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Boryeong, a small coastal city up in the northwest of Korea started having a mud festival 11 years ago. This event has become the big go-to event for tourists, and many Koreans also attend. This year it runs from July 12th to the 20th. The town is pretty sleepy during the other three seasons, but because the beaches are so nice, it gets pretty hopping during the summer, and it peaks during the festival, of course. I feel bad for the locals, but I'm sure all the businesses make tons and tons of money for that 9 day period.
Here are some muddy visitors. There were a number of tables with buckets of mud and paintbrushes, so you could paint your skin and not your clothes. The clothes get muddy anyway, so I think the draw must be that painting is fun.
I received an email from ASK Now, the company that got me out here, organizing a trip, with buses from Seoul and Busan. Busan is about an hour away from me. I asked my friend Kent if he wanted to go, and he did. He took the bus from Seoul, since he's up north. The trip consisted mostly of foreign English teachers, mostly Canadian (ASK Now is a Canadian company), but since the Busan trip was run by a Korean travel agency, and since people were allowed to bring any non-teacher friends, there were also some other foreigners and Koreans on the tour.
The package included the bus trip to the festival and accommodations at a minbak, a Korean guesthouse, and for those of us going from Busan, breakfast and a free Kangsan Travel t-shirt given out at Saturday's departure. The shirt is yellow. I like it. The trip would put us at the festival from lunchtime Saturday to late afternoon on Sunday, getting us back to Busan in the late evening.
This trip, which should have been a total blast from start to finish, had its ups and downs. Unfortunately, there were more of the latter. The first one was just getting there. I had to get up before 3am on Saturday to take a train into Busan, and a taxi to the meeting point. Luckily, my boss offered to drive me to the train station at o'dark-thirty, which was very nice of her, so I didn't have to take a taxi.
Once I got to the meeting point, I saw a bunch of white folks hanging around in a circle with backpacks. I asked them if they were going to Boryeong, and they said yes, so I stood around with them until someone indicated a bus to get on. After talking to this kid next to me for a while, one of the travel agents got up at the front and announced that there were too many people on the bus, and they should have enough seats, so there must be some people here who don't belong. It never occurred to me that there would be more than one trip going out from the same spot. I asked the lady if they were with Kangsan travel, and she said no, so I was on the wrong bus. As it turned out, the boy next to me, despite having shown the bus driver his confirmation printout, was also on the wrong bus. By the time he found that out, though, his bus had gone. He was actually able to get a one way ticket on my bus for not too much more than he'd already paid, so we ended up sitting together again. I told him not to feel bad about paying again, because he got breakfast, a t-shirt, and a last-minute bus ride for only 15 bucks.
We were supposed to leave at 7:00, but of course someone was late, and we ended up leaving almost 20 minutes late. We were scheduled to arrive at Boryeong at 11:30, but we didn't get there until 1:00. That really pissed everyone off. I'm not sure if the travel agency misjudged the actual travel time or if the bus driver (whose name was coincidentally Kangsan, same as the agency) was just a slow driver. Luckily, there was a group of Canadian teachers right behind me who were being very entertaining the whole trip. Unluckily that meant I didn't get to take a nap on the bus.
When we finally got there, I had a bit of a hard time finding Kent, who had been at the festival for two hours already, but we finally found each other and he walked me over to the main event area, where there were thousands and thousands of muddy people. I've never been to Spring Break, but it's pretty similar to this shindig. Probably 80% of the foreigners were drunk, and I'm sure a similar percentage of the Koreans were also drunk, whether or not they had children with them. People were allowed to walk around with open alcohol containers, too, which I thought was pretty cool and convenient. Apparently most people consider drunkenness to be a necessity at this event.
The beach was covered in neat little rows of umbrellas; umbrellas on tables, umbrellas on picnic platforms, and umbrellas stuck in the sand with beach chairs and/or picnic pads next to them for people to enjoy. There were even loads and loads of free inner tubes in neat piles on the sand, so you could just grab one and return it when you were finished swimming, or taking a nap in it.
The first thing I did was get in line for the mud vat with Kent. The picture on the side of it showed it being like chest deep, but when I finally climbed up the ladder and over the side, I found it to only be ankle deep. So many people had gone through by then that the mud had dwindled. There were buckets in there to dump mud on yourself or others. Kent went ahead and dumped mud in my eye like an asshole, and since I have issues with even clean water being in my eye, I had to walk right down to the beach to wash it out with burny salt water. I was a little grumpy by this time.
Here are some of the mud apparati. The first one, I think, is some sort of obstacle course. The second one might just be a mud pool, but it looks like it's losing air. I don't even remember taking this picture, actually.
Second, we decided to get in line for one of the mud slides. This line was about a mile long. That's the only big problem with this festival. You have to wait in line forever to do the cool things. There isn't just a huge pool of mud or anything. It's brought in and placed in vats and slides and pools and barrels and such, and not everyone can fit at the same time. We waited for over an hour for this slide, and then just as we were almost next in line, it suddenly lost a bunch of air. The lady doing the announcing for the slide kept telling people that it would take more than twenty minutes to fix and we should go enjoy the rest of the festival. But since most of us had invested so much time, and would just have to go get into another line, we sat our asses down and waited. It actually only took about ten minutes to refill the slide. It kind of burned my skin going down, since there really wasn't any mud on the slide. Oh, well.
After the mud slide, we wandered around a bit and ended up in the muddy pool. It was this shallow pool with about a foot of water and a fine layer of mud at the bottom. It also had this big spout overhead shooting muddy water into the middle. It was fun to stand in front of.
This is not the muddy pool I'm talking about, but it is a pool with mud in it:
By the time we exited the pool, it was rolling around to 4:00, and I hadn't eaten hardly all day. We decided to walk back to the minbak, take a shower, grab some food, and start drinking. I don't know how it was so easy for me to forget about the food and just start drinking, but that happened. Much of what follows is a complete blank for me, but I do remember spending a lot of time hurling on the beach amidst thousands of tourists, and I think I remember wailing, "Why did you do this to meeeee?" at some point. Needless to say, I missed the rest of that day's festival, which included fireworks and probably other cool stuff, or at least just more playing in mud. Kent said it was the fastest deterioration he'd ever seen. One minute I was fine, then three minutes later I was completely incapacitated. I don't remember the transition. Or much before it. Or after.
Because we had to check out of the minbak at 11:00 the next day, but the buses didn't leave until later in the afternoon, Kent and I and the other people staying in the room with us decided not to get muddy on Sunday. We could have taken showers at the public beach showers, but we would have had to take our bags with us to have something to change into, which wouldn't work, of course. The trip was poorly planned in that respect. So after breakfast at the convenience store, we left our bags on our buses and wandered around the beach and the outskirts of the festival, looking at the little shops and stands and such. It was wicked muggy, and awful weather. I wished I had put my bathing suit on, but I didn't think of it, as hung over as I was.
This is the first time I've seen this much haze in Korea without it being smog. It was quite foggy out. What you can barely see the catamarans in the water, but they're there, and they're all being towed in a circle for some reason.
Here are more of the neat lines of umbrellas:
Here are some sharks for Dana. I won't tell you for her sake what kind of establishment the tanks were in front of.
A little bit before 4, my bus left for Busan. It wasn't as long a trip this time, and I was able to sleep for most of it. Luckily the entertaining Canadians were on the other bus this time, and everyone one this bus was either boring or quiet. No one sat next to me, so I didn't have to talk to, or ignore, someone.
When we got back to Busan, one of the travel agents asked how I was getting home. I told her I was going to take the train home, but she suggested I take the subway to the bus station and bus home, since it's faster and cheaper. She pointed me to the subway station, but when she herself went over there once she had finished seeing the rest of the crew off, she found me wandering around it, completely confused. I'm not very good with the subways here. She helped me get a ticket from the machine, and rode with me most of the way, since she lives near the bus station. And she was glad to help me with all this. Koreans are like that.
So the mud fest could have been better, but I still had some fun. Maybe if I come back to Korea for another year, I'll try it again.
