East coast · Gangneung, Gangwon
정동진해변
The railway station sits on the sand — and people ride the night train out for the sunrise.
Jeongdongjin station is built so close to the water that the platform is essentially on the beach, which is why the overnight trains from Seoul have been a New Year tradition for decades: you arrive in the dark and watch the sun come out of the sea.
The beach itself is a short curve of clean sand. The town above it has grown around the view, including a cruise-ship-shaped hotel perched on the cliff.
What else is here
Jeongdongjin is a strange and rather wonderful place: a tiny beach with a railway station almost on the sand, a cruise ship marooned on the clifftop above it, and a national reputation for watching the sun come up.
The closest station to the sea
The Guinness record holder: the tracks run about fifty metres from the water, with the platform and the beach separated by a fence and nothing else. Trains on the Yeongdong line still stop here, and the station is the reason the place exists as a destination at all.
A ship on a clifftop
A hotel built in the shape of a 165-metre cruise liner, sitting on the cliff a couple of hundred metres above the sea. It opened in 2002 and is exactly as odd in person as it sounds. You can walk up to the sculpture park around it without staying there.
Why people come at 5am
Jeongdongjin means 'due east of the capital' — the point on the coast directly east of Seoul's Gyeongbokgung. New Year's Day here is a national event, with trains running through the night to get people onto the sand before dawn.
Along the coast on the old line
Four-seat pedal carts running on a disused section of coastal track between Jeongdongjin and Gungchon. Flat, slow and popular with families; book ahead in summer.
1995
Until the mid-1990s Jeongdongjin was a halt on a coal line with a handful of houses. Then a television drama, <em>Sandglass</em>, shot a scene at the station in 1995 — a single pine tree on the beach, a woman waiting for a train — and the country arrived.
The tree is still there and signposted. So is the station, which is now on the tourist map largely because of where it is: the Guinness Book lists it as the railway station closest to the sea anywhere, with the rails about fifty metres from the water.
The beach is small and, frankly, not the best on this coast. Come for the sunrise, the peculiar sight of a cruise liner on a clifftop, and the novelty of stepping off a train directly onto sand. Arrive the night before if you want the dawn, because the first trains do not get you here in time.
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.