South Korea Day 2: The Air Cruise

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Songdo Beach is a man-made beach in Busan, created in 1913 and was a popular tourist destination in the 60s and 70s with a cable car from the beach to a small island just off shore. It suffered over the years from pollution, general neglect, and typhoons which destroyed the cable car. Lucky for me, a new cable car (the Songdo Air Cruise) opened in 2017 connecting Songdo Beach to Amnan Park headland and providing thrills for people who like to dangle high over the ocean in gondolas.

Looks like fun!

Off we went to cruise the air. Roger decided to take the risk of being struck midair by an earthquake and came too, although he drew the line at getting into a gondola with a transparent floor.

Not looking down.

Looking back.

The ride took long enough to take heaps of photos and still have time to sit back and count the cargo ships out in the Korean Strait.



And to regret buying a return trip Air Cruise because otherwise I could have walked back on this awesome boardwalk around the cliffs.

Getting off the Air Cruise catapaulted us straight into a delightfully quixotic world of entertainment, not at all the standard observatory that I was expecting. There was a whole rooftop playground of art installations and photo opportunities, the significance of most totally eluding me given my ignorance of Korean language and a translation app that was creative but not necessarily accurate in its outcomes.

This yellow man appeared quite a lot. Not sure why.


Behind the artist, a tree from which hung multiple stuffed sloths in attitudes of somnambulence.

But there was more! Out the back a dinosaur themed park with a quixotic combination of animated dinosaurs vied for attention with food vendors and interactive art installations.

I could have bought a love padlock and added to it. For a price.

Something to do with snails, yellow, the wind, and playing.

And then of course, in the whiplash effect I've come to expect, we walked through a gate from tourist land and found ourselves on the walking trails of Jinjeongsan Mountain, walking through forests of pine and groves of cherry blossom to a soundtrack of birdsong. It was a sound track too: I searched assiduously for a glimpse of the birds before realising that the ambient birdsong was the forest equivalent of department store Muzak, piped through discreetly mounted speakers in the trees.

The speakers are hidden.

Once we were out of range of the speakers, real birds chattered and chirruped in the cherry blossoms. A feral cat watched us with suspicion from under the steps up to the hill top. Very few people were out on the trails, just the occasional bird watchers and a quartet of park workers practising the ancient art of shovel leaning.




Back at the Air Cruise Station the thrills kept coming: this time in the shape of a massively over-engineered suspension bridge out to Dongseom Island. Not that there was anything out on Dongseom Island or that our feet ever touched the island itself, but the suspension bridge was pretty cool and it gave Roger another thing to work into his earthquake catastrophe calculations.



To state the obvious.


After all that excitement, not to mention a choose-your-own-adventure for lunch, the Air Cruise back to base was a nice little chance to relax and count ships again before the last great adventure of the day: the grandly named Cloud Walk over the water to Gobukseom Island which was a grand name for the small rock where the original cable car had been housed.


The island held a mermaid and a fisherman, madly in love but never quite able to get together. I couldn't read the sign boards but the story appears to be universal.

The tide was out. Families gathered shellfish on the rocks while skyscrapers stood guard.

We finished off the day with a walk along Songdo beach which had the honour of having been South Korea's first public beach.

Not that the public was around when I was there.


I'm impressed if you made it thus far past all those photos. By the time we'd walked the beach I'd had enough too: it was well and truly time to go home after a very enjoyable day.

So we did.





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