A Different Path: Ten Days in South Korea for the Inner Journey

Ten days through the places South Korea built for stepping back

Korea is known for speed. It also has a long habit of withdrawing from it, and it built places for that purpose: a king’s garden behind a palace, a village of scholars in a bend of a river, a monastery high on a mountain, a hillside of Buddhas cut into the rock.

This route visits one of each, slowly, and sleeps a night inside the monastery.

Ten days · nine nights · four bases · train and bus, no car · Seoul to Gyeongju.

It is for a traveller who wants quiet more than coverage: someone curious about how another culture has thought about attention, patience and solitude, and willing to spend time in places made for them. You do not need to be Buddhist, or religious at all. If you want Busan, Jeju, nightlife or the country’s fast side, our South Korea itinerary is the better route. If you want the capital itself, see Seoul in five days.

We promise no result. Each day below says what a place was made for, why people have kept coming to it, and what a visitor may take from it. What you make of it is yours.

How this page was madeWe have not yet been to South Korea. With Japan, it is one of the two places at the top of our list, and this route is researched rather than travelled: from UNESCO’s listings, the national tourism site, the official Templestay site, Korean newspapers, our own guides to Hahoe, Namsan and Gyeongju, and the third-party transport pages named in the text. No journey time here is one we measured. Where sources disagree or fall silent, we say so. When we go, we will say so here.

Last updated 5 October 2026

The itinerary, day by day

Ten days. Open one, or open them all. Each opens with what people go there for and what they say they find, then where to sleep and eat. The practical detail for the whole route follows below.

Day 1Seoul — arriving, and a sanctuary in the cityairport transfer only

The painted main hall of Jogyesa temple in Seoul, with an old white-barked pine growing in front of it — Jogyesa’s main hall, with office blocks behind. Notice how small the courtyard is, and how the old pine is given room.

You will arrive with the journey still in you: the flight, the airport, the noise of a very large city. So the first thing this route gives you is a place to put all that down.

Jogyesa is a sanctuary in the middle of Seoul. Step through its gate from a street of office towers and the city falls away behind you. Visitors call it an oasis, and say the same things again and again: the chanting, the lanterns overhead, local people quietly at prayer, and a calm they did not expect to find in the middle of a capital. The quiet of the place is meant to work on you. It is kept so that the quiet outside can become a quiet inside.

Do what the people of Seoul do here. Take a place at the back of the hall and watch them arrive from work, bow and leave. They are pausing after the chaos of their day, and you are pausing after the chaos of your journey. You may notice how much stillness a noisy city can hold when a place is kept for it, and how quickly your own breathing slows to match.

It is the head temple of the Jogye Order, the centre of Korean Buddhism, open day and night, and nobody is charged to enter.

Sleeping here. Choose Bukchon, a quarter of old tiled houses within a walk of the temple and of tomorrow’s garden: a hanok guesthouse, or a small hotel in neighbouring Insadong. Hanok rooms are small, and many have bedding on the floor.

Travel: Airport railway or bus into the city, then the metro
Stay: Bukchon, in a hanok — where to stay in Seoul
Eat: Insadong, a short walk south — where to eat in Seoul
See: Bukchon Hanok Village, on the way

Jogyesa temple: the main hall and its courtyard trees
Check: Book nothing timed today. A late flight costs you only the walk

Day 2Seoul — a garden for slow walking, and a room for thoughtno travel beyond the metro

A lotus pond edged in cut stone, with a two-storey pavilion on a wooded slope behind it — A pond and pavilion in the Secret Garden. Notice how the building is set back among the trees, above the water and not beside it.

The Secret Garden is where to learn to walk slowly. Behind Changdeokgung palace, paths wind through wooded valleys past ponds and small pavilions, and visitors describe it in the same words: peaceful, serene, a relief from the city outside the wall. One writer who knows it well says a slow stroll is the only way to take in its mood, and that it is a different garden in every season. The kings kept this ground for stepping away from the court, and it still does that work. Nothing here was levelled: the paths go where the hill lets them, and more than seventy of the trees are over three hundred years old.

The Room of Quiet Contemplation was made for one purpose, and the museum states it at the door: “Time to lose yourself deep in wandering thought.” You walk in along a dim, gently sloping passage. The ceiling is scattered with points of light like a sparse night sky, and the walls of red earth carry a faint scent of cinnamon and cypress. Everything has been designed to make a thoughtful, calming and serene space.

