Naejangsan National Park

Naejangsan is the autumn mountain in the Korean popular imagination, a horseshoe of modest peaks in North Jeolla whose slopes are dense with maples that turn scarlet and orange in the first days of November. The set piece is the tunnel of old maple trees along the road up to Naejangsa temple, a few hundred metres of overlapping red canopy that is photographed more than anything else in the park. Beyond it, trails climb to the rim of the horseshoe, and a cable car lifts people partway for the view down into the bowl of colour. Outside those three or four weeks it is a quiet, pleasant, unremarkable park with a good temple in it.

What you actually see

• The maple tunnel - the arched avenue of old maples on the road to the temple.
• Naejangsa temple - the temple at the head of the valley, below the ridge.
• The ridge circuit - the trail around the horseshoe of peaks enclosing the valley.
• The cable car - the lift to a viewpoint over the whole coloured bowl.

When to go

The colour peak is short and lands roughly in the last days of October and the first of November, varying by year, and everything about this park is built around it. Go on a weekday and arrive early. Spring blossom and summer green are pleasant and empty by comparison. Winter is bare and quiet.

Honest expectations

For those two or three weeks it is one of the busiest places in the country: shuttle queues, a packed avenue, a long wait for the cable car and traffic backed up to the motorway. Come a week early or late and the trees are green or bare. The peaks are low and the walking unremarkable, so the colour really is the whole proposition.

Nearby

The bamboo forest at Damyang and the hanok quarter of Jeonju are each within an hour or so.