DAY 3 OF OUR 3-DAY ROAD TRIP
We found a restaurant that specialises in locally grown vegetables, well known for its healthy, tasty food. We then drove to a forest said to contain lots of white birch trees, then spent a looooong time getting back to Seoul…
In the car park opposite our accommodation, I took a few photos of a huge abandoned hotel; it looked sad and haunted, straight out of a film. There were a few run down places in the neighbourhood, probably gone out of business due to a glut of hotels. It’s a really nice area, next to a big mountain stream/river with places to site near the road and catch views of the mountains.
After my quick photo session, we left for Jeombong Sanchae (점봉산산채), about twenty minutes away. It serves locally grown vegetables in numerous ways. We opted for a set menu with a bibimbap type meal where you add your own veg to your big rice bowl. The restaurant itself was nice in it’s traditional modern design (1980s?) featuring wood interior, floor seating, and and shop area stuffed with dried vegetables.
Our next stop was only supposed to be about forty minutes drive from here, but I guess the Sunday traffic back to Seoul was starting. Along the way and onto smaller roads, we followed a big stream in an area I think was Inje; this looked like another promising place to explore. We came to the birch forest (Wondaeri Birch forest – 원대리자작나무숲), but once we got there, we didn’t really fancy the two to three hour walk to the centre where all the white trees were meant to be; we walked for about an hour, came back and had a coffee on a terrace of one of the nearby coffee shops (and Romana complained to a man smoking too close to us and he moved… nice!).
Afterwards, we started back to Seoul. Unfortunately, unknown to me at the time, the navigation app on my phone kept adjusting the route due to I guess heavier and heavier traffic on the main roads. A two hour drive turned into a long three and a half hour drive through (lovely) hilly village backstreets and eventually into a gridlocked part of south west Seoul… We basically parked up and got food and coffee to wait out the jam, studying the area to find a quicker, sneaky way through the snarled up roads. I may write more about this later… It wasn’t the best part of the trip by any means!
Places visited this trip: