Lovebirds in Korea: Vacation Part 3: Soerak National Park

On Thursday, we took a day trip to Sokcho, a coastal city on the eastside of our Province, Gangwon. We had originally planned on spending the night and checking out the beach and a few touristy things in town, but August is a big vacation month for Koreans and all of the hotels in Sokcho were booked.

Sokcho is less than two hours from Chuncheon and the trip was made by bus. I prefer trains, but buses do get you there faster if traffic is fairly normal. We left fairly early for the bus station and weren't able to leave until 9:10. We were a bit unlucky with our bus driver. He drove crazily along Korean highways and made some very sudden stops for two people who seem to get car sick. His crazy driving did shave time off of our journey though.

We arrived around 10:45 and immediately caught a city bus to take us to Soerak National Park. Fare was less than two dollars each making it very budget friendly. It took nearly an hour to get there because of frequent stops though. The park is seemingly huge. We did quite a bit of hiking and didn't make it through half of the park. I had read that it takes about 16 hours to hike through the entire park.

I packed a lunch of sandwiches, bananas and crackers and we ate it when we got to the park. We settled into a shaded patch that was full of other visitors doing the same.

The first thing we did at the park was buy tickets for the cable car. It is the most popular attraction at the park so you have to buy tickets in advance. We bought our tickets and had almost two hours to kill so we decided to walk around.

We saw the temple, the giant Buddha (I heard somewhere that it may be the biggest in the world?), and got a coffee from a vendor halfway up a mountain. We headed back and made it back about 15 minutes before our time of departure.

Waiting for the cable car proved to be almost torturous. Don't leave your house in August if you are in Korea, everyone and their moms are on vacation. There were so many people packed into a tiny space. And even though your tickets have a specific time and you can't go on the cable car until your time, many people still thought they needed to push and shove and be in the front of the quasi line that was formed. Anywho, we finally made it on the cable car and I'd say 8 bucks was worth it.

There are two trails from the outside of the cable car station. One leads up the mountain to a spectacular view.

The other leads to a "temple."

After we wandered back up the hill from the "temple" we headed back down the cable car. Those who are afraid of heights should probably close their eyes or just not go. We decided that before we leave, we should head up to the cave we saw a sign for earlier. The sign read 3.1 km. We didn't think that was too far and figured we could do that in a round trip of about an hour and a half. Wishful thinking.

What we didn't know was that the distance was counted vertically, not horizontally. That's right, 3.1 kilometers of mountain climbing, not hiking.

There were some spectacular views here, too. But we never made it to the cave. An hour and a half of climbing later, drenched in sweat, we called it quits and headed back to the park entrance. We took a cab back to the bus station because we were too tired to look for the bus.