Our final few weeks in South Korea - A Daily Vlog by Farmboy
/ Roxy Hutton
Today is the 6th of June, and in T-minus 20 days we will be boarding a flight that will take us back home to South Africa.
Farmboy and I have been living in Buan, a teeny tiny countryside town in South Korea for the past 3 years. We are about to wrap up our final teaching contract and head back home to sunny South Africa,
It's been an incredible adventure filled with all sorts of challenges and excitement (the biggest being the rescue of our Korean street pup, Shadow):
Over the past 3 years we have traveled to Bali, Vietnam, Malaysia, Borneo & India all while working a full time job teaching English. I've written travel guides to these countries as well as posts filled with photographs of each place. Click the images below to read and see more:
In January this year, Farmboy and I headed to India & Nepal with two friends for 18 days of backpacking adventures. We spent 15 days in India, and the last 3 days in Kathmandu, Nepal.
I will be writing travel guides for all of the places we visited, but it's going to take me a while as this was one of the most extensively planned trips we have ever done. Here is a breakdown of our 15 days:
Korea > Goa for 5 nights
Fly from Goa > Delhi 1 night
Delhi > Agra for an afternoon, then drive > Jaipur for 2 nights
Jaipur > Pushkar for 2 nights
Pushkar > Jodhpur for 2 nights
Jodhpur > Jaisalmar by overnight train for 3 nights (including a dessert safari stay)
Finally fly from Jaisalmar > Jodhpur > Delhi
It's going to take some time before the travel guides are up, so in the mean time, here are a few of the highlights of our trip. Make sure to scroll down to the end to watch the video too!
Welcome to Part 2 of my Borneo Travel Guide. My husband and I spent two weeks exploring Malaysian Borneo.
We spent the first part of our holiday in Kuching (2 days), moving onto Bantang Ai lake (3 days), then Kota Kinabalu (2 days) and then onto Semporna (1 day) & Mabul Island (4 days). As there is so much to say about our trip I am breaking up these posts into different parts. In this part I will be talking about Bantang Ai Lake; Part 3 I will be talking about Kota Kinabalu and finally in Part 4 I will write about Semporna & the scuba diving we did on Mabul Island.
We have also spent many a weekend camping, something I never thought I would enjoy before I met Farmboy. You see, I really am a city girl, but somehow the inconvenience of toilets or showers pales in comparison to the beauty of the places we have camped in.
It's been so worth the few moments of being uncomfortable. Click the images below to read and see more about camping in Korea:
This camping trip was a rather fun adventure as we met up with old & new friends alike. Stephanie & Ryan (the bloggers and youtubers behind the delightful travel blog The Hedgers Abroad) joined us from Yeosu. You might recognise Stephanie from some of my styled photo-shoots I've featured here on the blog...she has been my muse for a little while now (click here to see those styled shoots).
I was also excited to meet up with Megan & Scott from the awesome travel blog; Bobo & Chichi. Megan and I started up an online friendship a few months ago and it was wonderful to meet up in person. Scott creates the most amazing hyper-lapse videos of their adventures all over Korea, you should definitely head on over and take a look.
I also got to meet up with another fellow South African whom I have been connecting with via Facebook and it was great to share stories and laughs with her and her boyfriend around the fire. Even though it got terribly windy, this great group of people made the camping trip a real adventure. And of course my pup, Shadow, had a wonderful time being surrounded by dog-loving people (something he doesn't find too often here in Korea being a 'big, scary dog').
If you have a dog, this 'style' of camping is perfect for you. We do make sure to keep a long rope and clips in the car just in case we do come across issues with having him off lead, but this has yet to be a problem. I wouldn't advise letting your pup have free reign of an open space if they haven't had much experience being off lead before. As we live in a small town here in Korea and have a car, Shadow is off lead pretty much all the time. His recall is pretty good (not always!) and he generally stays near us. If you're looking for more posts on owning a dog here in Korea then click here, I've written some posts I think you might like.
