Using public transport in South Korea
It is easy and there are frequent services, even between places you wouldn’t necessarily expect there to be connections between.
It is cheap.
It is useful to have coins for the ticket machines but for trains they do give change and do accept notes.
Local buses
Local buses are a bit more challenging as there is a potential language barrier and some buses seem to take circular routes that take ages.
You need the correct change for buses, which is about 1,200 won or 1,250 won.
Trains
We only used the high speed, KTX, train. There were no obvious problems buying tickets but if you want a return, I believe you have to specify a time. Otherwise, two singles cost the same as a return.
Seoul Metro
There are nine lines, identifiable by numbers 1-9 and/or colours, eg Line 8 is the pink line.
If you buy a single ticket, you are issued with a plastic coin, which you pay a small additional amount that is refundable. After you’ve exited your destination station, you are in possession of the coin. On one end of the rows of ticket machines, you will see a refund deposit machine, into which you can insert your plastic coin and get your refundable amount back.
So long as you pay attention to the destination of the branch of the metro you want for your stop, it is straightforward and easy to use.
Taxis
Taxis are reasonably cheap. Our South Korean guest house hosts said that you don’t tip a taxi driver if the journey is 10,000 won or more. If it’s less than that, round it up to the next 1,00o won. That was just a suggestion; tipping isn’t commonplace in South Korea.
We paid 16,000 won (£10.26) for a c20-25 minute taxi ride in Gyeongju to the KTX station, Singyeongju, about 12 km away. In Seoul, we paid 5,500 won (£3.53) for a c 20 minute crazy fast drive through the early Sunday morning streets.
We found that quite often our pronunciation of where we wanted to go wasn’t understood, so have it written down, ideally in Korean. Alternatively, use a local map to point to where you want to go, though ideally written in both English and South Korean.
There were about six South Korean taxi drivers, us, a rubbish map and light merely from the front headlights of a taxi one night when we wanted to get from a train station to our hotel. We had picked a nearby landmark, a park, as our final destination. However, on hearing their discussion in Korean, we realised they had mentioned the name of exactly where we wanted to go, so it all worked out. It just seemed a bit unnecessarily complicated.
You can flag taxis on the street. There are a lot around, particularly around tourist sites.
All taxis we used had a meter. Check if you don’t see a meter as you could get overcharged, though that’s common sense anywhere you travel with unfamiliar currency.
Boats
Our one experience of a port was in Gunsan going to Seonyudo island. It was like a normal ticket machine with a big board displaying boat times in both English and Korean. Somehow, the ticket agent didn’t understand we wanted to go to Seonyudo (I don’t even think Korean is that hard to pronounce) so an English speaker was sent for. With hindsight, we should have written it down probably.
Tickets should be bought before boarding, unless, I imagine, otherwise stated.
Coaches
Coach stations were a bit more challenging in the sense that there are lots of different lines and operating companies and ticket booths and different bus stations (Seoul) for different places. We found it hard to find times for coaches (Seoul to Cheongju) and ended up arriving at the station ten minutes before a coach left, over two hours before the coach after that – we had been led to believe the coaches were regular (they were, but not from the station we went to).
At Incheon Airport, you need to queue at a ticket booth to buy your ticket before you board. That’s the same everywhere, ie buy before you board.
Coaches are comfy and the four that we caught were punctual, cheap and were non-stopping coaches so made good time.
Coach stations and stops seem to be well-placed in the centre of town. We opted for the coach station (where there is usually tourist information or the hope of someone who can speak English if needed for accommodation and directions, etc). But a lot of times, the earlier stops would have been better for our needs, so sometimes it is worth showing the coach driver where you want to go and seeing if he/she can drop you nearby (only do this if there’s not a big queue behind as such questions take a really long time to get answered. Or just go to the destination stop!)
Driving in South Korea
In South Korea, you drive on the right.
The odds of the car you drive being white, silver or black are very, very high. There also seem to be very, very few old cars on the road. Cars seem to be new, white, silver or black and mostly Hyundai, closely followed by Kia. We saw very, very few non-South Korean cars.
I am really glad we (a) didn’t have the car while we were in Seoul (not necessary and the roads are mad) and (b) had a car outside Seoul.
I can appreciate that we would have had a very different holiday had we used public transport rather than a hire car but we were able to go to more places, see more and plan to a timetable less, if at all. We also ended up getting some last minute accommodation that we wouldn’t have been able to get without having a car, ie located too far away from train or bus stations.
We read about driving and most guide books, internet sites, etc, advised against it, largely because the drivers there aren’t great and the public transport is so good. However, it was nowhere near as bad as I expected.
Rush hour is definitely best avoided though as there are lots of lanes of traffic going into and through most larger towns (and the towns were a lot larger than we expected) and, while the signs are in English, the maps are so bad the signs aren’t as helpful as they could be.
We didn’t get lost despite all this, only doing one U-turn the whole nine days we had a car. Oh, but that doesn’t include the fact that U-turns are often part of how you make left turns!
