Day 22, Leg 18

As much as my right foot was hurting yesterday, an arguably bigger problem seemed to have developed on my left foot: my left big toe was looking torn to shreds last night. When I was at the Hong C motel, I noticed some scabbing on that toe that looked ready to fall off. I tried to help it along, forgetting my own Don't Fuck With It rule. As you might imagine, that proved to be a mistake: the peeling skin was still attached to healthy skin, and when I started picking at the callused, dead skin, some healthy skin came away, causing a bleeder. Not learning my lesson, I found more callused skin elsewhere on the toe and picked at that, too, causing another bleeder. The first wound stopped bleeding, but the second one obviously needed some help, so I bandaged it up. In the morning, I re-bandaged the toe and did the painful 25K shortcut walk, thinking mostly about my right foot, which strangely stopped aching during the final kilometers of the walk. Meanwhile, my left foot had started aching, so I was now dealing with a fading ache in my right foot and a mounting ache in my left foot. Great.

Then I got to Jeokgyo-jang and, with some hesitation, took off my socks and my rubberized toe condom—which had been on my right big toe up until yesterday but was now on my left big toe—and saw the damage. The right foot, despite the fading ache, looked more or less fine. The left big toe, however, was a nightmarish disaster that also stank. The toe had been oozing all day under the condom, and the toe's skin, marinating in ooze all day, had gone ghostly white and dead-looking except for the parts that looked like open wounds. I took some photos of the left big toe, and I thought about slapping them up in this post, but they're rather disturbing, so I'll save them for when I publish the full photo essay. Something for you to look forward to.

The toe damage looked bad enough that I considered just canceling the walk then and there. But I washed the toe, which was oozing more than blood, gave the mauled digit some fresh bandages, and rationally pondered my options. There's no sepsis: if there were, there'd be swelling, redness of the entire foot, and maybe even a generalized fever as my whole body moved to fight the infection. What I have, for the moment, is localized to the toe itself, and while the toe looks really torn up, I'll finish the walk in a week, and the toe will have all the time in the world to heal. So after initially being stressed out about the toe, I've calmed down and now see the situation more realistically. The practical question is: can I finish the walk? For the moment, the answer is yes. But I think I'm going to have to break out my roll of Leukotape to make sure the toe holds together over the next few days. One complicating factor, though, is that it's supposed to rain a lot over the next two days, which means wet socks and wet bandages. Immediate foot care will be especially vital at the end of every day—not that it isn't vital already. I'm also running low on bandages and other medical supplies, so once I'm in Namji tomorrow afternoon, I'll head to a pharmacy and restock before I even get my beloved fried chicken. I'm also planning to buy a little bottle of blood-stopper powder to plug any further bleeding. That stuff is miraculous.

Enough about my toe. So, how was yesterday's shortcut?

The shortcut that Naver offered was the walking alternative to the bike route. The bike route from Hong C to Jeokgyo-jang was 39 km, and the walking route was only 25K, a 14K difference. As I found out, this route bypassed a few of the sights and sections of the path that I normally enjoy. Perhaps the most significant trait of this shortcut route was the traffic. There was a lot of it, and for most of the path, I had little to no road shoulder to walk on. Cars roared by so often that, at one point, I just took photo after photo of cars for about five minutes. I felt as if I were on the east coast again, dodging traffic. Luckily, the dreaded uphills never materialized; there were several long, gentle rises, but nothing challenging. Plenty of farms, and when one farmer called out to me about where I was headed, I asked him about a grassy-looking crop that I'd been seeing everywhere. "Garlic," he said. So, I guess it's now garlic season, with the main harvest over for many other crops.

The shortcut route was undeniably beautiful, but I have to wonder whether it was worth it. The walking route leads the walker away from the river, which is depressing if you're into following rivers, as I am. The traffic along that path was also horrible, with little in the way of sidewalks or bike lanes. There where a few moments where the walking path intersected the bike path; I jumped over to the bike path at one point because I was getting sick of the traffic. In fact, I did the bike-path portion that takes you on a detour away from Mushim-sa, leading you on flat farm roads around the mountain that Mushim-sa sits on, allowing you to avoid the nightmarish switchback incline right next to the Buddhist temple.

The more I think about it, the more I'd rather just do the 39K bike route than the 25K townie/farm route I just did. I'm not convinced that the traffic is worth it, and I regret not seeing sights like Hapcheon Changnyeong Dam, with its huge modern sculpture that I like to call the "scrotum spider." I realize my feet might be torn to shit after a 39K walk, but since I've more or less solved the camping problem, future walks won't involve carrying a 12-kilo backpack. That could make a huge difference.

