Sunday, 5 June 2011

Korea 2011 - Day 2: Yongin (용인) - Daegu (대구)

Day 2 began with a morning trip to the Herb Gardens, which was a 30-40 minutes bus ride from our hotel.

Photobucket

We reached the garden around 8AM (which is FREAKING early CAN?!), and the air was very fresh. We could smell the flowers and the herbs too!

Photobucket
View from the entrance, very very pretty and serene (:

There are many "sub-gardens" within the garden and below is just one of many:

Photobucket

Photobucket
Comfy within a bed of roses.

There are many flowers and herbs within the garden and we spent about an hour there.

Photobucket

Think this rose is huge? Wait till you see the ones in Everland's Rose Garden! But I shall not get ahead of myself.

We proceeded to Everland after that, which was a 2 hours bus ride away. Lunch would be self-served within Everland.

~~

We arrived at the entrance of Everland around 11AM local time.

Photobucket
Entrance of Everland.

Photobucket
Queuing up for tickets.

The lady who applied the entrance band applied it damn tightly to my wrist it almost cut off my blood circulation!

Photobucket

After a quick tour group photo near the entrance, the guide took us straight to the Skyway Gas ride, which was basically a cable car ride. It will take us to the main attraction concourse, away from the kiddy rides.

Photobucket

After a 20 minute wait, we finally got onto the ride.

Photobucket

And then... WE SAW IT!

Photobucket
The T Express Roller Coaster!

It was the largest roller coaster ride I've ever seen in my life! I was told it was one of the largest in the world! The entire ride was almost 3 minutes! More on that later.

At the bottom of the cable car ride, our guide gave us about 3 hours of free time while he settled the tickets for the Safari Ride. I had the 'privilege' of being dragged away by Mr. Kim to see the average waiting time for the safari ride while the rest of the group waited under the lovely shade. The weather was quite hot *grumbles*

We were told that the average waiting time for the T Express could be up to 3 hours! Undeterred, a few of us decided go for the ride. Some of my travel mates weren't keen on the ride so the rest of us went ahead with it.

It was also here that I really got to meet and talk to three other folks also on their graduation trip.

Photobucket
Made three great friends (:

This bunch of NUS and SMU folks are all on their second grad trip and go way back to their high school days! How cool is that! That's another thing I love going on trips: Meeting new people.

Anyhoo, the 5 of us made a bee line for the ride and saw that the average waiting time was about 90 minutes, which gives us more than enough time!

The wait was pretty uneventful but the ride itself was MIND-BLOWING! Below is the POV for the T-Express.


By the way, my friends thought I was crazy to even attempt to film the ride while I was on it.

Little did they know, I filmed another POV for another (smaller) roller coaster ride after the T Express ride. Haha. But that was a pretty mild ride so shan't waste time uploading it.

We had about 80 minutes of free time so we decided to explore the rest of the park and some rides.

We visited the Rose Garden, which was also huge:

Photobucket

And remember the rose earlier? Meet roses on steroids!

Photobucket

Need a closer perspective? Sure.

Photobucket
How's that for huge? Sure injected with drugs one.

Photobucket
Comfy among a bed of roses (take 2)

Also played around with my SLR a bit:

Photobucket

This was one of my favourite shots of the entire trip! Had to play around with the shutter speed and multiple frames to get this photo, which also means the poor ladies had to jump multiple times:

Photobucket

They also had mini-train rides, just like Disneyland :)

Photobucket


Photobucket
The non-operational ferris wheel. Eeyer, cheat my money.

By the way, they sell brilliantly-wonderfully-sweet-smelling pop corns! And in big big tubs!

Photobucket
Lots of kids were carrying one. Haha.

We also had time to visit a... brace yourselves:

Photobucket

That sounds and looks so wrong on so many different levels, by the way.

We met up with the rest of the tour group again around 3PM, where Mr. Kim (and Mr. Kim) led us to the secret (or what we called it, cheat code) entrance to the safari ride. I had the honor of being dragged away by Mr. Kim once again to view the super long queues, while the rest of the group boarded the (AIR-CONDITIONED!) bus *double grumbles*

But, it was a pretty cool ride! We were very, VERY close to the animals.

Photobucket

The main attraction was of course, the cross bred animals. Namely, what do you get when you cross bred a Tiger and a Lion? A Liger. No kidding.

Photobucket
Just like Tap Zoo for the iPhone and iPad. Can cross bred one leh.

We saw so many cats even I can't tell which was pure bred and which was cross bred actually. The predator enclosure was kept separated from other animals, naturally.

Photobucket

Of course, what's a safari without other animals?

Photobucket

There was also Zibbras but I'm lazy to upload so many photos. (Very tiring one, okay?)

Photobucket

The bears are damn cute too! They're trained to sit up while being fed by the trainer (who also happens to be the coach driver), so that the tourists (i.e. us) could get good photos.

Photobucket

After the ride, we came to the end of the allocated time for the park. Too short a time given to spend in such a big, big park. I must say, I am impressed with the scale and rides in Everland!

~~

We proceeded to dinner after that, and it was (no prizes for the correct guess) steamboat (which has damn spicy soup)...

Photobucket

and more meat (sinful!)...

Photobucket

But was saved by the veges (:

Photobucket

~~

After dinner, we had sometime to do a little night time shopping around the area.

Photobucket

Photobucket
Dongsungro Streets, I think.

Then, we came across the first...

Photobucket

Face Shop. And so begins the hunting of cosmetic products.

I couldn't resist taking a shot of this shop:

Photobucket

That's like opening a shop in Singapore and naming it "Tan" or "Lim" or "Ong", because so many Koreans have Kim as their surname.

~~

Finally, we were led to the hotel, which I honestly cannot remember the name of the hotel.

Photobucket

We'll only be spending one night here and will be moving off to Jeju Island the following day. I was damn happy to find NatGeo and Discovery Channel on their TVs, BUT, it was both in Korean :( They had a few English channels, one of which played America's Funniest Home Videos (the series is still running?). It's moments like this that I'm thankful for my iPad 2 :)

That pretty much concludes our second day. Can't wait for Jeju Island the following day!