![]() Many have cell-like rooms with cold hard floors and require guests to complete chores. Unlike Japan’s tourist-oriented shukubo (temple stays) that offer ornate vegan kaiseki meals, manicured gardens and even onsen baths, Korea’s temple stays are more structured and might feel slightly austere, but are truer to how the monks actually live. “Visitors here learn to love themselves and then envision how they can help five friends,” says Bubchang, taking a selfie of us with his smartphone. Samhwasa’s temple stay program is called “Love Myself and Help Five Friends.” While ringing the bronze temple bell after our humble supper of rice and kimchi, Bubchang held my hand and told me that I was beautiful. ![]() ![]() He guided me through the 108 prostrations ceremony, a calorie-burning Buddhist ritual in which I chanted 108 mantras and deep-bowed 108 times while stringing together 108 bodhi prayer beads to form a necklace. At the 1,000-year-old Samhwasa, a temple hidden deep in a ravine in the Muneung Valley, where I had booked a temple stay, I had the grounds to myself except for Bubchang, a sweet, wiry Buddhist monk wearing a heather gray robe, floppy cap and a permanent smile.īubchang walked with me in golden-hour light through mossy woods awash in pink spring wildflowers aside waterfalls trickling over weathered rocks, into which old poems were carved. But my next stop not only lacked other tourists, it had no other guests at all. From the top station, I scrambled an additional 20 minutes up to the top, where I took in views of the East Sea, pine tree-spiked ravines, not to mention the park’s stupas, temples, bridges and a 48-foot-high bronze Great Unification Buddha.Īt Seoraksan (and for much of my trip), I was the only non-Asian in the crowd, with no other international tourists in sight. The five-minute gondola ride to it whisked me up to a network of narrow hiking trails and boardwalk bridges. But six honey-hued granite peaks give the illusion of a towering castle and jut like spindly fingers into the sky. The fortress ruins are scarcely visible today. Like most visitors I opted instead for the shorter and easier cable car ride to another summit called Gwongeum Fortress, originally built to fend off the Mongolians, whose multiple 13th-century invasions left many traces in Korean art, cuisine and culture as we know it today. If you have a spare eight to 11 hours, you could make the challenging climb up 5,604 feet to Daecheong Peak, the park’s highest summit. At the park’s base is a smattering of gift shops and food stalls hawking hot coffee, noodle soups and fortifying bowls of dok boki, toothsome rice cakes drenched in a fermented red chili sauce. I was headed for Seoraksan (Snow Rock Mountain), one of South Korea’s 21 National Parks and a Unesco-listed Biosphere Reserve in the Taebeak Mountains, a spine running the length of the Korean Peninsula. ![]() I skipped the DMZ to instead explore the northernmost parts of South Korea, where domestic travelers have long sought out the pristine beaches, granite-peaked national parks and forested valleys. Gangwon is pressed up against the infamous DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), a 160-mile-long, 2.5-mile-wide buffer zone between North Korea and South Korea. South Korea’s northernmost province, Gangwon, two hours northeast, is a sensible first stop, not to mention the scenic shooting locale for “ Okja ,” a 2017 movie by the “Parasite” director, Bong Joon Ho, about a lovable pig raised on a lush mountaintop farm. As a traveler to more than 20 Asian countries, including popular destinations like Cambodia and Thailand, lesser-traveled spots like Laos, Bhutan and Taiwan, plus a dozen trips to Japan, I assumed the slow-paced side of Korea might be similar to those countries. According to the Statistics of Urban Planning, 92 percent of the country’s population now lives in urban areas, up from just 39 percent in 1960. The secrets of rural Korea are not widely known, even to many urbanite Koreans. The bustling nation had closed shop.īut on June 1, 2022, Korea opened to foreign tourists again, issuing short-term travel visas for the first time in two years and lifted most Covid-related restrictions for residents. A month later, the coronavirus hit and a calm returned. It experienced a cultural explosion of art, cuisine, literature and cinema with high profile films like “Parasite,” which swept the Oscars in February 2020 and nudged the nation onto many travelers’ maps. ![]() The name has long been used to refer to the Korean Peninsula, before the division of South and North Korea, because of its tranquil, temple-dotted mountains and serene forests where dawn breaks on the Asian mainland.īut calm is not a word that best captured the state of South Korea in the years running up to the pandemic. Before South Korea became globally known for its beauty products, kimchi and pop groups, it was known as the Land of the Morning Calm. ![]()
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