Encounter|Oeongchi Badahyanggiro, Sokcho — The Bench That Faces the East Sea

Sokcho is where the hotel heiress follows the intern. The coast is where the drama lets them sit still.

Oeongchi Badahyanggiro runs 1.74 kilometres from Sokcho Beach to Oeongchi Port, a deck and dirt path opened in 2018 on a shoreline that had been a restricted military strip since a 1970 infiltration. Encounter put Cha Soo-hyun and Kim Jin-hyuk on an observatory bench above that water. The city later marked the bench. Visitors still pose there because the shot is simple: two people, a rail, the East Sea running out past the rocks.

Lotte Resort Sokcho, the stand-in for Donghwa's Sokcho branch, sits on the same headland. The trail is public, free, and timed. Summer hours run into the evening; winter closes earlier; high waves close the deck without notice. Walk the Oeongchi section, not only the beach section. The cameras wanted the part that still looks half-forbidden.

You come for a bench. You leave with the sound of a sea that does not care who transferred whom.

Photo: Sokcho Beach at the north end of the trail, FAL / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons