About The Travel Manual

Real Stories, Structured Guides

 

I’m Alan — a professional travel writer and photographer based in South Korea.

I’ve spent the past decade writing about this country for magazines, newspapers, and national tourism campaigns. Every year I drive roughly 60,000 kilometers across the peninsula — from the volcanic cliffs of Ulleungdo to the tea fields of the southern coast — researching, photographing, and fact-checking the places that end up in these manuals.

The Travel Manual exists because of a gap I kept running into: the English-language internet is full of Korea content written by people who were never there, or who visited once and padded the rest with press releases. The detailed, current, honest information I was producing in Korean for domestic media simply didn’t exist in English.

So I started writing it myself.

What “field-tested” means here

Every guide on this site is built from an actual visit — my own photographs, my own parking frustrations, my own conversations with the ajumma who runs the place. When something disappoints, I say so. When a famous spot doesn’t justify the crowd, I tell you what to do instead.

You’ll find three things in every manual: the story of the place, the practical details that guidebooks skip (exact addresses in Korean for your taxi driver, which map app actually works, what to screenshot before you lose signal), and a Practical Manual table at the end that puts every number in one place.

What I write about

• Must-Visit Spots — the landmarks worth your limited time, and how to do them right
• Hidden Gems — the places Koreans keep to themselves
• Local Eats — restaurants, markets, tea houses, breweries
• Stay Guide — hotels and stays I’ve actually slept in

If a guide helped you, that’s the whole point. If you found an error — hours changed, a place closed — I want to know: reach me through the Contact page.

Safe travels,
Alan