Gochang - the Korean Countryside

I don’t know what I was expecting when I decided to visit Gochang, South Korea, but it certainly wasn’t what I was met with.

Not in a bad way! Not at all. I just found myself continually surprised over things I maybe shouldn’t have been surprised about.

Gochang is a VERY rural town near Gwangju. It’s about four hours from Seoul by Express Bus, which is the cheapest way to get there. Since it was a direct bus, it took about as much time as a KTX train would have taken, since no KTX would go directly to Nowhere. Instead, it would have dumped me off in Gwangju, and then I would have had to bus anyway. May as well save myself a transfer. 19,000 KRW later and I was on a comfy little bus down to Gochang.

What drew me was Tiktok, I cannot lie. I’d seen gorgeous pictures of the pink muhly grass fields, a characteristic of a Korean October, and all my research told me that there were sprawling fields in abundance down in Gochang. I wouldn’t have gone just for that, however, as there are smaller fields around Seoul that, while less spectacular, would have satisfied the itch for an Instagram-worthy picture (or maybe just to prove to my family that I actually DO enjoy nature, thanks very much). Gochang is also host to one of three UNESCO World Heritage Dolmen sites in South Korea, which would check off a UNESCO site for me, and also supply my history nerd with something to chew on.

Doing research, I decided these two things were reason enough to go. A four hour bus ride is fairly short compared to basically anything in America, and I figured that I would be going to a place nobody else would be going to. Somewhere unique, somewhere special. So I planned it all out - and then experienced a trip that went probably not even 50% to plan. An experience, one might call it, rather than a trip.

Day one - Saturday morning, 8am. I’d bought a bus ticket from the Express Bus Station in person a few days before, since the websites and apps are very confusing with no English options. I found my bus, took my seat, and pulled up Netflix for the long haul bus ride. We stopped in the middle for a bathroom and snack break, which was very nice. The rest station was huge; it was connected to a park, and had giant squirrel statues everywhere. By the time my bus pulled into the teeny tiny little station in Gochang at around 11:30, I was ready to get off my butt and explore.

Gochang is a small town. A few restaurants, a few bakeries, a few cafes, a few buildings. Nothing super special. In fact, it reminded me of a typical little town in the Midwest, where I’m from.

The first thing that stood out to me was how nice everyone was. I was probably one of the only non-Korean people in the area. Perhaps THE only non-Korean person, along with my travel buddy. We attracted stares - shocked, confused, intrigued. I bet they were wondering, why are you here???

I didn’t really know. It was a random, spur-of-the-moment decision. I was there to see grass and rocks.

While getting stared at, we encountered the first problem: there was little to no transportation. The buses came once every few hours, and they took fairly direct paths to a few different locations. There were maybe two taxis in the whole area, and they clearly run a very lucrative business, since the bus system wasn’t super. Most people out there had cars, I think. So I did what everybody else was doing and called a taxi to the first location: the Feelkkot pink muhly farm.

It took about twenty minutes to drive there. The driver was very nice, and was clearly used to people using his service to go to various pink muhly festivals, as all we had to say was “pink muhly” and he was already driving away.

We were dropped off in front of a large complex, spanning all the way up the side of a hill and down on the other side. It was gorgeous, expansive, and bright pink. It was an establishment that very obviously got a lot of tourism, as there were tents and food stands set up, hiking paths all illuminated with fairy lights and lanterns, and even a giant disco ball in the nearest muhly field.

It wasn’t all pink muhly, however. There were fields of different flowers, and fields of silvergrass, and fields of lavender, and fields of wildflowers, and more fields of just about every pretty thing you can imagine. We took a lot of pictures and enjoyed a lot of nature. There isn’t much more to say about that.

The first thing that surprised me was that there weren’t a lot of people there to see the flowers or the grasses. It was almost exclusively a couples area - there were dating couples who were looking at each other instead of the gorgeous nature around them, and couples swinging their toddler between them, and older couples who were commenting on how sweet - or not - the desserts were, and a large amount of couples who were doing maternity photoshoots amidst the pink. To say my buddy and I felt a little out of place was saying the least, as we both still had our giant travel backpacks on, were obviously not a couple, and also are not Korean At All. The kids loved us, though. Really couldn’t get enough of how un-Korean we are.

I suppose I should have seen this coming, as it is a fairly shallow place to be - it’s just a field with some pretty plants. It wasn’t like a country-changing battle had been fought there or anything. But still - nobody was alone, and nobody was a simple tourist. It occurs to me that this type of thing is known in the region for being a good set for various types of picture-taking and romance-enhancing.

And then! We couldn’t leave.

The place closed at five, so we headed out the gates and sat at a nearby bench to call a taxi, since the next bus was three hours out. Except there were no taxis, no matter how hard we tried. I even tried three different taxi apps. No luck.

So we figured walking to the nearest bus station to wait for the bus was our best bet, and if we managed to snag a taxi, then we could give it a clearer pickup location. Great idea in theory, but the nearest bus station was about a mile away, and there were no trails or anything. So we packed up and just walked on the road, past fields of crops and forest and a river and even a little village. While walking, night fell, so wholly and completely that it was hard to see even each other. The bus ended up missing us, instead of us missing the bus - it was likely so used to not seeing people to pick up that it went straight past us, not even slowing down. Yikes.

By 8:30 pm, three and a half hours after we left the farm, we finally secured a taxi. It happened to be the same taxi driver that had driven us to the farm in the first place. He took us to our hotel forty minutes away - the only available hotel in the area - and wished us a good night.

