31 March 2026
The lesser airport and fortress
Aviation Museum and Haengjusanseong Fortress
During the night I could hear strange noises at about 3am. Pumps and what sounded like cracking glass. I thought maybe there was a gas attack from North Korea so went back to sleep and thought nothing of it. In the morning, there were huge puddles and... clear blue sky. I think it rained a lot, but the rain was gone by the time I woke up, 6 hours ahead of the forecast.
I had planned an indoor activity on this a non hiking day, that I expected to be impacted by rain, but since it was already blue sky, I decided to tack on an outdoor activity too.
The first stop was Gimpo airport, the lesser airport, where there is a very exciting aviation museum. I had read that it was rather lacklustre, but I thought it was really good, and it was free too.
As usual I was there too early, so I looked for coffee, there is a huge mall but that also does not open until 10:30, so I ended up having coffee in the airport arrivals hall, marvelling at just how many flights there are between Seoul and Jeju island (the busiest airline route in the entire world).
After the museum and lunch, I headed across the river to a mystery mountain fortress. The mystery was, there is no fortress anymore, no matter how hard you look.
Behold, the surprise blue sky. I had to walk down to Seoul main station to get the train to Gimpo airport, its only about 15 minutes away, I recently did this at midnight when I got here, in the other direction.
Gimpo international airport. Most flights from Japan and China come to this airport rather than Incheon, they prefer to only receive smaller jets, but primarily the airport exists to ferry people to Jeju island, everyone in Korea on average goes 13.7 times a year.
I headed to the mall for a coffee to wait for the aviation museum to open, but it was closed until 10:30, with security checking ID badges letting workers in.
The gardens around it are quite nice.
Now to inflame some political drama. In the arrivals hall at the airport is this scale model of what Korea calls Dokdo island, which Japan calls Takeshima and the UN calls Liancourt rocks. Currently various armed fishing boats from both Korea and Japan are circling this island at all times, attempting to ram each other. They have been doing this for about 20 years without stopping, wasting the worlds supply of boat fuel. The diorama greets Japanese tourists as they arrive, the comfort girl statue is just out the door too.
Here is the museum. It is free and great.
The history of Korean aviation starts with Orbur and Wilvelle Wright.
Russia shot one of these down in 1983.
A Korean designed jet. They made 200 of them. I climbed up the ladder to look into the cockpit and next thing a guy is there to help me climb in and sit in it. I had to work really hard to explain to him that I just wanted to look, not sit. I may be the only person ever who did not want to sit.
It was difficult to get a good shot of all the hanging aircraft in the main hall because as you can see it goes around a corner.
Amazingly, the museum has a roof garden. I feel as though they could have craned a couple of aircraft into the garden. I suspect this view will be gone soon, there is a large construction site right behind it.
Above the roof garden, there is even a higher observation area, where you can see the airport, kind of.
I spent enough time in the museum to go and get lunch at the nearby mall, all connected by long underground tunnels. The mall is very clean and modern.
My lunch. I rarely have a proper lunch as it is not possible while hiking. Chicken today, not beef, strangely tofu was not an option. Given that most of my website visitors in the last 24 hours were from Switzerland, this cost 5.23 Swiss Francs.
The mountain top fortress is across the river. The train goes under the river. It is a very very long way down to the station. I generally do not get alarmed at this, however this time I did. Anyway, here is the entrance to the fortress, it is nowhere near a train station but a bus goes quite often from near the train station... you need naver maps to figure it out.
Probably the guy that lived in what used to be the fortress.
At this stage I still thought there would be a fortress, this is not it.
A monument commemorating a battle that occurred at the fortress. I suspect where this is was once a fortress. There were signs showing bits of gravel suggesting it was fortress rubble.
There is no fortress, but there is a great view.
Those mountains are Bukhansan National park, easily accessible from the city, I have been over all of those peaks a few times. Today would have been a good day to do that, as the overnight rain took care of a lot of the pollution.
Final pic from the no fortress mountain. A red bridge. Getting back to the city proper went on the new GTX line, after a bus, one station on the normal train and then a transfer deep (but not as deep as before) to the GTX station underground. This made only one stop before getting to the Seoul main station, slashing travel times. However it then takes about 20 minutes to get back to the surface because it is so far underground.