Anmyeondo Island: Trekking on the Road of Sunset
Exploring Seoul has nearly endless possibilities and will keep us occupied for a long time to come. However, we are also ready to spread our wings a little more and venture to some sites outside of the city. Our first trip outside of Seoul was a weekend visit to Anmyeondo Island on South Korea’s west coast, south of Seoul in Chungcheongnam-do Province.
I found very little information about traveling to and within Anmyeondo, so this whole trip was a bit of a mystery all the way through. Our post is in two parts because given the dearth of online information about visiting the area, I am going to give more details than usual about traveling on the island. We really had no idea what to expect – only that there should be beaches, pine trees, and a famous sunset. That seemed like enough of a recommendation to us!
This post will cover our day hiking the Noeulgil Course, as well as the food we experienced on the island. The next post will detail our day visiting the Anmyeondo Island Recreational Forest and Anmyeon-eup (the largest town on Anmyeondo), plus more about staying and traveling on the island.
We arrived in Anmyeon-eup at mid-morning on a Saturday and had a bit of an adventure checking into our hotel as we could not find the staff. We eventually discovered that one family runs the hotel, and we suspect that some combination of our late-season visit and the toll of COVID-19 on tourism has caused them to operate with a skeleton crew. Eventually the mother of the family found us at the desk and rather frantically called her daughter, who spoke more English. (Mom was not impressed with our offer of a translation app for assistance!)
We did discover around the island that people were very kind and helpful and spoke very little English. Our limited Korean language skills definitely made this trip more challenging.
Hiking the Noeulgil Course
Successfully checked into our hotel, we were ready to explore. There are two large hiking trails along Anmyeondo’s west coast beaches: Solmoraegil (“the road of pine trees and sand”) to the north and Noeulgil (“the road of sunset”) to the south. Both are part of Taeanhaean National Park. As the descriptions I found were sparse and the photos even more so, I thought we wanted to hike along at least one of these courses but really had no idea what they would be like.
Because we had only an afternoon to work with by the time we were settled, we chose to hike on Noeulgil as it was the trail closest to Anmyeon-eup. Noeulgil stretches from Baeksajanghang Port to Kkotji Beach, Anmyeondo’s most famous site. The 12.6 km course is known as having the country’s best spots to watch the sunset. Spoiler alert: Noeulgil could also be described as a “road of pine trees and sand.”
By some piece of luck (we later learned), we were able to find a taxi to take us to the start of the trail at Baeksajanghang Port, also the site of an outdoor fish market. This area is most famous for prawns and blue crab, although other shellfish are also abundant.
The port was an excellent point from which to view the bridge that connects Anmyeondo with Taean to the north. Can you see that it is shaped like a crab? There were lots of families digging for shellfish in the tidal flats under the bridge.
We learned that the Taean area once was the scene of the worst oil spill in South Korea’s history. A Samsung barge crashed into a Hong Kong-registered tanker in 2007, dumping 12,000 tons of crude oil into the West (or Yellow) Sea. Knowing that recent history of this area, it is remarkable how successfully the island has been cleaned up and revitalized. We saw no signs of this environmental disaster during our visit.
Just behind the fish market, a trail marker pointed us in the right direction to start our hike. We realized quickly that we were walking through a campground, which also turned out to be a recurring theme of the day. It is a beautiful place to camp right on the water and under the pine trees. The tide was all the way out, so we saw lots more people digging for shellfish.
The Noeulgil Trail does indeed follow the line of pine forests along the beaches facing the West Sea. We could walk out onto the beach to see tiny crabs, birds, tidal pools, shells, and rock formations, or we could stay in the shade on the quiet trail under the trees. There were plenty of access points between the forest trail and the beach.
There are times when the trail diverts away from the beach to climb over hills and rocks that otherwise would block the path. There were also several sizable hill climbs in the second 6km that were not the happiest surprise halfway through a long hike! It was interesting to divert through some agricultural areas, although at times we were uncertain whether we had strayed from the trail. (We hadn’t – the trail just takes some unexpected turns!) We later learned that Anmyeondo grows lots of sweet potatoes, among other crops.
This area is known for dramatic tides, evidenced as we watched the wide beaches begin to disappear as we hiked. By the late afternoon, there was no beach left for exploring tide pools or digging for shellfish.
