bathin in the yellow sea!

By Nicole Damiano, ASTA Verified Travel Advisor with FG Luxury Travel · Updated August 2026

Well, its about 12:30am on Saturday night/Sunday morn and as expected, we are doin what we rock stars in Asia do!…..right Nicole!!!??

oh…..

ok, well i’ll carry on without her this time.

So today we treked it out to Gamami Beach which is a little over an hour west of us in Gwangju. The weather was absolutely perfect so after breakfast, which I may not have mentioned, has become a priority in my life, we headed to the bus station in search of sun, sand and scantily clad asians.

We found the sun, we found the beach and we found the asians (usually not an issue here), but the scantily clad part was a negative. In fact, not only do they all wear shirts into the water, some even wear heels! There were only about 5 or six people including ourselves actually laying on beach towels but even they had huge umbrellas. They love the water and their tubes though so most of the day the water was packed but as we have been made aware a few times before, the sun is not a fan favorite amongst Korean folk.

…i know.

As we are not one to shy away from making spectacles of ourselves, we did the unthinkable, we removed our shirts…Nicole even took her whole dress off! So yes, there we were, at the beach, in bathing suits…blasphemous. But nonetheless, alot of fun as all the ajumas looked on in disgust and the teenage boys nearly fainted everytime Nicole walked near 😉

For lunch, we found a tent selling, hard boiled eggs korean corn on the cob, tofu soup and hot dogs on a stick (or what we thought was a hot dog). That with a smothie cost us about $7 so i’ll take it every time.

The water was extra warm and the beach sand was very different from anything we had ever seen. There were little balls of sand literally everywhere that looked like dippin dots ice cream that were actually being hand, or should i say “claw” made by these little crabs that were all over the place but you wouldn’t know it since they run into holes whenever you come near.

We made some friends with the little one in the water until Nicole called him crazy in korean which prompted him to have a mini seizure so we swam off and pretended it never happened.

Now after some napping by me and reading by Nicole we decided to head out but no day would be complete without some random act of Korean kindness right? Right. So we asked at the beach pavillion what bus to take home and were told where to catch the bus by two very nice people and so we went to wait for the bus. The bus we needed was going to be about a 30 minute wait but after waiting about 2 minutes thise same two people from the pavilion drove up and offered us a ride to the transfer stop about 25 minutes away! Shocked, but knowing that in Korean culture its rude to decline we hopped in and got an express ride to the terminal. Here’s nicole trying to figure out how to write “we are very greatful for your kindness” in korean to them while we rode.

So, our first real beach day was a success and next weekend we’ll be doing it again but we’ll be campin out in our new tent. Stay tuned!