The wife is of course particularly interested to visit Taiwan this year end, whereas for myself, I’m undecided still! The Taiwan itinerary I posted in the last entry would had been pretty dense and we’d be covering a lot. But the absence of subzero weather and any chance of seeing snow: those are things that make me not want to do Taiwan until I’ve gotten my snow fix!
Compared to the Taiwan itinerary, the South Korea itinerary is less convoluted. We’d be essentially basing our itinerary around just four cities compared to the six for Taiwan. From the beginning of our planning, we were also always going to do a significant segment at Jeju island – a popular spot that we visited in 2006 but skipped in our 2024 trip. Beyond that, I also wanted to check out the east coast of the country, an area that we also did not cover last year. So, with those broad strokes, the 20 day itinerary looks like this right now:
Landing into Incheon or Busan and taking a domestic flight to Jeju
Jeju for 6 days
Taking a domestic flight back to Seoul and making our way eastwards to Gangneung
Gangneung for 4 days
Taking a train northwards to Sokcho
Sokcho for 3 days
Taking a train back to Seoul
Seoul for 6 days
Flying home from Incheon
Few airlines will directly fly into Jeju from Singapore. The only airline I found that does is Scoot, but there are no flights on our planned departure date. Bummer. The early plan was to take any one of the many flights into Incheon, and from there, catch a separate domestic flight into the island. We then saw that while most international flights into South Korea land into Incheon, the numerous domestic flights southwards to Jeju were not taking off from Incheon but from Gimpo i.e. we’d have to make our way from Incheon International Airport to Gimpo International Airport in Seoul, e.g. via the Airport Express Rail (AREX) or cab.
Trying to change airport on a busy first day did not sound really appealing though. So, one alternative: fly into Gimhae International Airport in Busan, and take the domestic flight to Jeju from there. The flights to Jeju from Gimhae are much less frequent than those departing from Gimpo, but at least we wouldn’t have to change airports. But the online comments about Gimhae were pretty scary, and a lot of the most negative feedback were centered on the fact that Gimhae, being the pretty small airport it is, was not capable of handling the volume of international travelers. There were numerous comments about international visitors arriving in the country and getting stuck in the immigration queue for hours. In lieu of that, the indicative connecting flight to Jeju I’ve bookmarked gives us 5 hours between arriving and departing Gimhae – that surely must be enough time if we finally decided to do South Korea this year end!
Still, the comments about Gimhae are worrying. So, if we decided to do South Korea this year, a decision would have to be reached on how to get to Jeju: land into Incheon which has a much better oiled system but suffer the change of airports, or land into Gimhae and possibly tear our hair out at immigration there, but no need to change airports. Rock or hard place – gaaaah.
Most people would visit Jeju for 2 days; we’re spending six! The itinerary I’ve written up for the moment sees us spending each days in a different region of Jeju: central, southern, eastern, and western. We’d likely also need to get private drivers for the latter three regions, as I’m expecting cabs are a little harder to hail in those parts.
Most visitors to South Korea from here won’t ever go to Gangneung or Sokho: the vast majority would visit Seoul, Busan and Jeju. So, information about these two coastal cities is relatively more scarce. Still, based on my preliminary exploration, there is just about enough things to do in both cities for three full days each, and a highlight would be the visit to Seoraksan National Park from Sokcho.
We’d covered quite a lot in Seoul during our 2024 trip, so I had to really dig hard to find other interesting places in the area to fill our six days. We’d be covering the spots we skipped – including Namsan Mountain Park and Seoul Tower, and also trying again for the day trip to Wondae-ri Birch Forest that we had to drop. We also added day trips to a Ski Resort, Hantan River, and also a trip to a different DMZ: and the one that has the famous Starbucks outlet where you can sip coffee while eye-balling North Korea LOL.
Looking at both detailed itineraries, the Taiwan one is simply more dense with a lot more going on, though – apart from Taipei and Kaohsiung, much of where we’d be visiting is also more rustic and laid back, but there is also finally a bit more time touring the country in view of the better travel timings and less overheads. So, a really tough decision ahead of us on where to go in the coming weeks!