Geobukseom, Oido make quiet case for West Sea

SIHEUNG, Gyeonggi Province — Local travelers who judge a destination by the number of attractions tend to look east, toward the deep blue water and fine sand beaches that fill summer travel supplements.

The West Sea close to Seoul and its metropolitan area has long been treated as the consolation prize — flat, brown at low tide and governed by a tidal range that rearranges the shoreline twice a day.

Yet, those who would like the coast for tranquility and reflection will find this stretch offering exactly that at a price nobody has thought to advertise.

Siheung, a city of more than 500,000 in Gyeonggi Province, sits about 40 kilometers southwest of central Seoul and holds two coastal destinations — Geobukseom and Oido — of entirely opposite temperaments.

Geobukseom, which literally translates as “Turtle Island,” is an island of marinas, surf lagoons and glass towers that has not yet filled up. Oido, some 10 minutes away, is a former island that has been grilling shellfish for day-trippers for decades.

The "turtle" is not without its reason. Pull Geobukseom up on a map and the outline is unambiguous — a shell, four stubby legs and a round head extended toward the open water, the whole thing paddling northwest out of the industrial coastline behind it.

Neither Geobukseom nor Oido requires a car. Seoul Metro Line 4 and the Suin-Bundang Line both terminate at Oido Station, which sits about 6 kilometers inland despite the name, with local buses covering the remainder in roughly 20 minutes. Total travel time from central Seoul runs to about 90 minutes.

The order matters more than the timing. Both destinations face west, and the day is best built backward from sunset.

'Lake of death'

The water that laps against Geobukseom's marina carries one of the heavier reputations in modern Korean environmental history.

Sihwa Lake was created in 1994, when a 12.7-kilometer seawall sealed off a stretch of tidal flats to produce farmland and a freshwater reservoir. Within three years the enclosed water had turned so foul that the Korean press settled on a single phrase for it: the "lake of death."

The government abandoned the desalination plan in 1999 and allowed seawater back through the barrage.

The recovery has been substantial. Chemical oxygen demand, a standard measure of organic pollution, stood at 17.4 milligrams per liter in 1997 and had fallen to 2.2 by 2021. Otters returned. So did migratory birds, and eventually, so did boats.

On a weekend afternoon the marina now runs at a steady clip, with parents wrestling children into oversized life vests and small groups negotiating seating arrangements on the yachts. Gyeonggi Province operates daytime and sunset yacht tours out of the marina as part of its coastal tourism program, with tickets priced at around 25,000 won ($18) to 30,000 won.

Yacht tours should be reserved in advance, but nothing here demands the logistical campaign that an east coast weekend does, which is much of the appeal.

Cutest ghost town

Geobukseom was conceived as the leisure component of a large industrial development, and the plan called for its seafront podiums to fill with restaurants, shops and hotels.

A great many of them never opened.

Walking into one of the commercial complexes means passing floor after floor of papered-over glass along corridors that are clean and almost entirely silent.

Local reporting has documented persistent vacancies and a district that failed to take hold, attributed to a shortage of attractions that keep visitors overnight and to demand that spikes each summer before collapsing for the rest of the year.

The anchor tenant has not solved the problem. Wave Park is the largest artificial surfing lagoon in the world, generating up to 2,000 waves an hour across a basin 200 meters long, and it hosted a World Surf League event in July. By most local assessments, the spending has not spread to the streets around it.

For a visitor, though, the vacancy reads differently. The sea views are unobstructed, the promenades are wide and the businesses that did open feel generously spacious.

A cafe named Nugungaege, which translates as "to someone," occupies a second floor with a wall of glass facing the water. Its signature dessert is a cake shaped like a sleeping teddy bear lying face-down, served alongside an iced latte that arrives with a bear-shaped coffee ice cube slowly surrendering its ears to the coffee.

On an island drawn in the shape of a turtle, a bear made of ice is entirely in keeping with the atmosphere. What lingers is the optimism behind it — a business on a mostly empty floor still taking the trouble to freeze coffee into small animals.

Sunset with room to spare

The strongest argument for Geobukseom costs nothing.

The island faces open water to the west, with little between the marina promenade and the horizon. The sunsets along this stretch of coast are counted among Siheung's nine designated scenic wonders.

What distinguishes the experience is not the light, which the West Sea supplies generously up and down the coast, but the absence of competition for it.

On an evening in late August, with the summer heat still holding and the wind off the water finally cool, the promenade held perhaps a dozen people.

A woman facing the water moved through a yoga sequence, unhurried and clearly practiced, her shadow stretching back toward a row of unlit shopfronts. A couple stood at the railing, arms wrapped around each other but saying little together. A foreign photographer set up a tripod a few meters away without inconveniencing either of them.

There was no wall of raised phones and no queue for a viewing platform. Regulars have quietly worked this out; reviews of the cafe upstairs read less like restaurant notes than sunset reports.

Every argument about whether the development succeeded is, from a visitor's chair, an explanation of why the breathtaking sea view is this easy to claim.

Island in name only

Oido lies 10 minutes away by road, and the volume changes on arrival.

Its landmark is a red lighthouse that has never guided a vessel. Opened in 2006 and standing 21 meters tall, it is an observation tower built in lighthouse form, commissioned to give a fishing village something photogenic.

On that narrow objective it succeeded completely, and the deck delivers a view of the mudflats, the industrial complex behind them and, on clear evenings, the Songdo skyline across the water.

Oido's name is a holdover. It was a genuine island roughly 4 kilometers offshore until salt-farm embankments built in the 1930s began closing the gap, and the industrial development of the late 1980s finished the job.

After dark, the area becomes a shellfish town. Grill houses line the embankment road, their outdoor tables filling with university students and office workers over trays full of clams, bottles of soju and the darkening water. Aggressive touting, long a complaint here, has eased since the city and the local merchants' association stepped up to curb the practice.

The other regional staple is "kalguksu," hand-cut wheat noodles served in broth.

At Badam Kalguksu, the version arrives beneath a showy arrangement of clams, prawns and fishcake skewers in a broth that reads clean rather than heavy. It makes the case for West Sea cooking more persuasively than any amount of promotional copy.

Before crowds arrive

Siheung is working steadily to make its coast worth visiting.

If the tenants finally arrive, the silent corridors will fill and the promenade will thicken, and that is the stated objective of a city that has spent years and considerable public money pursuing it. There is nothing unreasonable about wanting it, which is precisely what makes the present moment worth catching.

The sequence is what makes it work. Give the afternoon to Geobukseom, to the marina and the cafe and the promenade as the light drops, and then cross to Oido once the color has gone out of the sky, take a table along the embankment, put clams on the grill and close the evening over a warm bowl of kalguksu while the tide comes back in over the flats.

It is not a spectacular day out, but it is a complete one, and for the right kind of visitor the distinction is the whole point.