Seems like a fun thing to do.

The Boryeong Mud Festival is an annual festival which takes place during the summer in Boryeong, South Korea. The first Mud Festival was staged in 1998 and, by 2007, the festival attracted 2.2 million visitors to Boryeong.

The mud is dug up near Boryeong, trucked to the Daecheon beach area, and dumped at a ‘Mud Experience Land’. The mud is considered rich in minerals and used to manufacture cosmetics…

The mud is dug up near Boryeong, trucked to the Daecheon beach area, and dumped at a ‘Mud Experience Land’. The mud is considered rich in minerals and used to manufacture cosmetics.

Some of the final weekend participants are foreign tourists, and especially American Soldiers, but most of the participants during the week are Koreans, attracted by clever marketing by the town. The town fathers and mothers discovered that the mud is more lucrative as a tourist attraction than using the muddy fields for agriculture. The economy generated from the festival supports the many hotels and restaurants along the waterway and several blocks inland. There is also a great deal to see and do in the vicinity and a free tourist bus takes visitors to local sites, including an impressive coal mine and a famous Buddhist shrine.

Designated as an esteemed festival by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism 2 years running for the improvement in quality of outside support including public TV broadcasts, and invitational performances. As a result, it won the Best Korean Citizen Product Award, Regional Innovation Award, and the got the best results from the Korean Festival Evaluation board.

It has been designated with a one step elevation of the status as an excellent festival by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. For the expansion of the experience event, the training experience and the beach marathon contests have been additionally operated on the beaches of the nearby coastal roadsides. Large-scale prior PR activities have been strengthened, including the improvement of the images by having the heads of the organizational bodies and the program staff participate in the wearing of the mud character costumes, the special edition live broadcasts on Joongang Broadcasting, the full-page publications in Chosun Ilbo, the construction of the homepage of the festival, etc.

As an authorized festival by the Ministry of Culture & Tourism, we unified the Mud House and event place under the concept of Boryeong Mud Cosmetic Globalization. It raised the very interest in the festival and promoted safety for participants as we diversified programs represented by the festivals concept such as Self Massage at the beach, Mud King contest and etc. and made various air-bounce attendance by equipments. Even, as we developed festival character products and sold with an exhibition, the foreigners has remarkably increased. Including 11,960 foreign visitors, there were 1,065,000 visitors.
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