My 'Hawaiian' Birthday

Continuing my posts about Jeju.... I don't care if you're sick of them! My birthday fell smack bang in the middle of our Jeju trip and I spent the day being badass (like every other day.) It started with cake in bed. 

Korea does AWESOME cakes and they're usually less than $20 NZ, just pop into one of the many 'French'-named bakeries and take your pick. This little number is from Paris Baguette.

Hidden in that stack of fruit is TOMATOES. 

Between the four of us we managed to polish off most of the cake before taking a bus to take a ferry to U-do, or Cow Island. Udo is on the east coast of Jeju, and the bus to there from Seogwipo takes years. It's only 40 or so kilometres, but as we stopped at every. single. town. on the way, it took an hour and a half to get there. Korea has rad public transport so I was surprised at how much the transport on Jeju sucked. Get on to it, Jeju!

Anyway, we caught the ferry to the island which was a 4,500 won round trip - cheap as chips! Somewhere online it says the trip to Udo is an hour by boat, but that somewhere is a dirty lie, it took 15 minutes max. It did however take about 30 minutes for the local bus to leave and take us to the nearest swimming beach. The wait was worth it though - the beach was the prettiest I've seen in Korea.

We spent an hour or so there swimming and watching the large group of people in white shirts do various team-building exercises. You can see them crowding around the boat in the picture above.

It was a bit of a mission getting the bus back to the port from the beach - I think there's only one bus and it does a full circuit around Udo and then stops for 30 minutes at a time to let the driver have a smoke and chat with the fishermen at the port. Fortunately the island is only 17 kilometres in diameter so the circuit doesn't take long.

When we got to the port we checked the only thing off our to-do list for the day - hiring motorised vehicles! For 60,000 won ($67) we got a quad bike and a golf cart and two hours to hoon around! It was amazeballs.

Bangin' rides

After very reluctantly returning our awesome rides we headed back to the mainland and got some dinner. Amazing food, fantastic company, wonderful birthday.

Aaaand.... matching couples!