For Chuseok this year we visited Gapyeong, a vacation area of mountains, rivers and lakes just outside of Seoul. It was a good place for a quick getaway.
We visited two places, Nami Island and the Garden of Morning Calm. Nami Island is by far the more famous and more popular of these two places. It became famous as a romantic site in one of the first really popular K-dramas, Winter Sonata. An island in the middle of the Bukhangang (the North Han River), it is reachable by a five-minute ferry ride (or there’s a more expensive option to zip wire in; these are tourist places). The island brands itself as its own nation, the Republic of Nami.
Nami Island has some lovely walks, particularly its lanes of trees. And it has lots of whimsical statuary and such that makes it a great place for families. If you do not have kids to entertain, you may find it, as we did, somewhat overdeveloped. Nonetheless, we enjoyed it.
The next day we went to a private arboretum, called in English “The Garden of Morning Calm.” This name comes, apparently, from a phrase often associated with Korea, “The Land of the Morning Calm,” coined by the early twentieth-century Indian poet Rabindranāth Tagore. (I say “apparently” because I have also read that the phrase is a translation of the name for the last Korean dynasty, the Chosun, but I think that claim has less authority. I would like to find the poem by Tagore and learn about its origin.)
In planning the visit to Gapyeong, the trip to the arboretum was an afterthought compared to the visit to Nami Island, but it turned out to be the highlight of the trip. This arboretum is beautiful, and we very much recommend it.
In addition to the varieties of trees, flowers and architectural features, the beauty of the place lies in its situation in a valley, so that the controlled nature of the arboretum is framed by the wild nature of the Korean mountains. Because those mountains are not tall enough to be sublime, the garden does not not quite create a play between the sublime and the beautiful (for you English eighteenth-century fans), but it is close.
Speaking of close, this arboretum, like Nami Island, is a completely doable day trip from Seoul, or even Incheon, though travel from the latter is long enough to justify an overnight. Gapyeong is not the most sensational place we’ve visited in Korea, but it was still a lot of fun, and is reachable from Incheon for a subway ride of less than $3.00! Can your subway do that?