If you look hard enough, you’ll find a T Rex at every corner. Goseong Dinosaur Museum is hard to locate if you don’t read Korean. It’s hard to find out how to get to Goseong to begin with since it’s pronounced the same as Gosong which is a separate town/province and there’s yet another Goseong which is on the East Coast of South Korea. This Goseong is all the way down South, closer to Suncheon and seemingly devoid of a train stop. It’s probably a bad investment on my part to spend just a night in town since it involved a 4 hour bus ride from Seoul. There didn’t seem much else to see though, apart from the museum and the coastline but it’s definitely a worthwhile visit.

The museum involved a small entrance fee and housed a selection of local finds and some of the more popular dinos trademarked and copyrighted, I’m sure, by Universal Studios. I like the velociraptors best but I don’t think the museum’s as comprehensive as some of the other ones I’ve been to. It’s possibly a good one to visit in Asia though I think I might have enjoyed the one in Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia a little more.

I can’t understand Korean but I think that there was a bit of explanation about breeding patterns in one of the signs in the museum.

While there’s an escalator that brings you up to the entrance, in place of the down escalator is a giant roller slide that accommodates both kids and adults. We need to have giant slides everywhere.

The main event of the museum trip though wasn’t so much a part of the museum. The museum’s built beside a boardwalk on the coast which features actual fossilized dino footprints. Goseong wasn’t intended as a tourist area until the discovery of a bumper crop of dinosaur bones and fossils along the coast which resulted in the museum being built.

The areas where the prints are at are left unfenced so visitors can get a better look (and feel). The trails are quite marked and easy to spot.

The coastline belongs to a different age. Layers of compressed rock have split and cracked to form caves and little streams of water all around. It makes me wish I paid more attention in Geography class and to be fair, if my teachers had made us watch documentaries on dinosaurs and ancient beasts and explained to us the significance of their specialization, I really would learn a bit more about the world.

[mappress mapid="1"] How to Get There: I took a late night bus and reached Goseong in the dead of the night thinking I could just walk into town and find a motel. A kind man I sat next to on the bus who spoke only Korean figured I needed some help and gave me a lift in his cab to the nearest lighted street in town. He couldn’t decide if he got it right that I didn’t have a place to stay or that I found a place that I can find when in town. The town has a bit of a creepy vibe at night.

There are a few buses to the museum at hourly (or more) intervals. I missed the last bus back to town (it’s at the late late time of 5pm) because I misunderstood what the counter staff were saying – they didn’t speak English either. One of the guards was nice enough to send me back to the terminal after his work hours. His limited vocabulary included “Wait for me”, “6pm”, and “Metallica” which he played on the radio and is a fan of.