Day 9, Leg 8

Today saw me walk to downtown Choongju from the On You Hotel in upper Choongju.  I had wanted to go to my tacky yeogwan, the Baekun Park (which I've seen awkwardly romanized as "Backun"), but when I arrived, I was shocked to see that the place had been cordoned off.  It was dead.  Tired from my walk, I went to the Chinese place next door to the now-defunct yeogwan to eat a meal and search for a place to stay.  Naver Map had issued a new and improved version of itself several months ago (late last year?), and I'm still getting used to its features.  I eventually figured out how to search for motels in the region, and I discovered that there was a veritable cluster of motels about 1.3 km away from Baekun Park.  I finished my meal (my server was honest-to-goodness Chinese, but she spoke nearly accentless Korean) and lumbered out of the resto.

What happened next might be the highlight of my day.  I was standing at a street corner, muttering to myself while I waited for the crosswalk light to turn green, when a large Western dude lumbered wordlessly up beside me.  I'm sure he noticed me just as I noticed him, but we said nothing to each other.  The dude had long, black, curly hair pouring out from under a baseball cap.  He had a backpack on, but not as large as mine.  When the crosswalk light turned green, the dude started forward faster than I did, which allowed me to see that he had draped a paper sign across the back of his backpack.  The sign was in Korean, and it announced the fact that he was walking the Gukto Jongju from Incheon to Busan.  I now know that the term gukto jongju is a generic designation:  the east-coast trail from Gangneung to Busan is also called a gukto jongju.  That said, I'm sure he was also walking the Four Rivers path down to Busan.  I had to laugh, but the guy was too far ahead to notice my mirth.

A few things:  the guy must not have been a sociable fellow, which is why he didn't do the extrovert thing and blurt out, "Hey, man—you hikin' somewhere?" as a conversation-starter.  When that crosswalk light turned green, he simply strode across the street, completely ignoring me.  I understood the feeling because the sight of him was triggering a case of GOMAS in me:  Get Out of My Adventure Syndrome.  When you're a Westerner in a foreign land (or, more specifically, when you're a Western introvert in a foreign land), you don't want to see other Westerners:  the sight of them ruins that first-man-on-the-moon feeling of uniqueness and makes you realize that what you're doing has been done thousands of times before by thousands of others.  And it's bad enough, when you live in a city of eleven million people, to realize that neither you nor anyone around you has any original ideas; it's even worse when you're in a smaller city, and you encounter someone who's had exactly the same idea you did.  I'm doing this trip as my own little adventure, which is one reason why I prefer hiking alone.  I'm also not much of a joiner in even the best of times, so even if I had tried to make conversation with the dude, the conversation would have ended with us wishing each other luck and parting ways.  There would've been no team-up, and I gather the feeling was mutual.  I wonder whether the guy wrote his Korean-language sign himself.  I wonder how good his Korean actually is.  (I'm not sure whether it's brave or stupid to go on treks in countries where you don't speak, read, or write the language.)

Anyway, that little moment was the most memorable thing to happen today.  Otherwise, the morning started out foggy and cold, and I began my walk after another fitful night of sleep.  In fact, I don't think I've slept well a single night this time around, and I'm not sure why.  Maybe my YouTube and movie-viewing habits have worsened over the past year, and it's been harder to stick to a disciplined sleep schedule during the walk as a result.

Another of Naver Map's improvements is that the app now plots walking routes longer than 500 meters.  I discovered a cheat for today's route:  a walking path that still followed the South Han River but shaved off about 10 kilometers.  Karma got me back, though, because I had to walk a bit of extra distance at the very end when I found out that my love-shack yeogwan had gone the way of the dodo.  The motel I'm in, which calls itself the Hotel Soo, is pretty good for W50,000 a night (everything's been W50,000 except for Jangsu Pension, which really shouldn't even be charging W30,000 for its meager comforts).  The Soo sits directly across from Choongju Station, which made me jokingly reflect that I could give up the walk and take a train back to Seoul right now.

