Another hiking trip is in the books! A few friends and I ventured to Byeonsanbando National Park for a day of hiking. Byeonsanbando is a great park because it’s a mix of both mountains and ocean. It’s located about an hour and a half to two hours north of Gwangju. To get there, we took the 8:35 a.m. bus to Jeongeup and then got a 35 minute taxi from there. The bus to Jeongeup cost 4,600 KRW ($3.54) and took about 50 minutes.
We arrived at the entrance to the park around 10:15 a.m. There are many different trails in the park, but I’d researched the trail map beforehand as well as some other blogs and found a nice loop to do. The total hike was around 9 km (5.5 miles) and took us about three hours to complete. We also had great weather for hiking! The temperature was the highest it had been all year, but luckily the trail was pretty shaded the entire time so we never got too hot.
We started with a nice ascent that quickly became steep as all Korean hikes do. Very soon we came upon a nice viewpoint of all the hiking stores and restaurants at the base of the mountain. From there, we continued our climb up. I’m glad we started the way we did because we had to scramble up a lot of steep rock faces which would’ve been difficult if we were going down. At one point we were walking on the ridge of the mountain with steep drop offs on either side of us with amazing views surrounding us. That is probably the most accurate way to describe Korean hikes: stunning, yet terrifying.
It didn’t take us too long to reach the ridge of the mountain and from there the hike became much more enjoyable. We were able to just walk and look out at the views around us. Right before the peak was one of my favorite views of the entire hike!
After one more short climb, we made it to the peak of the mountain! It was 424 m (1,391 feet) and had a great overlook as well as a shaded area to rest.
We hung out at the peak for a while and then started on our way down. The views on the way down were incredible! It was even better than the way up. The mountains seemed taller on this side and we could see a lake in the distance. It also seemed as if this side of the trail was a bit steeper than the side we hiked up which made me grateful to be going down rather than hiking up.
Soon, we reached the bottom of the mountain and our hike was done. It was a relatively easy hike compared to other ones I’ve done, but it had some great views! Amazing views with less work= a perfect hike:)
After our hike we ate lunch and then tried to visit the ocean part of the national park. However, due to some bad timing with the buses we were unable to make it to the beach and instead spent a lot of time on buses getting back to Gwangju.
Overall, this was a great national park! It was a bit difficult to get to since it required multiple modes of transportation to get to and from the park, but it was definitely worth it! I really enjoyed Byeonsanbando and wish I could’ve visited the beach as well.
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