At long last, almost 13km from our starting point, we walked through Bangpo Port and arrived at Kkotji Beach in time for sunset. The hike took us about 5 hours from Baeksajanghang Port to Kkotji Beach. We weren’t moving too quickly, but we also didn’t stop very much. You could easily spend an entire day on this hike if you wanted to meander slowly and spend an hour or two visiting some of the beaches along the way.
The sunset is especially famous at Kkotji Beach because of the Halbaebawi and Halmaebawi Rocks. Halmaebawi (Grandmother) Rock is said to have once been a woman, Mido, who lived during the Korean Silla Dynasty (1st century BCE to 7th century CE). Her husband went on a trip out to sea and never returned. Mido sat by the ocean every day waiting for his return, eventually turning into a stone. Further out to sea, there is a large rock which earned the nickname of Halbaebawi (Grandfather). Numerous photographers had already staked out their spots when we arrived.
We stayed at the beach until it started to get chilly after sunset, and of course then we started to get hungry!
A Weekend of Food, Glorious Food
Always having our priorities straight, we did manage to find some pretty tasty seafood while in Anmyeondo. Just after our arrival in Anmyeon-eup, we found YeongSim’s Mandu, a little restaurant run by an older woman (ajumma) who was doing all the cooking, serving, and bussing tables by herself. We enjoyed kalgatsu (knife-cut noodles) with clams fresh from the seafood market next door. The local ladies already lunching stared at us a little bit, but we don’t think we embarrassed ourselves too much, despite the only menu (a chalkboard on the wall) being nearly undecipherable to us. We also enjoyed watching some Korean soap operas on the television inside.
Lunch was delicious, but oh the excitement of dinner! I had found basically one restaurant recommendation online: Seungjin Hoetjib at Bangpo Port close to Kkotji Beach. We could walk there quickly from the beach after sunset. Anmyeondo is known for several seafood specialties: prawns, soy marinated crabs, and gegukji, a spicy soup cooked with whole crabs, prawns, and fresh kimchi. We missed the soy marinated crabs unfortunately, but we found the gegukji!
So at this place we definitely embarrassed ourselves, but we hope our obvious enjoyment of the food made up for it. After hours of hiking, we folded ourselves barefoot and cross-legged under the Korean-style table, managed to convey that we wanted gegukji, and watched as the numerous side dishes (banchan) rolled in.
Besides the usual variety of kimchi, we were served dried anchovies, marinated eggplant, jeon (vegetable egg pancake), sweet black beans, jeotgal (salted fish innards), fish cakes, seaweed salad, a whole fish, and probably something else I’m forgetting. These were the best side dishes we’ve tasted in Korea so far. The ajumma here just smiled at us and kept refilling our empty dishes!
I have felt very intimidated by the thought of visiting a Korean restaurant where the food cooks right on the table, which means I have been afraid to go to a lot of restaurants as this style of dining is very common. I was afraid I wouldn’t know what to do, and well – I was right! We were so clearly out of our element, though, that the server had mercy on us and helped us cook our gegukji stew properly and even showed us how to cut up the large crab pieces (the stew contained two large crabs that were in quarters) with scissors so we could eat them. We also used the scissors to cut the whole fish into pieces.
You haven’t lived until you’ve sat on the floor and dried to dig meat with a spoon and chopsticks out of a hot, brothy, chunk of crab! I confess that some amount of broth ended up on my socks. And by the way, we were given one napkin with which to contain our gigantic mess (also common in our experience so far). Despite our undoubtedly ignorant consumption of this meal, man did we enjoy it! We were so hungry from hiking, we were able to do these dishes complete justice. The server even helped call a cab to get us back to our hotel.
There is not as much story to tell about the food we ate on the day we left the island. We were too far away from town for most of the day and subsisted on trail mix and apples. Back in town to catch our afternoon bus, though, we found coffee and bingsu. You might remember the patbingsu with red beans we had early in our Seoul travels. Well, this bingsu was mango instead. I missed the beans, but Peter was happy with the fruit!
Be sure to catch our next post about visiting Anmyeondo Island, including our visit to the Recreational Forest and some traveling challenges.
Want to see more photos of Anmyeondo Island? Visit Peter’s Flickr album to see more of the Noeulgil Course and our “day one” adventures.
