Day 23, Leg 18

Wow.  Only four more walking days and six more calendar days left.  Today was the last day of walking over 30 kilometers.  The walk I'll be doing in two days is projected to be 30K exactly, but it's going to be 28K in reality because Naver insists on plotting a weird course to Hanam-eup, and there's an easy shortcut that shaves off 2K.  The two legs after that will both be 20K or less, then the final day will be nearly 29K.

I left the Jeok Gyo Jang Motel at exactly 5:45 a.m. today, which meant walking in darkness for the better part of an hour before the sun began to peek over the eastern horizon.  It was cold out, but I didn't put on my jacket.  My fingers were frozen as a result; I tucked my left hand into my pants pocket to warm my poor digits.  My right hand, the one holding the trekking pole, had to fend for itself.  The morning was shrouded in fog or mist, and it soon became obvious that the mist wasn't leaving without a fight.  It took until almost 9 a.m., but the sun eventually won out. 

Somewhere around the 10,000-step mark, I encountered a construction site:  another river-spanning bridge was being built.  A man was stationed on the bike path to act as a crossing guard for bikers as well as for truckers carrying heavy loads.  I walked up to the guy, who gave me a cheerfully informal salute, and asked him about what was going on; he said a bridge was indeed being built.  I guessed that the project would take a few years to complete.  The crossing guard asked me about my walk, and then I moved on.

Today was the day I encountered the first of two nasty hills that lie between me and my ultimate goal.  I walked a long time before meeting that hill—so long, in fact, that I began to wonder whether Naver had somehow plotted another easy route for me.  But, no:  the hill was there, waiting for me at the 21,000-step mark.  I took my time ascending it, pausing frequently to catch my breath and to photograph the graffiti written on the sandstone walls flanking the ascending road.  Once I reached the top, I wrote my own graffito, which you'll see in the pics below.  I regret not snapping a pic of someone's cri de coeur:  a person had written "ㅅㅂ" in huge letters.  I'm pretty sure that they stood for "씨발," an interjection that, in the context of a difficult hill, might best be translated as "Fuuuuuck!"  Because the rock is sandstone, all the writing fades pretty quickly; I doubt my little monument to myself will last even a year. At least I've got a photo.

Overall, the thirty-three kilometers went by fairly quickly and smoothly, with relatively little pain.  (I think I'd written in a previous post that today's leg was 32K, but it was actually 33.)  Now that I'm on the stronger meds, I'm taking rest breaks every 20,000 steps instead of every 12K to 15K steps.  I think my feet have been injured in all the ways it's possible for them to be injured while distance walking, so I no longer need to worry about further injuries unless I out-and-out break an ankle or suffer another stress fracture.  The horrific blistering and disgusting peeling of my hands are both clearing up, and I'm no longer wearing a bandage on my nose to protect it from Montgomery Burns's ancient enemy, the sun.  In terms of weight loss, I've been flirting with a three-belt-hole count, but only just.  I don't think I'll get below three holes by the end of the walk.  Too bad.  I was hoping to lose more than four inches off the waist.  As things stand, I can tell I've lost weight, but I'm also aware that no one else will notice this.  When you start off as fat as I did, you need to lose at least 25 kilos before anyone really notices a change.

I'm at the Heitz Hotel, another motel billing itself optimistically as a hotel.  Ads for Heitz started appearing when I was on the hill from hell; the place apparently focuses on bikers.  It's W45,000 per night here, which is not bad at all, given the stellar quality of the accommodations.  My room is clean, large, and well appointed.  There's an electric socket next to my bed, and an electric fan, which is a godsend when you're quick-drying your hand-washed clothes.  The room also has 5G WiFi, and there's a desktop computer that I'm going to try out soon.  If the computer is decent, I may spend all day tomorrow getting a head start on uploading my full-scale photo essays.  I also need to offload a bunch of pics from my phone, which is again nearing capacity.

