Mudeungsan Gwangju Hike: The Granite Plateau Most Tourists Skip
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Why Almost Nobody Outside Korea Has Heard of Mudeungsan Ask most foreign visitors to name a mountain near Gwangju and you'll get a blank stare. Mudeungsan (무등산, 1,187 m) sits on the eastern edge of Gwangju city — South Korea's fifth-largest — and yet it barely registers on international hiking radar. That's partly because Gwangju itself is undervisited, and partly because the mountain's headline feature, the columnar rock pillars of Seoseokdae and Ipseokdae, requires a permit-restricted military zone clearance that still confuses even Korean hikers. But the access rules have eased considerably, and what you find up there is genuinely unlike anything else on the Korean peninsula. I've driven clients to Mudeungsan on a handful of occasions now, each time starting from different pickup points — once from Gwangju Songjeong KTX station, once from a guesthouse in the Dongmyeong-dong neighbourhood. The approach through the city's outer ring roads is straightforward...