On her last stop in Gangwon-Do, our columnist goes leaf peeping Korean-style, which involves Buddhist traditions, selfie sticks and many, many plates of food.
Our columnist, Jada Yuan, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2018 list. This dispatch brings her to Gangwon, South Korea, which took the No. 7 spot on the list. It is the 46th stop on Jada’s itinerary.
Rising out of the mist and pine trees on South Korea’s mountainous eastern coast was a serpent. Or at least it looked that way, as I awoke, groggy, and peered out my hotel window at a colossal undulation of orange, purple and teal stripes snaking through the forest canopy. Two blinks later, the shapes and colors morphed into what they actually were: the twisty, tubular slides of a waterpark.
“Quintessential Korean experience,” my friend Jean H. Lee had written next to a note about waterparks in a tailored guide to Gangwon Province she’d sent to me from Washington D. C., where she runs the Korea program at the Wilson Center. Jean still keeps an apartment in Seoul and was snowboarding on the slopes of Pyeongchang long before they’d been home to the Winter Olympics.
The Games brought a new high-speed KTX train and gleaming white hotel towers with infinity pools overlooking the ocean (see: Goldon Tulip Skybar and the Richard Meier-designed Seamarq). Those mountains, though, loom largest, keeping the new Gangwon in harmony with the old.
Temperatures were already in an overcoat zone when I arrived, but the region was still packing in Seoul residents leaf peeping away from smog, and tourists from all over Asia taking selfies in the locations where their favorite Korean TV dramas, like “Winter Sonata,” were shot. I’d been touring the province, from the Buddhist temples of Pyeongchang to the endless coastline of Gangneung, with the help of a Seoul-based travel writer, Hahna Yoon, whom I’d met indirectly through Jean.
But on my last stop, in the city of Sokcho, just south of the Demilitarized Zone, I was on my own — and possessed with the Korean language skills of a mime.
Hahna had told me that my $90 hotel, Hanwha Resort Seorak Sorano, had a famous bathhouse, or jjimjilbang, that people came from all over the country to visit. Earlier in this 52 Places trip, I’d stayed at (and loved) the Holiday Inn Waterpark in Orlando, Florida. I’d never imagined, though, that I’d see that kind of family-fun excess in a Korean forest.
“Go straight, walk five minutes,” the hotel clerk told me when I asked how to find the jjimjilbang entrance. I did as told and got lost on a dirt path next to a stream lined with trees whose vivid yellow and red leaves were still clinging to their branches, just barely. There were tasteful bronze sculptures of naked women here and there, and a path around a placid lake built for contemplative strolls. I passed young families pushing strollers and old men meditating on stone steps built into a hillside. And then there was the child on a bicycle playing a video game at full volume, just as nature intended.
When I finally got inside, those twisty slides were closed for the season but there was still a wave pool and rivers of warm water and tiers of hot springs. Inside, men and women filed into separate facilities, which involved stripping naked, soaking in a really hot bath, jumping into a cold one, and repeating. It’s a sensation everyone should try at least once.
Later, I walked onto a pavilion over the lake and had to laugh. I was standing under a mock temple roof, looking across a body of water to the mountains, with a grove of red Korean pine trees to the right and that glorious gaudy waterpark on the left. It was a scene so perfectly Gangwon it could have been a scroll painting.
I hadn’t taken a two-hour night bus to Sokcho from Gangneung to see a hotel waterpark, though. My personal must-do of the trip was to hike in Seoraksan National Park, home to the region’s highest mountain, and legendary fall foliage. I’d missed peak leaf peeping by a week or two, but there were still a few trees that looked like they’d been dipped in red and yellow Kool-Aid.
At the top of the park’s cable car was a 20-minute climb to a rock face known as Gwongeumseong Fortress, the highest peak in the park and bare, with the exception of an occasional pine, bent over from the wind.