So here are a few dozen of the 240 pics I took today, during my most arduous walk (which also featured two "pre-hills" and one "post-hill" during the final eight kilometers of today's leg).

The dawn's early light:

Fog?  Mist?  Low-lying cloud? 

This might become my new desktop wallpaper:

Tractor-drivin' mama:

The hill from hell begins:

The first shwimteo, there to tempt you to pussy out and stop early.  Listen not to its siren song:

Graffiti on sandstone:

The second shwimteo, there to sap your will:

This says it all:

"Don't come up here":

Aigo is the Korean cry of agony, distress, and despair:

This isn't the "ㅅ ㅂ" graffito that I referred to earlier.  This is a straight-up "FUCK!"

I had to look up the second part of the Latin expression.  The whole thing is something like, "Seize the day, but put little stock in tomorrow."

The hill never seems to end:

Just short of the summit, I knelt down and scratched out my retarded-looking graffito using a small stone I'd found:

Smug self-satisfaction:

This is the shwimteo where I rested.  Third time's a charm:

The awesome view from the shwimteo down to the Nakdong River:

The other awesome view:

We're on an express elevator to hell:  goin' down!

I had to look up the vocabulary. I think "요철" refers to irregularities in the surface of the ground.  Watch for bumps and cracks, basically. 

That is one messed-up cat carcass:

The long-tailed lizard below was hilarious.  Normally, these guys are extremely skittish, but this little dude just stood there and let me take his picture.  I belatedly realized that his preternatural calm was due to the fact that he was sunning himself.  Lazy bastard.

Like last year, Naver sent me off/away from the main bike path.  This led to several kilometers of back roads, which made for moderately dangerous walking.  Below is a pic of where a major divergence occurred, and I got sent onto another 우회로 (detour).  As you'll see in many of the following shots, the road had no shoulders, which meant more traffic-dodging for yours truly.

Is this a 산신각 or something?  I'd seen another one of these locked-up shrines earlier:

At least it's clear which way to turn if you're going to Namji:

I didn't get the chance to indulge in carbs until very late in today's walk.  I enjoyed my sweets in this strange little shwimteo:

I again photographed a ton of gloves today.  Here's one of them:

Huge squashes.  So well hung that porn star Peter North saw them, began weeping, then beat himself to death with his own hypertrophic schlong:

Anyone know the name of this flower? 

I saw and photographed plenty of burial plots today.  Here's one such plot:

Hints of a bygone Korea abound:

The Namji-eup area has to have the most bamboo I've seen in South Korea.  It's everywhere, and not just in groves, but in actual forests:

At this point, I'm in town.  All this heavy equipment made me feel as if I were in Texas, where everything is supposedly bigger:

That church:

A church pew on a sidewalk:

The joke that never grows old:  the "OK" restaurant (Google Translate says "decent restaurant").  Mediocre fare for mediocre palates!

Instead of staying at the CF like the two previous times, I decided to try the Heitz, which opened only last year:

My personal mecca:

I'd been dreaming about this moment:

At the office, I order from the local BBQ Chicken maybe once every couple weeks.  It's fine chicken, but it's never fried quite crispy enough.  NeNe Chicken doesn't have that problem.  It's crunchy as hell.  Anyway, this batch of NeNe Chicken was good, but it didn't quite attain the mythological heights of my two previous NeNe sessions.  There's a Chinese place up the street from my lodgings; I might try it tomorrow instead of returning to NeNe.  Or maybe I'll hit the "OK" restaurant.

Namji-eup is where I really start to feel as if this trek is finally winding down.  The first time I arrived here, it was after a brutally hard walk, and NeNe Chicken was there to provide succor in the form of a crispy ornithoid.  Namji is a quietly charming town, worthy of further exploration.  I'll always associate it with the warmth and comfort that follow an ordeal.

So I'm here for one more night after tonight, then, sadly, it'll be time to depart.  The walk, like the show, must go on.

PHOTO ESSAY: