Seongsan Illchulbong's volcanic landscape inspires flights of fancy

The kind of landscape that looks alive to me

Can you see what looks like a monster 

peeking out of the bushes? ;)

 

From this angle, Seongsan Ilchulbong 

looks well majestic as well as nigh unclimbable!

After spending an enjoyable time at the top of Seongsan Ilchulbong (Sunrise Peak), the friend I had made the predawn hike up the peak with and I made our way down it along a different trail from that which we had taken to go up it.  In part because it was a more winding trail (that covered more distance), our descent took more time than our accent.  Then there was the fact that post sunrise, we could see more -- and ended up stopping from time to time to admire the views and volcanic landscape, and take photos of them.

For some time now, I've found volcanoes and volcanic landscapes fascinating, both geologically (I took a couple of geology courses as an undergraduate) but also purely on an aesthetic level; not least because volcanic areas feel alive to me.  To be sure, the sense that the actual rocks and other geological features are alive is particularly strong in the obviously active volcanic areas (such as Japan's Mount Aso and Owakudani valley).  But Jeju's Seongsan Ilchulbong also has the kind of landscapes that feel like they could spring to life -- in terms of the rock formations getting me thinking of monstrous creatures and such!   

Over the course of hiking in Hong Kong, I've come across many fancifully named rocks and rock formations in places like Po Toi and Cheung Chau.  To my mind, the volcanic landscape of Seongsan Illchulbong is well capable of inspiring similar flights of fancy.  

As it is, seongsan denotes a mountain shaped like a castle (or fortress) in Korean (while ilchulbong refers to a peak from where beautiful sunrises can be viewed).  Furthermore, the ring of 99 sharp rocks atop the rim of its crater -- that's some 600 meters in diameter and 90 meters in height -- has been likened to a giant crown.  And I'd go further still and state that there were angular sections of rock in the area that called to mind birds of prey about to pounce as well as at least one pair of holes high up on a rock wall that looked like they could be the eyes of a watchful stone monster or god looking down on the people hiking on the trail below!  

Even those without much of an imagination should be able to admire the spectacular sights that this UNESCO World Heritage-listed site presents from a number of different angles and vantage points.  And even while I wasn't able to view Seongsan Illchulbong from the air, I still would say that I managed to get views "in the flesh" of this justly famous Jeju landmark that rival those of many beautiful photos taken of it.

Making musical associations while atop Seongsan Ilchulbong (and elsewhere)

Puppet Ponyo atop Seongsan Ilchulbong

 

Early morning view from the top of Seongsan Ilchulbong

 

Looking out towards the actually much higher  

Hallasan from atop Seongsan Ilchulbong

  

If anyone were to ask me, I would not describe myself as a particularly musical person.  Yes, I took piano lessons for several years as a child (like many Asian children are made to do).  And yes, I also learnt to play the recorder and pianica at school, and actually was in the school choir and orchestra back in primary school.  But I didn't have the musical passion that I've seen a number of other people have and, unusually for an Asian, have never ever been out to a karaoke bar (even while I have been to plenty of bars where the primary activities are drinking alcohol and chatting)!

 

At the same time though, I can't deny my liking to sing in the shower and sometimes even while out hiking in the countryside by myself or strolling about on a street.  And there really are celebratory and/or happy moments when a particular song will suddenly pop into my head and I may give into an impulse to sing it out aloud! 

 

On a visit to England's Lake District many years ago, I was moved to sing the theme song from The Sound of Music after hiking up a hill and coming across the kind of scenic vistas that got me thinking of the ones that saw Julie Andrews (as Maria von Trapp) burst out in song in my favorite movie when I was younger than sixteen going on seventeen.  And after hiking up Jeju's Seongsan Ilchulbong and seeing the sunrise from atop it, a part of me wanted to burst out in song while up there too.

 

But whereas I had felt free to sing out loud on that hill in the Lake District because there was just one other person up there at the time (and she happened to be my cousin, who happily sang along after I got going!), there were too many people atop Seongsan Ilchulbong (aka Sunrise Peak) at the same time as me for my comfort!  So I contented myself with drinking in the beautiful views from atop the 180-meter-high volcanic cone, taking snaps of Puppet Ponyo posing atop it, and periodically humming sections of Cat Stevens' Morning Has Broken and The Carpenters' Top of the World under my breath.