In taking stock of my tech situation, I'm beginning to realize that, even after removing some 1100 photos from my "Food Porn" folder, my phone is still going to fill up at the rate I'm taking pictures.  Time for a new strategy, then.  For you, Dear Reader, nothing is going to change:  I'll still upload ten or twenty-some pics per entry.  For me, though, what I might have to do is periodically upload several days' worth of pics to Google Drive, as that's the only place I can store them.  I don't think you can embed stored photos on the blog, so once I'm done with the walk, I'll have to go through the long process of downloading the pics in batches, uploading the batches to the blog posts they belong to, then appending comments to help readers understand what they're seeing.  So be warned:  when the walk is over, the blogging won't be.  There is much yet to do.

My boss asked how my feet were doing.  I just checked, and miraculously, I remain blister-free.  This is nothing short of incredible because I had resigned myself to thinking of blisters as an inevitable fact of life on the trail (I'm still kind-of convinced they are).  What I've discovered, though, is why distance hikers all seem to worship Leukotape.  When applied wrongly, as I did to myself last year, Leukotape can be a nightmare.  When applied correctly, though, Leukotape is a game-changer.  I'll talk more about this—or not—once the walk is done.  I'm only about a third of the way through the project, so I might still end up getting blisters.  Even so:  it really is a marvel not to have gotten a single blister by now.  Aside from that, my feet are achy, but not intolerably so.  Knock on wood.

Weight loss seems to have plateaued.  My body now accepts eight-to-ten-hour walks as the new normal, and it has adjusted accordingly.  My belt-cinching test holds steady at four holes (you'll recall that I'd started at seven holes, so that's three inches off the waist).  While I'd love for that to get down to zero by October 26, I somehow doubt that'll happen.  I'm sure that my blood-sugar level continues to go down, so that's a plus.  Can't say the same for my resting heart rate, but I think my cardio is improving overall thanks to the relentless exercise.  Doing this hike is a bit like hitting the reset button; I spend much of the year misbehaving in terms of diet and exercise, and this is a chance for penance and purification.  I really do feel that I'm my best self when out on the path:  I sleep and wake up at reasonable hours of the day, I engage in vigorous activity, and I curb my normally voracious eating habits.  It's almost as if I can catch a glimpse of an alternate reality in which I'm living a more mentally and physically active lifestyle.

This motel room's computer is pretty damn good, so I'm going to use my phone to upload some images, then finish this blog post on the motel's desktop.  What follows is a glimpse of how today went (and no, I didn't take a picture of the walking dude, who looked a bit like Howard Stern with a fat ass).

Let's skip past the foggy morning, even though I have some eerie pics from that period of today's walk.  Here's a set of tap, a term that can mean "pagoda" but can also refer to these cairn-like stacks of stones:

A shwimteo stands alone and at the ready:

Hypnotic bridge geometry:

Dragonfly at rest.  It looked injured:

A view of a bend in the South Han River:

Among the vegetables being harvested are chili peppers:

Squash, too:

A little flower:

This is the sort of orb-weaver that is common in the States.  It has a compact, powerful-looking body and relatively short legs (like my women):

One thing I began to realize, when I took this shorter alternate path, was that this was the same path I'd taken in 2017.  Naver is currently listing this path as a walker's route, not as a bike route, even though it's clearly made for cyclists.  This explains why, last year, I kept expecting to see certain scenery, and I never saw it:  Naver had routed me along a completely different way.  This also highlights the fact that the Four Rivers Gukto Jongju isn't really a single path so much as many alternate paths that all lead from the same starting point (Incheon) to the same destination (Busan).  I talked about that three years ago.

I should've taken a video of this guy as he desperately flapped his arms in an attempt to get people to eat his "fire" jjambbong:

Vista:

There's a Choongju Museum that is heavily Buddhism-themed, sitting on tastefully landscaped property.  Out front, there's something like a rock garden or sculpture garden featuring what appear to be some very old Buddhist statues.  Here's the most Buddha-like of the ones out front:

Another view of the magnificent river:

One of the things I enjoy as I approach the downtown Choongju area is the almost Stockholm-like arrangement of several of the major bridges that join both sides of the city together (trivia:  Stockholm is basically a bunch of islands joined by bridges and tunnels):

More bridge geometry:

Looking back at a bridge:

One of the lower, smaller bridges that I had to cross today—the same one I crossed in 2017—is what I call "the suicide bridge."  The span sports several signs on it, all of which display a suicide-hotline number for despondent people to call.  Below is only one of nearly a dozen pics that I took; this time around, I wanted to capture every message on every sign, so I took my time, dodged traffic, and took a lot of photos.  Other signs are obvious attempts at heartstring-plucking; they feature quotes and proverbs like "Tomorrow brings hope" and "You're precious to everyone around you" and even "It's Mom... did you eat yet?"  I'm not sure whether to dismiss the signs as crassly manipulative or feel touched that people went through the effort of putting such signs up.  My question, though, is why the sign-makers picked such a low bridge on which to put their signs.  There's a much higher bridge right next to this one, and that bridge is just begging for jumpers.  I wonder whether it, too, has such signs on it.

