The Rakyat Post | Wandering off the trodden path in Korea
SEOUL, 1 Feb 2017:
The lure of free and easy travel does not need to be bound by time constraints of work or study if one is able to draw up some sort of itinerary – and this can be done even hours beforehand if Internet access is easily available.
But when faced with the additional challenge of language barriers, many of us end up taking the easy way out instead by simply latching onto prepackaged tours – and end up missing out on wonders known only to locals.
This challenge often crops up for many tourists to South Korea – but it doesn’t need to be so, says Amy Bae, founder and chief executive officer of KoreaTravelEasy – a website which aims to help foreign travellers straddle this disjoint between reasonable expectations and compromised reality.
She readily acknowledges the extra challenges faced by foreign visitors – which include not being able to easily tap into the otherwise ubiquitous Google Map service, which is rather restricted in South Korea due to security concerns related to the Communist North.