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Published: July 25th 2009
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Summer is in full swing and what better way to enjoy some sun than at the beach. Annually Boryeong, some two and a half hours by train South of Seoul, holds a mud fest. Yes, an excuse for just about every westerner in South Korea to hit the beach and get silly and dirty....it’s a recipe for fun!
7:40 am, excitement at an all time high and time to taxi to the train station. We got lucky that our seasoned mud festing mates organised us train tickets so that we weren’t subjected to a gruelling 6 hour bus ride! Getting to the station was proving to be a little challenging though cause Megum is a little quiet at that time of the morning, in fact we had to knock on the window of a snoozing ajoshie just to be bounced cause he initially misheard our destination so he wasn’t prepared to adjust his reclined seat to take us to the station....well that was until he somehow 10 minutes after our initial enquiry decided that he would actually take us to Suwon. I think it was largely cause he knew we had no option (since we had spent 10 minute trying
to find a cab to no avail and time was ticking cause we had a train to catch) so he figured he could con us for enough money making it worth his while to give up his morning nap!
Naturally I climbed into the front seat and boy oh boy was that a mistake. I swear this ajoshi was still well liquored cause his driving was mad, in fact at one point he missed the on-ramp so he proceeded to stop and reverse his car back in the direction of a fast approaching truck behind us so that he could take the on-ramp! I think he thought that by continually telling us how beautiful he thought we were and after numerous chants of I love you South African that we may forgive him for his poor driving....and admittedly initially his entertainment value was winning him back some points until he decided that he would rub my leg and make very inappropriate gestures and propose marriage at which point I had to get very stern with this well dank ajoshi! Yet again I manage to clock up another carzy taxi driver story to add to the already long enough list.
Dodge dodge dodge! I was super thankful to arrive at Suwon station even if we did have to part with double the amount we should have, crazy man!
After a nice chilled train ride we were delivered in Boryeong shortly before lunch and festivities were already in full swing. While our seasoned mud fest mates had done a sterling job organising us train tickets and a properly convenient minbak right in the heart of town to crash for the evening, they sadly couldn’t prearrange the weather so instead of catching a tan we were subjected to what can only be described as partly cloudy weather for the most part with sporadic torrential downpours! While beach and rain don’t really gel it totally didn’t put a figurative damper on my weekend, I had the biggest party it was fantastic!
I was very much expecting to arrive in another of South Korea’s one horse seaside towns teaming with a bunch of mad westerners slopping around in a muddy marsh type beach but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised! Boryeong is an awesome beach-side town with a very nice beach and they do in fact bring the mud in
from a nearby source so you can choose to either spend the entire time caked in mud or you can opt to coat, rinse and reapply or alternatively you can lounge on the beach and stay clear of the mud if you are not convinced by the Koreans assurances that the mud has some kind of revitalising properties!
We spent the afternoon messing about in the mud and then braved the insane downpour in order to watch the most spectacular fireworks shows I have ever seen and then what better way to warm up when you are completely soaked through than to party into the early hours of the morning!
We were all really hoping and praying that the weather would be on our side the following day since we were only catching the train at 3pm but sadly the weather decided that it would in fact step it up a notch with hurricane type winds and rain rather than sunny skies so we had no option but to pack up our things and where else do you go when you have 3 and a half hours to kill when the beach is not an option....E-Mart. Yet again
as luck would have it I managed to land myself in the front seat of a taxi driven by a maniac who has clearly never been warned that driving at 120 through massive pools of water in the pouring rain could end in disaster! Truthfully but white knuckle we somehow managed to reached the E-mart without aquaplaning and I couldn’t have been gladder to get out of a taxi for the second time that weekend!
I don’t think the Boryeon E-mart has ever seen so much western action and nor had the little massage parlour. I mean what on earth do you possibly do in E-mart for 3 hours.... you opt to pay your 10 bucks for a supposedly relaxing massage right. All I can say is that I have never ever ever in my life experienced that level of pain ever. I’m not 100% sure if the young masseuse was unleashing the fury on me since she went from 1 customer a week to a never ending cue of time biding westerners resulting in exhaustion on her part or if she just didn’t have a clue what she was doing or if in fact I should just make
a mental note to never ever go for a Korean massage ever again. I woke up the next day with such sore shoulders I’m surprised the bruises weren’t visible. I suppose like everything in South Korea it’s all about notching it down as part of the experience but perhaps not an experience I will be rushing to repeat!
While I’m sure the festivities would have been even more crazy had the rain not deterred some party spirits mud fest was truly well worth the trip and I will definitely try and get back on a sunny weekend in the near future cause it’s such a brilliant event! I think that such an event is just impossible to describe in words you just have to be there but hopefully the photos give you a little sense of just how much fun I had!
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