East Coast Vacation part 2: Haesindang Penis Park

part one - part two - part three

Our second stop on our trip up the east coast was Haesindang Penis Park. There's a regular bus that runs up the east coast to Sokcho stopping at many towns en route. we paid about 23,000 KRW for a ticket from Gyeongju to Samcheok. In the end we jumped off the bus early at a fishing village called Imwon and took a cab to the park from there.

Imwon


Haesindang Penis Park

This park is a difficult one to explain. It's located above a village called Sinnam a short while south of Samcheok. The coastal views from this park are stunning and that's before we throw the hundreds of penis carvings into the mix. Some of them are funny, some a bit weird and some are just straight up disturbing.

Here's the "legend" of the park as written on the Korean tourism website:

There once lived a young maid who was engaged. One day, the maid took her husband’s boat out to sea to harvest seaweed. Her husband dropped her off at a rock that was at a distance from the beach. After promising to pick her up later, he returned to the beach to do his work. Later, the weather changed, and brought with it strong winds and pummeling waves. The man couldn’t rescue his wife and she ultimately drowned. Since then, the village people caught no fish and some said that it was because of the dead maid. To soothe the spirit of the dead maid, the village people made several wooden carvings and held religious ceremonies on her behalf. After a while, the fish slowly returned and the villagers were able to live comfortably again. The place where the maid died was named Aebawi Rock and the building where the religious ceremony is held twice a year was named Haesindang. The ceremony is still honored today as a traditional folk event.

They must have dumbed down that version of the story to avoid freaking potential tourists away. The version I heard is that the husband urinated into the sea to appease his wife's spirit. That still makes little sense to me unless the couple liked to indulge in water sports. You see the sculptures here are very unusual. You will notice that some of these sculptures don't seem to have any relation to the legend at all! Pregnant women with raging hard ons and penises growing out of there heads? It all gets a little too wild. Enjoy!


I'm easing you into this with a pretty ordinary wooden nob.

Err, okay.

Dicknose.

This is just disturbing. Wonderful blossoms though.

The cock cannon

Some admirers of fine artillery.

A proper dickhead (the sculpture, not Jenny)

I'm not entirely sure what this is, but it looks like a fella sucking himself off.
In fact I think it must be based on Dalharubang - the famous statues on Jeju Island.

Anyway, enough of that sexy stuff. Here are some more blossoms to clean your palate...


part one - part two - part three