Sea-Parting In Jindo

Note: Sorry for the hiatus, life happened.

Two weekends ago I found myself in the southern end of Korea on the island of Jindo for the annual sea-parting festival. Every year in the spring a narrow land pass opens up for about an hour between Jindo and its neighbouring island, Modo due to the low tide. The land pass that appears is most likely some sort of sand bar, and is about 2.9 km long and almost 40m wide. Thousands of people go each year to walk along this sandbar that appears. Many of the Koreans spend that time looking for “treasures” from the ocean. Mostly what I would consider icky seafood.

So as per usual, we left Seoul very early so that we could arrive in the afternoon (it was about a 5 hour drive). Once we arrived we were taken to the beach near the festival so we can set up our tents. Of the group I went with my friend and I were the only ones who wanted to camp on the beach, so we needed to acquire new friends since we would have to share a tent. We quickly found an awesome couple. The awesomeness coming from the girl who also went to Carleton University (in or around the same years as me too). Now, camping on a beach sounds awesome, but it’s very much a love-hate situation. The pro to this situation is that we slept on the beach and got to wake up to the sound of the ocean. The con is that afterwards I found sand in everything. I’m not even sure how that happened. The science of sand?

Once we had our tent set up, we all went in search of beer and wellies. Wellies being the rainboot-almost-like-hipwaders-but-more-like-thighwaders. That’s a new word, use it. Here they are, in all their awesomeness:

I kept them for the impending doom/rain that is July and August. Always be prepared.

Once we had collected these things, we were off to the shore to begin the trek across the sand bar. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t hoped it would resemble this:

But it was still a very cool experience. It was hard walking where is was deep, I hit my bad foot numerous times on rocks. About 20 minutes in, I did the most expected thing and uttered the words “I need to pee”. At this point we were so far from any toilets and there’s only an hour and a half opening for the sand bar. So I pulled up my big girl pants and dealt with it. Once we got to the exposed sand bar it was easier to walk across, and moving about became less painful (re: foot).

Unfortunately we didn’t make it all the way to the other island before we had to turn back. Once we walked off the sand bar and back into the water, it was very cool to feel the tide rushing against my ankle’s. Luckily it wasn’t strong or high enough to knock us over. That would have been unpleasant. Once we finished the walk in the ocean, we headed back to our campsite. Our tent-mates had already come back and befriended some Koreans who were picnicking near our tent and invited us t join them. One thing about joining Koreans is they will feed you lots of galbi (which they were bbqing) , kimchi and beer. It could be worse. They were extremely friendly, and asked us many questions about ourselves and our time so far in Korea.

After they had to leave, we joined the rest of our group for a bonfire on the beach. I might have run into the ocean at some point before going to bed.

Stayed tuned for pictures from our hike we went on the next day on Jindo island.