The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
I’m obsessed with Korean drama – and it inspired my perfect midlife escape
A peculiar infatuation with the genre led Polly Faber to discover how the ‘real life’ version of the country measured up to fiction
You’re going 5,000 miles with strangers from the internet to look at concrete underpasses where fictional events happened?” My plans for a holiday based around South Korean drama locations raised a few eyebrows among my friends.
My love affair with Korean drama (or K-drama, as it is often known) began in April 2020 during the first Covid lockdown. On a family message group, my Sydney-based brother told us how his wife, Sarah, had become enchanted by a show on Netflix called Crash Landing on You. He was funny about the show and her interest in it and, between supervising online lessons for my teenagers and making soup from vegetables past their best, I decided to give it a go. It took me two episodes to absorb the conventions but then I was all in: this warm, witty and swooningly romantic storytelling offered the perfect pandemic escape.
Thanks to Gangnam Style and supergroup BTS addressing the United Nations, not to mention Blackpink’s attendance at a state banquet, the cultural export of K-pop may have a strongerhold on British consciousness than K-drama. There are some crossovers, however, in both fan base and performers. The two also share a refreshing refusal to be hidebound by conventional genres, and a commitment to the highest standards in their art forms, aesthetically in particular.
It isn’t just the hotness of the actors that appeals to me, but also K-drama’s commitment to telling a complete story in a single series. Over 16 hours, the episode format allows for total immersion in both place and character. With no expectation of continuing seasons, each storyline has a proper arc and a satisfying conclusion; the experience is akin to reading a compelling novel. In fact, from Romance is a Bonus Book to When the Camellia Blooms and Because This is My First Life, even the titles are intriguing.
I passed on my discovery to a local chat group comprising my female friends. Most ignored my strange new obsession, but Liz, a neighbour just down the road, fell in love in just the same way I had. With Sarah, we began a separate chat stream of gleeful daily exchanges about new drama discoveries, favourite actors and the more outré points of the plot. Liz and Sarah began studying Korean; I began reading Korean literature and making kimchi with those withered vegetables.
And then, two-and-a-half years later, with more than 200 dramas watched apiece, we were ready to plan a real escape. Liz stuck a map of Korea on the wall and began putting red pins and Post-It notes on locations from our favourite dramas. Our travel squad grew, as Liz’s husband Matthew – uninterested in Korean dramas but fascinated by the country’s history and infrastructure – and Diane, a friend I had made in another online K-drama chat group, asked to join us. All in our fifties and sixties, we hoped our common passion could sustain three weeks in each other’s company – helped by the non-negotiable requirement that those who were not married to each other had separate rooms.
The location wish list that we presented to our chosen travel company, Inside Asia, was eccentric, eschewing many of the major temples, museums and palaces. Somehow, our advisor Sam made sense of it, setting up a three-week itinerary featuring English-speaking guides, non-English speaking drivers, bus tickets, train tickets and eight different hotels, to take us on a clockwise loop around the country for a luxurious middle-aged take on a backpacking adventure.
I had expected to find real-life South Korea a different place from the virtual version I had spent so many hours inhabiting – and my romanticism to be stripped away. A country is not a theme park and I was well aware of some of its complications and contradictions. However, we arrived to a rose-glow sunset over Seoul that set the tone for the rest of the holiday. We felt heady due to the overwhelming familiarity of the place from the small screen. It was as if we had entered our own drama. “But it’s real! It’s really real! Amazing,” we kept on saying.
For three weeks the sun shone, transport worked seamlessly and helpful guides found us the places we wanted to find. We sighed happily together over closed café frontages, tunnel entrances, random flights of steps, hospital lobbies, abandoned theme parks, lily pond pavilions, breakwaters, lighthouses and more. Our nerdiest location moment occurred in the convention centre of an off-season ski resort where we negotiated our way past a buzzing pharmaceutical sales conference to photograph a particular wall and section of carpet.
We also explored the few temples, museums and palaces we had permitted on the schedule, slept on the floor of a traditional guesthouse or hanok, wandered through fish markets, rode rail bikes, climbed mountains, paddled in the ocean and walked along rice paddies and through bamboo forests. I developed a secondary obsession with persimmon trees and their orange fruit.
We ate barbecue and bibimbap and bulgogi and drank too much soju. We had chicken and beer by the river and banana milk and cup noodle ramyeon outside a convenience store. We sang karaoke at the noraebang. Sarah and I even braved the “Nakedness is Mandatory” women’s bath house where every inch of me was scrubbed to a state of never-seen-before smoothness.
But it was the people around us who really made us feel like we were floating through the country in our very own drama bubble. We spotted character tropes familiar from the screen wherever we went. There was the highschool couple on the bus, heads together peering at a phone screen with little fingers intertwined; the harassed office workers snatching cigarette breaks on a high-rise rooftop; the groups of senior citizen hikers, striding up sheer mountain paths with visors and walking poles; the mother tenderly placing her own food in the rice bowl of her son; the couple in matching outfits photographing each other against autumn foliage; even the delivery driver on a motorbike swerving down an alley making pedestrians – us! – jump out of the way. We had gone to spot individual locations but instead found the whole country a film set in action and ourselves wandering through as “extras” in the background.
We were noisy extras. On sabbatical from jobs, domestic duties and the various caring responsibilities that come with our stage of life, we were responsible for nobody’s wellbeing or comfort but our own. We talked nonsense about dramas, actors and our own lives, laughed loudly and often, and didn’t care about whether our journey made sense to anybody else or not. Our excitement must have been infectious. “I do like being on holiday with enthusiasts!” said Matthew – or Holiday Oppa as we christened him, the Korean term for an older brother or boyfriend – on one occasion.
Three days from the end of our trip, we found ourselves on our way out of Yongin Daejanggeum Park. A permanent film set tucked away in a rural mountainous location, about 40 miles south of Seoul, it is used for making sageuk – historical Korean dramas – but is also open to the public. We’d had a fine time poking around the maze of ad hoc buildings representing eras from the 6th to the 19th century, spotting places familiar to us from the many series filmed there. The thrill had been amplified by finding some areas that were off limits with actors and film crew in attendance.
As I was heading for the gift shop, I clocked a tall figure emerging from the back of a large, black people carrier. I froze and made the same sort of throaty gasp-squeak I had once made while hiking in Alaska and spotting a black bear at close quarters. Sarah, was noisier: “Rowoon! I’m your fan from Australia!” The startled bear – or in this case, 27-year-old K-pop idol turned male leading actor – clasped Sarah’s outstretched hand, pulling her in for a hug before being hustled into a building by his appalled manager.
Our holiday had always been due a happy ending like that. In news that may surprise those who have only watched Squid Game, Korean dramas specialise in such endings. But, as the five of us whooped, giggled and exclaimed together on the journey back to Seoul and eventually home, it wasn’t so much our chance encounter with an impossibly handsome leading man that had produced our broad end-of-holiday grins, but the fact that we had experienced it together – and all understood its significance.
That was true joy. The only very non-K-drama question remaining is: will there be a season 2?
Polly Faber and her friends travelled on a (very) tailor-made tour organised by Inside Asia (0117 244 3380; insideasiatours.com). The company also offers a 12-night Best of South Korea holiday for £4,362 per person including three-star accommodation, activities, various meals and all internal transport, but excluding international flights.