What is the travel information in this blog based upon?
My friend and I (two British female friends in our 30s) flew from London Heathrow (LHR) to Seoul Incheon (ICN) on Asiana Airlines, arriving on Thursday, 28th March 2013 and leaving on Wednesday, 10th April 2013. We hired a car for nine days and used public transport the rest of the time. We booked our first four nights in Seoul while still in the UK, booked our hire car from the UK (Monday, 1st April to Tuesday, 9th April) and booked our DMZ/JSA tour from the UK. All other accommodation we found when we arrived.
Itinerary
Before we arrived in Seoul, all we knew was that we would be in Seoul for four nights, then would collect our car from Cheongju (c90 minutes by bus from Seoul – we hadn’t want to drive around Seoul). We had also listed places we wanted to visit, not all of which we did get to, but we changed our itinerary pretty much daily. But this is how it ended up, with the places we stayed overnight in bold:
Thursday – Monday
Monday – Tuesday
Seoul – Cheongju (purely to get car) – Hahoe Folk Village – Ocheon Historic Site, near Andong
Tuesday – Wednesday
Ocheon Historic Site – Andong Dosan Seowon Confucian Acadamy – Gyeongju
Wednesday – Thursday
Gyeongju – Busan – Gyeongju
Thursday – Friday
Gyeongju – Daegu – Haein-sa
Friday – Saturday
Haein-sa – Damyang
Saturday – Sunday
Damyang – Jeonju
Sunday – Monday
Monday – Tuesday
Jeonju – Gunsan – Seonyudo – Gunsan
Tuesday – Wednesday
Gunsan – Cheongju (to return car) – Suwon
Wednesday
Suwon – ICN – LHR – home
Expectations
We chose to go to South Korea because we wanted to fly somewhere neither of us had ever been to and with flights less than £500 each. I had lived in Japan for two and a half years and knew a few people who had visited South Korea, were from South Korea or who had lived there so I felt it would be quite familiar. My friend had never been to Japan but had spoken to a friend who had recently been to South Korea. I expected Seoul to be a cross between Japan and Shanghai; I was probably about right about that. I thought it would be quite cheap and the guidebooks led me to believe the scenery would be stunning.
What did we want out of our holiday?
We both wanted to travel around and see and eat as much as possible, spend time somewhere new and exciting and have adventures.
Did it live up to expectations?
I would not recommend South Korea to a fair few friends and to others I would probably shrug and say, “It’s ok”. We didn’t have any bad experiences (except once being ripped off – more of that in a shopping section), it’s suitably bizarre, we had lots of new and interesting experiences … but there were no “wow” moments. We talked about this afterwards and to an extent agreed that maybe we’d been a bit spoilt in that both of us have travelled a fair bit and seen some truly spectacular places and South Korea wasn’t up there with them. For me, I couldn’t help comparing it to Japan and I’d find myself saying or thinking things along the lines of, “Oh, those mountains are just like the ones you get in Japan … but not as nice.” Maybe that is unfair, it’s not Japan. But in many respects it is similar.
As for Korean food, if you don’t like spicy food, red pepper paste, and fermented vegetables aren’t your thing, you may be a little challenged where food is concerned. I struggled and I would say that 80% of the food we ate wasn’t a pleasure for me to eat, 20% was lovely and of the 80% maybe half that was inedible to my pallet.
Why go?
It’d different, it’s interesting, there are adventures to be had, it’s safe and easy to travel around, accommodation and food can be very cheap, it’s possible to spend days (outside Seoul and Busan) without seeing other foreign tourists and it’s pretty cool to go somewhere out of the ordinary. You can also eat some amazingly fresh seafood.
Would I go again?
No. Unless I was going there for work or to stay with a friend. But I enjoyed my two weeks, though in some respects I could appreciate our stay there more once we’d got back home. I could describe to someone a particular place or experience and they would clearly look at you like it was amazing, but somehow it sounds better than it actually was. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate the country, the people or the food; it just didn’t really do anything for me.