Nearly Neutral Travel

Daegu is South Korea’s third largest city (after Seoul and Busan) and although it has few big-hitting sights, it’s a modern and lively city full of food, cats and fun.

After a day spent skiing, we zoomed the 379 km from YongPyong to Daegu via Seoul on a couple of high-speed trains in a single evening.

The trains were impressive not just for their speed and comfort, but also for the wireless phone chargers at every seat. Honestly, it’s hard not to feel embarrassed about the state of the trains in the UK after travelling on these.

Daegu’s history lies in Oriental Medicine, owing to its central location between mountains from which a wide range of herbs and remedies could be foraged. We learned about the development of the old medicine market from Daegu’s Museum of Oriental Medicine, which had some enthralling CGI videos to accompany the dioramas to keep our attention.

We also thoroughly enjoyed the interactive display which allowed us to determine to which of the four body types we belonged. This rather knowingly described Sara as someone who has “to rush their work because they start late and are slow” (fair), but also more insultingly claimed she likes “to slander other people” (less fair)!

While the original market was destroyed during times of Japanese colonialism, this didn’t stop Daegu from being a centre of Oriental Medicine, and the shops selling these medicines are still trading today in the area surrounding the museum.

Feeling suitably informed about Daegu’s history, we next needed to address South Korea’s shockingly low cat count, and for that we headed to a cat cafe. The cat cafe was split across two floors; the lower floor acting as more of a cafe and the upper floor a games room. The cafe was the perfect way to combine the two loves of Sara’s life (coffee and cats), and it gave us some respite from missing Thomas back home.

All in all, we met 30 new cats, though I’m not sure how to account for them on our cats per day metric. Is it fair to treat “paid for” cats in the same way as “naturally occurring” cats? I’m not sure, but here are a few of our favourites:

We probably spent more time eating and drinking in Daegu than anything else. There were so many restaurants close to our Airbnb, and a very popular street food night market to keep us grazing. We became particularly partial to a post-lunch Hotteok (rice-flour pancake filled with cinnamon, sugar and crushed peanuts). There was a lady making them in the street just down the road from our apartment, and the smell was so good we couldn’t just walk past it without buying one.

Here’s a close up of the finished product, along with a few of the other stand-out dishes we tried in Daegu:

The most extravagant dinner we ate was at 가장맛있는족발 종로점, where we ordered a joint of sliced pork shoulder, which came accompanied by the customary wide range of sides. We also ordered some rice balls, but were flummoxed when a plate of dried seaweed and a plastic glove turned up. We eventually worked out that there was rice beneath the seaweed, and the glove was to make your own rice balls. The end product didn’t always look good, but at least they were tasty! Fully embracing Korean culture, we ordered a few beers and bottles of soju to wash down our dinner, which more than got us on our way.

We ended the night with a much anticipated karaoke session in a private room, where we spent nearly the full hour trying to find a song that we recognised in the Argos-catalogue-of-songs and trying to work the machine (unsurprisingly, it was all in Korean!). I think we managed to sing a grand total of one intentional song (Just No Time To Die), although that didn’t stop Sara freestyle rapping over the various K-pop songs that I played by mistake. I think we’ll have to try again another day.

---

Our onwards travel required us to get to one of Daegu’s bus stations, which could be conveniently reached from our apartment via a single underground metro. However, it would have been criminal to visit Daegu and not ride its monorail, so we cut our connection time quite fine in order to crowbar the monorail into our route. While monorails seem like quite an expensive transport solution, they definitely hold the top spot of the coolest mode of transport. The views over the city were awesome as we cruised around over the streets below on our all-too-short ride.

The subsequent bus took us to Gyeongju, which was the jumping off point for our stay at Golgulsa Temple.

After a Covid-enforced break of nearly three years, we’ve just spent three days skiing (Sara) and snowboarding (Oli) in YongPyong, Korea’s oldest and largest ski resort. YongPyong’s main claim to fame is that it served as the Alpine Technical venue during the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics, hosting the slalom and giant slalom events. We were excited to find our snow legs again and experience skiing on another continent – our first time outside Europe. It turns out that nearly everything is different to skiing in the Alps…

the ski Resorts are easily accessible

Our resort was about 15 minutes by road from the nearest high-speed train station. We couldn’t quite believe how large, easy and ‘normal’ the roads into the resort were – no snaking up a precarious mountain road for an hour here! On our return journey, our shuttle bus passed through another resort on the way to the station, and this was a quick five-minute detour, so it wasn’t just our resort that was easy to access. We did wonder how much this had to do with hosting the Winter Olympics – I assume easy access is a big bonus but I can’t quite imagine it’s this good everywhere the Olympics goes.

