Boryeong Mud Festival!

July 17th and 18th was the opening weekend of the Boryeong Mud Festival. Several of my friends, including Diana and Bosun, and I joined a poorly-organized and over-priced Daegu Pockets tour that took us four hours west to Daecheon Beach.

There is nothing traditional, or even especially Korean, about the Boryeong Mud Festival (Korea seems to jump on any excuse for a festival!), and more than half of those in attendance are foreigners. So is should come as no surprise that the event is mostly an excuse for expats and GIs to binge-drink in the daytime. The mud itself is supposed to be very healthy and full of good stuff for your skin, but no one really cares about that when the festival comes around!

The crappy tour arrangements (over 3 hours of waiting on a bus over two days) and shady sleeping arrangements (drunks from our tour group trying to break into our room all night, even attemping a window entrance, to use the bathroom) aside, the festival itself was pretty fun! When else do mostly-responsible adults have an excuse to play in "therapeutic" mud, as well as climb through a muddy obstacle course, be painted with different colors of mud, go down a mud slide, and engage in a good old-fashioned mud fight?!

Mud slide. The line for this was always ridiculously long, so we never tried it.

You can see, from the left, Diana, Bosun, and I. We're smiling and having fun, but those smiles are just masking our fear.

Some people are VISCIOUS mud-fighters, and that stuff really stings when it hits you!

Daecheon Beach is also wonderful. The best thing was to get absolutely filthy, and then run into the sea to scrape it all off and jump around in the waves.

Diana and I, taken through the protective shield of Bosun's vinyl bag.

Bosun and I, through the muddy camera bag.

Most of these pictures are stolen - I had a plastic bag for my camera but I was usually too afraid to take it out and use it. The top picture is mine; the mud fight scene is from Diana's blog; and the rest belong to Bosun. They're pretty tame compared to what you can find if you search for this festival on Google Images! And I usually provide a link to my full album, but in order to protect the dignity of a few people I won't be making this one public!