Queuing for a visit to N Seoul Tower

My trip to Seoul was relatively unplanned. In my guidebook I circled several places that I wanted to visit, but upon arriving. I soon realised that with only three days in the country, I wouldn’t get round it all.

One place on my list was N Seoul Tower; I quite like tall buildings and viewing a city from up high. Though I had planned to hike up one of the mountains, to view the city, but that didn’t happen.

So my visit to the Tower was finally done on my last night, along with the rest of the tourist population of Seoul, so it seemed.

To get to Seoul Tower, I followed the helpful and accurate directions on the N Seoul Tower website. These directions took you to the Tower cable car station, but you can easily continuing walking through the park (Namsan Park) to the base of the Tower. You’d save yourself 8000 Won. However, it was 8.30pm and dark by the time I got there, and I didn’t know how well lit the park would be, or busy. So I sucked up the cost of paying the cable car.

This was the start of the queuing. After purchasing my ticket, I was directed to entry point, and was greeted by a long queue people which doubled up on itself about four times. I was in this queue for about 45 minutes to an hour.

 

 

A quick 3 minute journey up to the base later, and I was faced with my second queue to buy a ticket for the Tower. This took 10 minutes, at the desk I was told that the wait to get up the actual Tower was 30-40 minutes, but I thought I’d pursue it as I had waited quite a while to get to the point I was at. I spent time taking pictures at the bottom and wandering around the gift shop, where I saw my first ever postcards from Seoul … seriously, everywhere I went in Seoul there were no postcards for sale (gap in the tourist market).

 

 

I was given a ticket with a number, when my number was called, I stood in another queue for 15 minutes, and finally made it to the lift to the Tower, via the typical photo stop (so they do cheesy photocards, but no postcards .. odd)

When I finally got to the top and surveyed the city with all its twinkly lines, it was beautiful. I was amazed at how far the city seemed to stretch, and even though I was amongst a lot of tourists in Tower, it felt like I was so far away from the busy and crazy city I had spent two days walking (and getting lost) around.

 

 

I probably spent 20 minutes to half an hour in the Tower itself, but had to leave b 11pm, to be down to catch the last cable car by 11.30, I ended up queuing again for that. Again I could have walked through the park which appeared to be well lit, but I was still unsure as I was on my own.

When I finally made it back down to Myeong-Dong station, It was nearly 11.45pm and I was told that the trains stopped at midnight, this leads onto a whole New blog post about one the scariest travel experiences I’ve had.

It helps to be slightly prepared as a Traveller. I’ve said this to myself countless times, but I never appear to earn from it.

So it summary, Seoul Tower was lovely despite all the queuing, but if I was doing it again I would have went earlier, walked through Namsan Park, and went up to see it at dusk, or sunset.