Gyeongju-Busan-Seoul Day 2 (Part 1) – Enjoy Spring flowers by Bomun Lake

4 May 2012

The morning of Day 2 in South Korea started slow with a breakfast of instant noodles on the balcony of Hyundai Hotel, overlooking Bomun Lake.

The photo above shows the bird’s eye view of Bomun Lake from balcony of Hyundai Hotel looking north.

We could see the Gyeongju Tower in the distance from the balcony and near to the tower is the Shilla Millenium Park, our first stop for the day. The park opens at 10 AM, so there was plenty of time to enjoy the lake before visiting the Shilla Millenium Park.

Bird’s eye view of Bomun Lake from balcony of Hyundai Hotel looking south. Can see the Hilton Hotel, Gyeongju Expo Park and Gyeongju Tower in the distance.

The best way to get to the Shilla Millenium Park from any hotel in the Bomun Resort area would be along the walkway by Bomun Lake. The walkway by the lake was lined with many cherry trees and it would be a magnificent sight to see the trees in full bloom. One of our objectives of coming to Korea in Spring was to see the cherry trees in full bloom.  But we came slightly too late. The full bloom period, lasting about a week, was in April this year.

Cherry trees above was all green with leaves now in May, instead of completely white with the cherry flowers in April.

Fallen Cherry Blossoms.

Nevertheless, the morning walk along the lake was still enjoyable and nice. Many other spring flowers such as azaleas lined the path and as for cherry trees, there were still some late bloomers at some parts of the trail!

Bee on Azalea blossoms.

Azaleas growing as a hedge along the walkway and the blooms were beautiful and came in many colours.

Colourful azaleas.

Some late bloomers. Cherry flowers still on the trees that were in the shade.

View of the Hyundai Hotel where we stayed.

View of Hilton Hotel (another good hotel at Lake Bomun).

Signs of spring – Azalea flowers buds.

Koreans seems to like duck-shaped paddle boats. We saw such boats on the Han River in Seoul. Here, in Lake Bomun, there was even a “Mother” of all ducks. A motorised launch in the shape of a large duck or swan that takes tourists for a lake cruise.Mother duck and her ducklings! Or are these supposed to be swans?

Literally getting all the ducks line up.

I managed to shoot a photo of this man smoking inside a beached duck using my telephoto lens.

Southern end of the lake.

Bridge leading to the Expo Park.

Mirror lake making the half-moon bridge into a full moon.

Interesting roof and structure for a house in Gyeongju.

The lakeside walk took us towards the Shilla Millenium Park but getting to the park from the lake was not very straight forward. We followed the stream leading into Lake Bomun as the Park is located on the bank of the stream, accordingly to a simple map of Gyeongju I had. There was some kind of horse fair or show taking place on the river bank but the Koreans there did not understand English when we asked for some directions.

Anyway, we got a good view of Gyeongju Tower from the river bank. 

Gyeongju Tower is an interesting building. It looked like a pagoda had been cut-out from the building, leaving a “hole” in the middle. The tower is located within the Gyeongju World Culture Expo Park which we did not intend to visit.

Side view of Gyeongju Tower – seen from carpark outside the Shilla Millenium Park.

The base of the tower is a filming location of the last few episodes of K-drama Athena where the bad guys were trying to launch a missile to kill innocents and the good NSA lady agent was shot to death.

Trusting our simple map, we finally found our destination from across the road.

Outside of Shilla Millenium Park.

The Shilla Millenium Park is also a filming set used to shoot some scenes in the Korean Drama series Queen Seondeok which was based on the history of the Silla Kingdom.