Day 17, Leg 12

In a nutshell: today was long, cold, windy, snot-filled, and finally—stressful. 

I'm at the Gangnam Motel, which is a bit steep at W50,000 a night. The place has an automatic key dispenser—no front-desk person needed—but as with a lot of these machines, it'll only let you pay for a single night's stay. So I have to go up the road, find an ATM, and pay manually for a second night before the 11 a.m. checkout time tomorrow. Just an extra bit of stress after a tiring day that turned stressful. 

Today's walk took me out of Sangju and finally turned me east toward Andong. The first part of the walk involved making it back onto the Four Rivers/Nakdong trail. Once back on the trail, I then had to cross the Sangju Sangpoong Bridge to be exclusively on the Nakdong River trail. This latter part saw me walking mostly through farmland, often alongside the Nakdong River. Terrain varied wildly from placid straightaways to craggy and steep mountain paths to wooden boardwalks to streets with traffic to, at the end, roads with no shoulder. I swung by the Gangcheon-dae park where all the giant, wooden statues are, but Naver took me past that, so I didn't go in. I saw another vampire-deer carcass, and much later in the walk, I think I passed the mangled body of a large, feathery moth or something.

The walk was cold all day, and often windy, so I was glad of any opportunity to walk in the balm of direct sunlight. My fingertips were often numb, and this made undoing my backpack's chest strap a royal pain. Things got warm enough, in the late morning, for me to remove my gloves (nothing got lost today), but as the walk dragged on to late afternoon, I considered putting them back on again. The cold also meant I had a runny nose the entire walk. This isn't a cold: the runny nose goes away the moment I'm somewhere warm.

The walk was supposed to be 37K, but it went on longer than anticipated because I couldn't get a room at the Daesun Motel. When I asked the lady how much it would cost for two nights, she paused a little too long, then said she had no rooms. This might be true, but her long pause was suspicious, as was the perfectly silent hallway we were in (it was around 5:30 p.m.; most normal guests don't show up until after 6 or 7, so I'd guess most of the rooms in that hallway were empty and unreserved). Maybe she just decided not to accommodate the foreigner. Maybe she's doing her part to defend the homeland from pernicious foreign influences like Johnny Somali. So I trudged in the dark and cold about half a mile to the Gangnam Motel. With no one in the office, I saw I would have to contend with the automatic key dispenser. When I tried feeding W5000 bills to the machine, it spat them back out. I had barely enough cash in my wallet to pay the W50,000 fee for a single night—four W10,000 bills and two W5000s. The motel manager came up right as I was wrestling with the W5000s; he took my bill, fed it in himself, and the damn thing worked. I then fed the machine my other fiver plus four W10,000 bills, and that's how I got my key. So what could've been a long-but-pleasant walk turned into a bit of a nightmare. And it's not over: I still need to grab more cash to be able to pay for a second night. I'll go to the local ATM in the morning.

I occurs to me that I passed a lot of myo today—tumuli seen singly or in family plots. I had to marvel at the amount of money needed to buy all that real estate, especially now, as land is running out on this tiny half-peninsula. I took plenty of myo pictures, but I skipped about half of the ones I had run across. 

It's tempting to just walk on tomorrow morning, to shorten the walk calendar by a day. But I kinda need the extra day's rest: the distance and the stress at the end of today were a little much. My feet are fine but achy. They could use some time off before the final push to Andong Dam. 

Anyway, enjoy the images below.

back to showing 36K... closer to 38K

about 6235 calories burned

Sangju Church

creekside parkland on my way out of Sangju

a dynamic sculpture

dawn

persimmons hang-drying in a village

I stayed here two years ago.

hilltop view

a field of clay pots

one of a myriad of myo

a caution about using the trail in the winter

PHOTO ESSAY

"Danger! Because ice-related accidents can happen, please refrain from using the bike paths." I assume this is meant to be read when the path is actually iced over. Of course, if the path is iced over, how likely is it that there'll be anyone to read the sign?