Boryeong Mud Festival

21st July

The mud festival is held annually at Daecheon Beach, Boryeong, on the west coast of Korea. It's only 1hr 15mins on the train from Cheonan.

We arrived and wondered around for a while deciding what to do - there were food stands, cocktails and drinks stands, a "rock" concert going on on the beach, another stage with some "sexy" Korean dancers wearing next to nothing, mud painting, coloured mud painting, stands where you could make mud soap and mud candles... and in the middle of it all were a load of inflatable slides, obstacle courses and mud wrestling.

We got ourselves ready and painted ourselves with mud then we played on the beach for a while waiting for our session to begin on the slides. The beach was lovely but so crowded, I imagine on a normal day when there are fewer people it's really nice. The sea was warm, and it was nice to cool down and have a swim.

Whilst we were in the water we spotted a Korean man walking waist deep in the sea wearing a shirt and trousers! Behind him his entire family were following - fully dressed! Very strange. One man even had a waterproof jacket on!

By the "rock" music stage there was a giant water cannon that sprayed freezing water at the crowd of "ravers" - that was pretty fun. The heavy use of inverted commas is because the rock music was just a cover band singing The White Stripes and Bon Jovi, and the ravers weren't really raving, they were just trying to get wet - the PA system wasn't nearly loud enough.

I liked the mud fest, it was fun and cool to see but I wouldn't go again for the following reasons:

1. It was too busy. We bought a wrist band so we could have unlimited goes on the slides and inflatables but there were so many people there that we queued for 45 minutes to go on one slide then gave up.
2. There were lots of large groups of loud obnoxious Americans who were showing themselves up by being too drunk and too annoying.
3. Somebody stole Ric's flip-flops, and that really pissed us off.

Here's the pics:

Muddy mob.

Some of the slides.

Daecheon beach when we first arrived. Later on you couldn't even see the sand .

Muddied-up. Check out the supercool free visor I got ...