There are not that many left turns on multi-lane roads through towns so quite often there is an obvious U-turn arrow marked on the road in a sort of filter lane, usually just before a left turn filter lane. It is quite exciting doing U-turns, it made us feel like London cabbies! Don’t fear the U-turn. Just go when it’s clear coming towards you, as common sense dictates.
You stop at red lights. Obviously. But a lot of South Korean drivers don’t when the road is quiet. If you are slowing down to stop at a red light in a really quiet, non-trafficy area, check your rear view mirror that there isn’t a car hurtling behind you that won’t be expecting you to stop for a mere piffling red light.
If a traffic light is red but you want to turn right and the road is clear, you can proceed on that red light. But look out for pedestrians!
At night time, a lot of traffic lights become flashing lights so you can proceed with caution on a red flashing light, checking you don’t have cars to give way to. On an amber flashing light, you just need to be alert to other cars that might pull out.
The rules for traffic lights seem quite approximate but you kind of get used to them, though it’s a bit alarming how easy it is to be dismissive of red lights in quiet areas!
At petrol stations, some are self-service (we avoided them!) and others have an attendant. It appears there is a logical and universal hand gesture movement for “Fill her up, please”. If you want to pay a set amount, I guess best hand over the right money and gesticulate accordingly.
Petrol wasn’t much cheaper than it is in the UK.
We chose Hertz to rent our car from. I suspect if you rent a car from Incheon Airport or maybe a central Seoul location, English would be spoken. We chose Hertz because we assumed all documentation, etc, would be in English. We rented from Cheongju, a place c 90 minutes by coach from Seoul in the direction we knew we wanted to start off in. We wanted to avoid Seoul and location-wise Cheongju ticked boxes. No one at the small Hertz outlet in outer Cheongju (we got a bus there, thanks to the helpful people in Cheongju Tourist Information, right by the coach station) spoke English. Not a word. And the form was in Korean. It was tense and took almost an hour and a half, with a bit of help from someone with basic English over the phone. It was very stressful trying to establish what we were signing for, etc. Very bad from Hertz. There should have been an English form available.
Toll roads are not expensive but they do not guarantee you decent speeds. The first expressway we took had a speed limit of 110 km/h, which we assumed would be the case everywhere. Most others were about 80 km/h
There are a lot of speed cameras on the roads (they are obvious) and most people don’t seem to speed.
Everything takes a lot longer than you expect on the roads. We had to cut down the number of places we wanted to visit after our first drive took us a lot longer than we’d expected going by the map and distances.
Non-motorways are very slow-going.
If you don’t like driving along narrow streets, be aware that the old town areas, hanok villages, have very narrow roads.
Hiring a car, I don’t think it makes a huge difference whether you have the cheapest, smallest car or a big car. I think a small to medium sized car is probably best if you’re just driving around as we were.
Parking
It is not obvious where you can and can’t park. It would appear that where there is a white box, there will be an elderly man or woman sitting nearby who will need paying once you return to your car (they will leave a ticket on your car). In Daegu, we parked in such a spot, found the ticket on our windscreen when we got back to the car, a man came up to us as we got to the car, and we were charged 5,000 won (£3.21).
It is surprisingly easy to find free parking though. If there are no markings on the road, just dump your car! That seems to be what the locals do. Everywhere we stayed, we parked outside either on the street free of charge or in hotel free parking. I had thought parking would be a big stress but it wasn’t. That said, we didn’t drive or park in Seoul or Busan, the two biggest cities we went to, though I’m sure it wouldn’t have been as difficult as I would have expected.
If I went to South Korea again, would I hire a car or use public transport?
I would hire a car, though not if I was just going to Seoul and one or two other places for a minimum of two nights in each place.
I like that we had more flexibility with where we could stay and we always knew, not having booked anything past our first four nights in Seoul, that if we absolutely had to, we could have slept in the car. It was also good being able to use the car boot as storage to stop off at places. For example, we drove from Gyeongju to Haeinsa but stopped at Daegu en route to visit the Oriental Medicine Market (big disappointment!). We wouldn’t have been able to do that had we had rucksacks or cases.
We stayed just one night at quite a few places and it was nice to just be able to take a small bag into the accommodation with us rather than always lugging our case/rucksack.
To travel to, say, Seoul and Busan, it’s better to get public transport as it’s quicker.
I would say that the driving is a challenge to the extent the maps are rubbish, drivers adhere far less to rules than we do in the UK, traffic lights are a bit of a mystery and towns are a lot busier and more challenging to navigate than, say, British towns … but that said, if I drove around Birmingham with a rubbish map, I’d probably be in a similar situation. But whereas in the UK I would get pipped at for being in the wrong lane, there it’s likely that everyone is in the wrong lane! It is more stressful than driving in the UK but it’s not as bad as I’d been led to believe. But that said, I have driven in Indonesia and Bulgaria and I figured it couldn’t be worse than either of them and it wasn’t. By a long shot!