Dodamsambong

This past Sunday, a friend and I went on a tour offered by the travel service on our military base.  The tour consisted of three stops: Dodamsambong, Kosu Cave, and Chunju Lake.  We were both pleasantly surprised with the trip as everything was much better than we expected it to be.

We started our adventure at 8am.  Heavy traffic made the trip longer than it was supposed to be but luckily we had some DVD's to watch on the bus.

We stopped at a rest area after about 2 hours of driving.  Always searching for new and different foods to try, I picked a twisted cracker-type snack... mainly because I thought the cup was cute :)

There was a group of Korean Harley riders at the rest stop.  Zooming in on the photo below, I realized that the guy's arm tattoo is really a fake tattoo sleeve!  He's just pretending to be a tough biker ;)

I'm not sure how this guy can ride for any period of time with handle bars this high!  Zooming in on him, I found that his helmet is covered with extremely offensive stickers written in English.  Sorry, but I'm not putting the close-up of that on our blog.  I wonder if he even knows what they mean?  I hope the lady on the back of the bike doesn't since they're staring her in the face.  Not cool, man, not cool.

Our first destination stop was Dodamsambong.  Here there are three large rocks sticking out of the South Han River.  According to The Official Site of Korea Tourism, the legend of the three rocks of Dodamsambong is this:

There once lived a couple who loved each other but had no child.  They found a mistress because they wanted to have a baby, but once the she had the baby, she began to mistreat and taunt the wife.  The heavens saw what was happening and turned them all into stone.

A statue of the cartoon mascots of the town.  Those are some massive eyebrows!

"It's like the Bellagio fountains in Las Vegas," said our tour guide.  Umm... nice but not quite.

We hiked up thousands dozens of stairs to see a natural stone bridge called the Stone Gate of Danyang.  There was a pavillion near the top with a nice view of the area where everyone stopped to catch their breath and cool off a bit.

Our next destination was Kosu Cave.  It was a crowded area with many small souvenir shops and restaurants near the cave entrance.  Before touring the cave, we first all went to lunch.  Our bus driver led us to a restaurant tucked away behind the rest where there was a meal set up and waiting for us.

The main dish was pork bulgogi which was accompanied by the usual array of Korean side dishes.  There was one side dish I've never had the chance to try before... very tiny dried anchovies.  I did eat some but they were a little too fishy-tasting for my liking and the eyeballs were a bit disturbing.

Related Posts:
Kosu Cave
Chungju Lake

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"If you want to keep your memories, you first have to live them."

~Bob Dylan