Underrated Travel Destinations in Korea Part I: Perfect Day Trips from Seoul
- Aye Mon
- Jun 2, 2020
- 9 min read
Updated: Jun 30, 2020
Sometimes we hear people return from their vacations in Korea and say “yea it was okay”, “typical”, “kinda meh”.
Well. Did you get out of Seoul, bruh. 🙂
Honestly, many of the memorable destinations for me were the ones more frequented by domestic tourists rather than international tourists! Undoubtedly, Seoul is a wonderful city with plenty to explore as well, and I’m glad to have stayed there for a good five months to soak it all in (and I'm not just talking about the soju). But the weekend trips out - they were the truly mesmerising experiences. And perhaps less known than the popular ones like Seoul, Jeju and Busan, hence I thought to give them a little bit more airtime here for more people to get to know them~
Let me start off by tempting y'all with this collage. 😬
Okay these photos taken on an iPhone 6 may not really justify the beauty of these places, but I swear they will sweep you off your feet when you're really there in person. :")
And as the title suggests, Part I will cover some of the destinations that would make perfect day trips from Seoul! Here is the overview of the places I headed to:
Pocheon
Pocheon Art Valley
Pocheon Herb Islan
Gyeonggi-do
Manhwa Museum
Gwangmyeong Cave
Ansan Starlight Village
Danyang
Paragliding
Gosu Cave
Dodamsambong Peaks
Pocheon
I reckon there could be a number of people who have come to know of Pocheon’s existence (well we met one group of Singaporeans at the Art Valley), but are still perhaps too lazy to head there. My advice - DON’T BE LAZY. It’s really near Seoul too so no excuses there.
Pocheon Art Valley
Our initial plan was to visit two destinations in Pocheon within in a day, but Pocheon Art Valley was really huge so we spent our whole day there. :) And okay it was also quite hard to find not sure if it’s cuz we got off at the wrong bus stop…recommend you just take a cab from Jihaeng station. 🚕
The highlight of this place is the granite quarry - a simply beautiful work of art that I need not describe further - the photos say it all. :”) Lots of dramas have been filmed there too, and I love how there is also a stage area for orchestras etc. to have performances there too with the gorgeous backdrop of the quarry!
Besides the quarry, there are many interesting sculptures to explore throughout the park, and even an astronomical science museum you can drop by. Note that the park is quite the uphill climb! We chose to walk instead of taking the tram to shed some fats. :)
Some of the interesting, occasionally eccentric sculptures scattered around the park. 😏
Pocheon Herb Island
We explored the Pocheon Herb Island on a separate weekend, after visiting the Yangju Nari Park. This was a pretty little island spanning quite a large area, with many lovely little traditional English houses, souvenir shops and cafes to visit. We headed there near evening time, arriving about an hour before sunset. During winter, the plants/herbs will appear kinda dead so the vibe was a little bit gloomy whilst we were walking around - we just focused on checking out the lovely houses and their interior, as well as looking for random cute photospots scattered around the island. :)
When night falls, that’s when the magic happens. When the whole place lit up, it truly felt like a magical Christmas night! And for the first time I was celebrating it in the right weather. :”) It honestly felt like we were in a beautiful little fairytale-like town of our own that came straight out of a storybook.
No one around to judge us enacting our Cinderella story moment huehue
A panorama view of one of the Christmassy gardens~
As usual, Korea absolutely loves adding romantic photo spots at the tourist attractions as well, so we had our fill of couple selfies huehue.
I will also always remember the warm Omok (fishcake) soup we had that night at some alfresco seats of possibly the only restaurant that was open, and will certainly remember the belly dance performances we watched too, whilst wondering - how are they wearing these costumes and dancing on this heck of a freezing night?! 😱
Gyeonggi-do
It’s winter - you’re lazy to travel too far out and exams are coming but your time left in Korea is limited and you still want to be a productive traveller. So you start sourcing out attractions near Seoul…that’s how I chanced upon the gem Gyeonggi-do! For our day trip there, we covered the Gwangmyeong Cave, Manhwa Museum and Ansan Starlight Village.
Manhwa Museum (Comic Book Museum)
To start off the day, we took the subway to Samsan Gymnasium, and walked to the Manhwa Museum which was right outside the station. Yes, we are kids at heart and we found this comic book museum extremely cute and entertaining, sue us.
There are lots of interesting installations on the history and evolution of various different types of comics, nostalgic comic book stores where you can enjoy some quiet reading time, a lovely little station to draw your own cartoons, as well as a 4D ride which we really enjoyed.
The only reading I did on exchange 😛
Flexing some artistic talent at the drawing corner (jk we were tracing a guide with a pencil 😬).
Do remember to check out the outdoor installations as well!
Me enacting my own little dramas as usual...
This little outdoor bus has a little library/classroom inside! :D
Gwangmyeong Cave
We then headed to the Gwangmyeong Cave via train and bus, and this is probably the second dopest cave I have ever visited (dopest one is in Myanmar, might cover that sometime). An excellent job was done in refurbishing this cave to turn it into a “cave theme park”, as they call it. The cave is huge, and there are areas for you to walk around galleries to learn of the cave's history, take photos with the lovely lights, watch a lights show (on some days, orchestras can perform at the theatre within the cave! Imagine the acoustics!), or even try out and purchase some wine in the wine cave.
Yes the exhibits appeared to be well, quite random. Or at least those that ended up in my photos. 🙂
A glimpse of the epic lights show we witnessed at the stage area wew.