At the end sit two bodhisattvas of the sixth and seventh centuries, each with one leg crossed and a finger raised to the cheek. They are cast deep in thought, and they invite you to do the same. There are no labels to read. The curator calls it time to focus and think for yourself, and more than 660,000 people took that time in the room’s first year. Stay longer than feels natural. It is quietest early in the morning.

Gilsangsa, if you have the afternoon, is a temple for setting burdens down. It was one of Seoul’s most expensive restaurants until its owner, moved by a monk’s book on owning nothing, gave the whole of it to him. Her wish, visitors are told, was for a place where people could forget the pains of life. One guest describes sitting there among seventy strangers in complete silence. It is a place to think about what you could let go.

Travel: Metro to the National Museum of Korea and back
Stay: Bukchon — second of two nights
Eat: Near the museum at lunch; Bukchon or Insadong in the evening
See: The Secret Garden, at your booked time

The Room of Quiet Contemplation, National Museum of Korea

Gilsangsa temple, in the northern hills
Check: The garden ticket is timed. Check the museum’s hours and closing day

Day 3Seoul to Hahoe — the village where time slowsabout 3 to 4 hours

Hahoe village seen from above: tiled and thatched roofs among trees, wrapped on three sides by a broad river — Hahoe from the cliff across the river. Follow the line of the water: it holds the village on three sides.

Hahoe is where time slows down. People come to this village, and above all stay the night in it, for something cities no longer give: real dark, real quiet, and the feeling of a place where families have lived in the same houses for six hundred years and still do.

Guests who sleep here describe the same evening. The day visitors leave and the lanes are almost your own. There is no traffic, no neon and no hum of machines, and the stars come out as they cannot in a city. You sleep on a warm floor and wake to soft light through paper windows. One guest called it the aesthetics of slowness. Others speak of a rare sense of continuity: a living, working community, not a show, where the same clan keeps the same rites its ancestors kept.

There is more to seek out. From Buyongdae, the cliff across the river, the whole village lies below you in its loop of water, and you see why its founders chose the spot. On some days the village performs its mask dance, a satire of the powerful that has been danced here for centuries. And the layout itself rewards slow looking: UNESCO lists Hahoe because the placing of every house, study hall and pavilion expresses a Confucian idea of how people should live together and with the land.

Sleeping here. Stay inside the village, not in Andong city: a room in one of the old houses or a family guesthouse. We could not establish whether dinner can be had near the village in the evening, so ask your host about meals when you book.

Travel: KTX-Eum from Cheongnyangni to Andong, about 2 hours; then bus 210 or a taxi
Stay: Hahoe, in a hanok — where to stay in Andong
Eat: Lunch in Andong; ask your host about dinner — where to eat in Andong
See: Hahoe Folk Village: the lanes, the river bank and the pine wood
Check: Last bus 210 from Andong is reported at 6.20 pm. Arrange dinner ahead

Day 4Hahoe — an academy built to look at a river4 km each way

Byeongsan Seowon is a place to sit still and look, and to feel smaller in a good way. Visitors speak of its deep quiet and of having it almost to themselves. A Korean reporter who stayed wrote that its pillars “frame breathtaking views”, and that the setting teaches humility and modesty.

It was built for exactly that. This is a Confucian academy of the sixteenth century, and the scholars who studied here took the landscape to be part of the teaching. Its long open pavilion, Mandaeru, has a roof and pillars and no walls. A Korean professor of architecture says it makes room for the river, the mountains, the wind and the light, and that the building is incomplete without the Nakdong flowing past it.

The pavilion itself is normally closed, so sit on the step of the lecture hall and look out through it at the cliff across the water. Give it an hour. What you may take away is a question: what would you place in front of your own desk, if you chose it as carefully as this?

Travel: To Byeongsan and back: bus 210 on some runs, a taxi, or the riverside path
Stay: Hahoe — second of two nights
Eat: By the ticket office at lunch; dinner as arranged with your host
See: Byeongsan Seowon, in our Hahoe guide

Optional, by taxi: Dosan Seowon, a separate half-day north of Andong
Check: Only about three buses reach Byeongsan; the last back is reported at 3.30 pm

Day 5Hahoe to Haeinsa — a night inside the monastery2 hours by taxi, or 6 by bus and train

Long, low wooden halls with slatted windows around a bare earth courtyard, two visitors walking between them — The halls that hold the woodblocks, built in the fifteenth century. Look at the slatted windows, sized to keep air moving over the wood.

A night at Haeinsa is the heart of this route. People come to a temple stay for rest and for a clear head, and most say they find it. In a 2023 survey reported by the Korea Herald, about seven in ten foreign guests said a temple stay had eased their anxiety and their stress, and they put it down first to the stillness of the mountain setting.

Guests at Haeinsa describe the hours in detail. The wooden drum rolling across the courtyard in the dark. The dawn service by candlelight, with incense and many voices chanting, which one called profoundly atmospheric. The 108 bows, hard for the first thirty and then, as another wrote, carrying you along until they are done. A silent meal that turned out to be the most moving part of the day. No signal on the phone, and gladness at that. Mist in the valley and forest all round.

And there are the woodblocks. In the thirteenth century, under invasion, the kingdom had the whole Buddhist canon cut into more than eighty thousand wooden blocks, and they are still here, in the plain slatted halls built for them. A Korean journalist found something unexpectedly moving in standing so close to them. This is the route’s one long day of travel, and this is why it is worth it.

Getting there. By bus, train, metro and bus the journey takes about six hours. A taxi straight from the village takes about two. A route-planning site estimates the fare from Andong at 90 to 110 US dollars, and Hahoe is some 25 kilometres further out, so expect a little more. Shared between two or more people, that is a modest price for half a day given back, and it makes the early-afternoon check-in safe. Ask your host to book the taxi, and agree the fare before you set off.

Sleeping here. You sleep in the temple, on the overnight programme booked through the Templestay site. Expect bedding on a heated floor and a start before four. The temple feeds you.

Travel: A shared taxi direct, about 2 hours; or bus, train, metro and bus, about 6
Stay: Haeinsa, in the temple — a temple stay in Korea
Eat: Lunch in Daegu between train and bus; supper at the temple, vegetarian
See: The woodblock halls; one guide says the blocks are seen through the slats

The evening bell, and an early night
Check: Check-in is early afternoon. Buses from Daegu are reported until 8 pm

Day 6Haeinsa to Gyeongju — an evening among the tombs of kingsallow 4 hours

A street of low tiled-roof buildings at dusk, with lit shop fronts and people walking — Hwangnidan-gil at dusk. After a night in the monastery, notice how an ordinary street strikes you.

Before you leave Haeinsa, walk up once more to the halls of the woodblocks. They have kept the blocks sound for centuries with nothing but slatted windows and moving air. It is worth a quiet half hour.

The tomb park at Gyeongju is for wandering, and for a sense of time. Great grass mounds, the graves of the Silla kings, rise straight out of a park in the middle of town. Visitors call the walk surreal and tranquil at once, a place to stroll for an hour or simply to sit and think. One writer saw the mounds in morning mist as a herd of giant sleeping animals. Another advises the last hour of light, when they throw long shadows across the grass.

After a night in the monastery it is a gentle way back into the world. What you may gain is proportion: an ordinary evening, among people buried fifteen hundred years ago, in a city that wears a thousand years of history lightly.

Sleeping here. Take the old centre, near Hwangnidan-gil and the tomb park, for all four nights: a hanok room, or a small hotel if you want a bed after the temple floor. The old centre has few rooms and fills first in April and October.

Travel: Bus to Daegu, or a taxi in about an hour; metro; train to Gyeongju
Stay: The old centre, in a hanok — where to stay in Gyeongju
Eat: Hwangnidan-gil, by the tombs — where to eat in Gyeongju
See: Gyeongju: the Daereungwon tomb park at dusk
Check: Four hours is our allowance; we did not confirm the train time

Day 7Gyeongju — Namsan, finding Buddhas in the rock6.2 km on foot, about 3 hours

A wood of tall, leaning red pines with light falling between the trunks — The pine wood at Samneung, where the path begins. The trunks lean every way; give your eyes a minute to settle before you start to climb.

Namsan is a pilgrimage you make on foot, and the reward is discovery. The people of Silla held this mountain to be a place where the Buddhas lived, and over centuries they carved them into its granite and left them in the open. Korea’s park service calls it a museum without walls. Walkers call it a treasure hunt: you climb, you turn a corner, and there is a face in the rock.

It begins beautifully. The path sets out through the pine wood at Samneung, whose twisting trunks in morning mist have been photographed by one of Korea’s best-known artists, and whose scent, one guide says, is worth the climb on its own. Then come the carved and seated figures, one after another, up the valley.

What the day may give you is the oldest form of this whole journey: effort, then a presence in the stone, then silence. Stop often. The stopping is the point.

Travel: Bus or taxi to the Samneung trailhead, south of the centre
Stay: The old centre — second of four nights
Eat: Take food and water; there is little on the mountain. Ssambap in town after
See: Gyeongju Namsan: the Samneung valley path

The easier version: the pine wood, the tombs and the first carvings at the foot
Check: Rough and rocky. Not for anyone unsteady on uneven ground, or after heavy rain

Day 8Gyeongju — a day with nothing in itno travel

Leave this day empty on purpose. Those who write about slow travel say the same thing: the quiet days are the ones remembered, because only when you slow down do you have room to notice. After a week in other people’s places for reflection, this is a day for your own. Sleep late. Sit by the pond at Wolji or among the tombs.

If you want one thing, choose one. The great bell at Gyeongju National Museum is something you go to hear. Cast in 771, it is famous for a deep sound that lingers and seems to pulse as it fades. It is no longer struck, but the museum plays a recording three times an hour.

Or go to Seokguram and Bulguksa for serenity. In a grotto high on the mountain sits a granite Buddha with a calm, all-knowing face, placed so that the rising sun over the East Sea would light it. Even a visitor who was frustrated by the queue wrote of an undeniable stillness inside. Many say the best of it is the walk down through the pines to Bulguksa, whose stone terraces were built as the Buddha’s land brought to earth. Go early, and expect a glass screen in front of the Buddha.

Travel: None needed. Bulguksa is a bus or taxi ride, about 12 km south-east
Stay: The old centre — third of four nights
Eat: A market breakfast, and a long lunch on Ssambap Street
See: The great bronze bell at Gyeongju National Museum

Or Bulguksa temple, with the Seokguram grotto above it

Or nothing

Day 9Gyeongju — Tongdosa, the temple with no statueday return by train

A stone pagoda among flower beds in a temple courtyard, with tiled halls and pine-covered hills behind — A courtyard at Tongdosa. Notice the scale: low halls, a small pagoda, and the pines on the hill above them all.

Tongdosa offers space and calm on a grand scale, and one idea that stays with people. You reach it along a path through old pines, with forest on one side and a stream on the other. Visitors call that walk the overture to the whole experience, and one of the most meditative stretches of road in the country. Do not hurry it.

Then the idea. Tongdosa holds relics of the Buddha, brought here, it is said, by its founder in 646, and so its main hall has no statue. There is a cushion, a window, and beyond the window the stone altar where the relics lie. Visitors say that once you understand this, it changes everything you see. After a week of images, here is a place built around something you cannot look at.

Even in rain, one visitor wrote, it conveyed peace and calm. Stand in the hall and look where everyone else is looking. Then walk on: the temple has more than a dozen hermitages in the hills behind it.

Travel: KTX from Gyeongju one stop to Ulsan; taxi, about 15 minutes, or a bus
Stay: The old centre — last of four nights
Eat: Take lunch, or eat in the village at the temple gate. Dinner in Gyeongju
See: Tongdosa: the main hall and the relic altar behind it

The hermitage paths behind, if you find them open
Check: Entry is free or 3,000 won; sources differ. Check the train back

Day 10Gyeongju — leavingdeparture

Leave without hurrying. Seoul is about two hours north by fast train and Busan a little over half an hour south, and either has flights home.

You have been in a sanctuary in a city, a garden, a village, an academy, two monasteries and on a mountain, each made by people who believed that attention could be practised and that a place could help. Before the train, it may be worth deciding which one of them you would go back to, and why.

Travel: Bus or taxi to Gyeongju Station; KTX to Seoul or Busan
Eat: Breakfast in town; buy red-bean bread for the train
See: One last walk past the tombs
Check: The station is about 8 km out and the bus is infrequent. Take a taxi

Before dawn at Haeinsa: the quietest point

This belongs to the night of day five, in the temple. Gayasan, the mountain Haeinsa stands on, had a famous guest long before the monastery took paying ones. Choe Chiwon, born in 857, was the most celebrated Korean writer of his age, a prodigy who made his name at the Chinese court and came home to a kingdom in decline.

Around the year 900 he gave up public life. The twelfth-century Samguk sagi says he “took up the free life of a mountain sage”, and that he settled in the end at Haeinsa, where his elder brother was abbot. Nobody recorded his death. The legend is that his straw sandals were found at the edge of the forest on Gayasan, and that he had walked out of the world.

He stands for the oldest tradition on this route, the scholar who withdraws. You will be on his mountain at the hour described here.

Pause and notice

It is twenty to four in the morning at Haeinsa, and fully dark. A drum has sounded somewhere above you, and then a bell. Get up, dress, and walk to the hall with the others; few will speak. Notice the cold on your face and hands, and the sound of your own steps. Inside, sit down on the floor. The chanting starts low, many voices on one line, in words you do not need to follow. Let it pass through you. A little way up the slope, in the dark, stand the halls of the wooden blocks: more than eighty thousand of them, each cut by hand nearly eight centuries ago, and kept ever since in moving air. People gave their working lives to that. Others have risen on this mountain at this hour, for centuries, to keep it. You are inside something that was going on long before you came and will go on when you have left. What, in your own life, would you get up in the dark for? When the chanting stops, stay where you are a little longer. Listen to how quiet a mountain is before the birds begin.

The route at a glance

Four places to sleep, and what each stay is for. Tap a base to open its first day above.

The four bases, in route order
Base	Nights	The leg in	What these nights are for	Pressure
Seoul	2	Arrival, then rail or bus into the city	Slowing down inside the city before you leave it	A timed garden entry, booked ahead
Hahoe village	2	Train about 2 hours, then a bus of about 50 minutes or a taxi	The Confucian idea of retreat, and a village after dark	Few buses; ask your host about dinner
Haeinsa	1	A shared taxi, about 2 hours; or bus, train, metro and bus, about 6	The quietest point: one night inside a working monastery	A long transfer, a single night and a start before 4 am
Gyeongju	4	Bus to Daegu, then a train	Walking and looking, with room for a day with nothing in it	Low: four nights in one bed, and every outing is a day out

The shape of the route

Korea has more than one tradition of stepping back, and each left buildings behind. Kings and scholars made gardens for it. Confucian families built villages and academies where study was a discipline of the whole person. Buddhist monks built monasteries in the mountains, and some still take guests.

The route visits one of each in an order that moves from the city to the quietest point and out again: a garden in Seoul, the scholars’ village at Hahoe, the monastery at Haeinsa, then Gyeongju, where the walking is the practice. Four bases, nine nights, one line south-east across the country. Seoul is in the north-west. Hahoe lies about 180 kilometres to its south-east, Haeinsa about 90 kilometres south-west of Hahoe, and Gyeongju about 100 kilometres east of Haeinsa. Tongdosa is a day visit about 40 kilometres south of Gyeongju. These are straight lines; the journeys are longer.

Route map of South Korea: a line from Seoul in the north-west, south-east to Hahoe village, south-west to Haeinsa, then east to Gyeongju, with a dotted day trip south from Gyeongju to Tongdosa. Nights: Seoul 2, Hahoe 2, Haeinsa 1, Gyeongju 4. — The route: four places to sleep, nine nights, and a day visit to Tongdosa. The lines are simplified; the journeys follow railways and roads.

Before you commit

Three things decide whether this route suits you. The hardest move is day five, from Hahoe village to Haeinsa temple: two buses, a train and a metro ride, and most of a day, unless you share a taxi. The booking that fixes everything else is the temple night. And the route leaves out the south coast, Busan included.

Book the temple night first

Everything else moves around it. Haeinsa takes guests through the official Templestay site, with one programme at weekends and another on weekdays, so the night works whichever day you arrive. The site gave 100,000 to 130,000 won a person at weekends when we read it.

Check-in is in the early afternoon: the official page said 1.30 pm, and one recent guide says between two and three.

Know what you are booking. You sleep on a heated floor in a simple room, and one guide reports shared bathrooms. Meals are vegetarian, with no alcohol. The day ends at about nine and starts again before four. Our guide to a temple stay in Korea explains the etiquette. Whether the programme is led in English we could not confirm from the temple; one guide reports English-speaking staff.

Then the Secret Garden

The garden behind Changdeokgung palace is entered at a set time, on a ticket sold online from six days ahead. Book it for the morning of day two as soon as the window opens. Our guide to Changdeokgung and the Secret Garden has the booking steps.

