iGoBart sets sights beyond Seoul's 467 neighborhoods

Dutch travel vlogger Bart van Genugten, who built a YouTube following by documenting every one of Seoul's 467 neighborhoods, says the capital only scratches the surface of Korea — and he has the frostbitten memories from Mount Paektu to prove it.

Van Genugten's pivot challenges a common shorthand — that Seoul equals Korea — and carries particular resonance for Korean-American diaspora communities across Southern California whose family roots stretch to coastlines, mountain provinces and dialects far outside the capital.

Van Genugten built his channel — iGoBart, with 276,000 subscribers and nearly 50 million total views — on the "Welcome to my Dong" series, a methodical on-foot tour of every administrative neighborhood in Seoul, according to The Korea Times. He has now completed, or nearly completed, all 467.

But the scope no longer satisfies him. "Seoul is not Korea," Van Genugten told The Korea Times. "If you go out, you have all these different cultures, different foods, different dialects, different personalities, different mountains, different coastlines. You can go to Seoul on vacation then go back home. You cannot really say, 'I've seen Korea.'"

His travels have already taken him to Mount Paektu, the 2,744-meter peak at the northern reach of the Korean Peninsula. He urged future visitors to come prepared. "Rent the winter clothes that they have there," he said. "It was minus 23 degrees Celsius. I thought my eyes were genuinely freezing out of my head," The Korea Times reported.

A trip to Dandong — the Chinese border city on the Yalu River — produced one of his more unusual finds. Searching a Chinese map app, Van Genugten located a restaurant bearing the symbol of Taedonggang Brewery, North Korea's state beer label. "It looked like a Chinese restaurant, but everything was Korean — North Korean music, only Taedonggang beer, only North Korean food," he said, according to The Korea Times.

The channel's expansion has pushed into interview formats as well. Van Genugten launched an ambassador series after meeting female diplomats at a Ministry of Foreign Affairs event in Seoul. He said his dream interview subjects are the ambassadors from Japan, Russia and the United States. The Korea Times noted his series on Dutch veterans of the Korean War has been among his best-performing content, though it is not a sustainable format given the age of surviving veterans.

Van Genugten acknowledged that branching into new formats — expeditions, border dispatches, diplomatic interviews — risks unsettling viewers who subscribed for Seoul street content, even as it pulls in new audiences. He is scheduled to lead a Royal Asiatic Society Korea excursion May 30; tickets are priced at 30,000 won for nonmembers and 25,000 won for members.