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!