The village has few buses

Hahoe is served by the 210 bus, and sources disagree on how often it runs: nine times a day in one, thirteen in another. Budget for a taxi on at least one leg. Andong’s tourist taxi was listed at 125,000 won for up to five hours.

A taxi on day five is worth pricing

A taxi from Hahoe straight to Haeinsa turns six hours and four changes into about two hours. A route-planning site estimates 90 to 110 US dollars from Andong; from the village it will be a little more. We found no quoted fare, so treat that as a guide. For two or more people sharing, it is the change we would make first. From Daegu alone, the same site puts a taxi to Haeinsa at 45 to 55 dollars and just under an hour, against a bus of about 6,500 won.

What the route asks of your body

Most of it is gentle. Three things are not, and each has an easier version, given on its day or under Make it yours: the start before four at the temple; sitting on the floor; and the walk on Namsan, about 6.2 kilometres and three hours on rough, rocky ground.

Where our guides stop

Every base links to our advice on where to sleep and eat, with two differences. Hahoe is covered by sections of our Andong guide, not pages of its own. Haeinsa has neither, because the temple provides your bed and your meals.

Make it yours

Slower: add a withdrawal of two nights

If you want to go further in, add two nights between Seoul and Hahoe. There are two choices and they are different things. Musangsa, near Daejeon, is a Zen centre that teaches in English: sitting, chanting, bowing and a work period.

It listed a one-day retreat at 50,000 won and a weekend at 150,000. It is a fast train of about 1 hour 20 minutes from Seoul to Gyeryong, then a taxi.

Healience Seonmaeul, in the hills at Hongcheon, is rest, not practice: a wellness village whose own site calls it a digital detox zone, with no mobile signal and no television. We could not confirm that its programmes run in English. The trade-off either way is two more nights. We have not worked out a route from either place straight to Hahoe, so plan to return through Seoul.

Shorter: leave out Hahoe

With eight days, go straight from Seoul to Daegu by fast train on day three, which one timetable site puts at 1 hour 35 minutes to 2 hours, and on to Haeinsa by bus. You lose the Confucian leg and the village night, and the route becomes a Buddhist one. The hard transfer disappears with them.

A second temple night, on a weekday

Tongdosa takes overnight guests from Monday to Friday, with three days’ notice, through the same Templestay site. If day nine falls on a weekday you can sleep there in place of your last night in Gyeongju. You leave the next morning from Ulsan station, where you arrived, and you give up the unhurried last evening.

Easier on the body

If uneven ground is not for you, keep day seven to the pine wood, the tombs and the first carvings at the foot of Namsan, then spend the afternoon in Gyeongju National Museum. If floor sleeping or the early start rules out the temple night, sleep in Daegu and visit Haeinsa by day. You will still see the halls. You will not hear the dawn.

If the route slips

Two bookings are fixed: the garden ticket on day two and the temple night on day five. Protect the temple night. The four nights in Gyeongju are the slack, and that is where to take time back.

If you are running late on day five, contact the temple through your Templestay booking before the check-in time. If you cannot reach Haeinsa by evening, sleep in Daegu, take the morning bus up, see the halls by day and carry on to Gyeongju that afternoon.

If you lose a day anywhere, drop the visit to Tongdosa first: nothing after it depends on it. Drop the empty day last. It is doing more work than it looks. If a missed day moves the temple night, change the booking on the Templestay site before anything else, then the beds after it.

If the weather turns, Namsan is the day to move: a rough, rocky path is no place to be in heavy rain. Swap it with the empty day. Train times and tickets are on Korail’s site.

A final word on this route

Book the temple night, then the garden, then the beds. Travel light, start the long day early, and leave the empty day empty. These places were built by people who thought attention could be practised. Ten days is long enough to try.

Andrew + Margaret

South Korea Overview
South Korea itinerary: the classic route Journeys
A temple stay in Korea Culture
Korean sacred places Culture
Getting around South Korea Practical
Best time to visit South Korea Decide

Useful elsewhere

Templestay: booking for Haeinsa and Tongdosa Booking
Korail: train times and tickets Booking
UNESCO: Haeinsa and the Tripitaka Koreana woodblocks Official
UNESCO: Seowon, the Confucian academies Official
Samguk Sagi, by Kim Busik: the twelfth-century history that records Choe Chiwon’s withdrawal Reading