Heavily promoted as one of the new seven natural wonders of the world, Jeju Island, an oval volcanic island in the East China Sea, is a different country of South Korea with its different landscape, climate, architecture or even the taste of kimchi. Jeju is not a new discovered destination for me; my Korean friend often posted their honeymoon photos on Jeju on their webpage, Jeju is popular for Korean honeymooner, and during my last trip to Seoul, I saw many advertisements of its new seven wonder campaigns, even a large booth in Seoul Station for clicking the vote, so when I decided to visit Korea again, part of my annual Asian trip this year, I requested to visit Jeju as my prime destination to discover this island.

The best way to see Jeju is to rent a car, after landed at Jeju Airport, my first place to visit was the famous Manjanggul Cave; the lava tube cave is indeed a great site, very interesting, unique and definitely the best site of Jeju. While I really enjoyed the place, I also really concerned with the protection of the cave, currently tourists can freely touch and walk inside which finally someday will damage the cave and its unique lava surface. My next destination was the famous sunrise peak or Seongsan Ilchulbong which is actually an eroded volcano next to the sea; I was surprised to discover that the peak is surrounded by a very big town and large car park with hundreds of bus tours, clearly the peak is very popular. The peak itself is quite nice with its beautiful green lawn, high cliff and seacoast landscape, but with thousands of tourists, the place was really chaotic and noisy and made the whole experience not quite enjoyable. Actually, I had much more enjoyable time seeing Seongsan Ilchulbong from the nearby beautiful Seopjikoji Peninsular or Phoenix Island Resort, and as already mentioned by Paul, the works of Tadao Ando are very interesting and his design use Seongsan Ilchulbong as part of borrowed landscape is very classy.

Due to bad weather on Hallasan, I only saw two parts of the Jeju's World Heritage Site. The island is indeed a nice place to visit especially for its unique volcanic wonders not only the lave tubes but many beautiful lava coastlines. For other manmade tourist attractions, I found them are just fine and sometime to bizarre to visit. The food on Jeju is also nice especially abalone and other seafood, local products made from cactus and its local orange are quite good for souvenirs and interesting for their taste. In my opinion, UNESCO sites on Jeju, especially Manjanggul Cave, are one of the best sites that Korean offered to the World Heritage and should be seen at least once in a lifetime.