First, let's show you what that final climb up to the dam's top looked like. If you're athletic, it probably looks like nothing. But imagine you're overweight: visualize your healthy self with a 100-pound pack on your back to simulate the extra pounds (or strap on an actual pack), then imagine having had a stroke that affects your balance (try wearing impairment-simulation goggles), and imagine having had a heart attack resulting from arterial blockages such that sudden strains on the heart (say, going above 110 bpm) are probably not advisable (use physical simulators, like compression vests or breathing through a straw, if you can't imagine this). I'm not saying any of this out of self-pity; I'm just trying to get you in the proper frame of mind to understand my experience. For most of this walk, none of the above was really an issue—not until the final day and this final ascent.
With that in mind, are you ready, Poison Girls?
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| The initial stairs at the bottom of the dam, street level. See the top of the dam? I'm headed there. |
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| A look back down the initial stairs. Oh, there's more to come. |
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| a look up at the next set of stairs, which come after some time on a steep trail |
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| another steep bit of trail |
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| yet more steep trail (less steep, but longer, than an alternative trail) |
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| a more or less level portion |
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| Yay! More stairs! That's the bottom of the access to the observation deck. |
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| several 25-to-30-step flights up to the old, traditional jeonmangdae/전망대, or observation deck |
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| a look back down at the metal stairs |
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| a look up at the two flights of wooden stairs that challenged my balance |
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| finally at the deck and looking west into the river valley; the other side of the dam is a lake |
The dam's construction created a lake, Andong Lake, on the other side. This is not, however, the source of the Nakdong River, which actually originates farther east, toward the Korean coast. There's no obvious trail or bike route around the lake and to the source, though, so the dam is considered the effective endpoint of the Nakdong River trail.
The Andong Lake (Andong-ho/안동호) fills up several mountain valleys and thus has a strange shape reminiscent of a convoluted centipede or a writhing dragon, giving it an unwontedly long perimeter. It would be easier to boat over the lake than to drive, bike, or walk around it, hugging the shoreline.
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| you see the twisty, serpentine, multi-legged shape of the lake |
Compare:
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Various Korean dragons. The one on the right is my favorite (it's probably the googly eyes), and I love the effect of black smoke instead of the usual clouds. Or maybe that's just a black thundercloud. The middle dragon is too zany for my tastes, and the two on the left are too boringly classical. I'd love to see the right dragon done as a beautiful, 2D or 3D animation for a movie. |
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| The dam slopes outward on both sides, riverward and lakeward. |
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| Westward view. A 4 p.m. sun shines down on the river valley below. Beautiful sight and a great way to end the walk. |
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| pulling back from the deck a bit |
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| pulling back even more; the Chinese might be Andong Pavilion (안동누, Andong-nu) |
As I'd mentioned before, this whole place, designed for tourists, is normally pretty empty. I've been here twice during the cold winter, for example, and there was no one around to see me huff and puff my way up to the observation deck. But this past Saturday, this whole section of the city by the dam was filled with cars and people and bustling activity—celebrations, concerts, food stalls, restaurants, trinket shops, cultural-learning centers, small museums about Andong City and the Nakdong River's history, etc. My point, though, is that the omnipresence of people made it very hard for me to get the shots I normally get. In the photo above, for example, the reason why I didn't pull back farther to take a shot of the entire deck was that there were people just off to the left of where I was aiming, and I didn't want them in frame. I'm normally hesitant to photograph people up close without permission (but it does happen by accident on occasion); if I photograph people deliberately, their backs are normally turned, and they're off at a distance. Hilariously, people often have an atavistic instinct about when they're being photographed, and in a lot of my photos of distant figures, you'll see faces looking right at me, curious or possibly annoyed.
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| jeonmangdae as seen from the dam |
So that's the climb I faced at the very end of my walk, which had been blessedly level for about eight kilometers before that. How was the walk itself?
