Seoul Highlights & Hidden Gems Tours by Locals: Private + Custom
We arrived as ignorant tourists with next to no knowledge of Korean culture and history. So, we booked this for our first full day in Seoul and hoped our guide could give us some context and a ‘place to start’. And did he?! Our first surprise was that Young turned up in an A/C car on our scorching August day, “because there are so many places to cover in such a short time”. We were whisked from one side of the city to the other - from mountain viewpoints to museums to neighbourhoods. Our second surprise was that Young turned out to be a history scholar having discovered an interest in Korean history, and is currently turning his passion into a book. How he managed to give us a condensed history of Korea in just a few hours was admirable. We were blown away but the information, history and change that Korea has undergone. This tour formed a firm foundation for the rest of our stay, and didn’t ’step on the toes’ of other tours and sites that we subsequently took (e.g. DMZ and Gyeongbokgung). We were introduced to parts of Seoul we would never have thought of. I’d say 5hrs is a minimum for doing this and I wish we’d booked longer.