OFF MAP KOREA-Outdoor Activity Information in Korea

She Asked to Stop for Coffee. We Found Something Better. It was a Tuesday in late October, the kind of morning where the air finally has some bite and the ginkgo trees along the highway median are turning that electric shade of yellow that makes even a motorway look like a painting. My client — I'll call her Margit, a retired schoolteacher from the Netherlands — had just finished three days on the Bukhansan Dulle-gil and wanted one easy half-day before her flight. 'Just somewhere quiet,' she said. 'Not a famous place.' We were heading south out of the city, and I pulled off a road I know well but rarely use with clients. There's a small 편의점 (convenience store) at a T-junction near [Galmae junction, verify exact local name] where I usually stop to fill up on canned coffee. Margit got out to stretch, walked twenty metres down a side lane to look at a stone wall, and called back to me: 'There are steps here. Old ones.' She wasn't wrong. What she...

Why Most Foreigners Get Suraksan Wrong From the Start Every foreign hiker I have driven to Suraksan has asked me the same question on the way there: 'Is it really that crowded?' The honest answer depends entirely on which entrance you use. Pick the wrong one and you are shuffling up a concrete path behind a column of weekend warriors in matching visors. Pick the right one and you will spend most of the morning alone on a granite ridge with a view over the Han River basin that almost nobody in Seoul knows about. Suraksan sits in the northeastern corner of Seoul, straddling the boundary between Nowon-gu and Jungnang-gu, and it tops out at 638 metres. It is not the tallest mountain in the city, but the summit ridge is sharper and more exposed than Bukhansan, and the rock scrambling near the top is genuinely satisfying. The problem is that most people — Korean weekend hikers and foreign visitors alike — funnel in through the Sanggye-dong trailhead near Danggogae Station, which ...