In which Layla and Roz cross the island, stroll in a park, and watch a brilliant sunset

By Layla

Roz’s cunning plan for dinner turned out to be a re-visit to the good old kimibap joint, only this time we branched out into bigger main courses, a rice dish for Roz, noodles for me, and a large amount of spiciness for both of us. Steam coming out of our ears and lips burning, but otherwise having enjoyed the meal very much, we strolled down to Dorothy and had another cheery night drinking beer and mint tea, before heading home to bed.

This morning we got up fairly bright and early, and headed for Tous Les Jours (our second favourite French patisserie chain after Paris Baguette) and had bagels and cream cheese before picking up our bags, trundling through the hot sun, and catching a bus across the island, then a taxi to the capital, Jeju-si. We’d failed to book anywhere to stay as either places were full, or else not a word of English was spoken. We asked to be dropped off near a hostel, HK Hostel, much praised by Lonely Planet, but it looked so uninviting that we swiftly dashed away to find another option. Next up was the Tapdong and Bobo Motels – I have no idea what Lonely Planet was thinking when they recommended these horrible, musty old rooms. We were flummoxed and hot til a moment of wifi in the street revealed Hotel Impress, which seems clean, pleasant, has a comfy bed (not very common in South Korea), lots of space, and a view of the sea. We dropped our bags, pleased, and headed out for adventures.

But first, of course, lunch! Roz found a scary little café and after we pointed to ‘do you have any vegetarian dishes?” phrase in Korean at the back of the Lonely Planet phrase section, the woman in charge grinned in delight and pointed at two different items written in Korean. Non-plussed, we ordered both, along with some kiwi juice, and had a reasonably pleasant late lunch of vegetarian something sandwiches. And then to our afternoon destination, Hallim Park. Which I had mistakenly thought we could access from a downtown bus stop marked in good old Lonely Planet. Actually it turned out that it went from somewhere about 3 miles from there, but a full team of non-English speaking Koreans at the bus stop got us on one bus to take us to the terminal to catch the actual bus, and finally we were off. The island is a circle ringed by a road and our bus pottered west along it, stopping every 2 minutes. Roz and I were nerdily listening to educational things on our iPhones (Spanish learning for me, economics for her) and the constant announcements of the next stop were as disturbing as the old ladies wearing giant visors jostling violently for seats, as the sea sparkled on the right hand side throughout. Eventually we arrived.

Hallim Park is a really lovely park that has all manner of areas – palm trees, bonsai trees, stone sculptures, birds, reptiles, a folk village, a water garden, and our favourite, caves made of limestone and lava. We had a great afternoon strolling around the clearly demarcated paths to piped musak from the trees, dodging giant school groups, and trying to throw sticks into a barrel, one of the folk village games. We took such a long time to appreciate it all that the place closed, and we ducked out to a neighbouring shop to buy a couple of cans of beer in the nick of time, crossed the road, and sipped our Cas beers on a beautiful white sand beach, with black lava rocks, watching a brilliant orange orb of a sun setting in the water like a giant planet.

After that idyllic moment, it was more learning for us as the bus took us back to Jeju-si and we tried in vain to find the vegetarian restaurant we’d read about (but did get to walk down lots of dark back streets…). Eventually, we found another fab restaurant, the Baghdad Café, which was an Indian restaurant that was lovely in décor, ambience, and food. We lingered long into the night before strolling through cheery streets of bars and restaurants, then heading home to bed (having struggled vehemently to make three different taxi drivers understand where we wanted to go – it’s so hard when nobody speaks English!). Night night.