This was our second camping trip to Wido Island, a small island on the west coast of Korea, accessible only by ferry from Gyeokpo.
Even though right now it's technically Winter here in Korea, I saw buds on the trees while working to work yesterday. So thought this post would be a good one to write now so that you can get planning your first Spring camping trip of the year.
Having a dog here in Korea (click here to read more about our rescue pooch #ShadowTheJindo & owning a dog in Korea) makes it hard to travel. We do have a car, which makes our lives 100 times easier, but the accommodation is always a problem. You see many Koreans are terrifies of 'big' dogs (even though our pup would only be considered a medium sized dog in most countries). Here in Korea, he is a great big, scary wolf. and so booking accommodation is always a problem. Even the places which allow dogs usually turn us away when they catch a glimpse of him. This is why we go camping so much. This post is all about Wido Island, and one of our favourite (usually deserted!) places to camp in Korea.
If you have a car here in Korea then camping is super easy and a wonderful way to spend the weekend. Even if you don't have a car, you can easily get to most camping spots by bus or train and if you have an International Drivers license you can easily and rather cheaply hire a car too!
Camping is a very affordable way to spend the weekend, and the cost of your camping gear is easily covered by your first or second trip when you compare it to the cost of staying in a motel. Also, as we have a large dog, and so camping means we don't have to worry about him when it comes to finding places to stay here. Korea is not very dog friendly, and it is near impossible to find places to stay that allow dogs (especially bigger ones) and so camping makes life easier. And it's far more fun!
Just before the full force of summer hit, a group of us went camping on Wido Island. Wido is on the west coast of Korea, accessible only by ferry from Gyeokpo. We often visit the beach near Gyeokpo, and the ferry is easy enough to access from the port.
There is a shuttle bus that rides around the island, but as the island is very small, the bus route and times are very unpredictable. We went by car (we took our car along with us on the ferry) and were a lot more flexible with finding a good camping spot. From what I have read about camping in Korea, you seem to be able to camp anywhere, as long as you respect the area and clean up after yourself.
We spent a good 45 mins driving around Wido looking for the perfect spot, and finally found this little bay, tucked away from the main road and only accessible by a small path through over grown bushes.
As we get ready to pack up our lives here (and as I attempt to take back every single item of Korean stationery and beauty products!), Farmboy has taken on the challenge of a daily vlog.
These videos are a really fun glimpse into our lives here in Korea, and they also take you behind the scenes of what life is really like here in Asia.
I hope you'll join us over on Youtube and that you like and subscribe if you enjoy the videos. Farmboy will be documenting these final few weeks as well as the whole process of taking Shadow home (dealing with the steps and processes of taking a dog from Korea to South Africa) and of course us fetching him on the other side after his stay in quarantine.
Here is one of the vlogs from our weekend in Seoul, enjoy!
Welcome to Part 3 of my Borneo Travel Guide. My husband and I spent two weeks exploring Malaysian Borneo in July 2015. We had a great time, and would definitely recommend it. We had a few ups and downs, mainly due to the environmental damage we saw pretty much everywhere, it was terribly sad to see so much deforestation. I probably wouldn't have noticed it if I was traveling with anyone else, but Farmboy was an environmental consultant is his former life and so was more aware than me (I thought there was a lot of green but what I thought was natural vegetation was 9 times out of 10 palm oil plantations). We also knew very little about Borneo (apart from the fact that it is one of the last places where you can see Orangutan in their natural habitat), and actually ended up deciding to go there because it had the cheapest flights and seemed like a very unique holiday destination.
You may be thinking of heading to Borneo soon (or sometime in the future) so to help you plan your trip, I have put together this travel guide, as well as some tips from our stay. Please keep in mind that my husband and I may travel very differently to you, and have different likes and preferences for things. I prefer the more luxurious path, while Farmboy would stay in a hammock for the entire trip if it was up to him. So we plan accordingly, and of course, try to stick to the budget.