We’ve enjoyed pretty good weather in the first six days of our vacation in South Korea, the cold weather not withstanding: it’s been reasonably sunny throughout and we’ve gotten very usable pictures in such good lighting. Day 07 today finally saw largely cloudy weather that made most of our pictures pretty dull looking – and on the one day where we’d be visiting the national garden, and wetland reserve. What crummy luck.
The Suncheon Bay National Garden was a pretty close 8 minute away by cab from our hostel. Our hostel provided a simple but delicious breakfast, and we headed to the Garden thereafter and arrived just after its 9AM openingh our. The ticketing officer did not speak English, but using Google Translate, we managed to convey our interest to purchase the Suncheon integrated pass that covers all the attractions we were interested to visit in the city. The four passes we picked up cost 38,000 won.
The National Garden spans 1.12 million square meters, and is home to 790,000 trees covering 505 species, and 3.15 million flowers covering 113 types. To put it in simpler terms: the park is big, like really, REALLY huge. We’d initially set aside 2 hours to spend in the Garden, and thought that previous visitors were kidding when they advised allocating up to day to fully explore the park. Boy, were our estimates completely off! We walked about 7,000 steps in just over 2 hours exploring the first part of garden, and covered perhaps a third of the east garden: and there’s a west garden on the other side!
We eventually didn’t explore the garden completely and skipped entire sections on account that we had to head to the wetland reserve from the early afternoon. We finally spent about 4.5 hours and covered about two thirds of the garden, including speed walking through several sections.
Since the garden is so big, we’ve split this post into two sections: the pictures below are of the East Garden and where our cab dropped us off at the East Gate.
Continued in the next post!