The pine forest at Mongsanpo has its own weather. Under the canopy, the August heat drops a few degrees, and the air smells of resin and salt, a combination I have come to associate with this whole peninsula. I have been in Taean for six days now, and I keep coming back to this stretch of coast, to the way the trees hold the line between the road and the beach. It is a specific kind of quiet, broken only by the wind moving through the needles and the distant pulse of the sea. I walked here this morning along the coastal trail, past the campgrounds where tents are still pitched in the shade, families packing up coolers and sandy towels. The summer peak is thinning, but Mongsanpo still has that late-August hum, a last push before the season turns.
I sat on a fallen log for a while, watching a group of older men in sun hats playing a slow game of badminton on the flat sand near the treeline. They had a cooler of what looked like Hite beer cans, and every few rallies they would stop, sip, and chat, their voices carried off by the breeze. It struck me that this is the real rhythm of Taean, not the packed beaches of Mallipo or the busier spots on Anmyeondo, but these pockets of unhurried life. A woman nearby was collecting pine cones in a canvas bag, and when I asked her what for, she laughed and said her grandson liked to paint them. That was the whole conversation. It was enough.
I checked the time and realised I had been sitting there for nearly an hour, doing nothing in particular. That is something Taean does to you. The Cittaslow branding is not just a marketing label; the county genuinely moves at a different pace. I have noticed it in the way shopkeepers chat rather than rush, in the way buses wait a little longer at stops. It is a deliberate choice, a recovery from the trauma of the 2007 Hebei Spirit oil spill, when more than a million volunteers came to scrub the blackened rocks. The memory is still here, in the memorials and in the careful way people speak about the sea. But the recovery has been real, and the pines are part of it, holding the soil, filtering the air, giving the coast a green spine.
For lunch I drove into Taean-eup, the county seat, and found a small place near the bus terminal. It was a simple operation, a few tables, a fan in the corner, the menu written on a whiteboard. I ordered the bajirak kalguksu, the clam knife-cut noodle soup that is the staple of this coast, and it came in a steaming bowl, the broth milky and rich with the taste of the mudflats. It cost about nine thousand won, roughly six and a half dollars, which felt almost absurd for the amount of clams in it. The ajumma who served me asked where I was from, and when I said I was staying in the area, she nodded and went back to the kitchen. I sat there, slurping the noodles, watching the lunch crowd thin out. The soup was exactly what I needed, salty, warm, and honest.
After lunch I stopped at a café near the terminal, one of those places that seems to exist for people waiting for buses. It was called 해피준카페, and it had a few tables by the window, a stack of newspapers, and a counter selling the usual iced Americanos and somewhat surprising selection of packaged pastries. I ordered a cold brew, about five thousand won, and sat near the window, watching the intercity buses come and go. A man at the next table was reading a newspaper, and I caught the headline about the KPGA golf tournament happening at Solrago CC here in Taean this week. I had heard about it from a taxi driver two days ago, and apparently it is a big deal for the county, nine thousand spectators expected, free admission. The news is full of it, though the local gossip I overheard was more about parking congestion than birdies.
The sun had come out properly by mid-afternoon, so I headed back to Mallipo Beach, the big three-kilometre crescent that is the park's most famous stretch. The water was a flat, calm grey-green, and the light overcast haze had burned off enough to bring out the swimmers. The surf schools were running their late-afternoon sessions, and I sat on the sand watching a group of beginners get knocked off their boards by the gentle waves. There is a particular comedy to watching someone stand up for a moment and then go over backwards, and it happened about six times in ten minutes. The instructor, a wiry woman with a whistle, shouted encouragement in between laughing at her students. Beaches are the same everywhere; people are equally ridiculous doing new things, and equally happy about it.
I wandered up to the boardwalk and found a spot near the AR Surf office, where a handful of surfers were rinsing their wetsuits in the outdoor showers. The air had that late-afternoon golden quality, and the low sun caught the water, turning the C-shaped bay into a sheet of light. I struck up a conversation with a young guy from Daejeon who had driven over for the long weekend, and he told me he comes to Taean every August because the waves are more forgiving than the east coast. He pointed at a cluster of rocks at the far end of the beach and told me that is where the oil tanker ran aground back in 2007. Everyone here knows the story, he said. It is part of the beach now. We stood there for a while, not saying much, watching the surfers paddle back out.
I thought about the fishing boat, the Hebei Spirit, and the ten thousand nine hundred tonnes of crude that spilled into these waters. That number is so large it is hard to hold, but the lasting image for me is the volunteers, the million people who came from all over the country to scrub rocks and scoop oil with their bare hands. I have read that the local name for the cleanup was the opposite of a disaster, a kind of national embrace. And now, nineteen years later, the beach is full of children building sandcastles, and the water is clear enough to see the bottom. Recovery is a slow thing, but it is also a visible one, if you take the time to look.
For dinner, I had planned to find another local spot, but my walk along the beach took me past a small restaurant with a roadside sign that simply said 골목식당, which means alley restaurant, and I took that as a good sign. Inside, the decor was utilitarian, plastic tables, a menu on the wall, the smell of grilled garlic. I ordered the spicy blue crab stew, the kkotge-tang, which comes bubbling in a red broth full of crab, vegetables, and enough gochugaru to wake you up. The price was about thirty-seven thousand won per person, around twenty-eight dollars, and worth every won. The crab was sweet, the broth fiery, and I ate slower than I normally would, drawing out the meal.
Halfway through, the owner came out to check on me, and we got to talking. She told me she had been running the place for over twenty years, and that after the spill, she almost closed it because no one came to the beach. Then the volunteers came, and they needed feeding, and she cooked for hundreds of people out of her tiny kitchen. She said the gratitude she still feels towards those strangers is what keeps her going. She pointed at the walls, which were covered in handwritten notes and signatures, many of them in different languages. I looked closer and saw dates from 2008, 2009, 2010, scattered among the more recent ones. It was a wall of thanks, a living archive of the recovery. I added my own small note before I left, a single line in English, and she smiled and waved me off.
The evening was warm and still, so I took the long way back along the coast road towards my guesthouse, a budget pension near Kkotji Beach that is costing me about fifty thousand won a night, around thirty-six dollars. The sun was setting over the Yellow Sea, and the sky was doing that thing where it goes from orange to pink to a deep violet, all in the space of twenty minutes. I pulled over at a lookout point and just watched. A few other cars were parked, people leaning against their bumpers, phones out, capturing the light. But there was no shouting, no music, just the sound of the wind and the occasional shriek of a gull. For a place that has been through what this coast has been through, there is a remarkable peace in the evenings.
I have been thinking, on this slow sweep down the West Sea, about what it means to live somewhere that has rebuilt itself. Incheon gave me the city version, the port and the industry. Ganghwa gave me the borderland version, the tension and the history. But Taean is something different. It is a place that has learned to measure time in seasons rather than headlines, in the return of the migratory shorebirds to the Duung wetland, in the slow growth of the pines, in the taste of the clams in the soup. It is not a flashy place, and it does not need to be. It has its beaches and its arboretum, its golf tournament and its prawn festival, but the real draw is the quiet, the spaciousness, the sense that the land and the sea have made peace with each other.
The last thing I did before heading back was stop at a small convenience store to buy some water and a cheap local beer, about four thousand won, to drink on the little balcony of my pension. I sat out there for a while, listening to the cicadas serenade the night, the sound that has been the soundtrack of this whole summer. A text came in from a friend in Incheon asking how the flat hunt was going, and I realised I still had not answered his earlier message about whether I would make it back for the Songdo Beer Festival next week. I am due to leave Taean in three days, and after that, the itinerary gets more complicated. But for now, I am in no rush. The tide comes in, the tide goes out, and the pines keep holding the line.
If you are planning a trip to this coast, and I think you should be, the episode notes will have everything I have mentioned today, from the surf schools to the clam soup at 골목식당, and a few practical pointers on getting around the park without a car. It is a place that rewards a slow pace, so give it a few days, and let it work on you. Annyeonghaseyo, and I will see you down the road.