In February, I’ll be travelling with a friend to South Korea!
This trip was something that’d we’d been talking about for over a year and as time passed it started to come to fruition. For my friend, he’s been to Korea a few times and has continually grown very fond of their culture. I was super impressed when he learned how to speak Korean and how much he has familiarized himself with the country. So a return trip was always in the cards for him. Moving forward, we’ll call HIM “Suzy” (This was his choice, so if you’re curious about why, you’ll need to ask him) For me, ever since I had the opportunity to work for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver I’d joined the Olympic bandwagon. So when the chance to go to the Olympics in Korea showed up, it was perfect for the both of us!
Korea has always been on my travel list, however I don’t have a very big list of “musts”. In fact, if it wasn’t an olympic year, I think the list would be even smaller. At the same time though, I’m growing fonder of having less “travel goals” and more openness to travel surprises that invariably happen on every trip. It makes for some great surprises and stories to tell!
So my short list of musts are:
- Attend the 2018 Winter Olympics
- Take in an olympic event or two
- Visit the Korean Demilitarized zone
- Try all manner of Korean cuisine
We started looking for flights to South Korea and were able to find a cheap flight with Air China. We would fly from Vancouver to Beijing for a short layover before flying onward to Seoul. The return trip would be a mirror of the outbound trip.
With our flights booked, our next order of business was looking at the Olympic event calendar and deciding on which events we’d try to get tickets for. We ended up getting tickets to Women’s Ice Hockey, Snowboarding and a Team Figure Skating event.
The logistics of this trip wouldn’t be overly complicated as we’d primarily be basing ourselves in Seoul and taking the train around the country. With the Olympics going on, Korail had a special “Pyeongchang Korail pass” available. The pass itself would allow for unlimited travel on any Korail train. So it allowed us to travel between Seoul and the Olympic venues for the events, but also, with the days left over we wanted to try and explore
One thing we didn’t anticipate was the Korean New Year, this is the first day of the Korean Lunar calendar and a pretty big deal for the country. For 2018, it falls on Feb 16th. What this means is train availability will be limited between February 14-18. Our rail pass was valid from February 12-16, so we had a bit of overlap. Thankfully, our events fell on the 12th and 13th, so we weren’t at risk of transportation availability there. However, we did have a bit of difficulty booking trains to other destinations. We originally wanted to visit Busan, but we were unable to find any availability between the 14-16th.
We did however get tickets on the Korail G-Train, which was something we wanted. This was something Suzy (this is going to take some getting use to) had seen on a Korean travel show, and it seemed like a pretty cool concept. There are foot baths, and heated floors in some of the cars. So in a way the train was like a mini spa! I was curious about this and so we were lucky enough to book tickets on this train.
We also booked tickets back and forth to both the Pyeongchang Mountain Cluster and the Gangneung Coastal Cluster. If we weren’t going to be able to get too far around the country due to availability we decided to spend some time in the Olympic areas to check out what sort of festivities they’d have going on!
We tried to squeeze as much train activity into our rail passes as much as we could the first week.
The second half of our trip would be far less structured, we had researched a great deal of things to see and do in and around Seoul. So we figured we’d slot in different sights and activities as we went along. I think the only set activity was the DMZ tour which we booked with Panmunjom Travel Center.
One other notable item is that Suzy was able to score us some tickets to the Gaonchart Music awards. To my knowledge this is kind of like a Korean Grammys, so it will be an experience! I’m not very big into the Kpop scene, but I’m still quite excited to see this part of Korean culture in all its glory!
Past that, Suzy has a few friends that live in Korea that we’ll try to meet up with. He also has a coworker that is travelling around Asia, so we’ll try and meet up with her.
I’m also looking forward to seeing a familiar face when there Physio! Physio is a friend that I traveled to see in Australia in 2017 and he had planned to come up to Korea and link up with us while we’re there, so it will be good to see and catch up with him!
This is going to be a pretty interesting trip. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to visit the Olympics, but also to explore this wonderful country! I’m excited to see what is in store for the both of us!