Sunday, March 18, 2012

Namiseom-Nami Island

Namiseom or Nami Island is located in ChunCheon, South Korea. Previously it will take 2-3 hours to reach this place when you are coming from Seoul. Thus, our itinerary allotted 3 hours travel time from Seoul to Nami. BUT...

Upon reaching Yoo's home, our guesthouse in Seoul. The nice owner give us the direction which you cannot find anywhere on the internet nor on the subway map. Thus, we have debated whether to follow it or not but in the end we decided to follow her suggestion. However, things didn't go smoothly because the route is very new and only few koreans know about this. The owner did not give us the complete details so we asked around for help and we received different instructions, until finally one of the people we asked found the officer of ITX.

This is the newest(as of Mar2012) and fastest way in going to Nami from Seoul. Take the ITX express Korail which runs from Yongsan to Chuncheon.
1. First take subway which will take you to Yongsan or Cheongnyangni station.
2. Purchase the ticket from the ITX ticketing machine. Select Gapyeong station. Do note that T-card cannot be used in ITX as ticket(at least at this time). Upon receiving the ticket, check your cabin and seat number.
3. Go to the track which is going to Chuncheon and wait for the train which has Korail ITX design.
4. Keep your ticket for inspection. If the machine when you buy the tickets stated no available seats, you can only seat/stand outside the cabins where there are extra 6 seats and near to the exit door.
5. Station name is flashed on the screen. Alight at Gapyeong station. Take the taxi going to the port(KRW3000) and purchased the ferry and entrance ticket(KRW8000) to Nami Island.

Total travel time now is approximately 60minutes. However, ITX is more expensive than subway or other trains.

Now that we reached Nami, i will start to describe the place and our Nami experience. It was cold and windy that day(4 to -3 degrees celcius) but ferry going to Nami is always jampacked. Only few minutes from the port, you will be greeted by ice carvings on the left and flowers and some statues on front. Since it was cold, there are some fireplaces where you can warm yourself. I think Nami is famous for trees which are lined up that creates a beautiful view.

Since we are not good in using the map, we forget to get one so we don't know where to go until we heard that a tram is coming. We took it for KRW2000 and alight at the food stalls. Then we rented 1 couple bike and 1 family bike for 30min. Unexpectedly, we got separated with our 2 friends and unfortunately we went on opposite direction so even if we look for them and they look for us, we cannot find each other until our time elapsed.


After that we walked around and do lots of photoshoots, feed the squirrel we saw on one of the trees. Below are the photos we took in Nami and since we still have to visit some attractions in Seoul so we left the place at 2pm.

View Blog

On the boat going back to Gapyeong, we thought that we experienced 4 seasons in this place. Some parts have still remnants of winter snow, some leaves are still orange, some are green, there are flowers and beautiful lake. No regrets that we chose this place over the famous attractions in Seoul.

No comments:

Post a Comment