JEJU-DO, SOUTH KOREA—Every year on Jeju-do, a small island off the southwest coast of South Korea, thousands of people get together and set a mountain on fire. That’s the point of the Jeju Jeongwol Daeboreum Fire Festival, which this year fell on March 1. The idea is to celebrate the first full moon of the lunar new year (the Korean word “Daeboreum” translates as “Great Full Moon”), and to recreate the traditional annual burning of harvest grasses to exterminate harmful insects and ensure a frutiful year.
That’s the official line, anyways. The truth is that it’s a great excuse to stage a spectacle that brings hundreds of tourists to Jeju from the Korean mainland, and to ratchet up the media attention for Korea’s tourist industry (which, while nowhere near as muscular as those of China or Southeast Asia, does a decent business among Asian travellers). And, you know, to set stuff on fire.
For Western-looking foreigners, Korean festivals have the added bonus of making you feel like a coked-up rock star with an eight-foot neon boner that shoots lightning. Within fifteen minutes of arriving at the site—an idyllic grassy hill sandwiched between highway and ocean—I’d been cornered by a hungry Korean television reporter wanting to know where I was from, what I thought of the event, what my wishes were for the coming year. By the end of the evening, I’d been photographed (by my best guess) around seventeen thousand times, danced with dozens of women dolled up in traditional Korean garb, been introduced to the mayor of Jeju, and granted the privilege of joining the Druid-like caravan of people allowed to carry torches made of bamboo and gasoline-soaked rags to the base of the hill in order to light it up. I may as well have been David Beckham for all the fanfare. (Although, I must say, I’m glad I’m not.)
Fire is a staple of Korean festivals, although this is the big one for pyro fans. This year marked the twelfth annual staging of the event, and a rare instance in which it didn’t actually take place on the Daeboreum holiday. That was the week before, and although they tried their best to make it work, strong winds forced organizers to cancel at the last minute. Methinks there’s a heightened sense of unease around fire since National Treasure No. 1 got burned to cinders last month.
The rescheduled blaze, however, went off without a hitch. There were fewer vendors than usual, and a conspicuous absence of whole pigs roasting on spits, which you can usually find lining the walkways, turning serenely under yellow-and-red striped tents and being carved by busy old women into heaping plates of pork served with sweet and spicy red pepper paste. You could still buy a slew of Korean goodies: red bean cakes, fish loaf, ppeondaegi, Roman candles in bundles (a hit with the kids), beer, and soju, the national tipple that tastes like water but will make your eyes vibrate and your spine thrum like a slapped bass guitar string. Also, corndogs, which are an unlikely favourite here and come in a variety of styles: plain, double-dipped, rolled in breadcrumbs, flecked with tiny cubes of potato.
Of course, the main attraction is the giant fire, which starts at the bottom of the hill when the torchbearers touch their flames to strategically placed bales of hay, and crawls up the slope to ignite explosives shaped into Korean lettering that wishes good luck and, appropriately enough, no accidents. Once the fire reaches full roar, you can actually go right up to it to offer prayer, warm your hands or just giggle at the total lack of Western safety standards in play. If this thing were to be held in North America—the closest thing is probably Burning Man, and even they have a ban on fireworks—there’d be electric fencing and armed guards to keep people from getting too close to the giant potential lawsuit towering in front of them. Here, people bring their toddlers up to bask in the glow of the inferno, and there are only a few public officials strolling around to tell you to avoid falling face first into third-degree burns. While my mom would probably be aghast, it’s nice to be given full responsibility for your own safety, and even the drunkest revellers seemed able to avoid stumbling into death by immolation.
At any rate, it’s much less threatening than what awaits me tomorrow: my first day of school. I dare you to find anything more terrifying than trying to explain the Present Perfect to a bunch of kids whose command of English barely allows them to tell you what they ate for lunch.
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