But what we were really there for, and what I was really the happiest about, was getting to take all these amazing photos in the light tunnel! It totally makes you look like you're in a mystical galaxy - and this alone made the trip to the cave pretty damn worth it. 😌👌🏼
As we headed towards our next destination, we also managed to catch a beautiful sunset. :)
And autumn foliage just always looks great, doesn't it. :")
Ansan Starlight Village
Last but not least, we hit up the Ansan Starlight Village via bus. This would be a little like Pocheon Herb Island, but with different installations and is slightly smaller - nonetheless, both have lots of pretty lights and strong Christmassy vibes!🎄
And they seem to have their very own zoo too~
...albeit including a family of slightly creepy looking pandas.
Of course they still serve with romance-themed and fairytale-like installations galore~
We also decided to have a little horror-themed shoot cuz why not right. 💀
And with that, we bade goodbye to Ansan Starlight Village and ended a wonderful day of travel at the Gyeonggi-do area. 😇
Danyang
Our main purpose for heading to Danyang - a lovely region with beautiful mountains and just a short 2-hour bus ride from Seoul - was really to go paragliding!
Paragliding in Danyang
We were envious of a few lucky friends who somehow got sponsored to go paragliding, so we decided to experience it as well! But we weren’t influenzas so of course we had to pay ourselves. It cost about 85,000 won for the flight and 20,000 won (total 105,000 won, i.e. SGD$120+).
wheeeeeeeee
The Paragliding Experience
I’m usually the kind who’s scared of heights, but in that moment that I ran off the edge of the mountain and started to take flight, I was like heck yeaaaaa. It was a simply breathtaking experience to be able to fly, like really fly way above the mountains and soak in the beauty of nature all around you. :”) At some point my pilot asked if I liked extreme sports and I replied not really but he didn’t hear me and…went a bit extreme. And I got a lil motion sick hahahaha but at least that was towards the end. The flight time is pretty dependent on the wind conditions, and the pilot mentioned that I got to fly a little longer than usual. One thing to note, our initially scheduled date also had to be postponed by a week because of poor weather conditions, so do expect that there might be such changes. :o
Customer Service: To book a date, we filled out the form on the website, and thereafter they sent a confirmation email / informed us of the rescheduling etc. via email as well. They were also patient with answering some of our questions e.g. being a worrywart, I asked if my contacts might dry out in the sky and they were like nahhh you’re good. Upon reaching Danyang, they also picked us up from the station in a little van (they will inform you of the exact pick-up point), and took us up the mountains. The staff are Korean but all speak English quite well, so fret not. :) Once you’re there, they’d deck you up in some overalls, helmet, mask and all the relevant harnessy things to keep you safe (it was 2°C that day but the mountain felt a lot colder and I was wearing 6 layers….), and brief you a little before the flight begins.
Ain't easy to take a jumpshot with that many layers of clothes on, yall...
What didn’t work for us: The only unfortunate part of the experience was the video transfer. During the flight you’d hold onto a selfie stick with a little GoPro to film your experience, and they transfer that video file into your phone shortly after landing. However quite unexpectedly, the video appeared to “corrupt” my boyfriend’s phone, and the entire video got deleted, along with some of his own photos! 😱 For some reason that only happened long after we had left the mountain and were already back at the station, so we couldn’t directly ask the staff to transfer the file again. We emailed them, but they replied quite a bit later and said the video file had been deleted right after the transfer :( so the video was lost forever.... Lesson learnt - it would be good to backup the video in a few phones if you can!
As we didn’t want to make it too rushed of a day trip, after the paragliding we decided to just cover some places that were near the station and considerably accessible. So we hit up the Gosu Cave and Dodamsambong Peaks.
Gosu Cave
Coined a national monument, this is a huge limestone cave where you can observe plenty of amazing looking stalactites and stalagmites in the caves. Unfortunately that was the era of my iPhone 6 so I could not capture any decent photos in the cave... So instead here are some useless photos of me trying to be a bat.
Dodamsambong Peaks
This destination can just be a quick stop-by for some photos - don’t miss it, as the view’s really gorgeous around here. We found the Dodamsambong Peaks pretty cool, and the back-story (?) kinda cute too - the centre rock is supposed to be the husband rock, whilst the two on either side are the mistress and wife rocks!
And here's to some appreciation of other sights in Danyang that we caught near the station. :)
Our time was limited and we didn’t cover a lot of ground in Danyang, but if you do intend to stay longer and explore other places, there’s this pretty good guide you can check out. :)
Bonus: Yangju Nari Park
As mentioned above, we actually visited the Yangju Nari Park before heading to the Pocheon Herb Island on the same day, as both were in the same area. We took the train from Seoul to Yangju station, and took the bus 77-1 (or bus 80) for 14 stops to Haedong village. Even before you get off the bus, you’d already notice the lovely huge flower fields! 🌸🌾🌷
We visited in really late autumn/early winter, so there weren’t a lot of blooming flowers. But the fields were still dotted with some of the stronger flowers since it wasn’t full on winter yet.
Is that an oppa I spotted in the flower field?! 😍
Manager oppa carrying all the costumes and props :)
Transforms into flower arrangement enthusiast who takes her bouquet selection extremely seriously.
We were also totally into this cute little frame in the middle of the field which made for a great prop! Evidently, we had a bit too much fun playing around with it. 😁
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And that about sums up part I of Underrated Travel Destinations in Korea. /0/ Honestly I'm not sure how underrated they are and whether people know them but are really just lazy to head there anyways cuz the lure of shopping all day in Seoul is real. Also despite my lack of detail and not so great photos taken on an iPhone (and rudimentarily edited on VSCO/LR on my phone no less 😬), hope this has egged you on nonetheless, to put these places down in your travel itineraries! ^^
And do stay tuned for part II~~ 😉
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