The Boryeong Mud Festival: a day in the mud pits

The Boryeong Mud Festival had been on my list for years, one of those events
that turns up on every list of the world's most ridiculous. I was living in
Hong Kong, a long weekend appeared, I checked the dates, and the festival was
on.

It happens every July on Daecheon Beach, a couple of hours south of Seoul on
the west coast, and it is built around mud: the mineral-rich grey mud the
town is famous for and sells as cosmetics. They bring it to the beach and you
spend the day in it. Mud pools, mud slides, a mud prison, team games, a
filthy playground beside the sea.

I had booked a tour so as not to do it alone, and had pictured a minibus of
like-minded idiots. Instead I was collected in an ordinary car with two older
ladies and a young girl. I changed into the outfit I had bought in Hong Kong
for exactly this. At the gates I felt like the only excited participant over
the age of ten, though plenty of people my age turned up later to compete
with.

The arena is not huge, so within a couple of hours I had done every slide and
every pit and had mud in places mud should not reach. The team games brought
out a side of me; I do not lose well. Most of the crowd were teenagers or the
parents who had brought them. I was king of the castle.

By early afternoon it was scorching and I was caked, so I walked down the
beach into the sea and let the waves do the rest. Lunch, a swim, and we called
it a mud day. On the way back the tour pulled in at a long suspension bridge
over a lake dotted with floating houses, a calm contrast to the chaos we had
just left.

The festival is not deep or cultural. It is a few hours of being completely,
joyfully filthy on a beach full of strangers, and sometimes that is exactly
the trip to book on an hour's notice.