Most travellers who come to Andong come for one thing — Hahoe Folk Village — and they come for two hours, on a bus from Seoul, and they leave the same afternoon. Hahoe is worth seeing. That is not the trip this issue is about.

Andong is, first, a county. A slow river county in the middle of North Gyeongsang, where the Nakdong bends nine times through pine ridges and rice paddy, and along those bends sit four of the most important sites of Joseon-era Confucian Korea — Hahoe village, Byeongsan Seowon, Dosan Seowon, and Bongjeongsa temple. Three of the four are UNESCO. All four are within 40 km of each other. And the honest way to see them — the way that lets each one register — is not a bus tour. It is two nights in a hanok, a driver who moves your bag while you walk, and the willingness to arrive at each site on foot when you can.

This issue is three walks in that spirit. The Hwasan ridge from Hahoe to Byeongsan Seowon — three kilometres over a 321-metre wooded ridge, the same path Joseon scholars used to travel between the village and the academy while the tour coaches drive twelve kilometres around. The maple approach at Dosan Seowon — the academy of Yi Hwang, whose face is on the ₩1,000 note. And the cloister loop at Bongjeongsa — the temple that holds Geungnakjeon, the oldest wooden building standing in Korea.

Between the walks, the food is Andong's own. Andong jjimdak — chicken braised with soy, glass noodles, and a fistful of dried chillies — a modern dish from Andong's covered market. Heot-jesa-bap — a meal that borrows the format of a Confucian ancestral rite, once a scholarly household tradition, now offered as lunch. And Andong soju — a distillation tradition brought to Andong in the late Goryeo period, when the Yuan Mongol logistics base introduced Middle-Eastern distillation to the peninsula, and later refined by Joseon yangban families whose home recipes still form the basis of what is served today (typically around 45%).

If a night falls on a schedule, we plan the trip around it: Hahoe Seonyu Jul-bulnori (하회선유줄불놀이), a Joseon-era scholars' poetry-boating tradition still performed by the village on a handful of evenings each year. Mulberry-charcoal fires strung on ropes above the Nakdong fall in slow sparks between Buyongdae cliff and the Mansongjeong pine grove. The Hahoe village itself is UNESCO-inscribed; the festival is a designated Andong intangible cultural property, currently on the state's shortlist for national heritage recognition. This issue's cover is one of those nights.

The season is late October into early November. The maples at Dosan turn a week later than Seoraksan. The Hahoe fields are amber by day and misted by dawn. Bring layers. Book two nights, not one. And let the county reveal itself — slowly, in the order the walks give you.