We collected a rental car and headed South out of Seoul to the lakes and mountains. We stayed at a cheap (£20 a night), possibly “love hotel”, on the outskirts of Chungju City. We headed into the city to locate tourist information but no joy. Information is quite tricky to come by in Korea. Google Maps doesn’t really work here apart from for public transport, Naver maps works well for directions but a lot of place names are in Korean, Waze isn’t sure what it thinks and the car sat nav has different spellings for everything. Anyway, we managed somehow!
The next morning we headed to the largest lake in Korea, Chungju Lakes, created with a dam in 1985 with many people needing to be relocated.
We missed the tourist ferry by about 5 minutes so drove around the peninsula instead. Turned out to be much nicer and no Korean commentary! We found a trail to the top of a spine overlooking 2 lakes. It was called Gobong.
Then drove through Mirasil winery area, then apple orchards.
Next we drove to Tangeum Lake Park. Home of the Olympic rowing venue. As it was Saturday, it was full of families with their tents to avoid sunburn, their scooters or rented bicycles (probably nowhere to keep bikes in their small apartments). We walked along the river banks which was lovely.
Next day, we drove to Janghoe Ferry Quay, determined to catch a ferry cruise. There in plenty of time we ate our sandwiches overlooking the river with some awful Korean music blaring away. Thankfully our boat had no commentary and just quiet English movie tunes playing.
We were entertained by jet skiers (thankfully quiet electric jet skis) playing in the wake. As they got more brave, their skis became more vertical until one nearly flipped leaving him and his girlfriend swimming about collecting flip flops and glasses. Funny enough, they headed off after that – no more tricks.
Next we went to a bridge we had seen called the Jecheon Oksunbong suspension bridge. It was a lot more wobbly than it looked tipping side to side.
We drove to Danyang, found a great family run pizza place and took an evening stroll along the river.
Next morning we had a great, fresh kimbap and headed to Woraksan National Park. We parked at the Deokjusa Temple parking lot and headed up the 4.4km trail. We had read a review which talked of “The stairs of Hell” but didn’t realise that made up most of the trail. How they made some of them- I’ve no idea! We got to Maebong Peak, had our picnic lunch and deliberated if we had time to continue. we passed a pole where you could charge your phone, a defibrillator and also some posters reminding you to do your stretches and how to tell if you were going to have a cardiac arrest.
Then another 2.4km up some very steep stairs, to 1,097m of Yeongbong Peak.
This took us about 2.5 hours up and about 2 hours to get back down. Our legs certainly knew about it the next day. We decided to save our funds and headed back to our cheap Love Hotel – ready to heading back towards Seoul the following day.
We took a scenic coastal route via the island of Ansan but it was very, very hazy and pretty windy so it wasn’t too scenic. They crrate some amazing bridges in Korea – no two are the same style!
We met a Korean guy with a drone who kindly offered us a gift of a photo from his drone which was cool idea.
We stopped at a very windswept beach and then drove across a huge tidal power plant bridge. Very cool.
And now, we are spending the night near the airport ready to fly to Taipei tomorrow. It feels longer than 2 weeks that we’ve been in Korea but we’ve loved it – apart from the multiple safety alerts I get every day on my mobile warning of dangerous levels of dust in the air, forest fires and strong wind warnings. Sometimes it’s best not to know these things!
