Here’s mud in your eye!
For 50 weeks of the year, Boryeong is a charmless coastal city of seafood restaurants, tacky motels and average beaches. Extensive recent regeneration – including the erection of plastic palm tress – has padded over some of the grimness, but as your taxi takes you from the isolated train station, a wide vista of grey, unfinished construction sites greets your entrance to the town.
Located 190km south-west of Seoul with nothing but the Yellow Sea separating it from the Chinese city of Qingdao, Boryeong is just another dot on the map. But for two weeks every July, the annual Mud Festival attracts over two million visitors to this city of just 100,000 people.
The reason? Boryeong says its mud has special powers to refresh your skin and rest your soul. Koreans and foreigners flock from every corner of the country to Boryeong’s Daecheon beach to sample this mythical mud.
Over 200 tonnes of the stuff is deposited by the edge of the beach, allowing visitors to roll around in mud wrestling pits, baths, slides and other activities. The slimy, sloppy gloop is even thrown around in spectacular mud fights that is impossible to escape from. There are also large ‘mud sinks’ dotted along the beachfront, all with accompanying paint brushes, so you can cover every inch of your body in mud.
Meanwhile, on the main street, local entrepreneurs set up stalls selling whatever mud can be extracted from the ground. Soaps, hand cream, face care and jewellery costs a little bit more in this part of Korea.
In 2008, the Mud Festival was worth in the region of €45 million to the local economy. And local businesses are quick to take advantage. Accommodation that would normally cost €55 a night for a double bed rocketed to €92 per person, if our hotel was anything to go by.
Boryeong is not like other Korean towns. There are no cell phones stores, internet cafés, opticians or French-style bakeries here – just an endless collection of restaurants, hotels and hostels, fairground rides and karaoke rooms.
One central café transforms itself after dark into the kind of nightclub more commonly found in the likes of Temple Bar. Under the wall menu for lattes and Americanos, the crowd ‘dances’ in the most suffocating conditions. It feels like Ibiza without the fish and chips.
Despite the local tourist board’s considerable effort to promote the power of the mud, the festival’s popularity really lies more in its uniqueness. Foreigners appear to outnumber Koreans by as many as 3-to-1, and the festival is particularly popular among the 37,000 US troops stationed on the peninsula, but when 20,000 people are painted from head to toe in mud, its virtually impossible to distinguish nationalities.
For many foreigners, the Mud Festival is seen as a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but this year was my second excursion to the beach. Two years ago, an old woman charged seven of us €30 a night to sleep in the kitchen of her spare apartment. She packed in 18 people for the night all together.
Boryeong’s Mud Festival also has a reputation for being a place of hard drinking, harder partying and outlandish behaviour, but in reality it’s an event of somewhat controlled madness. It offers a convenient escape from the polluted monster of Seoul, and for those of us living in the capital, no price can be attached to experiencing clean air and sea breezes every few months.
Meanwhile, South Korea’s biggest rock festival is on the horizon, featuring the likes of The Stone Roses, James Blake and Radiohead. Indeed, summer has arrived – and so has the rain, finally!
Andrew Farrell works as an English language teacher in Korea.
