Two days in Sokcho, where a hand-pulled ferry still crosses to Abai village

The channel at Cheongho-dong (청호동) is barely wider than a city street, too tight for a bridge to bother with and too busy to swim. So you cross it standing up, on a flat steel barge, hauling yourself hand over hand along a cable slung between the two banks. This is the gaetbae (갯배), and it is how one side of Sokcho has reached the other for longer than most of the city around it has stood.

The ferry you pull yourself

You pay 500 won into a steel box at the landing, step aboard with a dozen strangers, and pick up one of the hooked poles resting against the rail. The barge runs between Jungang-dong (중앙동) on the town side and Cheongho-dong opposite, the low neighbourhood everyone calls Abai maeul (아바이마을). Pull on the cable and the boat inches forward; ease off and it drifts sideways with the current, so the whole crossing is a small negotiation among people who have never met.

Two minutes and you are on the far bank. The village behind the landing is flat and close-packed, laid out in the 1950s by families who came south from Hamgyeong (함경) and expected to go back within the year. They stayed, and the settlement kept its northern dialect and its food. Abai is that dialect's word for an older man, and it settled over the whole place.

갯배는 지금도 사람이 직접 쇠줄을 당겨 건넌다.

What the village puts on the plate

Order ojingeo sundae (오징어순대) and watch it arrive in coins: a whole squid, its body packed with glass noodles, tofu and minced vegetables, steamed firm, then sliced and each slice dipped in beaten egg and browned in a pan. It is a different creature from the pork-gut sundae sold in the rest of the country — lighter, faintly sweet from the squid, eaten with a soy-and-vinegar dip rather than salt. A plate runs about 15,000 to 20,000 won at the shore restaurants signposted 오징어순대·아바이순대.

The other house dish is abai sundae itself, a fatter sausage of pig intestine filled with blood, rice and glass noodles, cut thick and served warm. Ask for it with a bowl of the northern-style cold noodle and you have eaten the way this village has eaten for seventy years. Most of these rooms seat you on the floor and bring a shared plate of radish kimchi before you have decided anything.

The market and the queue for dakgangjeong

Back across the water, Sokcho Tourist and Fishery Market (속초관광수산시장) fills the covered lanes near Jungang-dong with the smell of frying. The thing to stand in line for is dakgangjeong (닭강정), boneless chicken fried twice and lacquered in a sticky-sweet chilli glaze; the queue outside Manseok Dakgangjeong (만석닭강정) is long enough by mid-morning that staff hand out tickets. A box is around 15,000 won and holds its crunch for hours, which is the point — people carry it onto the bus home to Seoul.

Work the rest of the lanes for seed hotteok (씨앗호떡), a griddled pancake split and stuffed with sunflower and pumpkin seeds, sold for a couple of thousand won from a window. The wet stalls at the market's edge sell the day's squid and flatfish, and several will slice a plate of hoe (회, raw fish) to eat at a plastic table with a bottle of soju for far less than a restaurant charges.

Seoraksan before the light goes

The mountains start twenty minutes inland. From the Sogongwon (소공원) entrance the first thing you reach is Sinheungsa (신흥사), a temple whose grounds are free to walk, guarded by Tongil Daebul (통일대불) — a seated bronze Buddha close to fifteen metres tall, green with weather, visible before you have parked. Local bus 7 or 7-1 runs there from the town centre in thirty to forty minutes.

From the same clearing the Gwongeumseong (권금성) cable car lifts you to a ridge fortress in a few minutes for roughly 15,000 won return, and the view down the granite valleys is the one the brochures use. If you would rather earn it, the trail to Ulsanbawi (울산바위) climbs 808 steel steps bolted to the last stretch of rock — under four hours round trip, and steep enough that people turn back at the base of the stairs. Go early; the last cable car and the last light both leave sooner than you think in autumn.

Getting there, and the one thing to check

There is no train to Sokcho — the line never reached this stretch of coast — so you come by road. Express buses from Dong Seoul Bus Terminal (동서울종합터미널) run the Seoul–Yangyang Expressway (서울양양고속도로) to Sokcho in about two hours twenty minutes for roughly 18,000 won, leaving through the day. Sleep near Jungang-dong so the gaetbae, the market and the bus stop for Seoraksan are all a short walk apart.

The mistake worth avoiding: building the whole day around the Gwongeumseong cable car. It shuts in high wind, sometimes for a full afternoon, and the gaetbae stops in rough weather too, which strands you on the wrong side of the channel. Ask at the ticket window before you commit the morning, and keep a market lunch in reserve. Come between early and mid-October if you want the ridges turning; come any clear morning and the water is still flat enough to pull a boat across by hand.