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Hwacheon Ice Fishing Festival | Korean Government Organizing Ice Fishing Festival in January
The Hwacheon county of South Korea gets noisy with thousands of visitors in the month of January. A special carnival named Ice Fishing Festival takes place here every year. This is a small village having population around 65,000. The village remains peaceful all over the year with adjacent hillocks, and beautiful river and lakes around it. This village resides in between south and North Koreas and thus has been hosting cops due to the war between the two areas very often. Half the population of the village is cops. Rest of the people is earning their livelihood by running bars, provisional stores and restaurants for the cops. The tourism department of Korea has started the Ice Fishing Festival 8 years ago to change the atmosphere and lives of the people in this village.
Hwacheon gets covered with ice completely in the month of January every year and layers of ice gets formed on the lakes and rivers near the village. Then residents of the village and visitors from other places also set up to Hwacheon with fishing rods and related equipment for fish hunt. The people catch fish that roam under ice layers, by making holes to the layer. Fishing competitions to catch fish of Sanchionio and Cherry salmon kinds gets conducted normally. These two kinds are considered to be the most valuable fishes all over the world. As making holes in the 12-16 feet dense ice layer is very difficult, tourism department of Korea is inviting visitors after making holes in the layers.
Hwacheon ice fishing festival is the biggest festival of such kind in the world and thus Korean government announces about fishing festival in the month of December of every year. This festival continues for three weeks during which more than 10 lakh visitors participate in the festival. Several stalls are also are arranged here to avail the visitors to have taste of the various dishes made with fish. Some other competitions like ice idol making, ice soccer, and ice hockey also gets held here. The place got highly reputed and thus visitors have to reserve their place for fishing at Hwacheon village.
