Today was the last of my little summer break.
I went to a little island called 무의도 (Muuido) with my friend Peter. He is returning to the US soon, and so we had decided to get together at least once before he goes, although I have a feeling he’ll come back to Korea at some point.
Anyway, this island is a small, touristy kind of island west of the Incheon Airport, which itself is on an island west of the main part of the city of Incheon, on the west coast of South Korea west of Seoul. The airport, and thus the airport island, is easily accessible from where I live in Ilsan, so it was convenient to take the bus from where I live to make this trip.
To get to Muuido from the airport, we took a local bus to the southwest corner of the airport island, and walked across this cool causeway to get a ferry. It’s a short ferry ride – at low tide, it seems like the ferry trip was about ten boat-lengths – maybe less.
On the island, first we walked over the little hill from the ferry terminal to the west side. Off the shore on the west side there is an even smaller island, that can be reached by walking across the channel between them at low tide. We did this. Peter wanted to see this island because it had been some kind of prison camp in the 1960s, and was used to train some convicts for a dangerous mission against North Korea. Unfortunately, the convicts had different ideas, and assaulted a bus and tried to escape at some point, and were killed. This was memorialized in a movie that Peter had seen. I had no knowledge of this story.
After visiting the prison island, called Silmido, we caught a bus and rode around Muuido some. There is a beach on the west side farther south, made famous by some TV show sometime back, and now very crowded and touristy. I didn’t enjoy the beach that much, but Peter had come here before with some coworkers and was waxing vaguely nostalgic.
We stopped and had lunch. I had some 바지락칼국수 – something like a clam-broth hand-made noodle soup. Then we decided to go to the airport. This was not random – it turned out somewhat by coincidence that our acquaintance Basil was flying out of the airport this afternoon.
Basil is moving to Istanbul. He said he was giving up on Korea. He seemed in good spirits.
I have known Basil since we worked together at LBridge in 2008. In fact, we met before I started at LBridge, just walking down the street in Ilsan and exchanging greetings as two “foreigners living in Ilsan.” Anyway, Basil and I have criss-crossed paths many times, including my having visited him in West Virginia in 2009, and him visiting me a few times in Ilsan, etc.
So Peter and I saw Basil off at the airport.
Here is a map I made of our meanderings at Muuido. I drew some low-tech lines on it: red is bus trips; orange is walking; pink is the ferry.
Here are some pictures we took.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]