As it has
been a couple of days ago since I’ve written my last blog post, I have quite a
bit to tell, as the last week of our journey was very rich in variety.
In Daegu,
the final destination of my last entry, we stayed only for one night (which was
enough though to lose one of our Lonely Planets – luckily we had two with us, I
guess we would have been pretty screwed without them!) as we had to keep up
with our schedule because there was still a lot to see in South Korea!
Our main
reason why we visited Daegu was, next to the fact that it is South Korea’s
third largest city, the nearby temple named Haein-Sa, another Unesco World
Heritage. It holds 81’258 woodblock scriptures, making it one of the largest
Buddhist libraries of its kind. The blocks are named Tripitaka and the first
set of blocks was built in 1087.
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| Tripitaka |
They contain an almost unbelievable number of
more than 52 million Chinese characters and
it took the monks over 16 years to complete it. The temple itself is
also one of the most beautiful ones in South Korea and thus, this is really a worthwhile
visit.
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| The symbol for the temple could easily be understood wrong... |
Next to the
temple, there was also another opportunity to hike one of the nearby mountains,
mount Gayasan (1430m) and get a view over this region. This time, there were
clearly fewer hikers on the way than on Jeju and it was also not one of the
“highway hikes” where you have a fence on your left and right. The climb was a
pretty uncomfortable one though, not because of the steep itself, but because
of all the thousands of insects flying around our heads for about three hours –
oh how I hated them! Luckily they didn’t sting us, but we felt like cows
standing in the middle of the meadow surrounded by insects.
