"One, two, three . . ." M&M trailed off as he counted the photographers. ". . . thirty four, thirty five. Thirty five of them! They're like locusts! They just keep coming!"
The participants of the photography contest had corralled us against the water, their huge SLR cameras aimed at us like rifle scopes. The clicks of the shutters was just background noise to the pleas of "One more, okay? One more time, okay?" We four westerners stood in the sun, striking pose after pose and (most of us) struggling to keep smiles on our faces.
"The photographers," our host, Isaiah explained, "are in a competition to see who can take the best photo. That's why they all want to take a picture of you guys; you're interesting and different."
And, we were. Myself, M&M, Lemonade, and Lord Oswell Firewine were the only Westerners there (other than two ladies that we saw very, very briefly). As such, we were bestowed celebrity status complete with camera-armed paparazzi. We dodged the cameras as best we could and took in all the sights of the mud festival.
That is, we saw stuffed squid, mud, robotic puppies for sale, mud, stuffed pork intestines, mud, lots of hats and umbrellas, mud, free beer, mud, colorful statue-type people, and mud. Did I mention the mud?
I only mention the mud because I fell in it.
Twice.
Sunday, July 17, 2011 was the first annual Mud Festival of Goheung County in South Korea. There were booths of food and more booths of food and drums and dancing and singing and . . . you get the picture. There were also mud-olympics.
They had a mud footsal competition, which is sort of like soccer, but in knee-deep mud. They had mud wrestling. They had mud tug-of-war. They had mud platform tug-of-war, where each team of five participants stood on a Styrofoam block. They had mud-board races where a person would lie on their stomach on a long, broad, ski-looking board, and push themselves through the mud with their arms. They had a bicycle relay. Yes, they had a bicycle relay, and yes, we signed up for the bicycle relay. Despite his skill with the motorcycle (hey, balancing a bicycle should be easy after riding a motorcycle, right?), I couldn't convince M&M to join our team. And Lord Oswell Firewine insisted that because of the shockingly ungentlemanly behavior of certain people in his childhood, he never learned to ride a bicycle. So, Lemonade, two Korean girls, and myself made the four-person team.
Let me preface this next bit by saying that I can ride a bike. I can ride a bicycle like nobody's business. I can ride a bike and talk on the cell phone at the same time. That's how good I am.
However . . .
I cannot ride a muck-covered bicycle on a wooden plank 18 inches wide that has been smeared with slimy, slippery mud.
I sat on the bicycle, pushed off, and slid right into the mud.
As I sank hip-deep into the muck, I couldn't help but think that Lord Oswell Firewine would have done as well as I in this competition.
Lemonade came to my rescue and hoisted me out of the muck. I scrambled back onto the bicycle, pedaled, and slid off the board again. The third time, though, was a charm. I pedaled to the end of the planks and hopped off. I handed the bike to my Korean teammate and she pedaled across the plank to give it to Lemonade, who also fell off the board several times. He made it to my end and our fourth teammate pedaled to the other side like she was pedaling through the flower-dotted countryside instead of a huge expanse of limb-sucking mud.
So, thanks to our Korean team-mates, we made it to the semi-finals where we were given the bicycle with the crooked handles. Fortunately, I noticed the crooked handles right away and managed to get across the board without falling in once. Yay for me! However, trying to quickly explain to my Korean teammate that we had drawn the short-stick, bicycle-wise, proved difficult. She fell in twice. By the time we picked her out of the mud the second time, our two competitors had already completed their runs.
We had to be content with third place.
And bronze medals.
And prize money.
And the warm, fuzzy feeling that we were all going home as champions.
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