So with my limited time remaining, I've had some help in gathering an adventurous little 4-some consisting of myself, the infamous Brian Miller, Justin (J-ROC) Nalepa and the Naomi Stanko. With such a clear view of my time coming to an end here on Jeju, I figured I needed to do all that stuff I had wanted to but hadn't gotten around to. Thus we developed 'Island Saturdays'. Every Saturday we wake up (hungover or not) and travel to an island off the coast. If we can't get to an island we pick a mountain or oreum. So far we've done Chagwi-do, Biyang-do, Tan-san and some Japanese WWII tunnels and anti-aircraft positions. It's been pretty incredible. I unfortunately forgot my camera for Chagwi but you can check out the pictures from The Brian HERE. (Even if you don't have facebook, you can check out the pictures.) If you have problems with it, let me know and I'll copy and paste some pictures in my pictures section on here.
Chagwi was amazing in a desolate sense. There were a few ruins of structures, one which might have been a house, the others (based on their size) were probably more military oriented. The typical Jeju house has one or two rooms, and this was big enough to have 6 or so. There was even a stone well and a couple of 2m tall stone pinnacles which were probably made from visiting fisherman and not b residents. The entire island was covered in golden wheat-looking plants that flowed with the wind. We walked to basically every point on the island, and I climbed the small weather station/lighthouse on the west side. There was even a nice little wave breaking on the NW side. So we took a fishing boat out to the island and had them pick us up to take us back to shore. Once back on shore we got some pajang (pancake with onions, squid and various things) plus some makkali (Korean rice wine) and warmed up. We hiked to the top of the famous Suwolbong, looked at the prehistoric site at Gosan and then went to Yeongmori so the girls could see the cliffs and canyons for the first time. To finish things off we went to an old Japanese radar station from WWII that was built into the side of a mountain and looked around. It was a pretty awesome trip, and the lonely but still so vibrant life on Chagwi was truly an experience I won't forget.