Incheon

Korea's only official Chinatown sits just up from the old harbour, a compact grid of red-and-gold frontages, bakeries and restaurants that is busier with Korean day-trippers than with foreign visitors. Its significance is culinary as much as cultural: jjajangmyeon, the black-bean noodle dish that Koreans eat by the ton and order reflexively on moving day, was developed here by the port's Chinese community and adapted to Korean tastes until it became something distinct from its origin. There is a museum dedicated to the dish, which sounds like a joke and is actually a good short primer on how migration and food work on each other. Eat it here at least once for the comparison.

The streets between Chinatown and the water hold the city's oldest surviving built fabric — brick and stone buildings from the turn of the last century in styles imported from several directions at once, now housing cafés, small museums and galleries, with a stepped street and a hillside park above. It is a short and genuinely pleasant walk rather than a major sight: an hour of streetscape that looks like nowhere else in Korea, precisely because so little of the country's pre-war urban building survived at all. Combine it with Chinatown and the harbour and you have a half-day.

Across the water from the historic district, Songdo was built on reclaimed tidal flats as a planned business district, and the result is genuinely disorienting: a full-scale city of towers, canals, a very large central park and wide empty boulevards, none of which existed a generation ago. It is not beautiful in a conventional sense and it is fascinating in an urbanist one — an entire settlement designed at once, with the seams still visible. An hour walking the park and the waterfront is enough to take the point, and it pairs oddly well with the old port quarter on the same day for the contrast.

Incheon's ferry terminals serve a scatter of islands in the shallow West Sea, and this is the part of the city that foreign visitors essentially never reach. The nearer ones are close enough for a day trip and offer wide tidal beaches, seafood eaten at the harbour, and the particular quiet of somewhere Koreans go to get away from Seoul rather than somewhere anyone goes to see a sight. Further out, the crossings get longer and the islands emptier. Sailings are weather-dependent and schedules thin outside summer, so check before committing a day — but on a repeat visit to Korea, this is a genuinely different register from anything on the main circuit.

The main international airport is unusually well equipped for long waits, which matters because a great many travellers reach Korea on connections. Beyond the ordinary lounges and showers there are cultural exhibition areas, performances, gardens, and — the genuinely useful part — organised short tours that run out of the terminal for passengers with sufficient time between flights, taking in the nearby temple, the Chinatown district or the coastal sights and returning you to departures. They are designed around transit passengers specifically and are the difference between a wasted half-day and having seen something. Ask at the transfer desks on arrival rather than trying to arrange it in advance.