Day 6, Leg 5

I'm still alive, but I'm fading fast (to sleep, I mean, not fading fast toward death). I walked from dawn until dusk today, surviving the route's meanest hill, and I'm now at the Jeokgyo-jang Motel. I'm here for two days, so I'll write tomorrow about how today went. Meanwhile, enjoy the promised pics and captions.

We're back to 20% exaggeration of distances. Sigh...

sometimes away from the river

I guess I was the first to leave today.

persimmons on the tree

cosmos

garlic, a second-round crop

farm equipment

hazy sun in a hazy morning sky

the Nakdong from a bridge

gravesite before my huge hill

the view from the top

another hill graffito saying "Fuck"

we interrupt this walk

The machine that goes bing says that Kevin is currently alive after having just done the big, mean hill that divides Nakseo-myeon/낙서면 from Burim-myeon/부림면 on the small mountain called Jandeung-san/잔등산. It was a slow trip up, with me stopping every 40 steps (right-left = 1 step), taking fifteen breaths, and continuing on up. If you're at all healthy, you're probably laughing scornfully, and I don't blame you.

The road up to the trail summit's rest area from the Busan side is an ungodly 1.4 km, breathtaking in all the wrong ways. Now if you don't mind, I'm going to charge my phone and take a 30-minute victory nap. Come to think of it; the time to worry about heart attacks is now, after the strain of summiting.

While there are other mean hills along the path to Andong, they're not 1.4 km in length. So the worst is over in terms of hills. In terms of distance, though, a 40K stretch is yet to come.