leaves and dead trees. Its almost as if there has never been a fire here to clear out the underbrush.
We thought it best to follow the streem down the mountain and meet up with the road again. the kind of time It takes to traverse these steeps slopes is not time that we have yet. Our time in Japan is limited and full of sights and festivals to see.

We trek down the stream and come accross a set of falls that we all assume must be the Fudo falls we were looking for. Colums of icicles dangle from the rocks as the water careens 10 meters to be deflected off a large boulder to fall another 5 meters. There is no pool at the bottom of the falls as the mountain side is far to steep. We rest here for a bit taking in the frosty beauty before the sun steals it away.

We continue down along the side of the stream bed hoping bus sized boulders as we go, the stream dips under rocks and earth alike, always appearing moments later to lead us to the mountains base. 300 meters from the first falls we find what we now know to be the Actual Fudo falls. A breathtaking site though I think we all agree that the ones further up were a bit more awe inspiring.
Coming to the base of the stream we find a parking lot and immediatly realize that the path we took brought us over the mountain from the backside. Where we were traversing entire mountains here lays a road less than 1 km of easy walking to the falls. This path may be easier but had we taken it we would have never found the second set of water falls.

Near this parking lot is a small path carved into one of the mountain sides leading to a single shrine. An out of the way place next to yet another falls. We dont know the name or the significance of this place but we stopped, I said a prayer and started back down.

Following the road leading away from the parking lot we walk for about an hour to find ourselves in the exact same spot as we had left the day before. It turns out that when we decided to leave the road to go into the wilderness that we had actually been following the road that lead right to the falls. -sigh. I guess thats the way it is when you cant read the local language to follow any maps. But it was the adventure of it that mattered.

We left Fudo falls and again walked along the road, now when I say road Im talking about a highway. The highways here however are like our single lane one way streets. We have about a 7-8 Km walk before we get to the next town, Shigaraki.

Shigaraki is our halfway point to Kyoto. We stroll into town and are met with one of the more odd things weve seen yet. There are stores upon stores selling these statues, ranging in sizes from the size of your thumb to the size of an RV of beavers. Not just any beavers mind you, beavers wearing sombreros with HUGE.... nuts. Thats right, testicals that drag on the ground, and these things are EVERYWHERE. We still have no idea what they were all about but I tell you they were on every corner. Even the sewer drain covers had pictures of these big balled beavers.
The trek to Fudo falls left us with a few blisters and a new found respect for the mountains of Japan so we decided to skip the second half of the hike to Kyoto and head for Shimonoseki. If we get some more time in Korea in the winter then we can get to Japan faster in the spring without missing anything. We decided to do Hiroshima in the spring because of schedual conflicts with some things we want to do in Korea.

The trip from Shigaraki to Shimonoseki was one of boredom, spending the entire day on the trains, about 14hrs on the trains. Most people would never do this because you can take the bullet train in a fraction of the time but since there is a special on a certain type of ticket (seishunn kippu) we save ourselves literally hundreds by doing it this way.

We got into Shimonoseki in the nick of time, 2355 (our tickets end at midnight). The problem with Shimonoseki is that there are no woods around from many dozens of kilometers. So camping, wasnt really an option. We wandered around for a bit and asked some people if there were any nearby sentos for us to stop in. A sento is a public bathing area and since our last showers were in Yokohama 5 days ago and we had been hiking through the mountains we were about due. Unfortunatly there were non to be had, which is a double disapointment because we were looking for a place to kill a few hours. The Shimonoseki international port didnt open until 0730.

We wandered around a bit and aroun 0200 found a little bycicle parking lot that was fairly inconspicous and sat down to cook a meal. It was a neat little area, completely covered and out of the wind, but it had these motion lights that kept giving us away. We ate there and slept for about 3 hours. We figured we should be out by 0530 before people started going to work.

We walked around for about 3 hours just wandering the streets. At one point 0700 i think we started here the gongs of all the local temples. The back allys of the Japanese citys are like a rats maze and after 30 minutes of trying to follow the gongs to a temple we gave up chasing after cheese and went back to the ferry terminal. Pretty much the entirety of the 15th was spent sleeping in the terminal (the ferry didnt leave until 1800)

The ferry itself was like a grand hotel to us. Warm, clean, a room to sleep in and a shower. Resturaunts and bars it was more like a cruise ship than a ferry. We were, and I say this with 100% authority, the ONLY white people on that ferry. It was interesting that Jeff and Nathans first sento experiance was not in Japan, but in international waters. The shower room on the ferry was a grand bath or a sento like public bathing area. Sleeping on the boat was like being constantly rocked like a baby. Its a good thing none of us get sea sick.

We arrived in Busan early morning on the 16th and woke early enough to see the sun rise over the industrial city. We went though custums which was.... a circus. Dont get me wrong im glad we werent hasseled but they pushed us through security so fast i could have been carrying 10 pounts of tnt in my pocket and they wouldnt have known.

We spent some time in the station setting all the coordinants into our gps and exchanging some currency. Now we have dollars, yen, and krw in our billfolds. We started out to find one of the hostels that we figured we would be staying at. It was a sort of follow your nose type of find as the hostel we choose is right in the biggest fish market in the city.

The land lady here seems to know absolutly no english and is probobly one of the worst communicators ive ever tried to interact with. i mean most people get that when you point to something your talking about that thing. this lady seems confused at just about everything. Basically it ended up being that she held out her hand and we filled it with money until she nodded and gave us a key.... Maybe she does it on purpose.

The rest of the day was spend wandering around the market place, almsot being run over by scooters (the motercicles and scooters drive on the sidewalks here) and sitting out by the port and letting our solar panal charge our stuff. Its definitly a different culture here. People screaming accross the street, old ladies will push you into walls to get you out of the way, people stare at you all the time. As i was writing in my journal on the peir there were a few people that would just stand right over the top of me and watch me for like 5-10 minutes at a time. Definitly no sense of personal space compaired to Japan or even the states for that matter.

Its all an experience though. It took us a while to figure out whether or not they haggle here or not because nothing has a price on it. They dont seem to haggle at all because weve really been trying and no one comes down or changes their price at all, even if we just walk away. Still, nothing is marked so you always have to ask how much something is.

We started walking to one of the sites we wanted to see here but kept getting side tracked walking down different roads or stopping in various shops. We had only made it about 4 km before we realized we wouldnt make it by a reasonable hour, so we decided to look for a place to get some food. We walked past a bar that was basically built out of cardboard and tarps with a few 2x4s here and there and found a small.... i guess resteraunt. The resteraunts here are a bit odd. most of them are really small with only 1 or 2 tables. Basically only big enough 4-5 people at a time.

We pointed at some things on the menu that must have been food because before we knew it we had chicken and beer in front of us. We left full, tipsy and our wallets a bit lighter and started to find our way to the nearest subway station. Which, by the way the....bartender? I say that questionably because the kid looked to be about 17, it seemed to be a mother and son operation... any way the kid told us it was way to far to walk to the subway station. Little did we know that we had walked about 5 hrs just to get there.

After asking a plethera of people, some of which were freindly, some of which completely ignored us, we found the subway station and were headed home and to bed. Washing our clothes in the sink first of coarse.

Today we took the subway (damn the subway is cheap here) to centum city. Supposidly one of the biggest shopping centers around. WOW we were out of place, it was like the clampets walking down rodeao drive. Upscale stores selling upscale things and here we come rolling in with our 3 week old beards and dirty coats.

I would like to mention something on the side.... I dont think Korean people wear undwear, or they make them themselves because we looked for 3 hours for a pair of boxers and came up with nothing. We walked by hundreds of stores and only found 1 single store that sold them. I swear all they sell is coats, shoes, and sunglasses. Rediculous!

