Muan County is a lotus-flower heaven - and the octopus is pretty tasty, too
Despite the festival's cold official English moniker, the venue itself is anything but.
Calm, serene, quiet, albeit scorching hot, the Hoesan White Lotus Ground - where the festival was held earlier this month, boasts Asia's largest lotus patch, sprawling across 30,300 square metres of pristine wetland.
The county is situated at the southwestern tip of the peninsula, about a four-hour drive from Seoul.
Festival visitors enjoyed pleasant and relaxing schooner cruises across the Hoesan Wetland - the "lotus path fantasy boat rides".
The five-day festival had a host of family-friendly activities, such as lotus-root harvesting, making lotus soap and creating lotus dye.
There were cold lotus-water baths for visitors to dunk their legs in, as well, and chilled lotus-leaf brew and tea.
South Jeolla is home of the pumba, and there were plenty of performances throughout the festival.
A pumba is a travelling minstrel show of the type typical during the Joseon period. They were nomads stricken with poverty who roamed from one town to the next staging shows in marketplaces in the hopes of earning enough to eat.
Then, evoking both smiles and scowls of contempt, there was the gigantic wooden bowl of bibimbap, big enough to serve 2,010 adults.
There is much more to be explored in Muan County, like digging for octopus and crabs in the ocean flats after the sun sinks. This is done by torchlight, since the area becomes nearly pitch black once the sun goes down.
The reason for hunting nakji - the octopus - by night is because they're nocturnal and, when the temperature drops, they come out of hiding to look for food.
Visitors are always guaranteed a real culinary treat, since the province is famed for its food.
You can enjoy everything from lotus cookies, lotus noodles, lotus ice cream, lotus bread and lotus dasik - the traditional Korean confection.
But the area is also known for its onions and garlic, and of course the octopus, roasted in open-flame pits, wrapped and skewered on wooden chopsticks and seasoned with sea salt, garlic and sesame oil and seeds.
Most other coastal regions serve nakji on skewers lathered with spicy chilli sauce. As one zealous local claims, "The octopus in other areas doesn't taste as good, so they have to use strong seasoning."
Instead of wooden chopsticks, bundles of straw were used "back in the day". Visitors who take the time to spark conversations with county residents will hear the phrase "back in the day" a lot. No need to be precise about when.
One might wonder why they abandoned such a unique practice.
"It's just a real pain for the restaurant owners and the chefs to clean the straw of dirt and grit," says Chung Hae-man, the head of the county's culture and tourism bureau. "Using chopsticks is faster!"