Why go:
It is a small, normal (ie not touristy) South Korean town with emphasis on bamboo. There is also a very pleasant spa resort hotel (details in South Korea 5 – Accommodation) and a memorable traditional South Korean restaurant known for its “Bamboo Rice” feast of a meal (as with most Korean food, I didn’t like most of it, but it was a worthwhile experience and I loved the bamboo bowl containing rice with nuts).
Is it worth going out of your way to visit:
No. But if it isn’t too far away from where you want to go, you could spend a pleasant day or half a day there. But that said, I do think fondly of our 24 hours there.
What were my highlights:
Bamboo Museum (there is an English headset and it is far more interesting than I was expecting, particularly information about how bamboo is used)
“Bamboo Rice” set meal (some really interesting dishes, some edible, some not (to me!))
Bamboo Culture Experience (a small bamboo forest laid out for tourists – all were South Korean visitors when we were there)
Damyang Spa Resort Hotel (you can just visit the spa for a bit of lovely hot water relaxation – more on that later)
Lovely roadside dumplings (there was a lovely pavement booth with big silver steamers diagonally opposite Paris Baguette along the main shopping street – “bean” or “meat”)
Overall comments:
It is not an exciting place and if you read this and think you’d like to go, don’t expect a beautiful town with bamboo growing everywhere. On our way into town we saw only a few clusters of bamboo, the architecture of the town is drab and it really is a small town.
However, it is in a pretty enough setting with mountains and trees around and there is a river. But in winter/early spring, it looks quite bleak.
The shopping area of town seems to largely centre around one main street. There are a lot of wholesale type bamboo shops which are more expensive than I expected and after two or three of them you realise the stuff is largely the same in style and price. If you have your heart set on buying bamboo products, fine, but it’s not destination shopping for anything else. The local strawberries are very nice though.
But I reiterate that, despite the disappointment of so few bamboo trees (I have been to the world’s biggest bamboo forest in China where Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was filmed and that was absolutely amazing and I now realise how spoilt I was having been there), there is something appealing about the town’s ordinariness.
Bamboo Museum:
It doesn’t take long to go round, maybe 45 minutes, and only costs 1,000 won.
The headset information is interesting, particularly upstairs, and it is activated according to what you’re standing in front of so you can easily skip bits.
There was a very helpful woman at the welcome desk just inside the entrance to the museum when we were there (you buy tickets from a booth outside the museum) and there is a good supply of maps and Damyang information. She spoke good English and even booked us a hotel, the Damyang Spa Resort, and got us a 10% discount.
The shops around the museum are probably slightly cheaper, unexpectedly, than the shops along the main shopping street. Bamboo products were not as cheap as I’d expected and I was disappointed to only come away with a bamboo tea strainer, which as I recall cost about £6.
Bamboo Rice Meal:
Even if, like me, you’re not keen on South Korean food, this is a really good meal to try. I get the impression a lot of restaurants in Damyang do bamboo-based food.
We went to the restaurant suggested in the guide books, Bakmulgwan Apjip. If you walk out of the Bamboo Museum and stand on the pavement by the quiet but wide road and look right, you will see a main road crossing the road you’re standing on. Before you get to that road, you will see a tall building on the other side of the road with an orange circle and Korean writing, a minute’s walk. It doesn’t look particularly like a restaurant. Go inside and you might think it’s a bit posh.
Ask for the “Bamboo Rice”, which is 12,000 won each for 20 dishes. We tried almost everything and didn’t feel hungry afterwards but, as you can see from the two photos, it did not look like we ate much. All the food tasted fresh and I really enjoyed the grilled fish, the bamboo rice and one of the green vegetable dishes. The rest was in part “guess the food: veg, fish, meat, other?” There was one plate of the crunchy skins of prawns; to me this was a food waste dish as it’s the prawns without those shells I’d have wanted to eat – apparently they shells/skins are good for digestion.
Bamboo Culture Experience (Bamboo forest park):
This makes for a pleasant walk and we pootled around for maybe an hour and a half.
The area has paths and there are even some (dreadful) plastic pandas – it’s child friendly, put it that way.
