Hello folks! Since I've got here to South Korea, I have been pretty busy catching up on some backlogged cartography work, but I finally got a chance to get out with my wife Christina Richards to see some of the limestone cave around South Korea. Since I searched this forum before we left and found almost nothing, I thought even this might be a way to archive some information for other travelling cavers. Since these are all commercial caves, I will give a link which has directions to reach them- most of which require significant bus rides from Seoul, if you are not in possession of a car, but which are quite easy to reach using public transportation, even for those, like myself, who speak zero words of Korean.
Check out my next two posts for Hwanseongul: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=15883
and Daegeumgul: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=15884
The first cave we visited is called Gosu (or alternately Kosu) cave, located near the town of Danyang. A link to info is here: http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/SI/ ... cid=264275
This is a nice little cave, which can easily be walked in about 45 minutes on the self guided (along a walkway, but at your own pace) tour. The entrance to the cave is hidden behind a bunch of touristy junk shops, but easily found along the edge of the hillside behind the shops. After paying a few dollars at the entrance, you begin your walk into the cave at the stainless steel handrains in the entrance.
From here, the cave is a smaller fissure controlled cave- varying between 10 and 30 feet wide at it's widest, and quite tall in most places- with 60-70 foot tall vertical crack areas where the steel walkways turn into extensive circular staircases, where a rope would have been required. Here, a steep steel ladder climbs up what would have been a roped handline area.
Here, an example of the circular stairwells, which would have required a roped ascent or descent.
The cave was fairly well decorated, but many of the formations suffered from algae growth under the poorly organized lighting within the cave. Fortunately, there were many tags throughout the cave (in english) indicating positions of new lights, so it was apparent that someone was planning on fixing the lighting some time in the near future. This was also the dry season, so many of the formations were underfilled, or perhaps no longer active- a significant contrast from caves we saw later.
Some of the extents to which tourist protection were taken might have been a little extreme, but was still sort of fun to see.
And one more picture of the pretties:
Overall, it was a nice little cave- It was apparent that this was a private commercial venture, unlike the state run caves we saw later in the week. The cave was worth the low price of the visit, and it was apparent that there were many other caves in the area.