Thursday, July 24, 2014

Travelogue: Korea Day 2 - Taejongdae Resort Park x Gamcheon Cultural Village


Finally decided to continue with my Korea travelogue after weeks of procrastinating!

For day 2 in Busan, after breakfast, we took the subway to Nampo station and took exit 6. Make a right turn and you'll see a bus stop. From there, take bus 8 or 30 to Taejongdae Park and get down at the last stop. Just in case, do have the name of the places you wanna go in Korean on hand and show it to the bus driver when boarding to confirm that the bus goes to those places and most of the time the bus driver will tell you when to get down! (:




After approximately 30 min of bus ride, we reach the bus terminal and you'll see this cafe on the side of the road where the bus stops.


Continue walking down the path, and at the end of it is Taejongdae Park.









There is no entrance fee to the park but there is this train is called Danubi Train which takes you around the resort park! The price is 1500 won/Adult and 600 won/Children. However, that morning it rained and the road was slippery so the train wasn't in operation ): We had to make our way around the park by foot.



There were quite alot of up and down hills along the way to the famous Yeongdo Lighthouse, which was all the way at the far end of the resort. There were a few stops along the way to the lighthouse for photos.















Along the way, there's this gallery which showcases Korea's famous actress Choi Jiwoo's love story in Busan. The photos of her were absolutely stunning!





After 1 hour plus of walking, we finally reached the lighthouse.







Unicorn in the making.




Well, it was so windy that I seriously thought I was going to be blown away. Just look at what the wind did to my hair and you can imagine how strong the wind was. I was turned into Merdusa for a second there.


So we went all the way down to the cliffs. And wow it was really cool. You actually get to sit on the edge of a cliff! (Well sort of anyway) Hahaha. But it was really windy and I didn't dare to go further out.




Selfie time! Hahaha.




So once we're done taking photos, we made our way out of the park for lunch.



What better way to cool down on such a hot day, than some ice cream? Hehehe


So we had our very first Korean meal at a Korean restaurant. It was hard to place our order though... Since the locals there don't understand English. So we had to just point to the photos. The food was mostly spicy as usual so I ended up eating porridge with seaweed, which was quite nice actually. hehe.




After lunch, took the bus from the opposite bus stop where we got down from earlier and took the bus back to Nampo station.

Hung around the super huge shopping mall for awhile to do some shopping and chanced upon this store which sells shaved ice dessert which they call Patbingsu in Korea. It's like shaved ice, with condensed milk and red bean toppings! This one had mixed fruits too! Really yummy ^^



We walked around Nampo-Dong for awhile before heading to Gamcheon Cultural Village.


To get to Gamcheon Cultural Village, we took the subway to Toseong Station and took exit 6. Make a right turn at the once you come out of the exit and walk straight to Pusan National University Hospital bus stop.




There, you can take bus 1-1, 2 and 2-2 to get to Gamcheon Cultural Village.


Gamcheon Cultural Village is a quaint little village with colourful buildings that resembles those in Santorini, thus this village also has the nickname of "Santorini of Korea".





It wasn't as picturesque as I had expected probably cause of the faded colours of the building. Those photos that I saw online painted a better picture of this village. Maybe it was cause we went during sunset and the positioning of the sun wasn't that ideal to photograph the buildings. Despite that, we still continued to walk the trails, following the map we took photo of at the start of the trail.


























There are residents actually living in the village so visitors are reminded to keep the noise level down so as not to disturb the residents.




There are many of photo opportunities along the trails too! After about 1-2 hours of walking, we decided that it was time to leave for dinner. We continued on the trail and somehow we got lost. We just kept walking down and down but it didn't seem correct. Found a bus stop in the end and boarded bus 2. However, it was going towards a different subway station. We panicked a little but with the help of GoogleMap, manage to find where is the nearest subway station this bus is headed to and got down. After this experience, I would suggest just walking back to the entrance of the cultural village to take a bus back to Toseong Station. This village is like a maze and it's pretty hard to navigate your way around the small alleys.

Settled dinner at a food court and went back to the hotel to rest for the day. This ended our long and exciting day 2 in Busan.

Read the rest of my Korea travelogue here !

6 comments :

  1. Hey Janice! How do you go back to Nampo station from Taejongdae?

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    Replies
    1. Hi, we took the same bus from the bus stop opposite from where you alight (:

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  2. Hi. Can we use T-Money for the bus ride?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hello! Yes you can use T-Money for the bus ride (:

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  3. Hi Janice,

    Will be my first time to Busan. Do you have a itinerary to share with me?

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  4. Enjoyed ur blog going to busan on the 9/3/2017 will be doing what u did.. chk many blog but yours was very detailed thanks

    ReplyDelete