5 Mistakes Foreign Hikers Make in Korea Every Week
What I See From the Driver's Seat Every Single Week I pick up foreign hikers at subway stations across Seoul and Gyeonggi several times a week. I drive them out to trailheads that buses don't reach — places like Yongmunsan, Garisan, and the quieter flanks of Gyeryongsan — drop them off with a printed guidebook, and agree on a pickup time. Then I wait. In that time, I've watched a lot of things go wrong. Not dramatically wrong, most of the time. But wrong in the slow, exhausting, blister-forming, argument-starting way that turns a great day into a miserable one. Here are the five mistakes I see most often, and they're almost always avoidable. Mistake 1: Underestimating Korean Trail Elevation Gain Korea's mountains look modest on paper. Yongmunsan tops out at 1,157 metres. Bukhansan, the national park right inside Seoul, peaks at 836 metres. Foreigners who've hiked in the Alps or the Rockies sometimes laugh when they see those numbers. They stop laughing...