July was a very muddy month. Not only did I attend the Boryeong Mud Festival (which I believe attracts more foreign visitors then any other festival in Korea), but I also visited a very muddy island.

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Muuido Island

To celebrate the 4th of July (which, yes, I realize isn’t a Korean holiday), a couple friends and I decided to visit an island fairly close to Incheon Airport called “Muuido”. To get there, we had to take 2 buses (a bus to the airport, then a shuttle), a ferry (which literally only took about 3 minutes to cross from the mainland to the island), and then another bus to the beach.

The journey was definitely worth it.

During the day, it was a somewhat busy spot, with people not only enjoying the water, but having fun with a zipline, hiking, and daytime camping.

At night the island became a ghost town. If you wanted to leave and didn’t make the last ferry, you were stuck there until morning. Luckily, we reserved some huts. Once the sun went down, we relaxed and watched a friend of ours do some fire spinning.

Once the sun rose, we were able to see one of Muuido’s most prominent features – the mudflats. The tide at Muuido goes incredibly far out, which pretty much just leaves a bunch of mud. At certain points, it almost feels like you’re just in the middle of the desert.

We saw families looking for crabs (one family even found a small octopus), getting dirty, and generally just looking for what seemed like the following nights dinner.

When I say the tide goes out, I mean it goes out! I walked a good 30 minutes, and I still had yet to reach the ocean.

My favorite part of the island was definitely the island itself. It looks gorgeous. It has some awesome rock formations that look like they came straight out of the island from Jurassic Park. There was even a couple people using the cliffs to go rock climbing!

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Boryeong Mudfest

Near the end of the month, some friends and I journeyed to the small town of Boryeong for the fairly famous Mudfest and had a ton of fun.

Unlike Muuido, I didn’t actually care for Boryeong’s beach. It wasn’t all that special, and as the day went on the tide covered a pretty large chunk of the beach anyway. There was sand, there was water, it’s what you expect out of a beach.

The average beach was more than okay though, because the biggest highlight of the festival is getting incredibly dirty. There’s mud fights, mud slides, competitions where you get mud thrown on you if you lose, and in general just about anything you can think of that results in you getting dirty.

You can also get your face painted with colored mud, which was pretty cool. I didn’t have my camera on me at the time, but we saw some guy completely covered in blue mud from head to toe, including his glasses.

If you want to take a break from getting dirty, there’s some live music to enjoy. Just be sure you’re not around for the tomato fight!

As we were waiting on the train platform to head home, we witnessed this fantastic sunset over the rice fields. The beach at Boryeong might not have some great views, but the train station sure does!

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To see more of Ryan’s photography head over to his official website theRyanography.com