Sokcho, South Korea
A long overdue post from my visit in January 2017
I was having a great time in Seoul… such a great time that I had eaten my weight in Korean BBQ, and acquired so many new winter coats and clothes that I had to make a trip to the Korean post office to send a package of clothes home. I couldn’t help myself, I didn’t come to Korea with the intention of shopping, in fact I hadn’t even planned to come to Korea at all. The original plan was to fly to Beijing and take the Trans-Mongolian train through to Siberia. But the hazardous air quality reports in Beijing were alarming enough that I decided to reroute my trip to Siberia and skip the extremely polluted cities of Beijing and Ulan Batar altogether. In the winter those cities burn A LOT of coal to stay warm, and the result is a cloud of smog so thick, that at times you can barely see across the street. No thank you.
I had to get out of Seoul. Seoul is great— but it’s a big shopping, eating and drinking city. Like Tokyo, its an exciting place to be for a few days, but so much shopping and spending becomes tiresome. I actually prefer the slower-paced stop-and-smell-the-flowers sort of cultural experience of being in small towns.
Alex and I spent quite a bit of time online researching where to go to escape Seoul for a day or two. We knew that Korea is big on hot springs and spas, and I LOVE soaking in geothermal waters. I looked for Korea’s equivalent to Japan’s natural onsens (hot spring fed baths that are indoors, and occasionally outdoors with/without snow monkeys sharing your tub). Our web searches turned up a lot of water parks, some even with hot spa facilities. But these family resort water parks weren’t quite the cultural experience we were looking for.
While having a chat with another traveler in our guesthouse, he mentioned that Seoraksan National Park is a nice natural area to visit, just outside the seaside city of Sokcho. We looked it up and found that we could easily take a 3-hour bus ride from Seoul to Sokcho. Without any better ideas about where to go for a quick city escape, we booked a guesthouse and (re)packed our bags!
SEORAKSAN NATIONAL PARK
We had just two days in Sokcho, and our first day there happened to be the one day of the week that the national park was closed. As our luck would have it, our one and only day to spend out in nature in South Korea coincided with a cold snap… and for that one day (and only one day) the daytime temperatures dropped from the 40s down to the teens. I had never actually spent any amount of time in the outdoors in temperatures that cold, but we were on our way to Siberia… so there was no better time to get out and test how warm my new North Face Korea winter coat really was!
The host at our guesthouse was kind enough to drop us off at the park entrance. It was a beautiful sunny day with clear blue skies, but the air was bitterly cold. Once in the park, I stopped at a shop to buy myself a knit face mask and hand warmers. I absolutely love wintertime in Asia, it’s so unbelievably cozy! In Japan and Korea there are always little shops, stands, and vending machines in the most unexpected places offering warm beverages and various supplies to keep you toasty and dry.
We didn’t really know where we were going or what trail we were here to do, we just followed the steady flow of people moving deeper into the park. The weather didn’t seem to deter the local outdoor enthusiasts, people had come in various levels of preparedness, from those wearing casual everyday clothes and shoes, to others in full mountaineering getups.
Seoraksan was unlike any National Park I had ever been to in the world; it was both a natural and cultural experience. Sprinkled along the trail were buddhist statues and shrines, and stone etchings. The trail started pretty flat, and before we had even walked a mile, we arrived at a very cute coffee hut where I couldn’t resist taking a totally undeserved break for a matcha latte. Once we got moving again, we had to keep stops to a minimum in order to stay warm in the 15 degree cold. As the trail started to climb, we still didn’t quite know what or where our destination was, until a metal framed stairway hanging on the side of a rocky mountain came into sight. At this point I wasn’t much of a hiker, so I was pretty intimidated by the thousand feet of straight climbing that lay ahead of me.
A group of Korean mountaineers enjoy a picnic lunch at the top of Ulsanbawi Rock on a 15 degree day.
The intense cold gave me a boost of energy while climbing the thousand or so steps up the mountain. Rather than the exertion making me sweaty and tired, it kept my blood moving and my body warm, despite the burning cold in my lungs with every breath.
When we made it to the top, the panoramic view was spectacular… but the cold, cold wind was absolutely brutal. It was hard to stay up at the viewing platform for long enough to snap our photos, meanwhile a group of Korean hikers (dressed as if they’d just summited Everest) comfortably sat, eating their carefully packed picnic lunch as if this was a summer day in the park.
Once back down the mountain, a hot, delicious meal awaited us at the park entrance. There’s probably nothing better on a 15 degree day than kimchee and seaweed dumpling soup to thaw your frozen bones. Did I mention how much I love Asia in the wintertime?
Just before it got dark and we had to leave, I took a this quick drone shot from a bridge in a quiet corner of the park. Although I did some online research, I was still unsure about the rules and regulations about drone use in the Korean National Parks, so I decided to air on the side of caution and not use my drone from the very top of Ulsanbawi Rock… although I would have LOVED to get that shot. I can only assume that since the time when we visited (in January 2017) that the rules have changed and drones are now prohibited there.