Sea Life Busan; Green Line

This afternoon in Busan, South Korea, started with me seeing some sea life at Sea Life Busan, an attraction by the sea. See? It ended with me taking a walk along Green Line Park, which is a walkway that sits a fair bit up the side of a mountain and along the coast.

So, this afternoon was an all-sea day. Now that I think about it, this morning was all sea too, with visits to a Buddhist temple by the sea, Haedong Yonggungsa Temple, and then to Haeundae Beach. If you read my morning post, you’ll know that I chose to end the morning at Haeundae Beach mainly because it was close to my planned afternoon activities.

And when I say close, I do mean close.

Sea Life Busan

Sea Life Busan is immediately adjacent to the promenade that’s immediately behind Haeundae Beach. In my morning post, I mentioned that, for much of the way along the promenade, there’s a narrow green buffer zone between it and the buildings beside it. This is one of the exceptions. The Sea Life building abuts the promenade.

In case you didn’t figure it out from its name or from my opening paragraph, Sea Life Busan is an aquarium. At street level, the building is quite small. It barely intrudes on the beachscape. The majority of the aquarium is underground. So, it’s much bigger than it looks from the outside. A TARDIS aquarium, if you will.

There are tanks on two underground levels in Sea Life. Early on in my walk through the aquarium, I came across a tank with a bunch of fish. Five of them, one big, and four smaller, were sitting stationary, peering out the glass. It’s almost as if the people were there for the fish to look at. Maybe we were. But, if so, shouldn’t the fish be the ones to pay?

I spent a while with them, until they got tired of looking at the people and turned away.

A few tanks over, two fish looked directly at me when I arrived, waited until I took their picture, and then, as soon as I did, both of them simultaneously quickly turned around and swam to the back of the tank. “Alright, Mr. Klebanoff, I’m ready for my close-up.”

Sea Life Busan also has some axolotls, one a dark grey and a couple white with some pink, all in the same tank. I first became acquainted with axolotls at a museum in Malmö, Sweden. They are truly amazing. They remain in adolescence for the rest of their life. And, with four small legs, they look like the missing link in the evolution from sea to land creatures.

The aquarium has a large tank for a colony of penguins. Their space has both water and land sections. When I was there, only one of the penguins swam in the water for a bit. The rest of them stood or waddled on land.

Signs in the aquarium are bilingual, Korean and English. The English on the sign beside the penguins called them—this is the term Sea Life provided; not me; I’m embarrassed to repeat it—”Jackass Penguins.”

What a thing to say. I can’t imagine what that does to the penguins’ self-esteem. Really. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.

The sign said that they’re mostly found in Cape Town, South Africa, and they’re the only penguins found naturally in Africa. Huh. I wonder if racism played a role in their naming. I was joking about that until I typed it and saw it on my screen. Now, I’m thinking, maybe. The world isn’t always a nice place.

Is it any surprise that no other penguin species choose to inhabit Africa? Who wants to live where locals call them jackasses?

There was a tank with rocks and water that contained otters. Their colouring was so close to that of the rocks, and they scurried around so much that I couldn’t get a picture of them worth posting here. I know that I haven’t always let low-quality photos stop me from posting them here. But I’ll show some restraint this time. Aren’t you proud of me for that?

One tank contained a couple of large, lumbering loggerhead turtles swimming about. They were a joy to watch.

There was also a turtle of roughly equivalent size swimming in Sea Life’s largest tank, but I don’t know if that one was also a loggerhead turtle. The large tank also contained a collection of sharks and other large fish. Plus, there was a glass tunnel through a section of the tank.

Sea Life Busan had far too many tanks for me to talk about them all, despite some of the other fish being quite attractive.

Oh, wait. I forgot to mention some tanks. Jellyfish! I didn’t count, but I think Sea Life Busan has about half a dozen jellyfish tanks! Big jellyfish and smaller jellyfish. Life is good.

There were a few extra-fee activities at Sea Life Busan that I didn’t do. In what now seems to be standard at many paid-entry attractions. They offered to take my picture in front of a screen. I said no.

There is also some sort of temporary Lego exhibit on. When I bought my ticket to the aquarium, the ticket seller tried to pitch me a ticket for it. She did that right after she checked my passport to verify that I really am entitled to the senior’s discount the aquarium offers. Seriously. I said no.

As I walked through the Sea Life aquarium, at one point, a couple of staff members tried to sell me on buying a glass-bottom boat experience. The boat is in Sea Life’s big tank. Another no on that.

