2 Rock Peaks of “Maisan” and the Stone Pagodas Temple “Tapsa”.
We walked a lot for this visit, so prepare to wear good shoes!
Maisan (KR: 마이산 Read: my-san or sounds like MY SON!) is about 2 hrs away from Goeje Island where we live, it’s 30 mins away from Jeonju City.
There are 2 ways to access the temple, we followed our car GPS and park on the street market side. There are many shops and food. We especially liked the wooden furniture and decoration shop!!!
Most purpose in visiting Maisan is the Tapsa Temple, the magical temple in which the stone pagodas were built without any glue, cement, or furrows like upside-down icicles!!!
The Tapsa temple is listed as in MUST VISIT temple in South Korea, and the Must See in CNN Travel.
The temple is quite small but with unique stone pagodas.
It says the stone pagodas built in the 1800s by Yi Gap-Yong and he took more than 30 years to complete.
You can see his statue in front of the temple, he was almost 100years old when he passed!
I tried to look very closely at the stack stones to find out how they stack them together without any glue! They don’t really have anything to stick them together, is it AMAZING?
There are more than 80 stone pagodas or stone-stacked towers that are more than 15 meters high but have not faltered despite typhoons and strong winds!!!
And they made it thru the KOREAN WAR too???!!!!
Even more amazing is that some of them are on top of the mountain – who can go to stack stones up there!?!?
We walked up over the stone pagodas temple to the next small temple to get closer to the Rock Peaks.
We found a long stairway up but we weren’t sure where to? But we were thinking to visit a small cave, so we kept walking up.
And the more that we walked, the more steps to go!
The mean part is once you got almost the last step, you will see the sign “Steps Ahead”….WHAT!!!
Yes, there are 4 options when we got up here. 1 – hike up to the top of the Maisan Peak, 2 – go down another side (I guess if you come to Maisan another way with us), 3 – go up to the small cave and 4 – go back to where we came!
We can’t hike up to Maisan Peaks, we don’t have water! So we took the way up to visit the cave.
It’s very-very small cave and we found a good view up there with Maisan Peaks in the background.
We came all the way down to where we came from and where we parked our car…
We took about 2 hrs to walk today, it was more than 5km distancing, about 40 floors!
There are good restaurants to eat at here… we did shop for wooden furniture!
This is part of our Jeonju trip, visited during 21-24 October 2020.
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