Seoul City Wall
The last great photographs we got were of Seoul City wall. We ended up at the wall after taking Yuki’s parents to the airport for their flight home. We were pretty tired but we’d napped on the train back into the city and decided we’d check the park out.
We started at the East Gate of the city. Like the Nandaemun gate, it is one of the 8 old gates and has been fully restored not too long ago. I was disappointed that we couldn’t go into it and because it’s surrounded by roads there’s not much else to do. Fortunately, the old city wall is just across the street.
The less exciting part was that the wall is on a ridge line and we began hiking up. We weren’t too enthusiastic but we managed to walk up on the outside of the wall noticing that the majority of the wall was actually recreated in the last few years.
As with the picture at the top, you can see that the top part of the wall is a white rock but there are sections of darker rock. The darker rock is older stuff, of which there are 3 or 4 different types. It’s not surprising that the wall has been restored so many times but like all the other palaces and temples we visited, it is quite obvious.
At the top of the ridge is a nice park. We spent time climbing up on the wall to get photos before a guy stepped out of a kiosk with a mini mega phone to shout us down. By then, we’d already gotten good photos so we moved on to places where he couldn’t see us.
This is a good viewpoint in Seoul because you can see how sprawling the city is but also how mountainous the country side is. Most great cities of the world are built near rivers on flat ground. I was surprised by how mountainous Korea is and by how many hills there are in Seoul. That’s not to say that they haven’t done a lot of land reclamation, but that’s more in Incheon than Seoul.
And that about it does it for Korea photos. :D
