I don’t know, I reckon every day of this walk was amazing in its own way, even the hot ones, the long ones, and the long, hot ones. Even that first half-day with the garbage-strewn beach, even the pain-wracked ones near the end — and the ones like Day 5 where I had to stay on my toes for hours to avoid becoming roadkill…
I was alive, I was free — it’s hard to articulate it beyond that. I’ve been on a buzz ever since I completed this walk. I wake up feeling almost smugly satisfied; I have a new optimism about my life here and the future.
It’s quite sickening, actually…
I woke at 3:30 with light rain falling on my face.
I slept at the base of that column on the left
Damn it, I really needed sleep. By the time I’d woozily packed everything but the groundsheet, the rain had gone and I lay back with my head on my pack, nodded off, and was woken by footsteps and an old farm woman staring down at me as she passed.
I saw I was only 20 miles from Pohang. An easy day.
I turned right & was in quiet farmland…for a while
I walked half of it along Rt 14, climbing steadily over a range…
Much greener than where I come from
..dodging 25.5-ton dump trucks loaded with gravel screaming to and from the highway construction.
A tiny fraction of the day’s road-raptors
It was nerve-wracking as verges were tight, weedy or non-existent — and those trucks FLY. But I felt great, very strong despite my four hours of sleep.
They make road construction seem like fun!
These are just garden plants back home
You see that range up ahead? I’m afraid so…
Abandoned hotel
Village shrine
World’s Saddest Dog winner, 2012
Danger! Wild Rainbow!
Fellow denizen of the verges
Yes, one day I’ll photo-whatsit out those wires
I said hello. He ducked his head.
Near the outskirts of Pohang, the smell already hitting me
Pohang is a big port city famed for the presence of the state-owned POSCO steel works, one of the world’s largest. I could smell POSCO long before I arrived, a rotten-egg odor that hangs beguilingly over the town. It took an hour to walk past the plant.
Cicadas were dropping dead all over the footpath.
The hot & endless trudge past POSCO
I got a hotel room for 40 bucks, washed and napped, and went out to enjoy the spectacular lights of the steelworks sparkling along the breezy river.
View from my hotel near the river
Hey, no TV for five days, remember?
It was cool & refreshing near the river at dusk
POSCO from beneath the girders
I’m very tired now and must sleep. Tomorrow I think I’ll hit Rt 7 and slice my way coastward a lot further north. I really liked that lovely farmland of the last couple of days…
~ And that’s all the Goat wrote
The Goat that Wrote 
Goat, there’s some diversity going on in this post! Oh yeah, I can imagine why you just had to get a photo of those concrete columns. The do look incongruous in that green field! Everything just looks like a landscape under attack? A resource waiting to be used?
I have to say I pity your lungs having to troop through an area knocking insects out of the sky!
As usual, great captions!
I love the sound of cicadas in summer evening trees. I do not like them dropping dead.
Me too, though I got them most of the day long in rural areas. Not sure if it was the heat or the noxious fumes bringing them down onto the sidewalks.
What Greg said. Internet here is slow as molasses so I am struggling to view all you recent posts. I will save them for our return.
Hey, no hurry, Rachael. You’ve earned a nice break from me! Meanwhile, I’ll just keep pumping these picture-posts out. I almost wish I’d never started!
Your dusk/dawn pictures are always so beautiful! How do you do that in such low light??!!
Thanks! The NEX does well in those conditions without racking up (is that the spelling?) the ISO too high (I seldom go over 400) but usually I expose for the sky, modify slightly with the camera exposure compensation, and then bring up the foreground a little in (very primitive) post-production.