It would be much nicer if there weren’t paths and you could just frolic through the bamboo trees (you can to a very limited an unexciting extent though).
It is nowhere near as large an area as I expected but it’s bamboo and walking amidst the swishing of bamboo always makes me feel like I’m in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; both expectations made it disappointing for me, but it is pleasant.
It was raining while we there and even then it was still nice. But a word of warning, if you go on weekends, it will be busy. We were there on a Saturday and there were a lot of children running around and making a lot of noise. Korean children appear to be allowed to run riot more than, say, British kids.
There were no shops and no food places while we were there, though I get the impression it wasn’t fully completed so I suspect at some point there will be places to at least eat. There were toilet facilities and lots of parking. It didn’t cost much to get in.
I only wanted to go to Damyang because of the bamboo forest. I hadn’t expected it to be a low key bamboo theme park. So it was a bit disappointing, but there was bamboo.
Damyang Spa Resort:
This hotel and spa was started by the same businesswoman who opened the Bakmulgwan Apjip restaurant. It cost us 157,000 won for the room (with our 10% discount, courtesy of the haggling of the nice woman at the Bamboo Museum).
The room was clean, comfortable and pleasant but not luxury. There were nice big towels though, which was lovely after a week of either face towels only or the big, thin travel towel I had with me.
The reason we decided to stay there was to go to the spa (which you can pay to go to even if you are not staying at the hotel – 8,000 won). If you have never been to a Japanese onsen, you might not know what to do, so I will explain.
Go into the (single sex) changing area and take off all your clothes. You cannot wear a swimming costume. Take a towel (to be stowed just outside the bathing area) and cleaning kit (sponge/flannel/scrungy, shampoo and shower gel/soap) and head for the bathing area.
You can pick up a plastic bowl to store your washing stuff in. Then sit on one of the plastic bowl stools in front of a shower and scrub and clean yourself vigorously. This should take you at least five minutes (my suggestion).
Once you are thoroughly clean and scrubbed, leave your bowl of shampoos, etc, on a wall (other people will have left their bowls and baskets there).
Then head into the pools. There are loads. It is all single sex so if you go as a male/female couple or group, you will say goodbye as you head into the changing rooms and hello as you leave the changing rooms.
There are tubs of varying temperatures, a VERY powerful massage fountain (we overdid it in that pool and ended up with sore backs the next day!!!), a bamboo sap tub, green tea (it has huge green tea teabags in the water!), a bamboo charcoal sauna, a jade sauna (way too hot for us), outdoor warm and cold baths, a cold pool (lovely after the hot pools, but in a hot to cold shock kind of way) and various pools with jets. There is also a kind of dry stone area with heated lamps, which is a lot more relaxing and lovely than you expect. There is also an outdoor pool but that was closed when we were there.
It is relaxing and lovely and afterwards you will want to sleep (I recommend going there towards the end of the day rather than the beginning).
Practical information:
Easy to drive into/out of and around. Easy to park pretty much anywhere on the streets.
Finding accommodation wasn’t as easy as we’d been led to believe so we were lucky the woman in the Bamboo Museum rang around and found us somewhere. It wasn’t obvious where accommodation would be despite it being a small town and two places were fully booked, but it was a Friday and Fridays and Saturdays are busy for South Korean tourists.
The only western style food we could find (not that we wanted any) was Paris Baguette, but by week two I was over Paris Baguette (you think something is going to be savoury but it ends up being sweet – it’s very hit and miss but it is baked on site and the food is good quality). The point of saying that is that sometimes it’s nice to know if there’s an option of not having pickled vegetables and stuff with your meal and in Damyang, beyond Japanese food, if there were such a place, we didn’t find it. There are no food shops around the Damyang Spa Resort so if you visit or stay there, take your own food or drink.
If you are driving from Damyang to Jeonju (as we did), only take the mountain roads if it isn’t raining or if there isn’t low cloud as we ended up driving in extraordinarily thick fog and it was far from enjoyable and we couldn’t see anything of what we’d been led to believe would be beautiful views.