Jejudo-Manjangul

So this was one of the things I was most looking forward to about going to Jeju. Manjangul is the worlds longest lava tube, totaling over 13km of underground tubes that go as deep as 1km. Although it was pretty cool, it was so commercialized they may has well have put a restaurant in the damn thing. I was just expecting something entirely different, and I guess that is one of the only major downsides of seeing new things. We could have skipped it and I would forever have this beautiful picture in my mind of what these lava tubes look like. However....

It is still pretty neat looking. Alan was also disappointed, and thanks to the Lonely Planet guide book we got what we were looking for. Now what we did next may be considered reckless, crazy or even downright idiotic by some, but for us it seemed like a great idea. The book told us about this closed down lava tube about a 20 minute walk from the ones that we had just been to. It was a very loose description, and since it was already about 9p.m. and well past dark we weren't expecting to find anything. Oh yeah, did I mention that we also didn't have any flashlights?!? (we had planned to buy some earlier in the day but couldn't seem to find any)

Anyways, after doing the hedge maze (which we completed somehow in about 5 minutes) we continued on down this rural road until we found what looked like it matched the description in the guide book, which we were reading by moon/cell phone light. Well we found it, but it was boarded up and there was a huge padlocked fence covering the whole thing. I dug around in my backpack and found some trusty fire logs, we hopped the fence and went exploring. Now I am glad we had the fire sticks, but even in pitch black they don't exactly put out a whole lot of useable light. We ventured as far as we dared, about 3/4 of a fire stick in until we found a huge hole in the floor that lead to something unknown and I tried to throw the fire stick down the hole to see where it lead. Well obviously it went out almost immediately and turned out to be a bit of a waste of our light. We lit up another, and were on our way. I don't have any pictures, because it was the last night we were there, and all of my CF cards were packed full of pictures, and it was pitch black in there.

Somehow we finished this maze in record time, without making any wrong turns. We watched for a while as people got horrible lost and it can take hours to find you way out of this thing. The lady also gave us a "tourist on foot" half price discount, because we walked all the way to this place. Mind you, it wasn't by choice, there were just no busses or cabs around, and we had no other choice.