THE SOUTH KOREAN movie industry has been on the upswing for several years, but there's never been anything quite like this: 350 reporters, about half of them foreign media, pack into six buses and a convoy of vans and SUVs and travel almost five hours to catch a glimpse of Bae Yong-joon, the nation's No1 international heartthrob.
Leaving Seoul at 8am, our entourage travels through the snowy mountains of Gangwon province to the small seaside town of Samcheok for the biggest press junket South Korea has held. All this to report on Bae's latest film effort, the weep-fest April Snow.
It's a long trip, especially when you factor in the travel time to South Korea that the 150 foreign journalists (mostly Japanese) have made, for about half an hour on location and another 40 minutes in a press conference. But for Bae, apparently anything is worth it.
The South Korean media has pushed Hallyu, or 'the Korean wave', pretty hard in recent years, taking any opportunity to talk about how well Korean actors and singers are doing around Asia and the rest of the world. Recently, however, reality has begun to catch up to the rhetoric.
Singers such as BoA and boy-band Dong Bang Shin Gi have scored big hits in Japan, Hong Kong and around Asia. And films such as Taegukgi, My Sassy Girl and A Tale of Two Sisters have pulled in some respectable box office, too.
But they all pale before Bae, star of the TV series Winter Sonata and the movie Untold Scandal. Think tanks and tourism bodies have estimated the economic gains of Winter Sonata as being worth hundreds of millions of dollars.