I had called this my "redemption walk" because, when I'd tried the same route last year, I ended up in a massive rainstorm that I very unwisely chose to walk through to reach my destination. Ten kilometers of misery and soaked feet. This caused massive irritation and blistering (even without cotton socks, which every hiker knows are inadvisable at best), and frankly, I should have known better, having done seven long walks before last year's (one in the US, six in Korea). The principal injury (see here and scroll down), a massive blister that ruptured and exposed raw skin to the brutal reality of my bodyweight and the distances I was walking (about 28 km per day on average), was so severe that, for the first (and hopefully last) time ever, I made the command decision to pause the walk for a month until I'd had a chance to heal. I went back to Seoul, saw my local doc, and spent a month just working in the office and not putting any pressure on my feet except to walk short distances from A to B. Since I'd stopped in late October of 2024, I restarted at the very end of November and did the rest of the walk, approximately half, mostly in December, when the weather was turning icy cold, and all of God's creatures—shaman spiders, earthworms, slugs, grasshoppers, snakes, butterflies, etc.—had retreated into the earth to await the return of warmth. Korean winters are as harsh as Korean summers, just in the other direction. But the second half of the walk went spectacularly well. Chastened by the mistakes that had led to my injury, I was extra scrupulous about taping up my feet beforehand, and by walking in December, I ensured that there was no rain to plague me—just cold, which was only a problem whenever I exposed my fingers to take pictures.
This time around, in 2025, I decided that most of October was way too rainy, so I started the walk on the 27th and ended on Saturday, November 15. And except for a not-quite-healed toe injury that got worse over the course of the walk, this walk went swimmingly. The toe wasn't (and isn't) a major concern despite some dramatic reactions by certain concerned Instapundit commenters to pics I'd displayed: my diabetic neuropathy prevented me from feeling much pain, and the injury itself, as I knew from experience, wasn't that deep to begin with, not even at the very end, after hundreds of thousands of steps. I expect the toe to be mostly healed by December.
Normally, with these postmortems, I do an equipment review ("equipment" includes clothes), and I also talk about things like food, lodging, my health, the weather, the landscape, and nature. Let's talk equipment, then.
Equipment
I designed my route so that there'd be no camping. It was mostly yeogwans (old-style inns) and motels, with one pension. This means I didn't need to bring camping equipment, which also means I didn't need my 85-liter Gregory Baltoro. Gregory is my favorite brand thanks to its always-smart design, but there was simply no need for such a huge backpack for this simple walk. Korea, being a small country, has few places that qualify as "the middle of nowhere," so finding some sort of lodging is normally not too difficult. In fact, there's probably more lodging out there than even I realize: when I search for motels and inns on Naver Map, for example, I'm aware that many places, especially the older places, don't even show up on the map, but I've seen them when I've physically passed by them.
Upshot: I used a smaller backpack, which was sufficient to hold water bottles (I long ago dropped the whole "Camelbak" thing once I realized how little water I'd actually need during a given segment, and how often I'd encounter Korean 슈퍼/shyupeo—Konglish from English "super/supermarket," i.e., small, simple stores—or modern convenience stores along the path) and other necessities. The backpack I used had its own hip-belt harness plus a chest strap; the hip belt barely fit around me, causing a muffin-top bulge, and the chest strap was too tight, restricting breathing. I had brought along my own chest strap, though, which was looser and allowed for free breathing. The backpack also had plenty of straps and zippable chambers in which to store things of varying priorities; I dedicated an easy-access outer pouch to my makeshift first-aid kit and other potential emergencies; a non-emergency chamber was for the pills I would take every night and morning; the main chamber was for storing water bottles, food/snacks, and clothing like my winter vest, neck warmer, jacket, gloves, winter hats (I brought two, lost one, and bought one en route), and toiletry kit.
[UPDATE: I found the hat I thought I'd lost, crumpled in a dark corner of my backpack. Dammit.]
The first-aid kit was mostly bandages and various rolls of Leukotape and Leukotape-adjacent tapes to protect my feet from the wear and tear of the road, and from the friction produced at contact points where my feet rubbed against my shoes tens of thousands of times per day. I Leukotaped up my Achilles tendons and the tops of my feet, and I used other, softer tapes to protect the bottoms of my feet, especially the metatarsal heads. I had initially brought along only a multitool for cutting, but it proved useless for doing anything other than tearing the dressings to shreds, so when I had the opportunity at a convenience store, I bought myself some scissors. Much better.
