I'm gonna be going to South Korea for a year, leaving near the end of December. I can only bring 50 cigars duty free, and my girlfriend can also bring 50, so that makes a hundred I can bring in without having to pay for them. It'll be really hard to pick out only 100 cigars from my collection, of around 3-400, to bring; especially because almost all of them are singles that I have not tried yet. I just got off the phone with some customs guy in South Korea. He told me that the taxes are 40% (of the value) for the national tax and around 70 cents per cigar for the local tax. A rough calculation, estimating the average cost of each cigar at $5, gives me a bill of around $800 to bring 300 cigars. However, I'm not sure how reliable the guy was, because his english was not that good and he kept calling them cigarettes, instead of cigars, even though I kept correcting him.

So, I guess my options are:
-sell a lot of them
-bring them all and pay the duty, which will not happen, too expensive. plus how are they gonna find the value of all my cigars when they are pretty much all different brands and sizes.
-get someone to look after them for a year... Don't really know any that I can trust to do a good job
-package them up and get someone to mail them to me when I'm there.. again the duty problem may arise

I DONT KNOW WHAT TO DO!!
Honestly, I haven't been able to sleep well the last couple of nights thinking about this!