Tag: sights

HK: will it be sunny today or won’t it?

The weather forecast (online) is still calling for very sunny weather today. I see dark clouds over The Peak.
So which one is it? Maybe it will be sunny later today…

I was going to do some require-good-weather trips today (up The Peak and either a bus ride to Stanley Park on the south side of the island or a trip to Sunset Peak on Lantau Island), but if it doesn’t clear up soon, I’ll have to go with Plan B and see some sights in the New Territories (like a centuries-old walled village) and Kowloon.

Though I was going to save Kowloon for tomorrow when the museums are free (and most of the museums seem to be in Kowloon).

So far the weather has been quite cooperative, in that there have only been a few brief sprinkles (vs the low-chance-of thunderstorms called for)

Update: no it wasn’t sunny. It did sprinkle a little in the late afternoon. Even the MTR entrance showed the rainy forecast and temp on the digital display above the entrance turnstyles.

HK: Day 2/Sun summary

Here’s what I managed to do on my second day (a Sunday), with more details and photos to follow in later posts.

  • Did some research and blogging over breakfast and coffee at Cafe de Coral (a chain); the millet porridge was surprisingly tasty but the sandwich and coffee were disappointing (I was expecting a fresh sandwich, but maybe not for HK$20/US$2.60 for the set breakfast)
  • Tried to go to the Peak (as you might imagine, it’s the tallest point on Hong Kong Island, just south of Central), but didn’t want to wait in line an hour for that tram
  • Meandered around Central a little, including Hong Kong Park next to the Peak tram (random: the park also houses the HK Squash Club)
  • Noticed the large number (many hundreds? a thousand?) of F Filipino maids hanging around Central, especially Exchange Square, anywhere they can find shade (this is Sunday, remember, so it’s their day off it seems)
  • Hopped on a ferry to Cheung Chau Island for seafood, a temple (home of the annual bun festival coming up), a beach and a long scenic walk ending with a pirate’s cave and a “resting” (perilously perched) boulder (and a surprising amount of trash, mostly in the form of discarded water bottles);
    it’s also the childhood home to HK’s only Olympic gold medal athlete (windsurfing in ’96 Atlanta games).
    Definitely recommended (thanks Yin)!
  • Saw some of the nightly Festival of Lights, where buildings in Central, Wan Chai and Tsim Sha Tsui are lit up in a “moving” light show

HK: Day 1/Sat summary

Here’s what I managed to do on my first day (a Saturday) after the late arrival the night before:

  • Walked around my immediate area (near Causeway Bay MTR), including a light breakfast (not that many options at 8am!), purchasing and activating a SIM card and wi-fi plan, stumbling on a St@rbucks (pros and cons for that one :-), and a light lunch of squid ball soup at a hole-in-the-wall resto in Jardine’s Bazaar
  • Rode the double decker tram (streetcar) westbound to a loop terminus at Chun Yeun St Market near North Point MTR
  • Walked around North Point area, finding the pier where my dinner cruise will leave from later this week, a little seafood market, little a waterfront promenade, a cement dog run park, a green park and another cement park with (Chinese) Checkers players
  • Hopped on the tram to the next westbound terminus at Shau Kei Wan MTR (not much to see there); the south/inland side of the road/tracks starts going uphill right away
  • Met a nice local traveler named Yin for a veg dinner
  • Walked around Wan Chai in the evening – lots of bars, many with “bad” bands, and hostess bars (apparently this is where the sailors used to go, but the area has cleaned up some)

HK: Exhausted on the return ferry

After bailing on going up The Peak because I didn’t want to wait in line for an hour, I hopped a ferry to Cheung Chau Island.
Great day trip!
Fresh seafood, temples, beaches, long walk with views and cool boulders. Epic!
Before rounding the point, the big tower in Kowloon sticks out from a distance, much like Taipei 101.
Also catching the nightly festival of lights.

Tallest building in Hong Kong is in Kowloon, lit up during nightly Symphony of Lights

Maui: funky Holy Ghost Portuguese church in Kula

Trippy little details at this Holy Ghost Portuguese church, including the Last Supper (with a woman next to JC, as per Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code), statue of Mary on a snake, and the dedication plaque referring to the creation of the world 6681 years ago (really?)…

Maui: Sun Yat-Sen park (father of Taiwan)

Apparently Sun Yat-Sen went to school in Hawaii, and his relatives lived in upcountry Maui (near Kula). He even planned some of the Chinese revolution from here.
There is a park with a new statue of him, with a great view of the ocean.

Seoul: sauna and hot tub details

Very close to the Seoul Station is the Silloam FirePot Sauna (sauna and hot tubs and more). Also called Siloam Fomentation Sauna.
Note the Lonely Planet directions are terrible – check the map on the aforementioned website.