I had brought two pairs of gloves with me, but as it turned out, I needed only one pair plus my chemical hand-warmers. Some people online had complained that those hand-warmers could get scaldingly hot (maybe if you stupidly splashed water on them and provoked a violently exothermic reaction or had freakishly sweaty hands), but mine never got above gently lukewarm. The packaging also claimed that the warmers could provide up to eleven hours of heat, but I never tested this: the warmers did last for at least two or three hours, which was usually all I needed before the sun would start warming the air.
As far as clothing and footwear go, I regretted not bringing along my blue windbreaker with me this time, but my outer heavy jacket, my winter vest (both gifts from my ex-boss), my Under Armour shirt (which also protected my armpits from back-and-forth friction), and my walk tee all served to keep me warm even in freezing morning temperatures, providing sufficient layers and insulation. My walk tee wasn't the 2025 design I had made; the tee-making company, the US-based Spring (formerly Teespring), was unable to print my shirt for this year's walk in a timely manner; after a long silence, a staffer eventually claimed this was because their company had been bought out by another company, so things were in transition. Whatever. I canceled my order and put on a 2023 tee that showed the wrong route: the Four Rivers walk. I'm going to see about getting tees custom-printed locally from now on. I've had it up to here with Spring and its fuckups.
One equipment-related complaint I have is about my Gigastone-brand power pack (보조 배터리/bojo baeteori, auxiliary [portable] battery). It's only a couple of years old, but during the walk, it acted as though it were twenty years old. Useless piece of shit. I have to find a decent brand of portable power pack and hope it'll last longer than a couple of years before it starts to act the way this current (and soon to be former) one does. A good, fresh power pack, once fully charged, is like a battery that can fully charge your phone three or four times before it needs to be charged up again. My pack, as it now performs, can charge my empty phone up to 50% only once before depleting itself. There are probably ninety-year-olds who have more stamina. I'll have to see what brands are out there and whether they're available via Coupang. And once I get my new power pack, I will unsentimentally get rid of my current piece of crap (I know, I know—dispose of it properly).Since I have to take my old-man pills every day (anti-stroke/coagulation, blood pressure, blood sugar, etc.), and since the Korean pharmacies issue these pills in little, individual dose-packets, I had to count out twenty packets of each group of pills to take with me, along with the various supplements I take on my own recognizance. I put all of my pills into a large Ziploc bag (my traveling medicine cabinet) and did the same for my first-aid kit, which was mostly bandages, tapes, ointment, and a pair of scissors acquired while on the path and in one town or other.
My shoes and trekking pole also stood me in good stead; I didn't lose my trekking pole the way I had while doing the east-coast walk (scroll down to "Equipment Review"). My shoes were the wrong ones: on the day I left for Busan, I had rushed out to throw away some garbage before heading out to the Express Bus Terminal, fully intending to change shoes once I got back up to my studio. Instead, I rushed to the basement, threw out my garbage, rushed back upstairs, threw on my backpack, grabbed my trekking pole, and rushed out to the bus terminal without once thinking about my shoes. It's the kind of senility that strikes me more and more frequently as I live through the fog of my mid-fifties, slowly enstupidating in my own brain-juices. But the shoes I was wearing were black Skechers (not "Sketchers"—there's no T in the brand name) that I had worn on a previous walk. These shoes had been comfortable enough during that walk, but they'd become uncomfortable afterward, so I would only wear them around for short trips here and there. I'd heard different things about wearing Skechers for long, extended walks; a lot of people seem unimpressed by their quality; some people have complained about how the "give" in the shoes' sides allows one's feet to slide around too much inside, thereby creating a tripping or toe-crushing risk on inclines. I found the shoes to be comfortable during the first walk, and the lack of laces made putting the shoes on and taking them off a breeze, not to mention friendlier to the way Koreans have long treated footwear through the ages: slip on, slip off. My Skechers, specifically designed for long walks, miraculously worked fine this time around, too, but the soles are now too worn to be used again. In fact, I normally have to buy new shoes every year that I do a walk; this was my first time reusing a pair of shoes. My trekking pole's rubber "goat's foot" shoe also no longer has any treads; I've got plenty of peg-shaped replacements for it that might actually be better on things like softer ground: the goat's foot has a tendency to slip on certain surfaces; a peg, despite its shape, might have more traction. But it'll wear out faster.
