Jeju is a volcanic island off the southern tip of South Korea that calls itself Samdado, the island of three plenties — wind, stones, and women who still work the seabed on a single breath. The stones came first. Everything here was built by eruptions. Hallasan, the country's highest mountain, stands at the centre with a crater lake called Baengnokdam, the white deer lake, in its old vent, and 360 smaller cones stud the slopes below it. At the eastern tip, Seongsan rose out of the water itself, piled up by steam blasts when magma met shallow sea. Twenty minutes of wooden stairs put you on the rim of its wide grassy crater, and timed for first light the sun lifts straight out of the sea, which is how the peak got its name. The same lava left tunnels underneath. At Manjanggul a stairway drops into one, a cool dim kilometre where the ceiling arches twenty-five metres above you and the walls are still rippled from the flow.
The wind is the second plenty, and you meet it everywhere: on the bare crater rim, in the low huddled shape of the old houses, in the silver grass moving on the cones each autumn. It follows you along the coast, where twenty-seven marked Olle routes ring the island. They run past black lava rock, low stone walls and small fishing harbours, onto beaches of dark volcanic grit that hold their heat underfoot. Inland, a shaded ravine leads down to Cheonjiyeon, where the water drops twenty-two metres into a deep green pool that rare marbled eels live in. The third plenty is out in the shallows. The haenyeo, Jeju's women divers, many of them grandmothers, go down with a mask and a float and no air at all, work the bottom for about a minute, and surface with abalone and urchins. Each time one comes up, her breath leaves her as a long whistle that carries across the water — and there are fewer of those whistles every year.