The hotel was nice! It had a huge shower, a giant TV, and a wonderful full Korean-style breakfast. We packed up the next morning early and headed out to the second farm - Gochang Blue Farm. We called a taxi - the same guy from the day before. We were well-acquainted at that point, even though he didn’t speak English and my Korean is rudimentary.

This farm was way off the beaten track. Out of the mountains and far into the agricultural countryside, we were taking dirt roads and little twisty tracks to get to our location. Our lovely driver was intensely confused and even had to back out of a few fake roads (???). As I looked out the window, I was trying to relate what the countryside looked like - in my head, it looked like a funky mix of rural Austria and Ohio. Wild, I know, but it was like if Ohio had really nice sloping mountains/hills, and if the little Austrian house settlements were all stylistically Korean. It was truly beautiful, and made the car smell like cow manure. Or whatever type of manure was out there.

The second farm was equally as nice as the first one. Built into a nature reserve, it had miles and miles of hiking trails behind it, and even some rentable cabins if one desires to get away from the farm and enjoy nature. Ha ha. I liked it just as much as the first farm, even though it had different features and a different layout.

Lord of the Rings music continuously played through hidden speakers, so I felt like I was in Rivendell, or the Shire or whatever. The huge muhly field was on a slope, so if you angled yourself right, you could only see pink and the sky. There was a maze of wildflowers and an extensive herb garden, which smelled positively delightful. There were tons of picture stations with mirrors, swings, benches, and what-have-you.

The farm even had a homemade wine cafe, where lots of couples were enjoying themselves. Thoroughly. I had too many plants to see to bother with that, though, so we kept moving. There were less people at this farm, probably due to its … interesting … location, so my friend and I messed around in the grass taking both beautiful and exceedingly stupid pictures. We were enjoying our main character moment, that’s for sure.

But then we had to get to our second location of the day, which was the Dolmen park. That meant starting the dreaded hassle of finding transportation - a task that was quite daunting at that point. The nearest bus stop was about three miles away; we really didn’t want to walk that, but since no taxis were available to be called to the farm, we had no choice.

This was probably the most interesting part of the trip, to be honest - we ended up walking through this super rural town, so rural that it isn’t even a town, rather just a few houses on the side of a big-ish road that connected to fields. We walked down dirt paths, past guard dogs that seemed to think we were a major threat, rows and rows of persimmon trees, and very old ladies picking weeds and berries or whatever from nearby plants. We even walked in between fields, trying to figure out what crop this or that was. There were large piles of abandoned peppers in ditches on the sides of roads, and little planks that took us across streams. We had to dodge falling persimmons and the occasional truck that came trundling down whatever road we were on. Without fail, every single truck stopped dead, the drivers’ heads sticking out of the window to stare at the two very short White girls with giant backpacks walking down random roads in the middle of Nowhere, Korea. They all laughed, and I absolutely cannot blame them. We must have been somewhat of a jumpscare.

But eventually we came to the bus stop, which was just a bench, and a taxi was able to pick us up at the bus location. It was the SAME TAXI DRIVER. He couldn’t stop laughing either, and yet again, I couldn’t blame him.

He delivered us thirty minutes later safe and sound to the Dolmen park; we assured him that it was the last time we’d be seeing him. I wasn’t sure if he believed us or not, but he drove away still chuckling, so at least we made his day a little sillier.

The Dolmen park was huge. There was a little tourist village built up there, with some cafes and clothes shops and the like. The museum was very nice - we walked in, and must have looked beat, because the ladies at the front desk let us leave our giant backpacks with them while we walked around.

The museum was intensely interesting - there were village recreations of the appropriate Dolmen-making village time period, thorough definitions of what Dolmens are, why these are unique, etc. Outside, there was a larger and more interactive village - you could go into the little stick huts and see which one you liked the best, the square one or the round one. Then there were the Dolmens themselves - truly impressive giant rock tables that signified graves or star markings or whatever else. The air smelled fantastically clean, as it was a huge mountain national park, and somehow tasted like persimmons.

We wandered around the area for a long time, testing our nature photography skills and reading up on all the different types of Dolmens. There were more tourists this time; a large group of British people were getting bussed all around the area, talking about how these Dolmens compared to their Dolmens - of which their most prominent cluster is the universally-known Stonehenge.

There was plenty of wildlife and plenty more wildflowers. I felt very at peace with nature for the brief time we were there, and then I went back to being annoyed at the lack of signal and the intense presence of ginormous, radioactive mosquitos.

Our return bus was at 7pm, so we had to start making our way back. We picked up our bags from the ladies with a lot of thank yous and grateful bowing, and then headed off to the bus station. This bus station was impossible to get to, because the route to get to it was across some highways and a river without regard to the poor walker. So we ended up sneaking through the backyard of the Dolmen conservation facility, climbing up the rock wall they had around back to prevent people from getting in (us), running across a highway and apologizing to cars, finding a bridge to get over the river, and then finally trying to figure out which dilapidated old bench was our bus station. We only had to wait about forty minutes for the next bus, which was incredibly short compared to the other bus wait times we’d experienced.

We hauled our poor battered bodies into the nearest bakery, bought out the rest of the place for snacks, and got on the bus back to Seoul with a surplus of wacky memories and experiences that even my Korean friends don’t have, because they’ve never been to Gochang - why would they? I learned that the countryside looks like Ohio, that the pink muhly grass tastes gross (I tripped face-first into it), and that the people in rural Korea are very friendly.

Definitely worth it.