 

Incidentally, besides being places that have made me want to burst into song, the Lake District and Seongsan Ilchulbong also both happen to be UNESCO World Heritage-listed sites -- of which I count myself fortunate to have visited 75 (in 23 different countries) to date.  And so too is Salzburg, which I will forever associate with The Sound of Music, and where I also was moved to sing songs from that movie when I spent time in that fair city! ;b  

Predawn hike up Seongsan Ilchulbong to see the sun rise from its peak! (Photo-essay)

The majority of visitors to Jeju spend a night (or more) at Seogwipo, over on the southern side of the island.  My party of four didn't do so and, instead, spent two of our three nights in Jeju over to the east in Seongsan, a small town with one very big tourist draw in the form of Seongsan Ilchulbong (aka Sunrise Peak), a tuff cone which rose out of the sea as a result of hydrovolcanic eruptions that occured some five thousand years ago.

On account of it being located on the far eastern edge of Jeju, Seongsan Ilchulbong has the earliest sunset on the island and it's become very much the thing to go see the sun rise from atop this UNESCO World Heritage-listed site's 182-meter-high peak.  So the day after we had an early dinner and a far earlier bed time than we usually do, one of my friends and I got up and went for a predawn hike up Seongsan Ilchubong that we were able to accomplish in far less time (some 20 minutes!) than I had anticipated, with plenty of time to find a prime viewing spot from which to view what turned out to be a truly stunning sunrise... :)

It was still pretty dark when we approached and 

began our ascent of Seongsan Ilchulbong

The path up was clear enough though

thanks to there being lights showing the way

I really was amazed by how far up we got in so short a time!

The horizon was orange-tinged but the moon was still visible 

and far up in the sky when we picked our sunrise viewing spots

 Here comes the sun, looking as though 

it's rising out of the grayish-blue sea!

That's the sun, not the moon! :O

The sun looked to me like it was causing 

portions of the horizon to melt!

A sunrise that truly was worth the effort to see -- and this 

from someone who is far more of a night owl than early bird! :b

Seongsan sunset and twilight views

Sun setting behind Hallasan

 

Twilight view from the balcony of my Seongsan hotel window

 

In the hour after the sunset, South Korea's 

highest mountain loomed really large over the landscape

 

Shortly after arriving in Takayama by way of the Hida Limited Express from Nagoya last month, I was unexpectedly treated to a beautiful sunset sky show by Mother Nature.  In Jeju earlier this month, I got more of an advance warning that I would get to see another beautiful sunset when, as my party of four were walking back to our hotel after our black pork feast, we noticed that the sun was casting long shadows and turning the western part of the sky a reddish orange.  

 

Hurrying over to the edge of the lagoon in front of our hotel, I managed to snap one shot of the setting sun before it vanished behind Hallasan (which, more than incidentally, was considerably further away from Seongsan than it looks courtesy of it being really pretty massive!).  Having learnt over the years by way of viewing sunsets at the likes of Tai Mei Tuk and Matsue that the sky show doesn't immediately end after the sun vanishes over the horizon, I tarried a while to enjoy the golden hour displays -- and, even after finally retreating to my hotel room because the temperatures fell pretty dramatically once the sun set, I still couldn't resist spending a few minutes checking out the views from my hotel room balcony.

 

For my troubles, I was rewarded with the kind of views that one feels very lucky to be able to observe; this even though the sun does set every day!  And okay, it might seem weird to segue into the following but I once was asked which of the five senses I feel least able to do without -- to which I pretty immediately replied that it would be sight.  Without it, I really think I would feel lost -- when venturing outside my home but also within it -- as well as be deprived of being able to enjoy two leisure pursuits I enjoy so very much: reading, and watching movies.  

 

I also would be unable to appreciate so much of nature's beauty; be they in the form of cool flora or fauna, and also amazing sky shows courtesy of the rising and setting sun.  So, truly, I am grateful that I do indeed have vision in my eyes -- and also am grateful that I have been able to see so much of the planet's beauty over the years. :)          

Jeju meetup, with "bonus" shocks and culinary revelations!

Quite the spread for four people, right? ;b

 

Local custom dictates that the meat needed to be cut up 

(using scissors!) into bite-sized pieces before we dug into it! ;D

Less than a month after I got back to Hong Kong from my most recent Japan trip (which saw me spending time in Nagoya, Inuyama, Takayama and Hida-Furakawa), I was off again -- this time with my mother in tow -- to meet up in Jeju, South Korea, with the two friends I had an Okinawa rendezvous with some six years ago.  My mother had met this mother-daughter pair when we went off together for a Hakone holiday (that included two nights at the wonderful Gora Kansuiro) a couple of years ago and we all had clicked so well that we didn't only end up hanging out together some more in Tokyo but my mother also got to suggesting that the four of us should meet up again in Jeju some time. 

