Namsan Park

The day has warmed up nicely. The sky is mostly cloudless unlike yesterday with its occasional drizzle. I want to take advantage of the weather by going to the N Seoul Tower observatory.

The tower is in Namsan Park, which in itself has some elevation. Some people walk uphill to the park from lower Namsan, but owing to the heat I opt to take the cable car up and walk back down later.

Anyway it looks like half of Seoul have a similar idea. I'm in a queue for the ticket line. Fortunately there's shade and a place to rest my daypack, albeit a tad close to the electrified fence, as the queue moves from outside the building to inside. Then I pay 6000 won ($6.50) for the one way trip and walk upstairs to the boarding area, also known as queue number 2.

Eventually we all cram into a cable car. As I'm not one of the first to board I don't have any photo ops going up. We disembark, it has taken at least an hour from go to whoa. I walk over to the Tower Observatory ticket booth and see that it's another half hour wait to go up to the observatory. I'm all queued out for the time being, maybe another day.

So I walk around Namsan Park for a while, then go inside the shopping area for some refreshment. There's a cafe selling frappucinos and I'm lucky enough to find a seat nearby. First rest I've taken since walking to Gyeongbokgung Palace earlier this morning. I take my time enjoying the frappucino.

After half an hour or so I decide to walk back down. There are a number of people walking both up and down, I'm sort of envious of those walking up as they've avoided the queuing experience. On the downside, some of them look absolutely knackered.

There's a mother and young son walking down, the boy is counting the steps in English (as far as 10 anyway, after that he's back to 1). I compliment him on his English.

It's a fair way downhill to get back to the subway. There's more shopping around this area (both Hoehyeon and Myeongdong underground) than where I'm staying.Read more