Our next stop was Gyeongju, close to the southeastern coast. The city is known for its “tumuli parks”, which are basically ancient graveyards. People here are still buried under little mounds of earth, but in ancient times these mounds could be huge if they contained the tomb of a king or somebody important:
I guess it’s not the best season, but there are some huge and beautiful lotus ponds:
One day we visited Bulguksa temple. Now we have seen a lot of temples, but this was definitely my favourite one. There was this old stone pagoda:
You might be able to see a couple of grey “boxes” on the first “floor” of the pagoda, these were devices to measure the inclination, and there were other devices to measure tiny movements of the pagoda, I guess it’s quite fragile and could fall if it got destabilised.
I also found this unusual inhabitant in the temple:
And there was a nice park around it:
About 40 minutes away on foot, there was another small temple (Seokguram) with a very famous Buddha statue (no photo of that one, not allowed to take photos), and a beautiful view: