This update took a while to put together, work got in the way. Here’s the last part of the weekend trip to Seoraksan. On Saturday we went hiking in the national park and on Sunday we went to the coast. We didn’t have any clear ideas of where to go, except to see the sea, walk on a beach, and eat some fish.
There was a tourist office at Sunrise Beach, so we just set the navigator for that place and started driving. After about 20 minutes of driving we passed the place, but you couldn’t make a left turn, so we had to drive about 1 km more to be able to make a U-turn. In Korea, lots of intersections have a specially marked U-turn, so that was not surprising.
Once we got to the place where we were supposed to make the U-turn, we saw that there was also a beach at that point. So, we stopped, got out of the car, and walked around a little bit.
Then we got back in the car, drove to Sunrise Beach and by that time we were sort of getting hungry. Sokcho (the city where this was) is mainly a fishing town, as evidenced by the many fishing boats all over the place.
Where there’s fishing boats, there’s fish and where there’s fish, there’s also lunch. The little guys in the photo below are 시르기, 놀랭이, and 우럭, clockwise starting from the left. About 5 minutes before I took this photo, the guys were swimming (happily?) in a tank.
The rest of them went in here along with some veggies.
Food was very nice. After lunch we asked in the tourist office, what there was to see. They said that about 10 minutes drive away is the Naksansa temple which is in a very nice location.
The temple was basically destroyed in a forest fire in 2005 (and damaged a little bit by typhoon Sanba earlier this summer). The only thing to have survived the fire was the statue below.
In the temple grounds, there were also small piles of rocks, assembled by the visitors.
All in all, a very nice day out by the sea.
The drive back to Seoul on Monday morning was pretty uneventful.