My wife and I have visited Korea six times over thr last 10 years and throughout that time have never participated in an organised tour, so when the stars somehow alligned for us to attend the Tonight Tongyeong Tour we jumped at the chance as it's an area of Korea we had yet to visit and had heard alot of great things about it.
We boarded the bus with an amazing group of people, all of whom were younger than us, as we discovered the majority of those doing the tour we foreign students based in Busan so it was great talking to the people on the tour about their experiences as a foreigner living in Korea.... but I digress.
The tour bus was clean, fun on time and Dont our multi lingual tour guide made us feel at ease from the get-go, cracking dad jokes all the way to Tongyeong, we had a great atmosphere on the way to the first stop which was lunch which consisted of a Seafood Strew that had more seafood than an all you can eat buffet! It was amazing and highly recommended.
Next stop was some arts and crafts in which we made key rings using Mother of Pearl. ARTS and Crafts have never really been my thing but I really enjoyed it, especially looking at some of the other creations within the group, they were seriously good.
We then headed to a beautiful park that overlooked the water and had some free time to explore, that was also one of my favourite parts of this tour, we had loads of time to wander around on our own and we never felt rushed! My wife and I are explorers, so we decided to use our time to explore a nature trail that forms part of an interconnected network of hiking trails that transverse Korea. If we had more time we may have ended up walking back to Busan as the trail was that pretty!
Once our time at the park was up, we gathered back on the bus to head into the main part of town to explore. Our tour guide Dony lead us to the pretty culture village that overlooked the city and then left us on our own for a few hours to find dinner and take in the Tongyeong night life.
My wife and I explored many of the narrow alleyways and markets and as dusk morphed into night time we then walked around the main bay to enjoy that bright lights and seaside performances that were taking place, we saw drum shows, singing and dancing which kept us entertained for ages until we got hungry.
We quite enjoy a "off the beaten path" adventure so we meandered into the back streets where we came across a small family restaurant manned by a single lady.
Whilst we are just tourists we have been studying korean for a year and the lovely lady at the restaurant was completely shocked when we ordered in our (poor) Korean! She was so encouraging and gave some great language tips whilst serving a delicious Kimchi Stew accompanied by the best Panchan (side dishes) that we've had in our entire time in Korea.
After finishing dinner we glanced at our watches and realised it's time to rejoin our comrades and head up to Dpirang, an interactive light presentation that we've heard alot about.
As both myself and wife were from Sydney which hosts the Vivid Festival so we had high expectations for Dpirang and it blew them out of the water. The light installations were incredible, we felt like we were in a movie much of the time and were taken to a place and time we've never experienced before. We both thought this was even better than the Sydney Vivid Festival, which is very fine praise.
After 90 minutes we grabbed a quick cup bingsu from the Cafe and then headed to our hotel for some well earned rest. We arrived at the hotel and were assigned rooms, the hotel was spacious, clean and had a beautiful view and were extremely surprised how good the accommodation was, it surpassed the motels we were staying in Korea previously.
We had a wonderful nights sleep and woke up ready to join the group on our last activity, the Cable Car.
When we arrived we were advised there would be a short delay due to maintenance so it gave many of us the chance to get to know each other better, we had some amazing conversations with people from India, Czech Republic, Kyrzgiztan, Philippines, Kazakhstan, Hawaii and of course Korea and before we knew it, it was cable car time.
We were whisked onto the car and we were greeted with some incredible views on our ascent, once arriving at the top we were given the choice to walk to the summit, which we hastily agreed to and made the 15 minute relatively easy climb to the top, where we were welcomed by some of the most amazing views of Tongyeong and its surrounding Archipelego. We got loads of happy snaps, selfies and made a few korean friends also at the top.
Before we knew it, we (sadly) were being marshalled back to the Bus and on the road back to Busan, we had a lovely lunch and view at our roadside stop and then were back in Busan on time where we said our goodbyes and exchanged many Instagram profiles with our newly forged friends!
I cannot recommend this tour enough, thank you Trazy 🙏 ❤️ 💜 😊