I don't own a motorcycle, but the protagonist of this story, as of so many other romantic Road Trip stories (cf. Zen and the Art of...) is a motorcycle. My Little Scooter That Could often acts like it believes itself to be a real motorcycle, especially on this 'mammoth' road trip I took for the three day Korean Constitution Day Weekend.
The Mud Festival was on in Chung Chong province, about 350 Km from Seoul, and I had never, ever even thought of taking my scooter, which is decorated to look like a 'Ska-mobile' and elicits a lot of jests from my friends, for more than a five minute spurt to get groceries or go to work, etc. My friend Lex insisted that scooters were underrated, and that he had once driven a 'Tact' brand scooter (that's a 'Pinto' to those of you not in the know about them) across the mountains of Kangwando to the East Sea (that's the Japan sea to those of you not worried about offending Koreans), and that it had done just fine.
After an hour of haranguing me to get off my arse and follow him and his motorcycle down to the festival, Lex finally came out with a soliloquy worthy of Captain James T. Kirk - a very moving piece of rhetoric, actually, and so I threw together a change of clothing and we whisked across the river to try to find our way out of this stinky metropolis of 18 million.
After three hours of exasperating zooming around in the dark, sharing six lane highways with eighteen wheelers and breathing their smog, the white-knuckling had finally got to me. Lex agreed to stop in the next town, which turned out to be a little village named "Paran". We expected to see the usual generic Korean mish-mash of stores and corporate names, the completely ubiquitous face of the Korean countryside.
Instead the first thing we saw was a sign that said: Store: Russian, Uzbekistan, Kirgizstan, Thailand, Indonesia, Mongolia food. So we stopped in and admired the cheese and sausage, the packets of Nasi Goreng mix, and the curious Usbekis who manned the store. They told us about a cheap hotel around the corner, so we turned the corner and discovered even more foreign stores. For those of you who don't know Seoul or why it should be astonishing to find so much ethnic diversity in such a small place like Paran, let me just say that Seoul has never, ever really had decent and affordable Chinese cuisine, and until very recently only had one Thai restaurant where dinner cost twenty dollars. This is not because Koreans don't like eating out, or not because they don't like 'ethnic foods' - but rather, because they have never had much exposure.
So that night, we REALLY felt like it was 'vacation', since after all, we were eating Adobo chicken, drinking Red Horse beer, and sing-a-longing to Tagalog songs with a bunch of very friendly filipino guys. One of them turned out to have a voice identical to some seventies pop icon, but I cant think of the name just now- but the effect was quite astonishing, and as we talked to him we realized that this dude worshipped the music of the seventies and eighties...as do many filipinos.
The next day we hit the road again, this time it wasn't such white-knuckle driving; just a nice pleasant three hour cruise to the mud festival town, Daechon near Boryung.
This festival has been going for a few years now, this will be my third time I've gone, and though I'm going to say a lot of negative things about it, it is hands down the closest thing Korea has got to real, honest-to-goodness 'fun'.
It was originally modelled on the Tomatina in Spain; the town fathers undoubtedly were quite interested in the story of this little nothing town in northeastern Spain whose only resource was tomatoes in harvest time....so they decided to make what became one of the world's quirkiest festivals; the largest tomato throwing event in Christendom (or under any religious hegemony, for that matter, though I'm sure the Korean buddhists have thrown a few pickles at eachother, and Japanese Zen masters have flung a few grains of rice around from time to time).
That was the concept. But unfortunately it was the corporation, not the town pushing the event. Poryung mud company is a cosmetics manufacturer that makes a panoply of soaps, scrubs and creams from the tidal flat alluvial ooze near the town. Their idea, I suppose, was to drum up a little publicity for the product by highlighting the naturalness of its source. The nearby beachtown, Daechon, was ideally situated to host such an event.
At first their approach was open minded and experimental. They offered amusements like a mechanical bull covered in mud, mud wrestling and climbing a mud covered plank. It attracted mostly foreigners, and the first three years consisted of about twenty of us, covered in mud and shreiking to the delight of about 150 photographers, who couldn't get enough of the images of bodies covered in mud.
Now it is a corporate dream come true, a mud-covered freak show of epic proportions. Unfortunately, though the number of people attending and mudding up for the cameras has increased tenfold, and the number of people participating has finally leveled out....
to be continued