Despite being much bigger on the inside, Sea Life Busan is still a little on the small side for a major aquarium. Nevertheless, I quite enjoyed it. I mean, jellyfish. What’s not to enjoy?

Jellyfish at Sea Life Busan:

Green Line Park

After leaving Sea Life Busan, I didn’t have far to go to my next destination, Green Line Park. It’s a linear park that starts (or ends, depending on which direction you’re going) just a little beyond one end of Haeundae Beach. It continues for 4.8 kilometres and ends at another beach, Songjeong Beach.

Songjeong Beach isn’t as big as Haeundae Beach, but it is still big, has golden sand, and is a shallow arc.

The Green Line Park between the two beaches isn’t what you normally think of as a park. It’s a boardwalk or, for some of it, a path of another surface material, that’s a bit wider than a normal railway track. It used to be a railway, the Green Line. At least, that’s what I read.

As I said in the intro, Green Line Park is quite a bit above sea level. It hugs the side of a mountain along the coast and is cantilevered over the edge for much of the way. Would a train track be cantilevered over the slope of a mountain?

The views of the ocean and the trees on the side of the mountain for most of the 4.8 kilometres are beautiful.

Plus, there are some constructed sights along the way.

At two different points, there are observation decks that jut out over the ocean. The first one I came across when walking from Haeundae Beach is white. It has two walkways that leave the Green Line angled away from each other. They then arc back toward each other and join up at another section, a circular observation deck that juts out farther over the ocean.

There is a large, curved support pole anchored into the seabed, with cables that do part of the work of suspending the whole deck over the ocean. However, there are also other support pillars under it.

About the circular deck. There’s a circle within the circle that’s a glass floor. Fortunately, there’s an opaque ring around the glass, so I could stay off the glass. Glass floors scare the heck out of me.

The other observation deck is blue, held up exclusively by pillars, not suspension cables, and shaped like a horseshoe, with the two prong ends of the horseshoe joining with the Green Line trail at different points.

Walking along the sides of the horseshoe from either side, there are sections where the middle portion of the walkway is a glass floor. But there was enough wood flooring that I didn’t have to walk on the glass.

Then I got to the curved end of the horseshoe. It’s all glass floor, from side to side.

I had a choice: walk on the glass floor or turn around and go back the way I came. I paused for what seemed like an eternity, petrified by the glass. But then, I gingerly stepped on it and nervously walked all the way across to the solid parts on the other side of the horseshoe. Miraculously, I lived through the experience.

On one side of the Green Line Park boardwalk, somewhere between the locations of the two observation decks, there were about ten wooden statues. They were all made of the same dark-red wood.

The statues were heads on top of smoothed, but otherwise unsculpted, thick poles. But here’s the thing. Every head, every single one of them, was uproariously laughing at me. Specifically me. Don’t they know I’m a low self-esteem person? How do they think that makes me feel?

My guidebook told me there’s a colourful tunnel along the way, Dalmalji, that I should check out. It told me that, but I forgot as I was walking along. I remembered when I saw a small directional sign pointing to Dalmalji Tunnel, a little over 1,400 metres back the way I came.

I debated walking back to take a look. I feared that I’d be missing out on an unmissable sight if I didn’t. And if it truly is unmissable, but I miss it, then who knows what miserable outcome would befall me as a result. But it was getting on in the afternoon and, at that point, I still had a ways to walk if I wanted to walk the length of Green Line Park, pausing appropriately to take in the views along the way. So, I tempted fate and pushed on.

Along the route, several points offered stairs you could take to walk down to the shore below, or sometimes to a viewing platform partway down. I didn’t do that because doing so would mean I’d also have to walk back up.

At Songjeong Beach, I walked to the end of the beach and explored a pretty, but tiny park hill that is attached to the mainland, but juts out into the ocean. Then I called for an Uber for the journey back to my hotel.

Oh, I should probably mention that there’s also a Blue Line Park, but it’s less of a park than the Green Line Park. It’s a railroad track that runs about the same length as the Green Line and immediately beside it. It’s a single track, but with a couple of sidings along the way. Short trains run along it, with stops along the way.

There’s also an overhead thingy, but, unlike the train, it doesn’t go nearly the full distance to Songjeong Beach. I’d call it a monorail except that the very boxy people pods that run on it ride on two cylindrical rails. There are two, side-by-side sets of these double cylindrical rails. When the cars reach the end of the line, they circle back on a loop to the other end. This contraption runs for its shorter length beside the Blue Line, on the other side from the Green Line.

And with that, another enjoyable afternoon is done.