Homestay ved Jirisan Nationalpark

It was a challenge to find my way to this national park. Lonely Planet provides virtually no guidance - in general, the book unfortunately has major shortcomings. Fortunately, we found help online from other tourists who had traveled from Busan to Jirisan National Park. There are countless routes and entrances to Jirisan National Park, we chose this one: We took the metro Line 2 to Sasang Seobu Intercity Bus Terminal. From here there was a bus to Jinju - 1.5 hours and it cost about 5,000 won per ticket. From there we took another bus the rest of the way to the tiny town of Jungsan-ni, located in the mountains at the foot of Jirisan National Park. This journey also took 1.5 hours and also cost around 5,000 won per person. Suddenly, we found ourselves in a town surrounded by mountains, which we hoped was the right place... Coincidentally, 2 girls were waiting for the bus out of town. We asked if they spoke English. Usually we get "no". But this time we got a smile. They were 2 sisters, one of whom currently lived in California, USA, where she worked as a nurse - so she spoke fluent English :o) They were very helpful and had 45 minutes before their bus left, so they were willing to act as our interpreters in this small town in the middle of nowhere. They wrote some Korean sentences for us so we could find our way to Jirisan National Park the next morning. They also took us to some minbak so we could find a place to spend the night. A minbak is a private home where rooms are rented out. The rooms are very spartan and without beds. You sleep on an ondol, which is an elevation in the floor that is heated at night. You are given some thin blankets to sleep on. However, you can easily feel the hardness of the floor through the blankets. But it was beautiful and wonderfully primitive to sleep for one night up in the mountains. You appreciate the city so much more afterwards :o) It's hard to say exactly where we stayed as the locals don't always use addresses. The town is so small, so it's easiest to say that we stayed very close to the parking lot, which is in the middle of town. Our minbak was the first one up the road towards the church, where there were also other minbakes. We ate dinner with our host family, but we were explained that we were vegetarians as we figured it would be safer not to eat meat as we were a little doubtful about their hygiene. It cost 7,000 won per person, which is not very cheap considering how far away from the city we are.