day 23: the reason God created hiking boots

Today I found out why people buy hiking boots. We woke up at 6 am to catch the bus to Halla Mountain, one of korea’s natural treasures. The bus brought us to the bottom and we hiked and hiked and hiked. Imagine climbing up 80,000 flights of stairs, then you will come close to understanding. We hiked 2000 vertical meters in 3 hours. I’m not going to brag, but we did it an hour faster than all the people say it would take us. At the top was a huge crater that was left from a volcano thousands of years ago. We sat up there after feeling like we had just been mugged by the stair-master. That lasted for about a half an hour, and then we started the decent. If you thought climbing up hot molten rock was easy, try going down it. it almost took us the same amount of time to go down, but we luckily made it down in one piece. (Well, as one-piece-ish as you can call legs that don’t work anymore.)

Then emily’s dad came and picked us up and drove us to the biggest lava tunnel in the world. It was long, dark, cold, and all the other adjectives that describe cave like structures.