Sunday, August 29, 2010

Camping at Riverhills in Gangwon Province.

Pre Travel Expectation:
CAMPING !!!Trip

About the Place: The Location is Suju in Gangwondo province. Gangwondo is always an exciting name for people who loves to travel and be close to nature. Every time we visited Gangwondo province, we forgot our busy life and always got into a nature appreciation mood.
Check the website for the Riverhills camping area and register before going there.

To book a spot in this Camping area, do the following.
1. From the website URL below, check for the availibilty of spot on the day you want to do Camping.
There is no need to register or login to this site.
http://www.riverhills.kr/default/app/app_online.php?topmenu=5
2. Click on that Date and few more clicks on next few pages and 1st step of your Site booking is done.
3. One you recieve SMS, transfer the booking amount to the account number mentioned in the SMS.
4. Call the Owner and cross check whether the reservation was done.

Camping Anxiety: We tried to find from net what all places are available for camping and then zeroed in to the Camping ground in Suju.
The one thing that bothered us most during pre travel time was weather."How the weather would be? Will it rain???." Weather forecast consistently showed rain forecast. We were extra cautious about the consequence of bad weather since we had 3 kids in our team, Nidhi being the youngest(11 months).
Backup For Bad Weather: After a lot of brainstorming we finally decided to reserve a Condominium as a back up. If the weather is too bad or rains heavily, we would go back to the condo. If weather is good we will visit the condo on our way back and pay the rent.

Twist1: We tried to reserve a condo but due to some last minute problem we could not reserve it.
Agian brain storming for some time wether to go ahead or cancel. Nevertheless we decided to go ahead with our plan and this time with a new back up plan. "Pack everything and return home if wheather gets wild"

The Journey:
On 28th of august 4 families started at around 10am from Suwon.
Twist 2: Early morning obstacles popped up. 2 of the Navigations stopped working.On same day, 2 of them down.. what a coincidence). We put an attempt to fix them and after an hr of experiments, 1 came back to life. Without trying more we started our journey.Naveen following our Car without navigation. Well he was the natural choice being highly skilled in driving without Navi.

On the way taking rest at Yeoju Rest Area. The place from where things slowly started to fall in place The weather got sunny and the traffic showed imrprovement as soon as we left yeoju.

At Yeoju rest area.

Beautiful sceneries on the way

Olle look!!! The Camping Site Welcome board on Entrance.
Riverhills camping site. We finally reached the camping site at around 2 pm, it started to drizzle again. We rentend an extra tent since we did not have confidence in our tents because of rain prediction. The Camping place donot rent tents but there were two tents used by the Site maintaners, and they were kind enough to rent one of them to us. The availability of a new strong tent acted as boost to our confidence and we started to set up for the lunch.

Near the entrance to the camping site.

Kumar with the manager of this camping site.



Cooking rice for the lunch.

Had a yummy lunch with rice and Rajma curry.

There were lots of other campers in that place. So many beutiful tent of various design and size. It was quite big camping ground.


By evening slowly the drizzling stopped and we got the confidence to open our tents and put them .

Naveen and Jagdeesh roasting corns and sweet potatoes.

Relaxing time beside the river.

We roasted almost all kinds of vegetables. Everything tasted great in that atmosphere.
Our tents all set . Now time to sleep.

The night spent successfully inside the tents and hooray no rains!!!!

There was a big bathroom and shower rooms where we refreshed ourselves in the morning.




The bathrooms and the shower rooms.

The shop where you get all necessary items like charcoal,gas, noodles, snacks, beer etcetc).

The washing area near our tent.

Deepa busy making yummy sabzi for morning.

Chandra, Suma,Deepa and Nishi Cooking puris .

It was a great fun having breakfast early morning near the river. Nishi usually eats two plate full in breakfast..Hehehe Kidding...Hope Nishi is not reading this...OKOK..Suspense over.....She is just holding Naveen's plate while he takes the Picture.




Spent a great time and had unique experience since this was our first full night camping.We had earlier done a few semi campings (Semi=Returned at late night and did not sleep there in tent). On our way back home, thunder showers and heavy rains greeted us and all of us were thanking god silently for holding these heavy thunder storms till we had packed up. Else it would be completely different story.
Hope to go more camping trips and more well equipped next time.