East coast · Pohang, North Gyeongsang
호미곶
The giant bronze hand rising out of the sea, at the easternmost point of the mainland.
Homigot sits on the tip of the Homi cape, the furthest east the Korean mainland goes, which makes it the first place on the peninsula to see the sun.
The Hand of Harmony is a pair of bronze hands — one on the shore, one standing out in the water — and on 1 January the sunrise festival here is one of the biggest in the country.
What else is here
Homigot is not really a swimming beach. It is a cape at the far eastern tip of the peninsula, and it exists in the Korean imagination as the place where the country's day begins.
One hand in the sea
Two bronze hands, one standing on the square and one out in the water, installed for the millennium. The sun rises between the fingers of the sea hand, which is why every photograph of this place looks the same and why it works anyway.
1 January
Tens of thousands of people come here for the first sunrise of the year. Pohang lays on extra transport and the roads in are closed to ordinary traffic. If you want to do this, plan it weeks ahead.
1908, and still working
A white brick tower over 26 metres tall, built in 1908 — one of the oldest lighthouses in Korea and a registered cultural property. There is a small national lighthouse museum beside it.
Steel, and Guryongpo
Pohang is a steel city, and one of the more interesting stops nearby is Guryongpo, a fishing port with a preserved street of Japanese colonial-era houses from when it was a Japanese fishing settlement.
The tiger's tail
Korea is often drawn as a tiger, and on that map Homigot is the tip of the tail — the name means 'tiger's tail cape'. It is the easternmost point of the mainland, which in practice means the sun reaches it before anywhere else in the country.
The Hand of Harmony was installed for the year 2000: a right hand on the land and a left hand out in the sea, reaching for each other. It is unapologetically a monument rather than a piece of scenery, and on New Year's morning it is surrounded by a very large number of people holding paper cups of tea.
The rest of the year it is quiet, and worth an hour. There is a proper old lighthouse from 1908, a museum about lighthouses that is better than it sounds, and a coastline of low rock and small harbours running north and south.
Gyeongpo Beach
Gangneung's big, easy beach — white sand, a lake behind it and a KTX from Seoul.
Naksan Beach
Four kilometres of sand with a pine forest behind and a clifftop temple above.
Hajodae Beach
Turquoise water, very few people, and Korea's surf scene a few minutes up the road.