I'd brought my wide-brimmed hat along, but I think I wore it only once or twice.
Food
When it came to food, well, I had started the walk with the best intentions. Because my newly revised pedometer was now tracking my activity calories more realistically, I was no longer being told that I was burning an extra 3500 to 4000 calories per day—on top of my basal metabolic rate of about 2000 calories per day. This time around, even my longest-walking days showed no more than 1600 calories burned while walking. Add to that my BMR of about 2000, and that meant I was burning a maximum total of 3600 calories per day, and I could easily make up for a lot of that with calorie-loaded and carb-rich food and drinks from convenience stores (it takes a will of iron to subsist on just chicken breast and tuna). I did have a few fasting days, but I made up for those by overeating crap the way I'd done even before my 2021 stroke and my heart attack last year. Now that I'm back in Seoul, I'm back on a more strict diet. I can't say I saw much if any weight loss this time around, but I was delighted to see, upon my return, that my blood sugar had remained low despite the sometimes extravagant number of candy bars, banana chips, and carby mixed nuts I would eat on the trail. Walking long distance definitely lowers your blood sugar, a point I'd made to my boss last year when he tried to persuade me to take my exogenous insulin along (I'm now totally off insulin, which is a fat-storing hormone that many experts recommend against; the fewer your meds, the better off you are; stay off insulin, and stay the hell off metformin).
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| gganpoonggi/깐풍기 |
(Cultural note: Buddhists in Korea aren't strictly vegetarian by any means; the monastic Vinaya proscribed meat-eating for monks and nuns, and that was a restriction that came long after the initial founding of Buddhism. But even today, Buddhists who are given prepared meat are allowed to accept and eat it, but they certainly can't kill their own food thanks to the old Indian doctrine of ahimsa, non-violence or no-killing, which strangely doesn't apply to vegetal life forms even though science seems to be edging closer to confirming the existence of a kind of plant or non-animal consciousness [think of experiments with fungus—okay, technically not a plant—that tentatively indicate the existence of a weird sort of distributed intelligence, or think of inter-arboreal communication about blights and predators via pheromones]. Meanwhile, the current Dalai Lama eats meat regularly. A running joke in Korea is that the monks will occasionally sneak out of the temple to go into town to eat beef and pork. Of course, the larger issue of precepts-breaking is widespread and well known among all religious traditions. There are Muslims who drink and violate Ramadan's eating restrictions; there are Jews who love pepperoni pizza; there are Catholics who eat meat on Lent Fridays, etc.).
Anyway, food was never a problem during this walk, and I certainly didn't come out of the experience looking starved or losing much weight.
Lodging
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| Hong-C Motel |
How electric sockets are arranged in a motel room has become, over the years, a surprisingly important factor for me. The best arrangement is a socket next to the bed. Since I tend to sleep on my right side, a nightstand on that side of the bed, with a wall socket behind it, is the perfect arrangement for charging both my phone and my power pack. Whether a motel room comes with complimentary bottles of water, small cans of fruit juice or barley tea, and "sticks" of powdered, sweetened coffee is also important. Just as important is whether a room has an electric fan, which helps me to dry hand-washed clothes faster. (Aside: I've gotten over my compulsion to wash clothes every day. I now live more contentedly in my own stink, especially since I travel solo.) Oh, and a fridge that's moderately cold is always nice. At some older places, the fridge in your room is unplugged when you walk in.
When I'd originally planned my walk route in 2017, the first time I'd ever walked across South Korea, I had used the bike path's "certification centers" (phone-booth-like stalls where a biker could stamp his passbook to prove he'd been by that way, then turn the passbook in to receive a certificate for having done the path) as waypoints, finding lodging close to those points de repère. The next time I walked, I wasn't motivated to collect any more stamps (I didn't have a passbook the first time, but I'd put all the stamps in my Moleskine book, a gift from a friend), so I instead connected the dots by finding lodging close to the bike path. This wasn't always easy, and there were, as a result, some segments that ended up being well over 30 km in length because I just didn't see any plausible lodging along the way. Sometimes, there would be something extravagant like a full-scale luxury hotel or a "pool villa" (풀 빌라, a step above a pension), but I would never consider staying in one of those places. I try to be more of a budget traveler, staying in motels and yeogwans. I need to get in the habit of staying at minbaks, which started out as bedrooms in people's houses that got rented out for a night or two. Nowadays, though, there are buildings billed as minbaks that look no different from yeogwans or motels (maybe they still have communal showers and toilets, leaving the bedrooms otherwise featureless). There are, in fact, genre-straddling examples of lodging called "pension minbak," and I have no idea what such a thing must look like on the inside. Most of the motels and yeogwans I stayed at had Western-style beds; Libertar Pension, however, has never had beds, meaning you have to sleep either Korean-style, on the floor, or curled up on a short couch that is practically a love seat. I did the couch thing this time around; I was too tired, that day, to set up my usual pile of blankets when sleeping on the floor.
