This year's set of two very different walks proved to be very educational. I'm going to bang out this postmortem as best I can, but there's a good chance that I'll come back to it several times to change and/or add new insights as they come to me. Trying to remember everything at once isn't as easy as it used to be. This post will be divided into six major sections. I'll start with the least interesting part first, then move on to more interesting matters: (1) an equipment/supplies review, (2) things I learned on Jeju, (3) things I learned on the Andong path, (4) Jeju vs. the mainland's east coast, and (5) Jeju vs. the Andong path, and (6) my concluding thoughts.
Equipment/Supplies Review
Once I plotted out my route and realized I wouldn't need to camp anywhere—Jeju is full of motels, hotels, resorts, and everything else—I knew I wouldn't need my faithful Gregory Baltoro 85. So everything went into the obscure-brand black backpack I'd bought in Itaewon—the one with a modest hip belt. I ended up not having to use the hip belt; the pack simply hung from my shoulders, and I suffered no back problems from the experience.
I'm glad I ended up taking along my first-aid kit: given my toe damage, the kit proved useful, providing me with tape, bandages, hydrogen peroxide, and alcohol wipes. These, along with my ibuprofen pain pills, all proved to be useful.
I discovered—rather belatedly—that I could take my trekking pole apart and stuff it into the backpack. I checked my backpack in when flying from Gimpo to Jeju, but on the return flight, I was told not to check my backpack in, which led to the confiscation, in the security line, of my poor little multitool—a Daiso dollar-store purchase and therefore not a huge loss. The multitool was my one equipment loss this time around; I somehow managed not to lose anything else. The loss of major equipment is something that normally happens to me on every walk. For its part, the trekking pole performed solidly this time around even though I didn't tighten its screws before departing for Jeju. I had some moments, while trying to make my way across boulders, when I thought my pole would collapse under my weight, thus making me crack my head open on some rocks. Luckily, the nightmare did not come to pass.
While I'd brought my poncho, I ended up never using it, relying instead on my blue "waterproof" windbreaker, which is great for dealing with wind but utter shit when it comes to rain. I've learned that your rain jacket needs to get re-sprayed periodically to maintain its waterproof properties; I'll have to look into obtaining waterproofing spray, maybe via Coupang.
My hat deserves a brief mention. It's the same hat I'd bought back in 2017, and while it saw plenty of action on Jeju, it was mostly hidden in my pack during the Andong walk because the weather, while nice, was often cloudy. As a matter of policy and practicality, I would never put the hat on before 8:30 or 9 in the morning, anyway, simply because the rising sun wasn't at an angle to cause sunburn. After 9, though, if it was sunny, the hat would go on. Another reason not to use the hat while walking the Andong path was that I had already been so exposed to the sun while on Jeju that the hat wouldn't have done much for me, anyway. And that's a conclusion I reached during this walk project: I need a hat with a much wider brim, at least for the early parts of a walk. The current hat doesn't really protect me that well from sunlight. I know such wide-brimmed hats exist: I've seen workers and walkers wearing them, so it's just a matter of tracking the item down. And they look kind of cool, too.
I had brought along some Korean meal packets to eat on the day when I knew I'd reach my quotidian goal and be 3 or 4 kilometers away from any restaurants, but that day proved to be one of the days that JW was with me, and I didn't even end up where I'd originally planned to be, anyway. The meal packets contained freeze-dried beef bibimbap, which I found mighty tasty. Each packet contained only 348 calories, so I had brought along four to eat for myself. With JW there, though, I gave one packet to him and ate some of JW's delivery fried chicken when it arrived (his meal came with fries and chunks of Korean ddeok).
Probably the biggest equipment-related disappointment during my time on the Jeju and Andong trails was the charging cable that connected my phone to my portable battery. I wasn't sure what was going on at the time, but it now appears that my charging cord somehow lost much of its ability to carry electricity. For most of my time outdoors, I was hounded by "slow charging" warnings that claimed it would take from 5 to 10 hours to fully charge my phone. On the final leg of my Andong Dam walk (Day 4 of that walk), my cell phone's battery flirted with 0%; the portable battery did its best to keep my phone alive despite the flawed charging cord, but the phone did end up giving up the ghost. Luckily, the phone didn't die until after I had taken my victorious pics of Andong Dam. I was able to charge my phone a lot before my Day 5 walk to the top of Andong Dam, so everything worked out.
My second-biggest disappointment was clothing-related: my tee shirt's back image got almost completely rubbed off thanks to friction from my backpack. As the flecks of press-on ink came off, they acted like particles of dandruff, getting all over the backpack and the rest of my clothing. Very annoying, and now, I think of the shirt as useless. Because of the flaking problem, I can't even wash it with other clothes. From now on, when I design walk tees, I'm going to make two designs: one with front and back images for general sale to the public, and one with a front-only image that I can use for my walks with no fear of anything coming off.
