Travel around Korea
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The Great Wall of… South Korea? Namhansanseong Fortress
The Korean Peninsula’s strategic position between China and Japan has increased its risk of military invasion for centuries. Vestiges of this history remain in the form of protective fortress walls in Seoul and beyond, many of which are now maintained and utilized as hiking trails. The ease of accessing these trails, as well as their tendency to be well-maintained, have made them a go-to for our hiking adventures since we arrived in Seoul. In addition to trekking the Seoul city walls, we have visited Namhansanseong Fortress just outside of Seoul, and Hwaseong Fortress in Suwon. Each is worth the trip from the city and provided very different opportunities for exploration.…
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Artful Seoul: More Sites in the City and Around (Part 2)
In this winter season, many museums and similar sites are closed due to the current coronavirus restrictions. The South Korean government has been pretty organized about how it sets restrictions when COVID numbers start to rise. Consequently, as soon as business re-open, we know we’d better get our visits in before they may be closed again! Fortunately, I was able to visit several art exhibits with friends before the current closures began. You may have read about my visits to the very cool exhibits at Museum SAN (Space, Art, Nature) and teamLab: LIFE in Part 1 of this post. As promised, here is Part 2 of our artful adventures in…
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The Ultimate Day Tourist: Gapyeong Rail Park, Nami Island, and The Garden of Morning Calm
Some tourist traps are so compulsory to visit that you have to fall in, even if you know it’s a trap! The Gapyeong area northeast of Seoul is filled with such attractions. For anyone visiting South Korea for a short vacation, there’s probably no reason to prioritize visiting this area. However, if you stay in Seoul for any length of time, you’re unlikely to escape going at least once. It is a very photogenic area to visit in the fall, and we wished we’d been able to visit in October when the leaves were at their peak. We decided to visit three of the top Gapyeong attractions in one day,…
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Artful Seoul: Sites in the City and Around
It’s hard to believe that autumn is long gone and Christmas is upon us! In this season when we especially are missing family and friends back home, it is a comfort to realize that in a few short months, we have made friends in Seoul who are fellow explorers. We feel really grateful for the opportunity to meet and learn from this international community. As a bonus, it’s always great to have a network of people who know about places we otherwise would never have thought to visit! While Peter is at the lab during the week, I’ve had the privilege of sight-seeing with new friends. As it happens, for…
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Trail Challenges at Seoraksan National Park
Our last post detailed our experience of the most accessible trails from the Seoraksan National Park entrance near Sokcho. In this post, we tackle a couple of the more challenging courses. Don’t worry though. As with any good hike, there are tasty food and beverages at the end! Ulsanbawi Course Ulsanbawi arguably is the most famous peak at Seoraksan National Park. Its iconic rocky ridge can be seen for miles around. Day-trippers travel nearly three hours from Seoul just to complete this hike. Unfortunately, because of the heavy monsoon rains this year and the COVID pandemic, we needed to make significant modifications to our hike. The usual place to begin…
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Seoraksan National Park: Best Adventures for the Whole Family
Seoraksan National Park is such a popular spot that we lost count of the number of people who recommended we visit there in the autumn. A Korean friend described the park to us as having “the most typical” mountains for a quintessential Korean hiking experience. Never ones for passing up a good travel recommendation, we took the 2.5 hour bus ride from Seoul to South Korea’s northeast coast. Although the park covers more than 150 square miles, its most popular hikes have trailheads at the park’s main entrance, Sogongwon Park. Sokcho is the city closest to this entrance, and local buses from Sokcho drop passengers off at Sogongwon Park. There’s…
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Sokcho and Abai Village: A Taste of North Korea
Last month, we traveled for the first time to South Korea’s east coast, home to some lovely beaches and the iconic Seoraksan National Park. We traveled easily by intercity bus from Seoul to this area. Though Sokcho is only a 30-minute drive from the national park, it is very much a beach town rather than a mountain town, so we thought it deserved its own post. We were able to take a local bus from our hotel near Mt. Seorak to spend a day in Sokcho and the surrounding area. Most interesting were the seaward-facing Naksan Temple and the historic fishing town of Abai Village, originally a settlement for North…
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Awesome Autumn Adventures in Bukhansan National Park
Autumn leaves, rocky trails, AND a giant golden Buddha? Sign me up! Bukhansan National Park is unusual in that Bukhansan (the southernmost mountain within the park) is technically within the city of Seoul. You can reach much of the park utilizing only the Seoul subway system. Perhaps because of this accessibility within a major metropolitan area, Bukhansan made the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s “Most Visited National Park per Unit Area.” We added to those numbers, visiting twice during October to appreciate one of the park’s other distinctives: one of the best places in Seoul to see the changing leaves. Knowing it would be really busy, we…
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Paju Imjingak Peace Gondola, the DMZ, and a New Friend
Did you know that the Korean War has never officially ended? Before the onset of a global pandemic changed everything, many people who heard us talk about the possibility of going to South Korea inevitably asked, “Aren’t you scared of North Korea?” While we haven’t felt afraid, it is an unsettling feeling to live in a country that has existed in an uneasy armistice with its sister nation to the north for 70 years. Currently, the closest you can safely get to North Korea is to visit the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), and the closest such point to us is at Imjingak, about 50km north of Seoul. We were able…
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Anmyeondo Island: A Walk Under the Trees
For our first day in Anmyeondo, we explored the island’s beautiful beaches. On the second day, we wandered in some of its quiet green spaces. I was a little concerned that we had left almost a whole day to seeing the Anmyeondo Island Recreational Forest, as I couldn’t find much about it when researching before this trip. As far as I knew, it was going to be really lame and not worth seeing. This concern intensified when we couldn’t get a bus or a taxi from the hotel on Sunday morning and walked a very sunny 45 minutes to get there, partly along the side of a highway. Well, I…
