We left at 8 o'clock Saturday morning for what was supposed to be a three hour drive north. We had rented a small charter bus-van-thing and we were all in good spirits, chatting and laughing and listening to music and such. About an hour or so into the trip, the driver goes off the highway and starts taking smaller back roads. We were then in the mountains, taking hairpin turns up and down on two-lane roads in a vehicle not built for mountain driving and a driver who was a total n00b. It was inevitable that some of us (including me) were going to start to feel a bit woozy. So one by one we started to move towards the front of the bus to get a better view out the front window. The driver was muttering to himself, and it was soon revealed that he was driving in the wrong direction.
The view was lovely, but the beauty was definitely lost on me and some others, as we were turning rather green. Eventually one of the guys told the bus driver to pull over because he had to puke. The bus driver pulled over to the side a bit, even though it was on a turn and there was no shoulder. This was fine, because in Korea, shoulders are for pansies. The sick guy got out and one of the girls climbed out with him to see that he was okay. It actually turned out to be really good that the guy had to throw up, or else the girl would not have seen that our front tire was on fire.
We fled the bus in much the same way as any foreigner will vacate their flaming Korean mode of mass transportation-- very quickly. This a picture of where we stopped to barf and consequently escape our fiery demise:
This is a picture of our bus:
It turned out that it was actually our brakes that were on fire, because the driver was riding them too hard on the sharp hills. We reluctantly got back on the bus for the rest of the trip. It wasn't long before we heard some protests from the back and realized the heater had overheated and had burned one of the girls on the leg. But we didn't have to pull over for that one.We backtracked several times, but FINALLY we made it to the rafting place. We ate our lunch, changed, had an uneventful afternoon of rafting (except when one guy fell over in the middle of the rapids), and rather warily took the bus back to our pension, where we were going to spend the night. This is the pension:
And a view of the landscape around the pension:
And my homies and I:
The pension was immaculate, the food was decent, and the only drawback was that the floors we slept on were heated, and it wasn't cool enough to be sleeping on heated floors. It was quite uncomfortable. But the showers had hot water and good pressure, so it was exponentially better than the pension experience from the mud festival.
We had a lot of fun taking pictures in the pitch dark though. Here's some:
This one isn't really what it looks like, but if you've got an embarrassing picture, show it off!!
Catchin' some air.
On Sunday we went paintballing. I've never been before, nor have I ever aspired to, but I guess I can now cross it off my list of things I don't care if I do before I die. Here's a picture of us in our gnarly uniforms. (I'm on the far left, Mom) I got shot once in the hip, it stung and I have a little baby bruise from it, but it wasn't much drama.
And finally, a lovely picture of us leaping for joy in front of the pension. What a great holiday!!
The trip home was blessedly uneventful. Our driver was a pro, we were on the highway the whole time, and I was sitting backwards and didn't get carsick once! We stopped at one of those awesome rest stops and ate lunch and got back mid-afternoon. The whole trip home was three hours, just as it was meant to be -_-;;
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