walk the dinosaur

I had heard that there were dinosaur footprints in Busan, but had never actually visited them. In June, for Peter's last weekend in Busan, we went to Igidae Park to find them.


And I'm pretty sure they're in this picture. It's about the same as the picture in the brochure, but I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking at. Interpret away.

Igidae Park has a lot going for it, though. There's fishing!


You can see the *other* side of the Gwangalli bridge


And those potentially-dinosaur-footprint-puddles are full of tadpoles and little frogs!


There's a path that goes along the water and past this structure


Which is full of...


I've been told that stacking rocks is good luck. I think this looks like the set of the "chatty duelists" scene in the Princess Bride.


There's a cave.


And Pete was brave and athletic.

Pictures of

Here are a few pictures of things.


A port-o-squatty, discovered while on a walk in Yangsan.

White fog on Haeundae, Korea's most famous beach.


One day in early May my walk home was interrupted by this...


There was a typhoon over the weekend, and on Sunday I passed a playground that had flooded, so kids were sliding down the slide in the rain, into a foot of muddy water. I didn't take a picture.

Narrative posts again tomorrow :-)

chop it down with the edge of my hand

Autumn and I went hiking a couple of weeks ago.



Geumjeong Mountain is a mountain in Busan. It has an old fortress at the top, and a cable car (um...aerial tramway?) to the top. We did not take the cable car and instead hiked to the top. I did not die. We took the cable car down and did not have time to explore the fortress (which is really a big stone wall... we will hike it another day!)



I didn't realize how far we had come until we hopped in the cable car to go back down. That bridge in the upper right is at Gwangalli beach, where I stay every weekend. And see the train track just to the right of the red cable-holder-thingy? We walked FROM THERE. There was no mid-mountain trailhead to which we took a taxi. Oh, no. We did the whole thing.

And then celebrated with milkshakes, like you do.

all i got is a photograph

This is what happens when I don't have a camera.

I took a bus to Surat Thani to catch the night train to Bangkok. The bus passed some truly beautiful scenery, which I yearned to capture but my camera is swimming with the fishes, figuratively, after swimming with the fishes, literally.

So I tried my hand at describing the scenery, and this is what I wrote in my little notebook (otherwise filled with to-do lists and guesthouse names.)

I couldn't take a picture of the palm tree orchards at twilight, casting perfect linear shadows on the pale green earth. They might continue forever, except when the road and the rolling of the hills meet with a subtle valley and the end of the orchard is visible.

Great fists of limestone, jutting into the orange sky! What impassioned you to stab mightily through the crust of hell, all angry knuckles and thumbs, and then to be still? To allow life, lush and dark, to creep over your hands and settle in the great crevices between your fingers? To allow to grow in the shadow of your fists a petty coconut field?

And this is what you'd have to deal with if I didn't replace my camera right away, which I did. You missed a couple of poetic scenes, actually. I highly recommend the road between Krabi and Surat Thani at sunset.

When I got to Bangkok, I went to MBK and bought myself a new camera, and took this picture on the way back. And hey I just noticed that I'm in one of the mirrors!



A thousand words, right there.

P.S. Tuk-tuk are funner than taxis.

we had joy, we had fun

There is not an error message on my Fujifilm Z33 Waterproof Digital Camera which says,

"Excuse me--I can't help but notice that you're about to jump off the back of a boat and you're still holding me. I'm quite flattered that you'd like to make use of my advertised underwater capabilities as you have done many times in the past, but I wanted to let you know that those have ceased to be, and it would be best if you left me on the boat.

Regards,
Your Camera."

As there is not such a message, I naively dove in, and without warning or goodbye, my camera captured some fishes



and died.

Riders on the storm

After the Songkran festivities, I didn't bother changing out of my wet clothes to go to the ferry dock, since I got soaked again on the way there. I did wrap my clothes in plastic bags before putting them in my backpack. On the ferry ride over, I saw ominous clouds gathering above the island. And then this!



My friend Laura had a much better vantage point from the beach, where she says that the waterspout actually picked up some beach chairs a couple of beaches down.

As we approached the island, it started to rain and I was glad that I was wearing my already-wet clothes. It poured as I walked through the town.

The next day, Autumn, Bert and I took a songthaew down to a beach about halfway down the island where Autumn had gotten a great massage before. Unfortunately, the massage place was closed for the Songkran holiday, but we watched as another storm brewed.



The storm passed over the island, leaving the water angry and gray.