Day 15, Leg 15

원덕에 왔다. 내일은, 포항. 오늘의 모텔에 무선인터넷이 없어서 5개의 사진만 업로드한다. 와이파이가 있을 때 나머지 사진을 업로드하겠다.

Arrivé à Weondeok. Demain, Pohang. Le motel où je suis n'a pas de WiFi, donc je ne téléchargerai que 5 photos. Je ferai le reste quand j'aurai accès au WiFi. 

__________

If my calculations are correct, then as of today, I've walked about 340.8 kilometers. None of my measurements are accurate, as I'm sure you realize, so take everything with a grain of salt and treat all this information as mere ballpark figures. 

I'm at the Bang Pa Je Motel. Stats:

Distance: about 25.5 km

Time: 397 minutes (3.85 kph)

Steps: 38,785

Calories Burned: 5,128

Calories Consumed: about 3,000 (deficit = about 2,128)

You win some; you lose some. I skipped ahead 1.1 kilometers to a motel farther down the coast than my pension stopping point (originally Chang Po Got Pension/창포곳 펜션, now Bang Pa Je Motel/방파제 모텔), and the place has no WiFi. None. Nada. (There's also no hot water, but I've showered cold many times before, so that's not a huge problem.) And there are no wired cafés in the vicinity. So I'm going to tempt you with articulate phrasing and only five images from today, with the promise that I'll upload the rest when I have time. The pressure to upload each day's photos is great because every day brings hundreds of new images to upload and caption. I don't know whether I'll have time, tomorrow, to sit down in a café and do a whole day's worth of uploading before I reach tomorrow's destination. I may have to upload the photos a bit each day for several days. We'll see.

Note to self, then: upload and caption Day 15 pics as you can.

So how'd today go?

I started the day by forgetting my red bandanna, but I caught myself in time and mounted a rescue operation that took all of five minutes to complete. Essentially, I doubled back, got the bandanna, and departed Full House Motel twice. The morning was great: cool and cloudy, but that meant the sunrise was blocked by the clouds, and I had to wait a few minutes for the sun to rise high enough over the cloud cover for me to photograph the dawn.

The next couple hours of walking weren't too bad; the ground was fairly flat. Around 8:30 a.m., I stopped at a convenience store run by an old woman, and she proved to be very friendly, even giving me two free Choco Pies, then taking my garbage from me when I was done eating. (Finding garbage cans for public use in Korea can be hard. Korean authorities apparently believe that, if you leave people no cans, they'll simply carry away their garbage. Instead, people just drop their garbage on the spot, and while I hate litterers and littering, I hate stupid policies even more, and I can't blame people for leaving their trash in imaginary, wished-for cans. Put in more garbage cans and make those garbage workers work a bit harder!)

A group of bikers heading north to where I started my walk pulled up to the store, and we all set to talking about different paths we've done. (This often turns into a pissing contest of "I've Done More Paths Than You.") Once again, I was advised to try the Baekdu Daegan trail, which is a real mountain trail and, from what I understand, extremely rough. I said goodbye to the friendly grandma and the bikers, then as I walked away, I felt a twinge of regret for not having snapped a group photo of everyone. (I did get a pic of the bikers as they were pulling up, but I'd rather have the group shot. Hindsight 20/20, as they say.)

Later in the day, though, the sun was out, and it was nothing but hill after hill in the heat. Once again, I lost count of the number of hills I climbed, and once again, the hills proved to be fine individually, but challenging when taken together. A foreign couple cycling south gave up when they reached the hill I was on, got off their bikes, and walked close to me without acknowledging me; when the hill leveled off,  they got on their bikes and sped away. I remember thinking to myself that, if they had to get off their bikes at every difficult hill, they'd be walking half the route. I caught up with them a few minutes later when we all converged on the cert center. Again, we said nothing to each other.

A bit earlier, I met a pair of Korean women who were out on a local hike. They seemed friendly enough, and we talked a bit about my hike, the area we were in (called 축산/chuksan, like the word for livestock), and things to see. They suggested I take a more scenic route, but I showed them the route Naver had plotted for me according to its mysterious algorithm, and after that, conversation trailed off. The women ended up lagging behind me, and while I waved at them when I realized how behind they'd gotten, they didn't wave back, and that was that. Hmph. I walked on, goodbyes unsaid.

The last few hours of today's walk were very annoying thanks to a huge amount of traffic and a general lack of road shoulders to walk on. That's one thing I wish the trail-builders had been more consistent about: putting in extra safe spaces for bikers. If you're going to widen the roads, anyway, to make them part of a larger bike network, why not finish the job by painting in defined bike lanes? It was a reminder of why I hadn't been looking forward to this walk: I remember traffic being an issue last December, during my reconnoiter. It's been an issue for much of this trip.

I stopped off for lunch at a seafood place (they're hard to avoid on the coast), and they were serving both sashimi rice and snow-crab porridge, so I grabbed both (W30,000 total—ouch). My intestines have been very well-behaved this trip; in a previous life, I would never have risked an anal explosion by eating lunch before reaching my destination. As for the food, the sashimi rice was quite good, but the crab porridge was limp and watery. I've made my own juk/죽/porridge before, and my porridge is way better than what I ate today. Come over to my place, and I'll serve you some real juk with huge chunks of shrimp in it, not barely visible, stingy shreds of crab.

From the restaurant, it was another 1.1 kilometers to the motel where I'm at now. And this is where things get funky.

