The last official day of the road trip with plans made. In fact, many plans. We wanted to head to the Boseong tea plantation and a few other places? Damyang county for bamboo plantation? The strawberry farm? The salt farm? I can't remember because obviously we were being overly ambitious when it comes down to planning. One thing we forgot is that Jeollanam-do is HUGE. Really huge. We didn't want to waste time finding out the route to Boseong tea plantation so all 4 of us wanted to share a cab. But to our horror, we got onto the cab for a very long 1.5 hours before reaching our destination. We also crossed over to another gun (otherwise known as county) and the cab fare came up to 79,000KRW.
By the time we head to Boseong green tea plantation, it was nearly 11am. We explored around the area and took some photos. Honestly, the view was pretty breathtaking but I didn't know why there was no one working at all. No green tea picking session for us too.
P.S. I always wanted to hide among the flowers. But since there is no flower around, green tea leaves are good too :)
There was a small cafe nearby and we stopped for a green tea bingsu and a green tea icecream shortly after. For 5,000KRW, it was one of the better bingsu I've eaten. We were also one of the only few visitors there, wondering why. Maybe we came on a bad day.
Unwilling to spend another 79,000KRW to cab back to Yeosu, we decided that we should probably take a bus to the nearby interchange and decide our course from then. Afterall, if we manage to get to a bus terminal, there should be inter-city / inter-county / inter-province bus to our next destination. Hence, I had to use my broken Korean to link it up into a full sentence. Amazed that the ahjumma managed to understand me. Even more amazed that I managed to understand her.
But to our horror, there is no way to identify the bus as the bus around the region do not operate with a bus number. Instead, they go by colours. #faint This feels so uneasy. There was also no bus stands / bus stops to indicate where to wait for the bus. The restaurant / cafe operators all had a timing whereby the bus would come by though. So the kind ahjumma told me to sit around for another 30 minutes or so because the next bus is only coming in about an hour. We left for the "bus stop" about 5 minutes away from the cafe.
The only few people I see walking in front were my travel mates. Everyone else pretty came by by car, it was also impossible to hail a taxi here so we had to take the bus no matter what. Unless of course, we asked the cafe ahjumma to help call a cab.
Look how empty and wide the road is. I could even sit in the middle for a photograph. Probably only one car will pass by every 5 minutes or so. This place is incredibly ulu (in Singapore terms) or obscure for city girls like us.
Another view of the very empty road. A bus came by after 1 hr of waiting but it was blue in colour and was on the opposite side. That's the first bus I've seen that has passed by so we were thinking if I understood the ahjumma wrongly. Going by her instructions, the bus should have came within half an hour of our waiting by the road. Finally, a green bus did come by in our direction after 1.5 hours of waiting (that's 2 hours of wait including the 0.5hr in the cafe) for a bus that may or may not come. Moreover, our destination is unclear. I only checked for the direction to the bus terminal but I don't even know which bus terminal we are heading to. We boarded the bus with suspicions.
We got off at an old-looking bus terminal after another 1hr 15mins of bus ride. The first thing I immediately did was to check out if there is any inter-city / inter-county / inter-province bus back to Yeosu. Thankfully there was one to Yeocheon bus terminal, which was nearby our hotel. Thankfully!!! If not we would be stuck in a foreign land with no internet.
Talking about the internet, the stupid EG Sim Card was supposed to last for 45 days. But the last 5 days had practically zero reception. The previous 5 days had reception so slow I couldn't even... And internet had to be non-existent when we needed it most.
Famished and tired, we decided to head for a late lunch at about 2pm. I miss all the banchans. Anything anywhere in Korea, you still get awesome food.
We got the 3.30pm bus tickets back to Yeosu. We were pretty glad we made a smart choice to head back to our hotel. Firstly because there were no buses to Damyang (I think). Secondly we figured it will take another 1-2 hours to head back to Yeosu (thinking that the cab ride already took 1.5 hours). We were right because we reached back to Yeosu at about 6pm.
We headed to the e-mart nearby to have dinner. And I was shopping in the sports section and realise Koreans really are so fashionable. Even their sports wear have interesting / fashionable designs.
And I also ate one of the most awful al-bab there at the foodcourt pffff.
Because we had an early train ride back to Seoul that day, we all wanted to sleep in early. (We had to get up at 5am and leave by 6am because we bought the 7.10am train ticket.) But we figured today was too unadventurous so to compensate for that, we decided to have some supper by the windows at the convenience store in our pyjamas downstairs. I think everyone who came by in were staring at us but heheh we don't really care. Perks of being a foreigner.
No comments:
Post a Comment