Any way our evening was awesome, we went back to the fish marked (more our kind of people, dirty, smelly and poor) and stopped by the street vendors to check out the local cuisien. After a couple of snacks here and there we got beckoned into one of the stalls, again these are like restoraunts for 5-6 people only, by a woman who must have been in her 60s.

Definitly one of the more friendly people weve met she filled out stomachs with raw squid, boilded crab meat and brains with oisters. All served with some of the spiciest stuff, raw oinions, raw garlic, and raw..... well a really hot kind of pepper.

Its a huge difference than japan where all the food is mild and the tastes are very suitle. Korean food will overload your taste buds. Sweat stuff is sickeningly sweet, spicy stuff will literally melt your tastebuds away... Regardless, that lady was awesome, she took some shots with us and was practically force feeding Nathan.

This is our last night at this place so once, again I dont know when we will have internet again. The plan is to take the bus tommorow to Taebaek and hike to a shrine at the top of Taebaek mountain. on the 22nd there is going to be a guiness book of world records event held on that mountain that we are going to try to participate in. The worlds largest snowball fight. should be fun.

From there we have to get to Seoul and catch our flight to Manilla. We dont really want to stay in Manilla long most of what we read says to leave there as soon as you can. So again. might be a week or so before we can update. Look forward to it and keep watching!

We're in Busan

Leaving Yokohama...

So on the 8th we went to Torigoe temple and watched a local festival where they burn their new years wishes and decoration offerings. At this particular festival the roast mochi (sticky rice balls) over the fire. I've read that burning the wishes is suppose to release the written prayers to the gods (kami) so they can be answered.

Any way, wanted to make a post and to let everyone know that it might be a while before our next post. We are going to be leaving Yokohama and heading to Iga. You can look below at the calender and see the updates and our potential schedule. Keep in mind that schedule is very flexible.

from Iga we plan to hike to Kyoto, which we are guessing will take us 3-5 days. from there we have to get to Shimono-seki and over to south Korea.

We have another 3-4 day hike in Korea planed. There's going to be a Guinness book of world record event where we are hiking, on one of the days we are hiking. (Lucky us!) They are going to try to have the largest snowball fight in the world there.

Anyway, after that we have to catch our plane in Seoul to Manila. So it is entirely possible that we won't be able to update the blog until we get to Manila. So if there is no post in the next week or 2 don't worry. We are just out doing what we came to do, Hike and adventure!

Trip update

Been spending the last 3 days sitting around yokohama relaxing and finalizing our route. Big new update to the Google earth plug in. All the grey'ed out way points are places we were thinking about going but don't have the time to. I know it sounds odd being away for 3 months but yet not having the time but thats just kinda how it worked out.

Its a lot of work to upload video so I think I'll just stick to pictures for now.

We went to a kaitenzushi place (sushi on a treadmill) the other day. Awesome sushi for really cheap. So far we all have been way under our original budget of 25 bucks a day. But that's because we have been walking everywhere. I'm talking covering about 30 km (18 or so miles) a day.

Right now we have a little base of operations at Kim's house -Thank you Kim! so we don't have to have our packs with us the whole time.

Oh ya, a belated thank you to my uncle John for lending us his GPS. Jeff's broke like 3 days before we left. We've been using it a TON! Actually our entire trip is based off gps locations so without it we would be SOL. Thanks again!

Here are some pictures that I took. Since Jeff has been posting I haven't really felt the need.



I don't know how the camera got the effect of blurring everything but Nathan and Jeff but it looks awesome.

Yokohama and Tokyo

Jeff here - We're still in Yokohama. We've spent quite a few days up in Tokyo looking around. On New Years we were at a temple near Tokyo Tower where it was easily the most crowded place I've ever been. At midnight, everyone had balloons with their wish on it that they let go of - Quite a site. We also went to the imperial palace on one of the two days per year that the emperor makes an appearance - but we were too late.
Kim just took off today back to the States, and her roommates should be arriving soon.