Unless one of you readers can tell me otherwise, I think today's cert center is the last cert center before Busan. I hope I'm wrong about that, but during my research, I never found a resource that clearly outlined the cert centers from the Uljin/Yeongdeok region down to Busan. So from here on, my waypoints are all motels and pensions, with the Nakdong Estuary Barrage (나동강 하굿둑) being the final cert center on my route. If you know of other cert centers along the way between where I am now and Busan, let me know in the comments.

My current location, according to Naver Map:

경북 영덕군 영덕읍 창포리 745

I'm technically in northern Pohang tomorrow, about a day earlier than expected. I'm slated to arrive at the Da Oh Rae Pension, although I will, of course, look for motels. If you know of any cert centers that I can use as waypoints, leave the info in a comment, and I will adjust my walking plans accordingly.

Here are five pics from today:

a few minutes after sunrise

port

water and reflection

They really worship crabs out here.

The choice was between (1) another pic of me and (2) this dawg, so I picked the dawg.

PHOTO ESSAY

starting in the Goraebul (whale fire?) area

dawn approaches

the clock is five minutes ahead

getting ready for sunrise

here is where I make my stand

ship in the distance, digital zoom

cloud-covered sunrise

a few minutes later

tons of pine trees all along the coast

Goraebul Bridge

no escaping crabs

crabs strike again

and again

Yanghae-myeon (I guess a myeon is like a village or township)

I guess these are crab pots

sort of a gay "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" moment

gloves, not abandoned

oddly roofed shwimteo

I'll have to decipher this later.

They really go heavy on the crab symbolism, don't they.

hill

at a guess, Chinese zodiac figures

pig

dog?

rooster

mawngkay

goat

money?

horse

snake

dragon

sheep

tiger

cow?

rat

I expected the pension to have a name like Zodiac Pension, but no.

The pension was simply called Bada Sarang Pension, or Beach Love Pension.

a proper myo, in a raised area

'Tis the season of the squiddies.

Do you see a gnarled face here?

I want this tree.

a tiger so badass that the tiger has a tiger

One of many loud dogs belatedly doing its duty; most of these dogs are terrible guards that start barking only when I'm right upon them.

another myo

kitteh, playin' it cool

another proper myo

concrete with a big hollow beneath it

just a trickle of a waterfall

harsh reminder that the coast is never clear

My camera is often pointed left towards the sea, but I sometimes remember to give some love to the right side of the path as well.

Chuksan-myeon. Chuksan sounds like the word for livestock. I met the two hiking ladies soon after, but I didn't take their picture.

If you read some Chinese, then you can "sea" there's a pun, here. The Sino-Korean word for "sea" is hae, and it's being used as a syllable in the phrase saranghaeyo, which means "I love you." Normally, the hae in haeyo is just a conjugated form of the irregular verb hada, which by itself means "to do," but is here part of the verb saranghada, to love.

Explaining puns ruins them.

"Happy Korea" is not a translation of the Korean text. 살기 좋은 지역 만들기 means, roughly, making the region into a place where it's good to live. Literally, "living good area making." Never ask me to become a professional translator.

stairs to mystery!

moving into downtown Hupo now

Did a double-take when I saw this. A meat dispenser? Apparently, yes. At the bottom is a drawer labeled "place where the product comes out." I guess this is basically a fridge.

granny apocalypse continues

a peloton flies by

Ace Mart

Right around here is where I met those two ladies. We parted company soon after.

hill

up we go

and now down

tents everywhere

squid shadow

myo

after a chair spends time tied to a tree for its crimes, it is cast into the outer darkness

hillacious

I wonder what the Chinese characters are. Hyo (hsiao in Chinese) is normally associated with Confucianism, as it means "filial piety." If that is is, in fact, what the character is, then Hyo Shim Sa could mean "Filial Heart Temple." (Shim means "heart" or "mind.") But maybe it's a completely different hyo.

I didn't talk about this in the main entry for this post, but a terrible/hilarious thing happened. I was walking along a road a bit like this one, but with cones along one part to keep people and cars away from newly poured concrete. A car swerved close to me, I stepped onto the concrete... and my foot sank into it. Deeply. I had just passed a tired-looking man whose job was obviously to patrol that section of road and make sure nothing happened to the concrete. Boy, is he in trouble. He had one job, and I fucked it up for him. You're welcome?

arf

Yeongdeok (pronounced "young duck"), probably meaning "eternal virtue"

wind turbines

if Stephen King did minbak stories

This flower is along the final part of the Nakdong River trail leading up to the last cert center of your walking from Yangsan City.

guilty dog #1

partner in crime, guilty dog #2

more stairs to mystery

What hides in plain sight?

aha

These are everywhere, but they're placed in rather arbitrary spots.

pension

yet another hill

Starting around here, I began snapping pics of traffic over about a two-minute period, just to give you an idea of how relentless the cars were. Really annoying and dangerous.

windmills peeking out

another hill

finally: the cert center

This was a tourist-trappy spot with lots of odaeng stands.

monster crab claw

one of those stands

impressive sculpture, but more crab worship

where I ate lunch

part 1 of lunch: mulhoe

part 2 of lunch: crab porridge

moving on

This is rare.

no groundsheet?

a lot of little urinal cakes (don't worry: I flushed)

This sort of masonry isn't common.

meditative

W35,000 after discount for being alone

dawg

tired dawg, and I'm tired, too

journey's end... for today