Camping in Korea: When a Tent, a Pot and a Burner Were Enough | Life in Korea

Walk through a Korean campground today and you may see something that looks less like a temporary campsite and more like a small outdoor home.

A large tent stands beside the car. Under the awning are proper chairs with armrests, a wooden-look table, lanterns for different purposes, neatly arranged cookware, storage boxes, and sometimes even a small refrigerator.

Dinner begins, and Dad is standing behind a surprisingly serious-looking cooking station, grilling meat while the children wait in their chairs.

Everything seems to have its place.

Sometimes even the colors match.

Looking at a campsite like that recently, I found myself thinking:

When did camping acquire so much furniture?

And then I remembered how my own family used to do it more than 30 years ago.

Our Entire Living Room Fit in the Trunk

Our camping equipment was hardly impressive.

A tent. A small portable gas burner. A set of lightweight nesting pots Koreans call a koppel. A plastic ground mat.

That was about it.

We had two young children then. Our son was still in diapers, but we would put both kids in the car and leave our home in Gwangju for Gyeongju, the east coast, or wherever else we felt like going.

There was no elaborate setup waiting at the other end.

Before sunset, we found somewhere to sleep and pitched the tent. At an established campground, we used a proper site. On other trips, if we found an appropriate place where camping was allowed, that could become home for the night.

Rice went into the pot. We cooked one stew.

Dinner was ready.

There was nothing particularly special about the food, but food eaten outside has always had a strange talent for tasting better than it should.

If you grew up camping with your family in the 1980s or 1990s, this part of the story may not feel particularly Korean.

Maybe your parents also packed an old tent into the car.

Maybe dinner came out of one battered pot.

Maybe nobody thought a camping chair needed a cup holder.

Different country, perhaps. Same family logic:

We have enough. Let's go.

Cardboard Was Our Camping Mattress

At night, the children rolled around and played inside the tent.

Washing properly could be inconvenient. Sleeping comfortably required a little improvisation.

One of our tricks was cardboard.

We unfolded thick cardboard boxes and laid them under us to block some of the cold coming up from the ground. It was not exactly luxury camping, but in our memory it worked perfectly well.

With setups like that, our family traveled around Korea twice.

We followed the east coast north toward Seoraksan, went as far as the Unification Observatory, and slept beside beaches whose names I can no longer remember.

Some trips lasted seven or eight nights.

Our backup plan was equally simple: if the weather became miserable, we would find a minbak—the kind of modest family-run lodging that was common in Korean travel at the time—and sleep there instead.

The tent, pots and burner often stayed in the car.

That meant leaving home did not require much ceremony. Add a few side dishes from the refrigerator, snacks for the children, and we could decide in the afternoon to sleep somewhere else that night.

Then Camping Got a Living Room

Now look at many Korean campgrounds.

The contrast can be wonderful.

The tent may be large enough to divide into sleeping and living areas. There are tables, reclining chairs, lantern stands, cooking systems, coolers, shelves and carefully organized storage.

Some campers build a space so comfortable that sitting outside almost feels like being in a living room without walls.

This is not just my imagination. Camping has become an established leisure activity in Korea, and recent research describes a variety of styles, including gear-focused “emotional camping,” minimal camping, vehicle-based camping and camping with pets.

In other words, there is no single Korean way to camp today.

But the fully equipped campsite is certainly one of the scenes you may encounter.

And I understand the appeal.

After everything has been unpacked, the lights come on as the sun goes down. Meat sizzles. Everyone has a comfortable chair. The campsite itself becomes part of the pleasure.

For some people, choosing the gear, arranging it and creating the space is not work they must endure before camping begins.

It is part of camping.

An old-style Korean puffed-grain machine, famous for the sudden “pop” when it was opened.

Wait. Did That Camping Machine Just Go “POP”?

Then there are the gadgets.

One little machine especially caught my attention.

It was a miniature version of an old Korean puffed-grain machine.

You put grain inside, heat the small pressure chamber while turning it, wait—and then:

POP!

Out comes the puffed corn.

For someone who grew up in Korea decades ago, the joke is immediately recognizable.

Old-fashioned puffed-grain machines once produced a startling bang that children knew was coming and still covered their ears for anyway.

Now someone has turned that memory into a tiny camping toy.

That may be one of my favorite things about modern camping gear: sometimes an object is not really about necessity at all.

It is there because playing with it is fun.

Maybe the Gear Is Not the Burden

My first reaction to a heavily equipped campsite is predictable.

Do I really need all that?

How many times a year would I use it?

I would have to buy it, store it, load it into the car, unload it, set it up, take it down, pack it again and bring it home.

At my age, another thought arrives rather quickly:

There is probably a pension nearby with a hot shower and a proper bed.

But then I look at the family sitting around their campsite.

They are relaxed. They are eating. They are enjoying the little world they have built for the weekend.

And suddenly all that equipment does not look like baggage.

It looks like their hobby.

That distinction matters.

My family once enjoyed camping partly because we could leave with so little. Another family may enjoy camping precisely because they love creating an outdoor home.

Neither version needs to win.

And Some Campers Have Gone Light Again

There is another twist.

While some campsites have grown larger and more elaborate, other people have moved in the opposite direction.

In Korea, chabak—sleeping in or around your vehicle—has become a recognizable camping style, alongside other forms of modern camping.

So the story is not simply:

Old camping was simple. Modern camping is complicated.

Today you can find people who love elaborate setups, people trying to camp minimally, people sleeping in vehicles, and people who would rather arrive at a glamping site where almost everything is already prepared.

Camping has become more varied.

And perhaps that is the bigger change.

The Strange Thing About Having More Convenience

More than 30 years ago, my wife and I traveled around Korea twice with two small children and remarkably little equipment.

We did not think we were practicing “minimal camping.”

There was no philosophy behind it.

That was simply how we traveled.

If the weather turned bad, we found a room. If the children were hungry, we cooked. If we found a place we wanted to stay, we stopped.

We carried less because there was less to carry.

Today, travel is more convenient in almost every imaginable way. Equipment is better. Campgrounds have more facilities. Reservations can be made before leaving home. Korean campers now have far more ways to choose the kind of outdoor experience they want. Modern campground research even treats facilities, reservation systems, hygiene and other services as important parts of the camping experience.

And yet sometimes it feels as though leaving home requires more preparation than it once did.

Perhaps that feeling is not uniquely Korean.

Maybe somewhere in Canada, Australia, Britain or the United States, someone is standing in a garage full of camping equipment and wondering how a weekend outdoors came to require this much stuff.

I know the feeling.

Thirty years ago, our tent was smaller.

Our cooking equipment was simpler.

Our sleeping arrangements were definitely worse.

But the car was always nearly ready.

A tent. A pot. A burner. A few things from the refrigerator.

And sometimes, by that evening, we were already somewhere else.

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