Saturday

On Saturday morning Jon and I took the subway East of Seoul to Yongmasan. We started the morning by visiting Yongmasan’s Waterfall Park. Which is (according to a Korean Tourism website)The largest man-made waterfall in Asia, where the central falls are 51 meters high, while those on each side are 21 meters. It was beautiful, but not as impressive as I expected (it was no Niagra Falls..hee hee).
After the waterfall, we found the trail leading up the mountain and began our hike up Yongma Mountain which is about 348 meters high.

The hike itself was not too hard, despite the fact that I was sweating like a pig (sooo sexy).
As we got higher and higher the views got better and better. Even though it was a cloudy day, we could see a lot of Seoul and the Han river.

The trails were not very busy which was great considering the weather was perfect when we started.
Here's a photo of Jon - barely breaking a sweat. The trail we took was more of a horseshoe loop that took us from Yongma mountain to Acha mountain. In total we hiked for about 4 hours.

Here is a very sweaty me - haggered almost non? Anyways, we stopped for lunch of kimbap and a few cans of beer before we started our decent from Achasan. It was good timing since the sky turned yellow and then opened up. As the Koreans littrally ran for cover, Jon and I enjoyed the refreshing rainfall (which was more monsoonal then normal for this time of year) and had the trail to ourselves.
Once we got to the bottom of the mountain, we stopped in at Hwayangsa Temple for a quick look around, walked through an old neighborhood near Achasan Station and then took the subway to Insadong.
We decided to stay in Seoul for the night so we wouldn't have to bother with the commute to the suberbs.
After searching for a motel we finally found one that wouild rent us a room for more then an hour (yep...you gotta love the Love Motels). The room was pretty standard. It's high point was the large flat screen TV on the wall and it's low point was a very unstable bath tub that rocked when you moved and a cockroach that we discovered the next morning...high class all the way!
~ Saturday night Jon and I had an Indian dinner outside on a beautiful patio and then spent a few hours walking through Hongdae.