Cultural Trip to Damyang, Jeollanam-do

Damyang is about an hour's drive away from Gwangju downtown.

Our first stop is Metasequoia Road in Damyang. It was said that this road is the most beautiful road in Korea. This place is often used for shooting romantic scene in Korean movies or drama.

Road lined with Metasequoia trees and named Metasequoia road.
These trees can live for many hundreds of years.

Next is Bamboo Theme Park or Juknok-won. This park is about 320,000 square feet large and it's covered with bamboo trees.

After breathing through bamboos, it's blackberry picking time at Yongyeon Farm! This farm is not open to public, the farm owners happen to be the organiser's friend so they worked things out and arranged this blackberry picking activity at Yongyeon Farm.

Black means ripe, red means not ripe. Blackberry plants have thorns with it so we have to wear gloves and long sleeves clothing while picking.

And that's me picking black berries. It's really easy and fun to pick black berries.

Organic chicken for lunch at a very nice place !

Served with many side dishes.

This certainly looks like lizard's shit.

It might not look presentable but this organic braised chicken dish is really really really good.

After a hearty meal, we head on to tofu-making.

First, grind pre-soaked soy beans.

Cook it.

After cooking, pour it out and filter through cotton bag.

Add salt water so that the water will seperate itself from the beans extract and also to harden the beans extract.

Get the 'bed'(mould) ready.

Scoop the soya bean extract with water into the mould.

Agitate it so that water will flow out leaving behind the tofu that we want.

Fold the cloth.

Cover then put weight on top of the mould to 'squeeze' out water.

Turn over the mould and open the cover.

Ta-dah ! Here it is ! Fresh Tofu !

Cute kids. They are tour member's son and daughter. The boy speaks fluent korean, his dad is American and mum is Korean.

Last stop --> Gamagol Valleys
This place is a popular tourist spot with many waterfalls, valleys, hanging bridge and beautiful rocks and stones. But we're running out of time, so we just dropped by for a short 30 minutes. We did not manage to reach the waterfall which is located far inside the valley.

Hanging bridge.

End of Damyang trip.