Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - Trip Report Mini Report / Thoughts on 4 Weeks South Korea Oct 2022

We had an absolutely wonderful 4 weeks in Korea back in Oct 2022.

A few random thoughts, written on the flight home and posted to the FB group I used for a lot of research and planning, Korea Travel Guide.

Self-drive was absolutely the right choice for us. It's a really really great way to see the breadth of the country, especially if you avoid the toll roads and use local highways and roads, as we did – which doesn't usually add much time to the trips either. And the views and snippets of small town and tiny village life are worth it! If you've driven much in big cities like London, you won't be fazed by Korean driving! If you're a fainthearted, nervous or inexperienced driver, you may not enjoy the experience at all! Pete really enjoyed it! Our itinerary included overnights in Seoul, Suwon, Jeonju, Gwangju, Yeosu, Jeju Island (Jeju City and Seogwipo), Busan, Gyeongju and back to Seoul. We had 3 separate car rentals to cover this and didn't bother to have a car whilst in Seoul or Busan, but picked them up on the morning we left each city.

We used Naver Map to navigate, for driving, public transport and walking. Ahead of the trip I had saved hundreds of favourites into the app (hotels, sights, restaurants, cafes, airports, key stations, rental car offices) and added more as we went. Even set to English, a lot of it remains in Korean, and not possible to use fully, but we got along fine with it anyway.

I already loved Korean food before this trip (I worked for several years in a town known colloquially as Little Korea and used to eat Korean for lunch 3-4 data a week), but that love has intensified even more. And there's still looooaaaads of dishes we didn't try, waiting for our next trip!

Google translate has come on leaps and bounds and we used it to translate menus all over the place. In tourist-heavy places they may have English translations but in many places they don't, but this wasn't an issue for us at all. If you have allergies or restricted diets this will likely be a lot trickier! I very occasionally used papago to translate a sentence to someone but it is much slower than Google translate. Still handy to have it. Load the Korean keyboard at that if someone wants to reply and have it translate Korean to English, they can.

Anywhere you have high rises in the cities, there are always amazing sculptures on the corners. Everywhere. It's amazing!

In Seoul we used buses more than the metro, mostly because it reduced walking and stairs and we had time. But we did use metro too. All very easy to use in our opinion.

Hotel beds in Korea are universally pretty damn firm. Some were so hard it was hard to sleep. Not much you can do about it but be aware. I chose my hotels carefully based on location above all plus bed size and room size and of course price. Was happy with all of them... booked them all via booking dot com.

Lost 3+ days of the trip to a really bad bout of food poisoning aka traveller's diarrhoea. 99.9% sure I got that at a hotel breakfast buffet I said at the time was a disaster waiting to happen - why didn't I listen to myself? We didn't even book breakfast anywhere but this hotel included it for genius level booking dot com members. All the clichés of food that should be kept hot being left out till cold, covers not put onto dishes between customers serving themselves, car crash in many respects. I'm an idiot. Conversely I didn't get ill once from street-food or casual cheap restaurants.

Almost flooded one bathroom when I went to the toilet whilst more than half asleep and pressed the button for arse wash instead of flush. As I was standing up, it shot up and out of the loo and even when I slammed the loo seat lid down it poured out until I woke up and pressed the button to turn it off. Attachment 8770 I love robot loos but make sure you know which one is the flush to avoid ensuing hilarity! Attachment 8772

A lot of restaurants closed during the pandemic. Naver Maps is more up to date than Google but you'll still find some places that aren't open though they seem to be listed as such, and a bunch of places that are open but still restricting to take out only. Have back up plans!

We pre-booked WiFi and a SIM that could accept incoming calls (but not make them). It had data as well. The WiFi was very very helpful when out and about. And the Korean number was useful for two things - booking taxis with Kakao taxi, and adding our name to waitlists for 2 or 3 restaurants that operated that system. We needed to be signed in to Kakao talk for that to work.

I posted a LOT to Instagram, usually with restaurant and place names and Naver Map links: www.instagram.com/Kaveyf and look for #kaveyeatskorea Attachment 8773

Happy to answer questions if you want more info on anything!