Day 4, Leg 4

I follow the misty 낙동 cold

To 쉼터s deep and 여관s old
I must away ere break of day
To 국토종주—the bell hath tolled

I think I really got it this time. The morning mist.

30 kilometers today, and I felt it. I left the Hwangtobang Motel at around 5:10 a.m. and schlepped to the town of Namji-eup where, as tradition dictates, I had to pick up a box of NeNe Chicken tenders, thereby undoing all of the hard work of the last few days. And fuck, was that worth it, even if it means I'll die even earlier than expected. 

I did manage to get some rest last night, maybe because my body had been so exhausted from walking a gazillion steps, then not sleeping. The ankle flareups are still happening when I stop moving, but they do seem to be lessening in severity.

Weather along the route today wasn't as cold as yesterday, but the temps went down before they went up. At 5 a.m., it was about 4.1°C (about 39 4°F); by 7 a.m., that had gone down to 3.6°F (about 38.5°F), and by the afternoon, despite it being cloudy, the temps had gone up to almost 18°C (about 64.4°F). The clouds were hinting at rain when I was walking the final few kilometers to Namji-eup, and the forecast now shows brief rain for both tomorrow (while I'm resting) and Saturday (when I resume walking). For the moment, the forecast for Saturday is rain starting in the night and not going beyond 3 a.m., but I suspect that Murphy's Law will find a way to fuck things up for my Saturday. Damn. I had hoped that South Korea would be rainless this November. No such luck.

[UPDATE, 7:55 a.m., Friday: No more rain in the forecast.]

There were a few hills today, but nothing on the order of what's coming up this Saturday: the biggest, meanest hill on the Nakdong River path. I'm going to take it slowly, even if that causes drivers and passing bikers to stare. Better to be embarrassed and alive than to be dead. If today's hills were any indication, I ought to be fine on Saturday. Aside from today's few hills, the trail was mostly flat, and we're finally back in dam territory. Today's dam—the final one before the estuary barrage when I'm walking toward Busan—was the hard-to-pronouce 합천창녕보/Hapcheon-Changnyeong-bo (bo being the suffix for weir or dam).

I'm now also almost at the 100K mark after four days' walking. By stopping in Namji-eup, I had to go a little off-piste, but I'll be back on the official trail on Saturday, November 1. 29K on Day 1, 20K on Day 2, 20K on Day 3, and 30K today. Up next: 33K on Saturday the 1st (plus another extra day of rest), 40K on Monday the 3rd (yes, plus another day of rest), 25K on Wednesday the 5th (Hotel If in Daegu, plus the Chinese place, plus one more day of rest), 33K to the Lee Motel by the Chilgok Dam on Friday the 7th (then resting on Saturday), then a brutal 32K to Libertar Pension on Sunday the 9th, where I'll be for only a single night because I had moved the rest day from Libertar to Namji-eup to accommodate tonight's cheat meal. 

Ideally, I'm supposed to fast all day tomorrow, but the devil on my shoulder is whispering that I should visit my favorite Chinese resto in town (two doors down from NeNe Chicken) and have lunch there... followed by fasting for the rest of the day. Will I give in to temptation? If history is any guide, yes. Because I am weak. But the next indulgence won't be until I'm in Daegu, then there's nothing after that. Just cans of convenience-store tuna and maybe spam.

100K is significant because I'm supposed to walk the final segment of the Camino de Santiago with my buddy Mike in 2029. That final segment is around 110-120 km; if we do the path in small bits, the whole thing might take us five or six days. Add a couple days for sightseeing and for a possible visit to my French brother Dominique's B&B in Le Vanneau-Irleau (I visited le marais in 2018), and we could be in Europe for two weeks or more.

Anyway, that's all speculation for the moment. In the here and now, I'm in Namji-eup after a pleasant-but-hard walk. I saw a lot of critters today but no Buddhist monk like last year. One foreign biker passed me while randomly screaming out something that sounded like "¡Basura! (Spanish for garbage)!" I'm guessing I misheard.

Since I have a rest day tomorrow, I'm going to hand-wash my stinky clothing tonight, take a shower, and change the dressings on my feet. Despite the pounding, I think my feet made it through the 30K more or less unscathed. We'll know in a few minutes.

Oh, yeah: I took a few breaks during this segment, including a rather long one at the dam. I started today's trek at around 5:10 a.m. and arrived at the Heitz Hotel (W60,000/night for two nights) at around 3:40 p.m. Not including about 90 minutes for all of my rest breaks, that's 30K in nine hours, or a pace of 3.33 kph—slightly better than the previous days. While I did feel a wee bit of strain in my chest from today's hills and from walking a long time, I would always recover after resting. Whether this means I'm okay or due for a sudden collapse, I have no idea.

So with today being the day before Halloween, I thought it meet to devote today's set of pics (way more than ten... and the above one, of the morning mist, is a bonus) to a creature feature. Enjoy the stats, the route map, and the faces of life (and death) that I encounter daily on these walks.

My daily step average catapults me into the top 1% of walkers.

Naver says "1 bridge," but the map shows four crossings.

Americans use the Japanese designation "Joro spider" for these.

Koreans call them mudang geomi/무당거미, or shaman spiders.

caterpillar with symmetrical bubonic plague

how I normally photograph grasshoppers: dead

another slug a-sluggin'

digitally zoomed ducks (10X)

Living Chinese grasshopper. How do they function with almost no head?

Squished Chinese grasshopper has eggs suspiciously similar to mantis eggs. Stolen?

one of the few live grasshoppers I've managed to photograph

another one of those winter-harbinger caterpillars

tough praying mantis that I refused to fight

seven-legger

tiny, injured-looking mantis

Krushed katydid. Deflate-ydid.

I've got video of this earthworm's struggle.

millipede-like critter not thinking about its legs

FEAR THE POULTRY.

Hundreds of tiny orb weavers dominated the bridge into Namji-eup.

... and the most frightening creature of all: the chicken tender