Day 80 – Sokcho
In the morning we walked to the Intercity Bus Terminal (the one we should have gotten off the bus a few days ago) and bought tickets to our next destination for tomorrow. We bought some food from the convenience store and waited for the bus to arrive for our second day of visiting the Seoraksan National Park.
The bus arrived at Seoraksan National Park Information Centre which is at the start of the Daecheongbong Peak course. The course is 5km long (one way) and we started it just before 10am. For some reason when going through this side, there is no entrance fee.
The climb was steep in sections, and the start is a killer, with large stone steps, which were very slippery in the Korean Autumn conditions. When we were doing the hike, all the autumn leaves were only present at the start of the hike, the higher we went up, the more barren the trees were.
When we were going up, there was a lot of people coming down. We assumed they were doing a two day hike and must have slept close to the summit. They were super friendly, and by the end of the day we had heard hello in Korean so many times that we also knew how to say it. “Anyoung haseyo” – Reference for spelling – (https://www2.rocketlanguages.com/korean/salutations/greetings-in-korean/)
With around 500 metres left on the climb, we saw isolated sections of snow, as the temperature was started to plummet. After the 4 hour climb, we “enjoyed” the views of the surrounding mountain ranges. There is a stone tablet right at the top. We took some quick photos while shivering (I was severely under dressed. We began the decent at 2pm, and the start sections we rushed through, attempting to get lower down the peak so the temperature would increase.
The way down was slow, as we could start to feel the toll on our knees. We arrived at the Park office in around 3 hours and 15 minutes. We then checked the times of the next bus at the office and it was arriving in 20 minutes, but we had to walk down a kilometre to the stop.
Not wanting to miss the bus, we ran down and then were trying to work out were to buy the bus ticket. There was a CU store close to the corner and I was able to buy the ticket from there, for a bus that was arriving in less than 5 minutes. The bus arrived on time and we were taken to Sokcho Bus Terminal. I left my hat on the bus 🙁
We ended up going to town for dinner, at a burger joint called Mom’s Touch. We had to wait 30 minutes despite being the only customers in the store as they kept making the burgers for online delivery services (think uber eats). That being said, the burgers tasted really good. It was surprising to see that the small town of Sokcho (population ~90,000 – Wikipedia) still had large chain stores that you don’t normally associate with a small town.