Given the low-budget nature of the way I travel, I normally expect accommodations to be lacking in some way: weird stains or hairs or cigarette burns on the bed linens and floor and furniture, or bed linens that smell funny, for example. Or plumbing problems in the bathroom like a leaky toilet or a poorly set-up sink drain that, once you turn on the tap, starts pouring out your spit-and-toothpaste-infused tap water onto the bathroom tile. In most cases, it's just a matter of knowing where to place your feet once you've gotten a read on how the floor is tilted to allow gravity to guide the waste water into a central floor drain. Sometimes, the shape of the tiles can divert the dirty sink water to other directions, making the dirty water's flow unpredictable, and you might have to change your footing accordingly. I consider all of these to be minor problems, though; I've never been the loud American who flies off the handle about lapses in quality, especially if I'm paying the equivalent of only $25-$40 a night. Besides, my Korean isn't good enough for me to spew out a string of articulate complaints.
Some people deride those of us who motel our way across the land. It's scornfully called "credit-card tourism," and while I see where these people are coming from—it's not a real trip unless you're camping and cooking for yourself the entire way, like a manly man—I flip the script and think it's the height of stupidity, in a densely packed country, not to take advantage of whatever facilities present themselves to a traveler. Wild camping has its charms, but if you can navigate at all in Korean, why not use your basic, intermediate, or advanced skills to get yourself a half-decent room and some food at semi-regular intervals? I mean, I have camped on these routes before, especially during my earliest walks (2017, 2019, 2020), but once I discovered how to do the routes without needing to camp, life became a lot easier. I'm now more of a Korean pragmatist than a Western idealist when it comes to the romantic idea of going on a journey: if there's an inn within reach, I'm not going to say no to it. Call that credit-card tourism if you like. Can't say I give a shit what you think. Hell, I can fall asleep on a random bench with my feet draped over my backpack, a plastic water bottle for a pillow, and my hat over my face to protect me from the sun. Can you do that? So it's not as though I need motels.
My Health
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| snake as health metaphor |
That said, my situation seemed mostly to improve while I was on the trail. I had worried that I might croak while walking, so, per a suggestion from one of my brothers, I had written up a will. It was a simple "holographic will," not the kind that can stand up if challenged in court, but enough to provide the basics in case I did die while out walking. While I don't particularly want to die, I've been quietly ready for the Reaper to take me at any moment since my diagnosis of heart failure in the spring of last year. (My heart attack was at the end of last summer. My stroke, which was minor but did do some damage, took place in the spring of 2021. All in all, I'm lucky to be typing this even if my fingers do have a tendency to stray away from the keys I'm trying to hit thanks to minor brain damage.) When I got back to my apartment Saturday evening, I was amused to see the original, handwritten will still sitting in its envelope on my bed. I'll keep that as my provisional will until I have a chance to visit a Korean law office and draft a more formal, legally robust will.
But questions of my health seemed to fall away the longer I walked. While I did do some practice walking before going on this yearly journey, I also know from experience that the walk itself is training, and walking an average of over 28 kilometers per day will do things to strengthen you, possibly toughening up a weak heart, lowering blood pressure temporarily, and lowering your blood sugar. This walk—fourteen calendar days out of twenty (six rest days)—wasn't long enough to instill any profound or lasting changes, but for the moment, I feel better than I had before the walk.
