(NB All information correct at the time of this trip, March 2013)
Guides we used
- Lonely Planet Korea (9th edition – February 2013)
- Rough Guide Korea (2nd edition – October 2011)
- Frommer’s Seoul Day by Day (1st edition – August 2011)
- North and South Korea map (Reise Know-How North and South Korea 1:700,000)
Comments on guidebooks and maps used
I have mixed feelings about guidebooks because, on the one hand, you can learn a lot about a country and its customs and you can make informed decisions about where you’d like to visit, assisted by practical information and maps. However, if you don’t have a guidebook, it feels more like you’re discovering somewhere new; it’s so much more exciting stumbling across an amazing building just while walking around than planning a trip to that building because it’s on a “Must see” list.
The Lonely Planet and The Rough Guide books that we took were, in my mind, two of the most misleading guidebooks I have ever used. The Frommer’s book of Seoul was very limited but I bought it because I liked that it set out small areas to explore with emphasis on, for example, food, shopping and history. I looked at a few other guidebooks for South Korea but I chose the Lonely Planet one because I felt we needed a lot of the practical information and it was the most up to date, being an edition published the month before our trip. However, it wasn’t so up to date that Metro Line 9, the gold line, which opened in June 2009, was either on the Seoul Metro map, on any of the Seoul maps or even mentioned (that I noticed).
I am not going to write a lengthy review and complain about all the things I found misleading, but I will give an example. I had wanted to go to Daegu’s Herbal Medicine Market. I love markets and I’d never been to a herbal medicine market. The Daegu market, in the Lonely Planet, “a fascinating traditional-medicine market”, even had its own info box and promised: “a history as vast as its scope … Korea’s oldest and still one of its largest [medicine markets] … head out to the street to stock up on everything from lizards’ tails to magic mushrooms …” We drove across Daegu, the fourth largest city in South Korea, for the sole purpose of going to see that market. We got to the correct Metro station, exited and could immediately smell herbal medicine type smells. We then walked around but couldn’t find the market, though we did see lots of small shops selling unidentifiable smelly bark and the like. But we couldn’t find the market. We found a tourist information booth and picked up a map, which had photographs of the market area. It was at that point I had the sinking feeling that I’d dragged my friend and I to a city we otherwise wouldn’t have visited (it took a good few hours to get into and out of Daegu) for a few run down shops full of bark. We did find a wholesale market under the Oriental Medicine Museum but it was essentially the basement of the museum filled with sacks of bark. We didn’t see lizards’ tails. I was promised lizards’ tails. It was very disappointing. Why on earth there was a whole box dedicated to it, I really don’t know. The box did suggest doing a tour, but we had already been on one thoroughly tedious tour and hadn’t wanted to do any other guided visits. There was a lot of disappointment based on guidebook expectations.
As for the Frommer’s Seoul guide, it had nice pictures, enough information that it could be absorbed and some decent suggestions. But there is not a lot of useful practical information. But it seemed more accurate than the other two guidebooks.
All maps in all books, including the fold-out maps and the road map, were dreadful. Find a really good map of Seoul and of the whole country if you are driving.
Road signs, both for traffic and as street names, are all in English and Korean. Yet the maps in the guidebooks – none of them – had street names beyond a few main roads. There are a lot of roads and alleyways in towns and cities so I can see it would be very difficult to put all road names on but a name every few streets would have helped enormously, particularly when you want to go to a restaurant that is a blob and could be on any one of the streets around it. It was a source of daily annoyance.
As for the road map, I am amazed and impressed that we didn’t get lost beyond the odd U-turn. We had to rely on signs quite a lot, which we hadn’t expected to be so prevalent in English (indeed maybe 90% were in English). Fortunately, we didn’t have any accommodation booked before we arrived in towns so didn’t have to try to find places based on addresses with semi-redundant maps. It made for challenging navigating and driving at times but there was not a single driver or passenger rage incident!
Recommendations
I would not particularly recommend any of the publications we bought. All towns have tourist information booths with maps of varying detail. If you intend to drive in South Korea, I would strongly recommend you get a road map in English in the UK. I do not think it is necessary to have one that has place names written in Korean and English as pretty much all signs are also written in English anyway. Plus, it’s not like you can (a) pronounce places reading the Korean if you can’t read Korean or (b) if you have studied a little bit of Korean so you can read the alphabet, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to decipher it quick enough as you’re driving past signs anyway.
Go into a proper book shop and look at all the guidebooks and maybe pick a town, say Daegu, and see which one you like the style of best, which has the better maps and which ticks your boxes for a useful guidebook.