12 Scenic Areas of Ulsan

Despite the fact that the visa office seems to think Ulsan has no tourist attractions (and lets face it, this really is primarily an industrial city), Ulsan has what it calls "The 12 Scenic Areas of Ulsan." There are countless pamphlets and brochures promoting these areas, and they are highlighted on every single map of the city. Jeff had some shorter days at work this weekend, so on Saturday we decided to try and check out some of these scenic areas. There are about four or five of these areas in the mountains to the west of Ulsan, so we decided to head out that way and see as many as we could before the sun went down.

It took about a half hour to get out there. Once in the right area, we followed the brown tourism signs pointing us to the 12 scenic areas. Suddenly the road narrowed and went from paved to gravel. We thought it was odd, but there were no tourism signs pointing us in another direction, so we just kept going straight. Then out of nowhere this little gravel road pretty much just ended. We took out our map and tried to figure out the route we had taken (the streets are not named on the map and there are few if any street signs, so we literally were thinking "okay we drove about two minutes and the road curved left, then there was a street on the right," etc.). We decided that we were most likely at some random park, so we turned the car around and tried to head back to the last place we remembered seeing a tourism sign. It continued like this for about another hour. We would follow the tourism signs, but they would literally just take you to a dead end. After about our 10th examination of the map we realized that two of the places we were trying to reach didn't even have roads to get to them! There were just hiking trails, which according to the map would take us about two hours to get to. We decided enough was enough and called it a day. We were disappointed that we were unable to find these elusive scenic areas, but on the way back we pulled over and took a few random pictures:

On late Sunday afternoon Lewis (another UOP employee who was in Ulsan during our first week here, left, and came back again this week), Jeff and I decided to check out one of the scenic areas closer to the hotel called the Daewangam Songnim Pine Forest. After our Saturday excursion I was not optimistic about heading out there, but we actually found the place with no problems and it far exceeded our expectations! It was a beautiful pine forest with a lighthouse and all of these gorgeous rock formations in the water. The day was perfectly clear, and we were there at sunset, so we got some incredible pictures like these:

We posted the pictures we have on our Yahoo page, but since the batteries in my camera died, we will make sure to get Lewis' pictures and post those soon too.