Sokcho and Seoraksan

Stop two in Korea is Sokcho, a seaside town right next to the Seoraksan national park.

The population of Sokcho is literally 80,000 which is kinda insanely small because it feels like a proper place. Mental to think it is the size of Grimsby, I'm not sure the Koreans would be impressed by a trip there. It also made me quite existential about the insane size of the cities we went to in China. Chongqing having 32 million people feels literally unfathomably massive. 3-4 Londons is mental.

We came this way to get to the national park, but staying by the seaside introduced us to some other cool stuff, so I'll split this post down the middle on the two sides of Sokcho.

Seoraksan

So as I said, we wanted to breathe some fresh air, see some trees, yada yada. I always find hopping from city to city feels too samey so Seoraksan was our plan to break that up a little and touch grass.

I keep being struck by how wildly different the nature feels from place to place on my travels and Seoraksan was another jump to an entirely new shade of green. To categorise my takes on the nature so far,

Taiwan: layered, dangly and everywhere

Hong Kong: dense, spikey and a lil drier

Yangshuo: alien pastoral vibes

Bali: aggressively bright green and lush

The vibes here are so new, it's very piney, much sparser, and filled with these huge smooth flat rocks, and lots of wild rhodedendrons. It feels almost super minimalist and clean, like someone has curated it.

The park is home to many different walking trails, but the general theme across them all is relentless steps and cute bridges. Our first trip up the mountain was a walk to some waterfalls that culminated in a staircase of 900 steps. We met a really chatty British guy at the top (hard work when you are out of breath from the previous 900 steps). He was so jazzed about Korea - he was doing solo travelling because he was mad at all his friends only wanting to drink pints and hang out in tourist spots in south east Asia. Bless him.

Anyway, he shaped our itinerary for the park, because he was literally buzzing about doing the hike to Ulsanbawi rock for sunrise, so we figured we had to try. He also showed us a pic of an upside down rainbow he'd seen, mental. Hope he is enjoying Busan and made it to the baseball.

Wailing sky mountain

So after this dudes recommendation we looked up the timings and clocked that we'd have to leave at 4ish to catch the sunrise on time. That was enough to almost put us off, so we practiced avoidance techniques and only decided to do it right at the end of the day so we couldn't change our minds.

Ulsanbawi rock is this huge smooth rock that sprouts out of the forest. In Korean it has two names - fence mountain, because it's kinda giving vertical fence posts? And Wailing Sky Mountain, because of the way the wind sounds at the top - spooky.

We locked in, packed our snacks and snapped our head torches on (shout out to Steve for those).

The hike itself was relentlessly uphill, but incredibly cool to feel it getting lighter around you. We paced it up to make it in time, and caught the sun just coming up over the sea from the top of the rock. It was so mad as a view that it felt genuinely like video game fake vibes with the sea, the mountains and the light and being the only people there. My legs just hurt a little more than if I'd made Zelda walk up there.

A Korean dad and daughter were 10 mins behind us, and were wildly insistent on us sharing their snacks which was very sweet. Got offered cucumber, apple, gimbap (like Korean sushi) and chocolate.

Wildly peaceful and lovely to hike in the dark when it's so quiet. Also very satisfying to indulge in the smug energy of seeing how many people were hiking up. It's approximately 100x the intensity of the vibe you have when you get to the office early having already gone to a spin class. Euphoric.

Other items

Some small notes on Seoraksan

1. Animal sightings
   • Favourites were a chipmunk looking for my snacks and a nuthatch. Still envious that the guy we met saw a wild baby mountain goat.

2. Blossom
   • We missed the cherry blossom in Seoul but the temperature dropped a lil here so we got to see the last of it, yay.

3. Pumpkin sikhye
   • Post hike snack in the park. It's kinda like sophisticated grow up slush puppy. Sweet pumpkin flavour, flakey ice stirred in and fermented chewy rice, I was so quenched physically and spiritually.

4. Rock stacks
   • These are literally everywhere in the park made by hikers. We spent a while choosing our fave rocks and thought we'd done a really good job, then found the proper ones, we dwarfed in comparison.

Sokcho

Just a cute Korean seaside town, very chill and a lil sleepy as a vibe. The Korean beach vibes are chill, no one swims, but people love to try and get cute photos. In fact Korea has been one of the funniest places for watching people try and get the perfect snap. There's so many tripods and a lot of time invested.

Most notable things in Sokcho itself were snacks, so I'll chat about them.

Americano on tap

The Koreans LOVE an iced americano the size of your entire head. My body composition is now 70% decaf iced americano. Mega coffee is our fave, despite the fact it's sometimes K-pop boy band branded. Normally I am so starved of coffee when abroad because decaf isn't a thing so it has been so good to be hooked up to an IV drip of sweet decaf goodness.

Mr Crabs

The other classic thing to do in Sokcho is a fresh crab meal. It felt more like a theatre experience than just a lunch.

We spent approximately 30 minutes meandering through this mega chaotic seafood market where the floor is unnervingly wet and sometimes squishy, and everyone is shouting at you in Korean.

Once you find it, you're asked to pick your favourite live crab from a tank where they're all crawling about. I was glad I didn't see our lil friend get whacked over the head. All you pay for the meal is the weight of the crab, but they proceed to bring you an ungodly amount of food.

It starts with a mushroom clam soup cooked at your table, then fresh scallops, before you're given the entire king crab to snap apart with your hands. Halfway through, she whisks away the head and returns with it filled with crab fried rice, with a side of crab ramen with an entire new little crab on top. Never been so full of crab. Mental that it was mum's first time eating crab, I think she can only be disappointed from here.

Other Sokcho seafood shoutouts go to spicy squid tteokbokki (he warned me 3 times it was really spicy and I still went for it for some reason, I am dumb) and squid soondae which is like crispy fried rice inside squid, it had real arancini energy.

On the road

We've hopped out of Sokcho on another luxury bus to Gyeongju (this time it's 5 hours long). Catch you there.