Resorts are much smaller

We picked YongPyong because it’s Korea’s largest resort, but it was still only the size of a (very) small European resort – at 13.6 km, it hardly compared to the 300 km of pistes available at Tignes/Val d’Isère, for instance. I’m not quite sure what possessed us to go in early December – the resort had been open just a few days and they hadn’t yet had their first big snowfall. This meant that there were only a couple of runs open (that had been snow-cannoned).

We were rarely out of sight of the village while skiing so it didn’t feel very intrepid, but at least coffee was never far away. By the middle of the first morning, we’d skied everything that was open – more than once!

The food is exciting and affordable

We ate lunch a couple of times in a food court in the resort. We ordered all meals from a single, multi-lingual self-service machine, then picked them up from separate chefs – choices included Korean, Japanese, Turkish and the ominous, vaguely-named ‘Western’. It was possible to get a full meal (with soup and veg sides) for around 13,000 KRW (about £8) – so certainly cheaper than in the Alps. We also thought that the selection was much more inspiring! It definitely beat the half-frozen brie and ham baguettes that we normally eat as a picnic when we ski…

The piste names are even more mysterious

If, like us, you’ve ever struggled to make sense of a piste map in a large European resort, let me present to you the piste names in YongPyong, which seemed to be expressly designed for maximum confusion. Red and New Red were both red (intermediate/advanced) runs – so far, so good. But then there was Red Paradise, which was actually a blue (beginner/intermediate) run and Blue, which was actually a red run. Meanwhile, Pink was a green (beginner) run, Rainbow Paradise was a blue run but Rainbow 1-4 were red runs. What?!

Health and safety is taken very seriously

We talked before about the number of warning and instructional signs on display in South Korea, and this was never more apparent than while we were skiing. In particular, skiing after drinking alcohol and smoking on the ski lifts were both strictly forbidden. What would our French friends think?!

Everyone is very courteous

There was no jostling for position in the lift queues, no children standing on the back of your skis and then zipping through your legs at the first opportunity, and the folks manning the chair lift bowed every time we got on and off. The level of chill was almost enough to compensate for the fact I didn’t have several mugs of vin chaud coursing through my veins while skiing…

Ski cleaning is a thing

We wouldn’t normally have thought anything of dumping our kit in the basement of our hotel or chalet still covered in snow. But since day-skiing is so popular here, people need a way to clean their skis and snowboards before loading them into their cars. The solution? Compressed air guns, which fire the ice off in all directions (mostly my face – thanks, Oli)! People were extremely diligent about using them, so we joined in, which was probably for the best, since our hotel’s ski locker was in the middle of the extremely nice reception area (it was by far the highest quality ski hotel we’ve ever stayed in).

Après ski? What après ski?

We weren’t exactly expecting to find La Folie Douce on the slopes of YongPyong, but we were still surprised at just how little was going on in the evenings – the best we managed was a quick pint at 6pm, carefully timed before the one bar in the resort closed.

On our first evening, we popped out for dinner shortly before 8pm, only to find that one part of the resort was already in complete darkness and the other part was just closing up. Thankfully, the 7-Eleven store had an excellent selection of beer to accompany our emergency dinner of instant ramen and sauna eggs!

I’d be really interested to see how different things are during high season. I get the impression there would be a bit more going on, but that it would all still be extremely family-friendly.

Overall, we really enjoyed our first foray into Asia’s skiing in YongPyong. To be brutally honest, I think we would have been disappointed if we’d come all the way from the UK specifically (because the piste length was a bit limited) – but that would have been a waste anyway, as South Korea has so much more to offer. Either way, it was time to move on, so after a happy couple of days going round and round on the open runs, we headed to South Korea’s fourth largest city, Daegu, to take drastic action to improve Korea’s cat count…