Saturday morning, bright sunshine, warm day ahead. The plan was to go to the Seoraksan National Park today and leave the seaside and other possible sights for Sunday, since forecast had been showing rain for Sunday. The rain didn’t happen after all, so also Sunday was a very nice day for being outdoors by the sea.
Although we could see one edge of the park from our hotel balcony, we had to drive a little bit around to get to the actual park entrance. Since September is not in the highest season, there weren’t too many other cars or people around. I’m not saying that we had the place to ourselves, not by any definition of that term, but the high seasons are July and August (holidays) and October (when leaves turn yellow and red) so it could have been much worse, I suppose.
Parking was easy to find and was quite cheap, only 4000 KRW for the day. The entrance fee to the park was 2500 KRW per person (children were free) so all in all a very nicely affordable experience. In the park we split up. I went up “my” mountain and The Better Half took the Kids and my mother up on a cable car to “their” mountain. The two mountains were on either side of the valley, so I told the Daughter that I would wave to them from my mountain. She didn’t quite seem to buy the idea of being able to see me…
On the way up, I saw a whole bunch of stuff. Mostly the path meandered alongside a dry-ish river, going into the woods occasionally, with some steeper sections covered by stairs, making the climbing not too strenuous. The photos below show some of the views and sights I observed along the way.
This is Heundlbawi Rock which you can push and make it shake a little bit.
At this point, I was only the last set of stairs away from the top. However, there are 808 steps still to go and I needed to start making my way back down, since we would need to start heading back to the hotel at some point and I was the only one driving. So, the top is for the next time.
So, I just enjoyed the view from where I was.
On my way down, I spotted this little guy having a snack.
After a late lunch we decided to try to check out some waterfalls that should have been nearby. Well, at least that’s what the map showed, but when we finally got to about that place, there wasn’t really anything to see (water levels were pretty low) and the Kids were starting to get tired. They had walked (mostly ran, though) admirably throughout the whole day, so it wasn’t a wonder they fell asleep in the car.
On Friday we had some Korean BBQ pork for dinner and it was excellent. On Saturday, we went to another restaurant in the hotel and the food was not bad, but definitely a step down from the Friday dinner.