With our different schedules plus the four of us living in different parts of the world (Vermont, USA, for one of my friends, Tokyo for the other, Malaysia in the case of my mother and Hong Kong for me), it's not surprising that our Jeju trip took some time to plan and come into being.  But it really did happen eventually and the four of us were reunited at the airport when my mother and I flew in and were met by our two friends (who had arrived the previous day and done such as rent a car for us to drive around in for all but our final day on the island).

 

From the airport, we headed straight to the first hotel that we'd be staying in on Jeju.  Located in Seongsan, over on the eastern side of the island, it would require what to me would qualify as a long distance drive but what my friend who was driving had said wasn't all that far as far as she was concerned.  

 

A few minutes into our car journey, we received quite the shock when what my mother had thought was the sound of a train horn in the distance turned out to have been made by the driver of the car behind us who was so upset by our being in the way of his being able to make a turn that he got out of his car to pound on one of our car's windows!  As I later remarked to the people in the car, it made for quite the dramatic welcome to Jeju but perhaps we should have expected this sort of aggressive behavior in view of what we've seen of Korean people in Korean movies and TV dramas!

 

Speaking of K-dramas: that's the main reason why my mother and one of my friends had wanted to go to Jeju!  And we did indeed visit a few spots on the island which had been locations for Korean TV dramas.  For my part though, Jeju's primary attraction came by way of its specialty foods.  And when we sat down to our first meal together on the island, we all got a very good feeling that we'd be eating super well during our stay in this part of South Korea!

 

After checking in to our hotel, we went in search of a place that was open on a Sunday and came across a restaurant which served up Jeju black pig.  Following the waitress's recommendation that we get two dinner sets, we had our second shock of the day when we saw the large amount of meat as vegetables (to wrap the meat in and such) well as banchan (side dishes) -- which included a few varieties of kimchi but also less traditionally Korean delicacies like a sizzling creamed corn concoction! -- brought to our table.  On the other hand, being veteran consumers of Korean food, we didn't bat an eyelid when the waitress came over with a pair of large scissors and started cutting up the portions of pork that had been cooking on the grill into bite-sized chunks!

 

Although we all had not thought that we could do so, we ended up finishing up every bit of the meat we had been served.  All in all, I think it's less a testament to our appetites and more to how very tasty the Jeju black pig really is.  And for the record: yes, I most definitely would concur with those who say that it's the wagyu of pork and might even go so far as to say that it's the best pork I've ever had in my life!   And while one would expect the pork at a Jeju black pig specialist restaurant to be good, the pork at our hotel's breakfast buffet the one day we decided to try it was pretty fabulous too, making what otherwise would have been a rather average hotel breakfast buffet spread into something very enjoyable indeed! ;b

Project Gutenberg is a genuinely entertaining money-maker! (Film review)

I love spending a couple of hours in the afternoon

watching an entertaining movie on a big screen :) 

 

Project Gutenberg (Hong Kong-Mainland China, 2018)

- Felix Chong, director and scriptwriter

- Starring: Chow Yun Fat, Aaron Kwok, Zhang Jingchu, Liu Kai Chi

 

There are Hong Kong movie fanboys and fangirls who don't need a reason to see this movie beyond Chow Yun Fat being its first-billed star.  I know second-billed Aaron Kwok also has his share of devotees.  If anything, however, the Cantopop singer-actor being in this crime thriller's cast caused me to delay checking out Project Guttenberg for as long as I did.  And, in truth, it was my curiosity to see what kind of Chinese-language film could be a box office hit both in Mainland China and Hong Kong that finally got me into a theater to view this offering on a big screen.

 

Set in the 1990s, this visually stylish effort can feel at times like it's harking back to Hong Kong cinema's late 20th century glory days: most notably by giving a showy role to Chow Yun Fat that allows him to unleash the charisma and even certain action movie moves which he has not had much opportunity to display in his more recent film appearances.  At the same time though, this movie possesses the kind of substantial budget that Hong Kong filmmakers of yore could only dream of; which allows for the assembling of a quality cast (some of whom, Jack Kao and Alex Fong Chung Sun among them, can create memorable characters with just a few lines and minutes of screentime) and a story that unfolds in places as far flung as Canada, Poland and South East Asia's Golden Triangle along with Hong Kong. 

 

Lest there be any doubt: Chow Yun Fat owns every scene of this film that he is in.  Early on, however, it's Aaron Kwok who has the limelight in scenes that see his Lee Man character in a hell hole of a prison in Thailand before being extradited to Hong Kong, where he sets to telling a story that began in Canada a number of years earlier. 

