Ten days in South Korea: one train line from the palaces to the sea

The airport train puts you at Seoul Station and everything below is a walk from it, which is the whole point of the first day. Do not plan more.

Namdaemun is the place to start. The great south gate of the old city stood for six centuries, burned down in an arson attack in 2008, and was rebuilt with traditional joinery and reopened in 2013. The market lanes behind it are the oldest in the city and a good first dinner is somewhere in them.

The palace day. Gyeongbokgung was the first and grandest of the Joseon palaces, razed by a Japanese invasion in 1592, rebuilt, and gutted again under colonial rule after 1910. The guard changes at the main gate at 10:00 and 14:00 and takes twenty minutes.

From there walk east through Bukchon, where the officials who served the palaces lived, and where some nine hundred tiled hanok houses survive on the slope. People still live in them: keep to the lanes and keep the noise down.

Finish at Changdeokgung, the better preserved of the two palaces, whose walled Huwon garden can only be seen on a timed tour. English departures are at 10:30 and 14:30, they sell out, and the afternoon one fits this day.

Two of the country's great collections sit a kilometre and a half apart in Yongsan, and both are free. The National Museum is the one to spend real time in: Silla gold, celadon, and a seventh-century gilt-bronze Bodhisattva that is worth the trip on its own.

The war memorial down the road covers Korean military history from the ancient kingdoms onward, with a whole floor on the Korean War and the UN forces. It is the necessary background for everything else you will see in this country, and the aircraft outside are free to walk among.

End on the hill in the middle of the city. Go up an hour before sunset, watch the city switch itself on underneath you, and come down for dinner.

A harder day, and the one people remember. Seodaemun Prison was built in 1908 and used by the Japanese colonial authorities to hold, torture and execute independence activists. The cells and the execution building are preserved as they were and nothing is softened.

Directly behind it the ground rises into Inwangsan, 336 metres of granite with a Buddhist temple on the lower slope, Seoul's best-known shamanist shrine above it and the old fortress wall running along the top. Rituals are performed up here. Watch from a distance and do not photograph them.

Come down the eastern side into Seochon for a late lunch, then walk five minutes to the Blue House, the residence Korean presidents used until it was opened to the public in 2022. Numbers are capped and booked online, and there has been talk of the presidency moving back, so check before you count on it.

Take a mid-morning KTX from Seoul, about two hours, and a bus or taxi in from the station, which sits outside the town. Drop your bags and rent a bicycle, because the rest of Gyeongju happens on one.

Start with the tombs. Daereungwon holds thirty grass-covered mounds inside a walled park, and one of them, Cheonmachong, has been opened so you can walk into the chamber: thirteen metres high, built in the fifth century, and named for the white horse painted on a saddle flap found inside.

Ten minutes south, Cheomseongdae stands alone in a field, a small stone tower built in 634 during the reign of Queen Seondeok and the oldest observatory still standing in East Asia. Then keep the pond for after dark, when the rebuilt pavilions at Wolji are floodlit and doubled in the water.

Take the early bus east up Tohamsan. Bulguksa at nine is a working temple; by eleven it is a school outing. The two pagodas in front of the main hall are the reason to look properly: one ornate, one severely plain, and Koreans have preferred one or the other for twelve hundred years. Entry has been free since 2023.

A shuttle climbs the last stretch to Seokguram, where a granite Buddha sits in a domed chamber cut into the hillside facing the East Sea. It is behind glass and photography is banned, and it is still the single finest object in the country.

Back in town for the national museum, which holds the originals of what you saw copies of yesterday: the gold crowns, the pond finds, and a bell you can walk around.

The shortest hop of the trip: about half an hour on the KTX, and you arrive in the middle of Busan rather than on its edge. Drop your bags and take the metro two stops to Jagalchi.

The fish market is the city in one building: tanks on the ground floor, a whole quayside of women selling what landed this morning, and stalls upstairs that will cook whatever you buy. Behind it, Gukje market grew out of the refugee years and still sells everything imaginable in aisles you have to turn sideways in.

Finish on the hill above with the tower on it, which is 118 metres and unashamedly a tourist attraction. Time it for the end of the afternoon, when the port and the bridges are at their best.

West of the centre the hills fall into the water, and today follows them. Gamcheon is a slope of small houses stacked in steps and painted in blocks of colour, settled by refugees and members of a religious sect in the 1950s and repainted by an art project at the end of the 2000s. Several thousand people live there. Stay out of the private stairwells.

Down on the coast, a cable car runs from Songdo out over open sea to the headland at Amnam, which is a strange thing to find in the middle of a city, and the beach below it is reckoned to be the first in Korea laid out for bathing. It is small and quiet and exactly right for an hour of doing nothing.

Korean temples are mountain temples almost without exception, which is what makes the one on the east coast an oddity: it stands on a rock shelf with the sea breaking under it. Go early, before the stairs down to it turn into a queue.

Haeundae is the beach the whole country knows: a wide arc of sand with towers behind it, packed in August and yours in October. Eat a street or two back from the front, where the prices halve.

Then Gwangalli in the evening, which is smaller and scruffier and much better after dark, when the suspension bridge across the bay lights up and everyone eats outside on the sand.

One last stop before you go, and the one that ties the ten days together. Busan held when the rest of the peninsula did not, and the foreign soldiers who died holding it are buried a few metro stops from the station, in the only cemetery of its kind anywhere in the world.

It takes an hour, it is laid out by nation, and the dress code is enforced: no shorts, no flip-flops. Then collect your bags and take the train north, or the light rail west to Gimhae for a flight.