East coast · Sokcho, Gangwon
속초해수욕장
The town beach for Seoraksan — sand in the morning, mountains in the afternoon.
Sokcho's own beach runs along the edge of the town, which makes it the easiest to combine with something else: it is twenty minutes from the Seoraksan park gate.
The fish market and the little hand-pulled ferry across the harbour channel at Abai village are both a short walk away.
What else is here
Sokcho beach is a city beach — a wide arc of sand with the town immediately behind it — and the town is the reason to come. It is the base for Seoraksan, it has the best fish market on the coast, and it has a history that most Korean towns do not.
A settlement of northerners
A district on the sand spit across the harbour mouth, settled by refugees from what is now North Korea who came south in the Korean War and expected to go back. They never did. The food here is northern — <em>ojingeo sundae</em>, squid stuffed and sliced, and <em>abai sundae</em> — and it is not cooked this way anywhere else in the south.
Pulled across by hand
A flat steel barge that crosses the channel to Abai Village, moved by passengers hauling on a cable. It costs a few hundred won, takes two minutes, and has been running since the 1950s.
The best on this coast
Two floors of tanks, stalls and fried-chicken stands in the middle of town. Buy fish downstairs and have it prepared upstairs, or just eat the fried stuffed squid standing up.
Half an hour inland
Buses 7 and 7-1 run from the intercity terminal to the Seoraksan entrance in about thirty minutes. Most people who stay in Sokcho are here for the mountain, and use the beach as the reward afterwards.
A town of arrivals
Sokcho was part of North Korea between 1945 and 1951. When the line moved, a large number of people from further north — Hamgyong province in particular — ended up here, on the wrong side of a border they expected to be temporary. Abai Village grew out of that, on a sand spit nobody else wanted.
Three generations later the food is still northern, the dialect still carries it, and the village is the most interesting twenty minutes in town. Take the hand-pulled ferry across rather than walking round.
The beach is a good one — wide, long, clean, with the Expo tower at one end and Seoraksan visible inland on a clear day. But Sokcho is unusual in being a beach town where the beach is the third or fourth reason to come.
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.