 

A technically gifted artist who nonetheless was unable to sell any of his original works, Lee Man discovers one day that he has a gift for copying famous works of art.  His pursuit of this avenue for him to make use of his talents leads him to become part of a counterfeiting ring as well as part ways with Yuen Man (Zhang Jingchu), the woman he loves and -- he gets to bitterly recognizing -- is a far bigger artistic talent than him.  It also got him coming across like a cat in danger of having used up almost all of its nine lives after a number of twists in his life tale that included his being one of just two survivors of the gang that successfully produced thousands of perfect replicas of the US$100 bill before the majority of its members perished in a shootout in the suite of a Hong Kong luxury hotel.

 

A movie with a non-linear narrative structure that can frustrate some viewers (including those who see too much of a resemblance between it and The Usual Suspects), Project Gutenberg is one of those cinematic offerings that relies to a significant degree on the goodwill of those who watch it and their willingness to sit back and enjoy the ride.  Its complicated -- some might say convoluted -- story unfolds at a good pace and, despite being quite a bit lengthier than the average Hong Kong movie at 130 minutes, the film never over-stayed its welcome as far as this particular (re)viewer was concerned.

 

In addition to it being an entertaining watch, I reckon one reason why Project Gutenberg fared so well at the Hong Kong box office is that this Hong Kong-Mainland Chinese co-production has a lot more Hong Kong actors and actresses in significant roles than Mainland Chinese ones.  I also appreciate the way Felix Chong and Co managed to fashion a finale that was able to satisfy the Mainland Chinese censors but still surprise rather than be entirely predictable and, actually, be quite the moving affair.

My rating for the film: 8.0

Beach clean-up at the Cheung Chau beach which sees the most trash washed ashore

Path cleared of post typhoon debris (including fallen trees)

The Cheung Chau beach that has the misfortune to be 

where the currents bring scary amounts of trash to

Beach clean-up in progress at Tung Wan Tsai (Coral Beach) yesterday

A couple of weeks after Typhoon Mangkhut struck, the beach clean-up group I organize went and worked on Cheung Chau's Tai Kwai Wan one Saturday.  After ascertaining that the typhoon debris had been cleared so that the path to our usual beach clean-up spot was open once more though, we returned to Tung Wan Tsai (Coral Beach) over on the other side of the island, where the currents look to bring over far more trash than any of the other Cheung Chau beaches I've been on.

The sight that greeted my party of eleven last month was expectedly horrific, with large amounts of trash strewn all over the beach and also higher up it and the rocks in the surrounding area than I had previously seen.  Still, I reckon we made a good dent of the trash on the beach on a day when the sun shone so brightly that I ended up getting sunburned (but didn't realize it until later in the day when a couple of friends remarked that I was looking on the red side and I saw that it was indeed so!).

So it was quite a bit of a shock to return yesterday and see trash strewn on a good swathe of Tung Wan Tsai once more; and this especially so since there hadn't been any typhoon or even major storm occur in the past month.  Making our task feel truly Sisyphean, more trash kept on being washed ashore by the waves as my group (smaller this time around than the previous month but supplemented by a Cheung Chau resident who happened on us at the beach!) went about picking up bits of trash that ranged from the pretty sizable to small but still recognizably plastic and, in fact, after we decided to call it a day to head off for lunch.

Whereas I previously would make a point to pick up glass shards as well as plastic items, I tend to focus these days on getting as much plastic and styrofoam off the beach (and back into the water courtesy of the tides).  One reason is that I've seen how plastic -- even those that appear on the solid side at first -- and styrofoam can break up into tiny pieces that are frustratingly difficult to sort from sand and also am super aware that those plastic microparticles get eaten by so many fish.  And then there are all those plastic bags that, when floating in the water, resemble the jellyfish that a number of marine creatures (including whales and sea turtles) feed on.     

Something else that was in abundance on the beach (including half buried in the sand and often hard to dig out) yesterday, and which I also have come to abhor, are ghost nets.  Truly, I find it difficult to understand how the fishing community can be so irresponsible and uncaring of the sea when its very health is so important to their livelihood.  And yet, time and time again, I see evidence of this at beach clean-ups and can only wonder what it will take to make these people wake up and see that they are contributing to the depletion of what they are able to catch and make money from doing so.

On a positive note, I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of times now that a stranger or two walking on to this pretty secluded beach, that's some distance -- and a hike away -- from the famous Cheung Chau sights, and seeing our beach clean-up in progress has stopped to help out.  Of course there also have been those folks who've blithely strolled past up without so much as a word or even those who've come up close to find out what we were picking up and then walked off after discovering that it was only trash!  But I take heart in the existence of the more good-hearted folks I've seen at Tung Wan Tsai -- and also those who sign up to work on what can seem like a futile task (and more than once too, as was the case with everyone who did so for yesterday's beach clean-up)!