One worry that I'd had during the walk was the major hills. Would my heart blow up on me if I did them? I had no idea what my limits were—whether I'd end up collapsing and carking it right there on the road or the bike trail. At each hill, I made the same grim resolution: Well, there's nothing for it but to push on. And I did, trying to climb each rise in a slow, measured way that didn't leave me dizzy or utterly out of breath. So I adopted a method: forty steps up, fifteen to twenty breaths' rest, then move on. That method got me up the meanest hill on the walk. A slightly different method—fifty steps, twenty breaths—got me up the final big hill on the walk's last day.
Unfortunately, I didn't use that method when climbing the final rise at the very end of the walk—the ascent up the slope of Andong Dam, which was not a hill but a combination of trails and stairs. Here's the thing: the two or three times I'd done that ascent before, it didn't feel so bad, not even after I'd had my heart attack. But this past Saturday, that same ascent was difficult, and I had to stop often to catch my breath. Because the nature of the path up kept changing, and because there were a lot of people on the trail with me, I couldn't concentrate on the steps-breath rhythm that had taken me up the journey's previous hills. That's why I'd written that I felt as if I were on the verge of a heart attack: because the final ascent really was straining me. It was a little bit scary, and there was an aspect of unreality about the thought that I really might die right there, right then, on my final day. I could feel my heart pounding as I went from steps to steep trail to steps to trail to metal steps to wooden steps... and finally, I was at the top of the jeonmangdae, the observation deck that stands next to the dam's top. From there, it was only a few steps over to the dam itself, and there I was, at the end of my walk.
The walk back down the long road/hill on the dam's southern side was murder on my thighs: I couldn't wait to slide into a cab and just stop moving. I got back to street level, had that little incident with the cute girl who'd been marveling at my tee shirt, and found a cab without having to use the Kakao Taxi app since, as I'd mentioned before, the area was full of traffic, including plenty of just-emptied taxis looking for new riders.
All that effort aside, it had been a slow walk. One reason why I don't walk with anyone these days is that I know my pace would drive normal people crazy. I walk slowly now after having had a stroke and a heart attack; I'm no longer capable of the average pace of 5 kph (3 mph); if I'm lucky, I can reach 3-point-something kph, and that's about all I can muster. Slowing me further is my urge to shutterbug: I'm fascinated by a million different things I see on the trail, so I often have to stop and take pictures. This, too, would drive a walking partner batty, and it's one reason why I've resolved not to take any pictures when my buddy Mike and I do the Camino de Santiago in 2029: partly because, if this is a meant to be a pilgrimage, then humility demands that I avoid the vanity (and tastelessness) of taking photos while on a holy mission; also partly because I don't want to drive Mike crazy with my constant stopping and staring, slowing our pace ever further. Maybe if I were doing the Camino myself, I'd be more liberal about shutterbugging, but since I'll be doing the Camino "unalone," as Keanu might say, I have to consider my travel companion.
Now that I'm back in civilization, I'll have to watch my eating and exercise habits. Angina wasn't much of a problem during the walk, but now that I'm back in urban mode, I won't be exercising nearly as much. I will, however, make an effort to simulate some of the strain of my long walks by doing my building's staircase again—pausing frequently every few floors to take a breather and to keep my heart from exploding. As Tyrone the six-fingered man tritely yet sagely says in The Princess Bride, "If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything."
Oh—before I forget: on my rest days (all except one), I did a resistance-band routine to keep up the work I'd been doing at my place, a multi-modal exercise program involving dumbbells, heavy clubs, resistance bands, limited bodyweight calisthenics (squats, dead bugs, wall pushups), resistance-band work, and kettlebells. Before I'd left for the walk, I had to figure out how many exercise modes I could simulate with just resistance bands so I came up with this list, which I tweaked a bit on the trail. The whole thing can be done in about half an hour. And no, it's not a perfect substitute for the raw reality of actual heavy weights. But I wasn't about to lug dumbbells and heavy clubs and kettlebells around Korea with me for twenty days. Now that I'm back home, it's back to the real exercises, starting today (Monday the 17th).
The Weather
Wow, November really is the perfect time of year to enjoy sunny days and no rain. Rain threatened to appear once or twice, but the forecast was always for "light rain," and the precipitation would often disappear from the forecast by morning. On the one occasion that it did rain, the rain stopped before I left my motel, so all I encountered was damp asphalt on my way out of the city.