Here's the biggest of the suicide-hotline signs:

A long stretch of road:

Your me-and-my-shadow shot for the day:

Next to the skanky-and-now-dead Baekun Park yeogwan is an easy-to-find landmark for taxi drivers:  the World Martial Arts Park:

Here's the cordoned-off yeogwan.  I was crestfallen.

While searching online for places to stay, I saw an entry for Baekun Park.  As you see, the announcement that the yeogwan would be closing on September 1st was put out on August 25th.  It's never safe to assume that any business will last in Korea, and I personally suffer from a specific form of Murphy's Law:  everything I love disappears.  (Then again, this may simply be a Buddhist truth.)

I have a ton more pics (I took over 180 of them today... not sure what got into me), but I'll end with a shot of the meal I ate at the Chinese place next to Baekun Park:  a small tangsuyuk and a regular jjambbong.  Both were mediocre.

That concludes today's blog entry.  I'll post something tomorrow, but at my leisure:  tomorrow is purely a day of rest and recuperation.  The feet need a respite from bearing my awful weight, and the skin of my hands and face could probably use a break from all the sun exposure.  When I get back to work, I'll pay a visit to the skin clinic just across the hall from my company's office and get myself checked for itty-bitty melanomas.  I've never had a problem with skin cancer before, but there's always a first time.

PHOTO ESSAY

Leaving the On You in a fog:

Fence rose:

The world is shrouded in mystery:

Interesting use for work gloves:

I saw this old couple tooling happily along but waited until they were a tasteful distance away before snapping a pic:

Manmade structures periodically interrupt the creek's flow:

All hail the giant Plant Kitty:

The cairn-like tap (탑) that one occasionally sees on a trail:

The fog lifts:

A lone, classic shwimteo, tastefully tucked aside:

Female orb-weaver spider on dewy web:

Death comes for us all:

Heavily damaged bridge, comically over-coned:

Another dewy web.  See the spider?

These clusters of exercise equipment appear randomly all along the trail.  I don't bother to photograph most of them, but here's an exception:

Evidence of horses (whose spoor you can also smell):

The day brightens:

I stopped at this rest stop for refreshments:

The dam over which I didn't cross:

I think I noted earlier that this little guy looked hurt.  Something about the bend of the wings.  Lots of dragonflies this time of year:

A charming little house that made me wonder about this sort of life:

The gochu (고추, Korean chilies) are ripening:

The next two pics are of the entrance to a pension.  I often wonder how my walk might be different were I to stop at different waypoints.

Squash:

 

A classic orb-weaver at work:

A two-tiered shwimteo:

I saw a few of these little floating tents for fishermen:

Choongju City is known for rowing and for martial arts:

Desperately flailing:

I liked the chiaroscuro effect here:

Passing by any restaurant produced a mental pang:

Am pretty sure I've bought bells like these:

If you haven't gotten the point yet, it's squash season:

I didn't want to rile this guy by being too obvious in taking his picture:

You can see at least two bridges in the pic below:

Right around this point, I met the dude who gave me a drink:

The "suicide bridge," with all the poignant messages:

"Tomorrow brings hope":

"Throw your thoughts in the water and go":

"It's Mom.  Did you eat yet?"

"It's okay; be strong":

"You're a precious person":

"Because you're here, I'm happy":

"I love you, my... child":

"Let's be strong once again":

"Tomorrow will be different":

"You're precious to everyone":

One of many, many cars illegally on the bike path:

Final stretch to Baekun Park yeogwan:

The stone declaring this is a world martial-arts park:

Fuck.  Baekun Park is officially dead:

I retreat to a next-door Chinese place and strategize over some mediocre jjambbong (front) and equally mediocre tangsuyuk (back):

An extra kilometer or two to a neighborhood full of motels:

Apples along the way:

The gray building on the left is the Hotel Soo:

Embrace the tackiness: