Major highways across South Korea were heavily jammed on Friday as motorists made their way back to Seoul after celebrating the Lunar New Year's holiday at their hometowns.

The Lunar New Year's is one of the biggest public holidays in South Korea, along with the Chuseok holiday, the Korean version of Thanksgiving Day. The three-day  Lunar New Year's holiday that began on Wednesday officially ends on Friday, but if the weekend is counted, the holiday can last as long as five days, longer than usual.

Officials estimated that about half of the 50 million South Koreans were expected on the road during the holiday.

The estimated time to reach Busan, the nation's second largest city, about 450 kilometers southeast of Seoul, was 6 hours and 10 minutes from the capital city as of 4 p.m., while it was expected to take about 6 hours and 40 minutes to get to Mokpo, another major city on the nation's southwest coast, 410 km southwest of Seoul, said the state-run Korea Expressway Corp.

Traffic was bumper-to-bumper on all three major highways that stretch to provincial areas in the east, central and west of Seoul, as vehicles bound for the capital city crawled their way back, it said.

The Korea Expressway estimated that more than 250,000 cars have returned to Seoul as of 4 p.m., while some 220,000 vehicles had left the city for an outbound voyage. The road congestion was likely to reach its peak around 5 p.m. before easing slowly from around midnight. (Yonhap)