Otherwise, aside from the morning fog that plagued the final two or three days of the walk, the air was generally clear except for clouds. But the clouds brought their own majesty to the proceedings, a reminder of the splendor of creation, especially in how they interacted with the rising or setting sun.
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| November sunrise, approaching east Andong |
There was often a lot of wind—to be expected in river valleys. I love a day that is both sunny and gently windy, and there were plenty of those on this walk, much to my delight.
I had long thought that October was the perfect month to be out walking: the summer heat is in full retreat, and around mid-October, a switch flips, and temperatures fall precipitously from vestigially warm to decidedly cool. Things get brisk: they embrisken, to coin a term. Fall has arrived, and with it, a change in the colors of the leaves. Koreans call this color change danpoong/단풍/丹楓. This doesn't happen everywhere in Korea, however, as there are many evergreens, and depending on the region, colors may change more quickly or more slowly. Altitude also affects the rate of change, just as it affects ambient temperatures. But as it turns out, November is really the perfect time to be out on the trail. For the most part, I had the clothing to protect me from November weather. I was never bone-chillingly cold. I did, however, often get warm enough in the late mornings and afternoons to shed my outer layers and walk without my jacket, gloves, and winter vest, wearing only my tee and my Under Armour shirt. And pants, of course. Always pants.
The Landscape and Nature
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| agriculture |
A spring walk across the country—the only one I ever did was my first walk in 2017—lets you see planting season and the rebirth of flowers as well as the re-greening of the earth. Unspeakably beautiful, but with more than an unpleasant hint of the summer warmth to come. Fall walks, by contrast, bring cooler weather and the fascination of the harvest, which I, as a non-farmer, am still trying to understand. I've walked paths from early fall to early winter, and one thing I know is that "harvest season" is not one single season because different regions do their harvest at different times, following the inevitable local logic imposed by Mother Nature: you can't forcibly harvest a crop if it's not fully grown, just as you can't pluck an unripe persimmon off the tree and expect it to taste good (tannins cause bitterness). My respect for farmers everywhere has only grown the more I witness Korean agriculture in action. I've passed fields of rice that are still in the "amber waves of grain" stage; I've passed other fields where the rice has been harvested and sheaved, and still others where the threshing has occurred, and the dried rice "grass" has been left on the field for the balers to gather up and turn into giant cylinders covered in white plastic, somewhere between hypertrophic, steroidal marshmallows and cadavers wrapped in cerements. Maybe the hay is given to animals; maybe it's composted and reincorporated into the soil. I spent a week on a farm in France the first time I ever went there; I'm sure the French farmers I'd met could tell me more about the processes I've witnessed. Ironically, I've seen plenty of farm life in Korea and France, but almost none in my own country. Maybe visiting farms in the States, both small and large, could be a future project.
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| Nakdong by the Andong Dam as evening creeps in |
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| Madame Six-legger |
(NB: The uploading of pics is a multi-step process. If you see pics suddenly appear, feel free to click on them to enlarge them. Right-click on the enlarged pic and select "open image in new tab" to see the pic in its full original size, usually 2MB to 5MB. Toggle the image larger or smaller as you wish. I will upload all of my pics, then go through post by post to enlarge them. Technically, this is an unnecessary step, but I think it makes each blog post more aesthetically appealing than to just leave all of my pics as tiny thumbnails that you have to click on. This is a labor-intensive process that takes time, and on top of that, I have to edit all of my posts and apply captions to the enlarged images. Finally, I have to add all of the commentary that I didn't have the energy to append during the walk. If I remember it.)
As bike paths go, the Nakdong path has some of the meanest hills I've encountered. While it's mostly flat when taken as a whole, it has some sections with steep inclines, and depending on which way you're headed, these inclines can be heaven or hell to you. But the reward of a hill is in the view it provides you, and as you've seen, there have been some magnificent views from several hills.
