Day 5

What, no "Leg"?

Well, y'ain't got much of a "leg" if'n y'ain't got no feet. 

Here's what I saw yesterday at the motel, after three days of walking:

March 19, 8:38 p.m. Note the perfect hole that marks the old diabetic ulcer.

March 19, 8:38 p.m. strangely enough, the ooze was not coming from the original hole.

It occurs to me that I have plenty of blood-stopper powder (the Korean version).

March 19, 9:00 p.m. I used my blunt "bandage scissors" to cut away some loose skin.

 And tonight, having sloppily debrided more of the skin around the wound:

March 20, 10:08 p.m., in the aftermath of an Epsom-salt bath but before the reapplication of iodine

The last pic, above, shows the wound after several things had happened: (1) further debridement, (2) cleaning and soaking with iodine, (3) a nearly hour-long soak in Epsom-salt solution, (4) re-drying and re-cleaning, then (5) re-bandaging the wound. I'll see the doc on Monday and ask for antibiotics.

So during Leg 3 of my walk, I walked 29 kilometers on that. Let's talk about Leg 3, and now that I've had a day to wallow in my defeat, let's talk about why I came back to Seoul today instead of pushing on to do Legs 4 and 5.

I think this walk was cursed or jinxed from the beginning. I finished Day 2 at the Crystal Motel in Gongju City, stayed there an extra day (Day 3, avoiding the rain), then started off on Day 4/Leg 3 of the walk yesterday. The married couple managing the motel turned out to be nice and chatty, and the Crystal was a decent stay at W40,000 a night, but after two nights there, I could see a lot of the flaws: for example, the sink had a leak (plumbing leaks from the sink and/or toilet are common in a lot of motels; they kind of come with the territory), and the bed was so soft that, by my second night, I was having lower-back problems. It would have been better to sleep on the floor. Also, the motel's location at the periphery of Gongju City also meant it was hard to access convenience stores and restaurants (because sometimes, all you want at the end of a long day of walking is just a decent, hot meal). The Crystal is a nice place to stop thanks to the friendly service, but it would have been better to have a firmer bed, no leaks, and more local options for food and supplies.

Despite the lower-back pain, I got ready early in the morning and was out the door and in the cold by 4:47 a.m. on the 19th. Every morning on this walk has been cold. And my fingers were more frozen during this walk than during any of my previous walks—this despite that fact that it's now officially spring (happy March 20! vernal equinox!). The original distance for this particular segment had been 26K, but I ended up doing 29K (as you see above). Let's go over the how and why.

Most of the walk was decent; it was a nice section to travel. In my original plan for this day, I would have followed Naver Map's bike route, and that would have been 30 kilometers. The thought of doing 30K tired me out, though, so I switched the Naver Map app to "walk" mode, which almost always offers a shorter route than "bike" mode, and Naver gave me a 26K option that, like the bike route, mostly followed the Geum River but on a parallel track to the bike path.

And the impression I'd had about how much litter was along the Geum River route was reinforced by my choice to follow Naver's walking route: There was so damn much trash, which left me feeling a bit depressed. But I did learn a valuable lesson: As much as I complain about Korean bikers and the occasional biker's rudeness when he strays off the bike path and into the pedestrian path, I began to realize that the pollution I was seeing lay all along the walking path. Conclusion: However rude some bikers might be, very few of them litter. The bike paths everywhere are generally much neater and cleaner than any long sidewalk or footpath. But Jesus Christ, those long sidewalks yesterday were a shit-show. Plastic bottles, metal cans, wax-paper coffee cups, mysterious cardboard boxes, randomly tossed bookshelves (I'm not exaggerating), plastic and metal bits and chunks hinting at larger equipment—the list goes on and on. Before I had realized that this problem was almost exclusively a walking-path thing, I began unfairly thinking that the Geumgang path is filthy. And as I said, this was a depressing thought. Sure, I've seen trash along bike paths; anyone who's read my walk blog about doing Jeju Island in 2022 knows how surprised and disappointed I was about the litter problem in what should have been one of the most beautiful spots in all of South Korea. But I don't think I'd realized until the 19th how dirty the walking paths paralleling the bike paths were. There seems to be a rule in Korea: if there's a sloping berm or embankment with a road or sidewalk running alongside it, you have to throw shit down that hill. So much garbage. Now, I'm nobody's tree-hugger, but why would anyone want to turn their country into a toilet? (And sure: To be fair, America's got a huge litter problem, too. I encourage all foreign tourists to go document it and shame us. We should all take more pride in our own countries instead of turning them into shitholes.)

Aside from the litter (and some barking dogs), the only other real annoyance about yesterday was the frequency of long, gently sloping hills that would tire me out simply by going on for so long. My lower back began to recover as I walked, now that I was away from the Crystal Motel's too-soft bed, but there was still something of an ache there thanks to my backpack, as well as a good bit of soreness around the hip joints. With water bottles, my backpack shouldn't have been all that heavy at around 12-13 kg, but I could just be getting older. (I should probably train by rucking with my weight vest, which can hold up to 20 kg.) I stopped frequently; for a large part of the walk, I would count 150 paces while walking, take a fifteen-breath break, then continue on. On hills, I'd go back to a 60-pace/15-breath rhythm.

Most of the day went by more or less smoothly aside from the aches, soreness, and fatigue, the latter of which I began to attribute to my heavy backpack, which was heavy because I was carrying camping gear for Day 4 of this trip. But disaster struck at the very end of the 26K segment I had planned: I arrived in the town of Buyeo-eup (an eup is a town, and Buyeo is pronounced "boo-yaw"), at what Naver had told me would be a motel called the L-tel (엘텔/eltel in Korean), only to discover that the place was actually a guest house called, creatively enough, Buyeo Guest House. You normally need to reserve space at a guest house in advance, and that doesn't necessarily guarantee you a private space (many guest houses will put you in a bunk bed in a shared room; I've only ever had one good experience at a guest house). I entered the building anyway and saw signs of construction or renovation, but the place's parking lot was full, so I assumed the place was doing business even with renovation going on. Seeing no one, I went tiredly back outside and met two construction workers who were walking up the same hill I had just walked up to reach this place. I told them my situation and showed them on my phone how Naver Map had labeled the place as a motel with the name "L-tel," and they then told me I needed to walk further to reach the downtown area (Korean shinae—shi = "city," nae = "interior"), about 1.5 km. One of the guys pointed uphill to where I needed to go (I groaned inwardly), and he reassured me that there would be plenty of motels once I got downtown. I thanked the guys and started to limp.

But here's the thing: I had been so let down by Naver's mislabeling of my destination that all of the negative aspects of this walk, plus my tiredness and lingering pissy mood, all became too much to bear. So as I walked away, I considered using my Kakao Taxi app to hail a cab and get driven to the Buyeo Intercity Bus Terminal instead of staying the night. With that in mind, once I'd rounded a corner on my way up the hill, I stopped, got out my phone, and called up the Kakao Taxi app. The app had somehow forgotten that I had already set up a pay-by-card payment method, and it again asked me to "enter a card." You're supposed to do this by physically holding your card up to the phone's camera and allowing the app to scan the card's image and info. I held the card up, and... nothing. The "enter card" screen reverted back to the previous "request taxi" screen. I tried this several times, but the app was obviously broken. I have bad luck with Korean apps. My Yogiyo app for food delivery doesn't work anymore; Kakao Taxi is broken; my Shinhan Bank app sometimes goes nuts when I have to renew the digital certification (as happened recently; see story here). I've had other Korean apps crap out on me before, too, including an app for buying bus and train tickets that froze on me when I was trying to access the QR code to be able to get on a train a year or so ago. The gremlins who fuck apps up seem to love me, and that's why my apps always die.

So I had little choice but to trust what the construction guys had told me: I continued my final slog to the downtown area of Buyeo. By that point, it was sunset, and I noted with bitter amusement that it was starting to get cold again. It might be the tail-end of winter, but winter isn't ready to let go quite yet, especially during dawn and dusk, and especially in mountain shadows during the day. Somehow, though, I followed the road signs and made it to Buyeo's downtown area, and sure enough, there were plenty of motels with their tacky signs ablaze with the arrival of evening. Since I had reached a mental tipping point, I had by this point decided that it was time to just give up this fucking cursed walk, and with that decision made, my mood lifted (per the Meyers-Briggs personality-trait system, I'm a J person, i.e., more comfortable after deciding something than before).

It was closer to 3 km than to 1.5 km before I reached the Myeongjin Motel. I had passed a motel advertising itself as a youth hostel, but I didn't want to deprive some youth of a berth for the night. I tiredly set my backpack down in my W50,000/night room and went back out to hit the convenience store across the street for a pack of tissues (cold weather always gives me a runny nose, and my nose had decided, from Day 1, to keep running even after the weather got warmer in the late morning). In another instance of bad luck, the GS25 "convenience" store didn't have any travel packets of tissue, but it did have a ton of soft, "winged" feminine products on the shelves devoted to tissues and other soft products. It also had plenty of wet wipes, but I didn't need those ("It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife"). I went over to a "Nature Love" grocery store to see about getting something to eat, but I saw nothing that appealed to me. So I went over two buildings to a Chinese resto that had a yeongeop-joong/영업중 ("open") sign, but the moment I stepped inside, the ajumma made a face and said, "We're all finished" ("다 끝났습니다/da ggeutnasseumnida"). It was 7:48 p.m. I guessed everything in Buyeo finished early; I'd seen a lot of closed businesses in the evening. Either that, or some crotchety ajumma doesn't like foreigners. I smiled tightly, bowed, nodded, and left while muttering. Nice to see that my luck was at least consistent if nothing else. I went back to the convenience store, bought snacks, and returned to my motel.

By this point, I was dead tired, as I usually am at the end of every such walking day. I slumped into a chair, placed my snack and drinks on the table, and before I started eating and drinking, I ripped twenty sheets out of my room's complimentary Kleenex boxes: I was going to get my tissues one way or another. The god of misfortune wasn't going to win every round. Ha! I stole my tissues, refolded them, then stuffed them into my empty travel-tissue package. I blearily wrote up my blog post, then set about the grim task of examining my right foot, which had been hurting for several hours. 

The first three pics you saw above were from that examination—the loose flap of skin, the chewed-up wound, the blood, the ooze. But thanks to my diabetic neuropathy and the fact that I wasn't in the middle of a walk, there wasn't as much pain as there would have been had I been healthy. Quite frankly, I'd like to lop my big toe off surgically; it's been the source of so many problems over the past few years. And the surgeons can take my right pinky toe while they're at it. (And please don't write any comments about how you need your toes for balance. In the world, there are doubtless millions of people who do just fine despite missing some digits.)

I got the wound cleaned up and redressed, and the sight of that torn-up flesh convinced me that stopping the walk now would be the right decision. I put on multiple layers of bandages, then thought no more about my toe and went to sleep. The morning of the 20th, I woke up and, not wearing my contact lenses, I squinted at my toe. Something seemed funny about the bandages, so I palpated my foot and realized the bandages had partially peeled off during the night, probably because the toe had never stopped oozing. A worse realization followed hard upon this one: I must've bled/oozed onto the bed linens! Squinting, I threw back the covers and, sure enough, saw the stains from my toe wound all over the mattress cover and blanket. Ick. And fuck, too—this was going to piss off whoever would have to deal with the bed linens. While I'm sure the motel crew had seen a lot worse, in terms of bodily fluids, then a few ooze stains, I still felt awfully guilty about what had happened, so I dashed off a note in Korean and left an extra W30,000 in the room for the crew's trouble. Frankly, I've bled onto motel sheets before—for various reasons—and in most of those cases, I've never left money. But for whatever reason, maybe to right whatever karma had gone so wrong on this trip, I decided that monetary restitution would be appropriate in this case. I only hope that the cleaning staff didn't come in later, take the money for themselves, and destroy the note. Koreans are generally more trustworthy than that, but you never know how desperate someone might be.

Otherwise, I packed, left, and did the 1.2-kilometer walk to the Buyeo Intercity Bus Terminal. I used the weird little automatic ticket dispenser (I almost never go to a window to talk to a human being these days; machines are easier to deal with, and I generally read "machine Korean" just fine), which looked very different from the machines I normally use in Seoul, to buy an 11:00 a.m. bus ticket to Seoul Nambu Terminal. After that, it was just a matter of waiting. The bus eventually pulled into its slot; I asked the driver whether I could store my backpack in the undercarriage storage area; he nodded. I got on board and gave the driver my ticket; he ripped it in half, I went to my seat, and we trundled off to Seoul. It was about a two-hour ride, and I dozed off a few times, physically and emotionally exhausted by this very brief walk. I hadn't done Days 4 and 5. But whatever. We stopped in Seoul; I got my backpack and headed to the subway station, which was right on Line 3, i.e., I could go a mere few stops and end up at my place.

Once back in my apartment building, I decided to console myself with some hot food. If you've been reading my main blog, you know about the new Chinese resto with the only-somewhat-satisfactory food. This time, I tried some different menu items, ordering the jjajangmyeon (chewy noodles with black-bean sauce), the jjambbong (spicy-salty seafood-and-pasta soup), and those gun-mandu (fried, thick-skinned dumplings or potstickers). The server, in another bit of unintentional rudeness, meekly asked whether I really meant to order that much for myself. I smiled and nodded, unbothered because I was back home and in a fog of fatigue. The food came out as I was scrolling through some sort of Insta-Substack article about Iran's now-destroyed illegal Bitcoin economy. I noticed, this time, that the mandu was very chewy and hard to bite through. The jjajangmyeon proved bland to the point of being tasteless, and it didn't come with any cubed potato or a topping of sliced, fresh cucumber. Judging by the lackluster nature of the menu items I've tried, I see no reason to waste my money any further on that place. I suspect that, in a year or two, it too will go out of business as so many previous businesses have. My building's basement shows no mercy to losers. If this resto doesn't do something to up its game, it's going to fail. Things the place could do would be to (1) make the mandu crunchier and thus easier to bite through; (2) make the gganpoonggi about ten times crunchier, with a thicker coating of batter; (3) at least add sliced cucumbers and cooked, cubed potatoes to the jjajangmyeon, but also make the sauce stronger and less bland by both adding more black-bean paste to it and spicing the sauce up (a recent, popular trend, which I approve); and finally, (4) add some shrimp and squid tentacles to the jjambbong, which was otherwise pretty okay in terms of saltiness and spiciness. Failing that, failing those measures... only death and destruction lie ahead.

Even though this walk was a disaster from the beginning (my last disaster was in 2024), I did learn a lot of valuable lessons, and if I have time this fall, I plan to try doing the walk again. I'll talk more about what I mean when I write up this blog's postmortem. In the meantime, expect the full complement of each day's pictures to appear: they'll be uploaded, enlarged, captioned, and commented, as I do with every walk blog. That's one of my projects for the weekend.

So sit tight. There's more to come. Postmortem first.