Rating: definitely worth it! Better than a Turkish Bath (hamam), perhaps not as good as a German Bad (spa) since the water parts are segregated.
Cost: W12,000/$10.60 between 8pm and 5am, W9,000/$8 between 5am and 8pm. Open 24 hours. I think your can stay for 12 hours, but no re-entry. (Costs a little less if only doing hot tubs)
No need to bring anything, but consider clean socks and underwear (feels much better afterwards when you are so clean).
I spent 2.5 hours there, trying out the various saunas and hot tubs.

So what is it? A large 5 story building with much more than saunas and hot tubs.
The locker rooms are on the ground floor, where you lock your shoes in small shoe-sized lockers, then exchange your ticket and shoe-locker-key for a regular-sized locker key, as well as loose fitting shorts and a T-shirt, and a towel (a hand towel in the west, but it’s a regular shower towel here in Korea!)

In the basement are sex-segregated hot tubs and showers. There are several hot tubs of different temperatures (inc. cold), using mineral water pumped from 300m underground. Some tubs have extras like jade, wormwood, charcoal or yellow mud (no, it doesn’t stain you yellow). In the middle of the room are showers (no stalls) or Japanese-style sit-down-on-a-stool showers. Swimsuits optional (nobody was wearing them on the men’s side, except for some masseurs – yes, there are 2 or 3 massage tables down there (extra cost)).

Upstairs above the locker rooms are 3 co-ed floors, and they’re the reason you get those shorts and t-shirt. Recall that you can stay for up to 12 hours…
Not just multiple saunas (see below), but also restaurants, snack bars and a cafe; barber shop, laundry service, Internet room, games room, singing room, mats to hang out on, yoga room, a room with exercise equipment, a massage room (extra cost), a sleeping room (with a hundred or so bunk beds), a snoring room (I kid you not) and more.

With that sleeping room, and it being open 24 hours, it’s possible to use it as a cheap hotel of sorts for one night, e.g. if arriving very late or you want to freshen up after having checked out of your hotel.

As for the saunas, there are many different ones 3F (the third floor) with different purported health benefits:

  • salt
  • jade
  • charcoal
  • yellow earth
  • infra-red (for some reason this one had a men’s and a women’s; all the others are co-ed)
  • ice-room (brrr but refreshing)
  • fomentation (steamy but not like a steam bath)

In some cases the materials are in the walls and ceilings; sometimes they are on the floor, e.g. in the salt room you walk and lie down on pebble-sized chunks of salt

There were young and old people, singles and couples; often young couples would lie together on mats in the large “atrium” outside of the saunas watching TV on their phones.

Seoul: DMZ Tour details

There are many tour operators who do DMZ tours; I chose the one affiliated with the local USO office: Koridoor.

Rating: definitely worth it! Very interesting, and you can’t do it without a tour.
Cost: $77 inc. tax (about $5 more if paying by credit card; less for military personnel)
Duration: Typically 7:30 to 15:30. Sometimes a later departure is available
Sights: JSA briefing and tour (step into North Korea briefly), 3rd Infiltration Tunnel, Dora observatory, Dorasan Station

Acronyms (see also this Wikipedia article):

  • MDL: Military Demarcation Line: the actual border line cutting across the peninsula
  • DMZ: De-Militarized Zone: roughly 2km area on both north and south sides of the MDL, across the entire peninsula
  • JSA: Joint Security Area within the DMZ where UN buildings are situated for negotiations

Details:

  • It’s about an hour bus ride each way to the DMZ (approx 55km north of Seoul)
  • First stop is Camp Bonifas just outisde the DMZ: you get a short interesting video on the history of the Korean War and DMZ (also showing maps), and then a briefing by US soldiers
  • A drive around the JSA in the military’s tour bus, which includes a few viewpoints such as the Bridge of No Return and the site of the infamous Ax Murder incident over the cutting down of a poplar tree, but most importantly the UN buildings right on the MDL, especially the set of blue one-story buildings that literally straddle the MDL, where negotations are held.
  • This is where you can see North Korean soldiers across the line, and enter one of the buildings where you can walk on North Korean soil (within the building).
  • The Third Infiltration Tunnel is a tunnel running under the DMZ that was built by the North Koreans (4 have been discovered so far). It is accessed via a long sloped access tunnel (built for tourists), after which you can walk (with requisite hard hat) a few hundred meters to the first of 3 walls built by South Koreans to block the tunnel. Along the way, you see the dynamite bore holes and coal painted on the walls by North Koreans as a misdirection (despite the fact there is no coal in the area).
    Oddly, there is also a natural spring fountain in the tunnel.
    Tip: For taller people, the actual tunnel requires hunching over which can make your lower back sore: even though it is roughly 2m in diameter, there is scaffolding which lowers the effective height.
  • The Dora observatory is on top of a little hill and lets you see the area surrounding the JSA, including the fake North Korean town Kijong-dong with a huge flagpole
  • Dorasan Station is a train station and highway checkpoint before North Korea. Some South Koreans do work across the border at factories owned by Samsung (mostly staffed by lower paid North Korean) and at this checkpoint they are required to store things (such as phones, cameras and mp3 players) in lockers.
    The train station is large and modern, with airport-style security for access to the tracks; however, this is virtually unused until reunification happens.
    The slogan here is: Not the last station from the South, but the first station toward the north.
  • Fun fact: there is a South Korean rice farming village inside the DMZ which is subsidized by the government: no taxes, guaranteed income (US$80,0000/yr per family), protected 24/7 by military (of course they also have to be in village by sundown and locked in their houses by midnight).
  • Fun fact: the DMZ is now quite an unofficial bio-diverse nature preserve
  • Fun fact: there is a one hole golf course – just don’t go searching for a stray ball in the rough as it is surrounded by mine fields

Misc:

Dress code: required by military, no tank tops, slogans etc. And wear comfortable walking shoes.
Food: optional Korean lunch at cafeteria at Dorasan Station (quite tasty and filling actually; either vegetarian bibimbap for W6,000/$5 or bulgogi for W10,000/$9) or brown bag it
Tip: Yes you can take photos, just not everywhere. Listen to the guide/soldiers.
Tip: In the JSA, you can’t bring any bags or purses or camera bags (must be left on your bus).
Tip: Remember to bring your passport on the trip.
Tip: Book in advance as tours fill up and don’t run daily. On their website, just because a tour is listed in the calendar, does not mean that the tour has space! For my one week trip, there was only one tour that had space.
Tip: Bring a snack and water bottle as lunch isn’t until almost 14:00. There are drink vending machines and gift shops at multiple stops.

Seoul: Leeum Samsung Museum details

More info on the Leeum Samsung Museum in Itaewon.

This museum has 3 cool buildings of different architectural styles; 2 house permanent collections (inc. modern Korean and foreign art), and one has a temporary exhibit.

Highlights of the museum (IMHO):

  • 2 funky huge spider sculptures by Louise Bourgeois in the courtyard
  • Museum 1: some small but impressive ceramic vases
  • Museum 2 upstairs: a tall thin bronze woman statue (Susan would like this one!)
  • Museum 2 main floor: a shiny smooth blue egg with a pink-red bow on top (sculpture) by Jeff Koons
  • Museum 2 main floor: a large mosaic-like painting of a face
  • Temp exhibit: When I visitied, it was Joseon era paintings, including surprisingly explicit erotic art, as well as:
    a 1760 painting of the Cheong-gye-cheon (canal) being uncovered and cleaned up (recall that this was just done 5 years ago, so history does repeat itself!)

Misc notes:

  • Cool technology: touch-screens that let you scroll and zoom in on digitized versions of some fragile paper art
  • the light in the temporary exhibit was so dim you could barely read the descriptive signs

Unfortunately no photos were allowed inside, but here are the spiders in the courtyard:

Louise Bourgeois’ Spider Statues

Cost: W13000/$11.50 for all 3 museums

Directions: M6 to Hangangjin station x1, go south and then follow signs to “Leeum Museum”

Seoul: Days 5-6 summary

It seems with each passing day I saw fewer and fewer sights each day…

Day 6:

  • Dongdaemun gate/market/design plaza and fashion district: market overload and it wasn’t even in full swing (busier as a night market!).
    The Dongdaemun Design Plaza’s contest-winning design is a Gehry-esque fluid building and green space designed by an award-winning female Iraqi architect
  • Enjoyed a nice grilled fish lunch (W6000/$5), where the big water bottle on the table was “Kirkland Signature” (i.e. Costco!)
  • Worked for a few hours :-(
  • Kalbi dinner (beef on a table top charcoal grill) with the hostel owner Mr. Kim and one staff member.

Day 5:

  • Inwangsan (mountain): hike up the 338m for shamanist shrines (part way up), old castle city walls and views of Seoul (south towards old part of town and Seoul Tower)
  • Dongnimmun Park with the Independence gate and park
  • Gyeongbokgung (palace): huge grounds with lots of buildings. too many beyond the first few… also a colourful changing of the guards ceremony at the top of each hour during the day.
  • Pork grill on table top hotplate with the hostel owner Mr. Kim, 3 staff and a few guests (going away dinner for a Canadian guy who stayed there for a month)

Also updated the map.