While the Korean landscape lacks the raw wildness of bears and wolves and giant snakes and tigers and lions and elephants and other dramatic beasts, it still has its own unique charms. The sudden uphills provide challenges for impaired people like me, and the November weather gives you a clear view of agricultural activity—the rhythm of life, both farmed and wild. Like the Four Rivers path, the Nakdong River path also connects diverse sections of the country together: rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, polluted and pristine. While plenty of repeated elements in my photos will give you the impression of Korea as a fractalized space composed of similar, repeating elements, I hope, when you see the rest of my photos, you'll gain an appreciation for how each place is also unique in its look, its impact, and its significance to the country as a whole.
Final Thoughts
It occurs to me that, for future walk blogs, I need to create a "Korean terms page" and link it on my sidebar for future walks. I currently have a sidebar link leading to an explanation of the term Gukto Jongju, which comes up frequently. I should expand that to include all of the recurrent terms you see on these blogs, many of which have become part of my walk-related vocabulary.
I also hope that some of you readers—assuming you didn't just come here for the pretty pictures—might be inspired to do and to document your own long walks. I, for one, would avidly read whatever you write. Here's the thing about long walks, though: you have to get in condition. I'm a fat, middle-aged guy, so I'm obviously not talking about "getting in peak condition" or anything so lofty; I'm talking about getting your body used to the notion of walking for a long time, and for days on end. (I've walked with people ten times more athletic than me and seen them come away from the experience in agony after a mere 15,000 steps.) There are things that can happen, physiologically speaking, especially in the early stages when you're still learning the limits of your own body and mind. Your hands can swell after you've walked 20 kilometers. You might notice that the graph of your energy levels tends to start high, level off, then plummet during the final stages of a day's walk. Five kilometers at the beginning of a segment will feel like nothing, but finding out that you have to walk another five fucking kilometers at the end of a segment will feel like hell. You also have to reconcile yourself to the fact that some problems will be recurrent year after year, like my big-toe problem or my blistering problem. Some of these problems may be fixable (through weight loss, better shoes with wide toe boxes, etc.); some won't be. And this is as much a mind game as it is a physical game: when you're walking up a winding hill, you'll find yourself wishing for it to end (a Buddhist monk might call this the demon of laziness whispering to you), and you'll see what looks like the top of your hill... only to discover that, as the hill rounds the bend, it keeps going up. You have to learn to put aside your ego and accept whatever the hill gives you. Because that's the thing about going up a mountain: mountains never bullshit you. As Schwarzenegger said about weightlifting, Either you can do it, or you can't. Weights don't bullshit you, either. So when you're in dialogue with the mountain, do more listening than arguing. Getting frustrated won't help you get up that hill.
My big moral lesson this time was, Know your limits. I'm turtle-slow, and I'm a big, fat wimp, but I think I have a good idea, now, of how to walk up a huge hill without collapsing and dying. Reward yourself with frequent pauses, keep faith that you will make up to the top, and never lose focus.
That is, arguably, one of the most charming and seductive aspects of these sorts of long walks: life simplifies and focuses itself. Every day, your only goal is to go from A to B. A side goal, I guess, is to keep yourself alive through nourishment. I admit I'm less wise about that, given my tendency to go off the chain and gobble garbage, but my point is that long walks have an inherent simplicity and purity about them that feels cleansing, whether or not you've got an injured toe. These sorts of walks will teach you something about your own character—whether you have the foresight to prepare well for your journey, the mettle to stay the course, and the fortitude to see your mission through to the end. So yes, there's a feeling of satisfaction, closure, and accomplishment that comes from doing such walks: I did that. It's a bit ego-filled, but allow yourself that one, small indulgence. Once your walk is done, no one can take that from you. It's become a part of your history, whether anyone else knows about it or not. But my larger point, if I may come back to it, is about the purifying simplicity of this activity: the walk is both a metaphor and a reality—a journey about life's journey. And I think you'll find that, after you've done one such walk, you'll be hungry to do more, and you'll have the confidence of knowing you can do more, that you will do more.
Thanks for accompanying me on this journey and cheering on my redemption.
Quick trip summary (YouTube Short): English.
Quick trip summary (YouTube Short): français.
Quick trip summary (YouTube Short): 한국어.
Again, congratulations. Given what you've been through health-wise in recent years, this is honestly a massive achievement. You should definitely be proud of what you've done.
ReplyDeleteAlso, that final climb up the dam looks like it would be a workout for anyone but he most maniacally fit.
Muchas Jerry Garcias.
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