When I arrived in town yesterday, I went straight to the motel, and surprisingly, the lady running the place remembered me from three years ago. After seeing a bunch of closed restaurants (probably not expecting customers between lunch and dinner), I went to the local café to have "linner." The guy running the place had a slightly hangdog look that reminded me a bit of a young Bill Murray. It's hard to explain. He proved to be very friendly and curious about the walk. At the end of my meal, he gave me a bag of Korean tangerines and a banana, so I was not hurting for snacks. In fact, he gave me so many tangerines that I ate only half and ate the other half today for breakfast. The guy turned out to be Buddhist; he had a gilded picture of Bodhidharma hanging on his wall. I snapped a shot of that, but as I walked out of the café, I realized I should've gotten a shot of the guy.

So now, we look forward to tomorrow. This is the walk to Namji, and if I'm not mistaken, this 33K segment has the first of two mean hills between me and Busan. This hill is where I carved my name and some dates into the rocky side of the path. I hope I can find that spot again and add a new date to it. If I recall correctly, the mean hill comes fairly early in the walk, so it'll be nice to get it over with. I'm not happy that it's going to be rainy tomorrow, but at Namji, I have another rest day scheduled, so I'll at least avoid the second day of rain. (Today's rest day was a spur-of-the-moment thing; the rest day at Namji, meanwhile, has been a tradition since the beginning.)

The walk ends next Saturday. Only a few segments remain to be walked. For those not aware of the significance of November 11 in Korean culture: that's Pepero Day, probably because "11/11" looks like four Pepero sticks lined up next to each other. It's a cringe-inducing "holiday" for a mediocre product, and when I finish the walk on that day, I'm pretty sure I won't be celebrating my victory with Pepero.

So today is all about resting my feet. I'll venture out for lunch, snacks, and provisions for tomorrow's hike. Aside some that, I'll watch YouTube, lounge around, and maybe read some ebooks.

Two cats I saw yesterday:

Cats are skittish, so I had to use digital zoom.

Captain's log, supplemental: had lunch at a place that advertised several dishes but in reality served only one: noodles. While the service was friendly enough, the food was dull and insipid. An older couple came into the restaurant, and I immediately noticed them staring and muttering about me. I heard them mention the key words "도보여행/dobo-yeohaeng (journey on foot)," which are written on my shirt, so I smiled and pointed to the shirt, which I guess permitted them to talk with me openly. They asked all the usual questions about how long the total trip will take, how many kilometers I do in a day, etc. It was a friendly conversation even if I didn't like how it began with open muttering. No mention of my weight, thank Cthulhu. The couple hailed from Busan, so they were delighted to know I'd be ending my walk there. We parted on good terms, and that was that.

I've washed my mangled toe, put on my next-to-last bandage, and wrapped the toe in Leukotape (which will serve as an artificial skin to protect the raw, exposed parts of the toe). That's going to have to do for the next 33 kilometers. I'm going to try not to think about my toe too much as I walk, but that's going to be hard, what with the rain. I'm morbidly curious to see which will win out during tomorrow's walk: diabetic neuropathy (numbness in this case) or pain in the nerves I still have down there.

About the rain: tomorrow's forecast for my area seems to have improved a bit. The national weather service is predicting rain until about 8 or 9 in the morning, which means several hours of wet, miserable walking. The rain is then supposed to stop until 7 p.m., by which time I ought to be at the Heitz Motel in Namji-eup, settled in and with a belly full of my favorite chicken. 

I will then have another rest day (Monday), after which I'll be off to Hanam-eup (not Hanam City next to Seoul) for my Tuesday overnight stay. On Wednesday, I'll be arriving in the one-horse town of Miryang, where it's a toss-up as to whether I get a room with a bed or end up on the floor. After that comes Yangsan City on Thursday, the second-to-last stop before the final push to Busan. I'll be in Yangsan for two nights, then it's off to Busan on Saturday morning for what Naver says will be a 30K walk (Naver has said this route was 28K in the past). And that will be another walk in the books.

At this point, I'll just be happy to survive this trip with all my toes. When I write my postmortem after I'm back in Seoul, I'm probably going to have to discuss the Skechers shoes which, while generally a nice fit, have been the cause of trouble for my left big toe and my right pinky toe. I haven't talked about the right pinky toe because nothing's happened to it aside from an ache and some pain when I palpate it. Are Skechers worth the trouble? I'll think out loud about the issue in my postmortem.

Fingers crossed for tomorrow, my final over-30K day. I have two more days pegged at exactly 30K, but tomorrow is 33K. Sucks to start in the rain, but it's supposed to get sunny later. Of course, the forecast will have changed by tomorrow morning. One thing that worries me is that I'll hit that mean hill tomorrow while it's raining, which will make finding my scrawled graffito all the more difficult. I wrote my name near a large crack in the concrete, though, so that visual cue might help me find my scribbles more easily. Here's hoping.

PHOTO ESSAY

lunch