One of the most indispensable pieces of equipment had to be my phone, which has also been the star of all my previous walks. I used the phone to plot and check my course on Naver Map. I checked the weather multiple times per day (especially on Jeju). I used my compass app in conjunction with Naver Map to identify local mountains and other landmarks. If I walked past a turnoff, Naver Map was there to help me find my way back, and this time around, I was able to catch myself fairly soon after making a navigational mistake. With Sky Map, I could spot planets like Jupiter in the morning (more like confirm I was looking at Jupiter, which is an easy planet to spot). Even the phone's clock was useful for helping me understand my pace, and my pedometer provided the rest of my walk stats. True, I didn't trust the pedometer's measurement of distance, but the app was quite accurate for step counts and minutes walked. Perhaps most importantly, I used my phone to take pictures and document my walk. A life in images.
Clothing-wise, I've covered the tee-shirt issue, but I can also talk about things like my belt, pants, socks, toshi, and bandanna. My belt is a thick, leather monstrosity that's seen better days. It's old and starting to develop fissures all along its length; I can tell that I'm going to have to retire the belt soon. It, too, is shedding little flakes—in this case, flakes of leather. My pants, recently purchased via Amazon, were of the cargo variety, like my previous pants, but these were made of a thicker, tougher material that lasted just fine over the almost 450 kilometers I walked (we'll talk more about distances at the end). The pants were dark blue, which is not how the online image looked when I ordered them from Amazon: I'd been expecting lighter-colored pants. I didn't want to be out all day in the sun wearing a black tee and dark-blue pants, but that is, alas, what happened. Luckily, the experience wasn't too horrible. My toshi (forearm-covering, breathable sleevelets/manchettes worn by cyclists) did their duty while I was on Jeju, but I forgot to bring them with me when I did the Andong walk. Result: slightly burned forearms. I think I got lucky: much of the Andong walk was cloudy, which may have protected me from being overly burned (the online literature on the topic of burns on a cloudy day seems contradictory to me). I ended up with my usual leathery-looking hands thanks to all the sun exposure, but as usual, there's no skin cancer. Doesn't mean it can't happen, but I've been pretty blasé about the prospect of melanomas since the beginning of my distance-walking career. My socks were a thick wool blend made for walkers, and they worked just fine, although they tended to snag on the Leukotaped parts of my feet. My bandanna was as reliable as always, and as a result, my face is tanned except for my forehead, which makes me look fairly comical.
Ah, yes: the Leukotape. I tried using it more judiciously this time around, and it proved to be an effective way of anticipating most blisters (except for my one 40K-plus day). There was the question of the Leukotape ripping off skin from the soles of my feet, but that proved not to be a serious issue. If you use Leukotape, though, do be careful to peel it slowly off your skin, otherwise you might really rip some of your skin off. The product is scarily sticky.
Finally, a word about one of the most important bits of equipment: my footwear. My New Balance shoes held up for the duration of the walk, but both shoes developed holes on their tops, probably because of friction from my toes. The treads of both shoes have also been worn down quite a bit, which is what normally happens during these long walks. I still prefer New Balance over other brands; NB shoes seem almost tailor-made for my feet. Other brands might feel initially comfortable, but they end up rubbing my skin raw or leaving me with early blisters.
Things I Learned on Jeju Island
Wow. Where even to begin with the question of what I learned on Jeju? The last time I was there was in 1986. I was a high schooler, about to turn 17; my brother David was almost 10; my brother Sean was almost 7. For us three boys, it was our first time coming to Korea (first time leaving the US, in fact), and Jeju was a place our parents wanted to visit early on in our three-week trip across Korea. We did the W100,000 cab-tour thing, in which you circle around half the island one day, stopping at various sights/sites, then do the other half of the island the following day. I vaguely recall my mother being amused because a young female airline staffer was asking Mom all sorts of questions about me while hinting that she was single. I knew zero Korean at the time (except maybe a few food words), so I didn't pick up on any of this, and Mom had to explain it all to me afterward. I don't remember much from our long-ago Jeju visit; there was the Seven Fairies Bridge, maybe some temples and some waterfalls, and Jeju might have been the place where my brothers were shocked by an order of sashimi we got at a restaurant: half the fish's body had been cut into thin slices while the other half of the fish's body remained untouched; the fish was still alive and trembling when it arrived at our table. My brothers both made despairing noises upon seeing the fish; frankly, I was a bit disturbed myself although, being older, I did my best not to show it. So 1986-era Jeju is little more than a pastiche of faded memories for me.
Fast forward to now, to 2022. If you've read my blog posts, then you're already aware of some of my impressions. My seventeen-day hike around the island was essentially a whole faceful of Jeju. I guess we can start with one of the island's most basic facts: the place is volcanic through and through. I guess this means Jeju-do sits on the outer edge of the Ring of Fire. Volcanic basalt is used everywhere, for everything. Volcanic rock is what makes the soil so rich, loamy, chocolatey, and fertile. As a result, Jeju's agricultural products grow up rich and robust. You can taste the difference in the tangerines. That said, I also noted that that doesn't necessarily translate into superior black pork: the animals that eat of the rich vegetation don't necessarily become high-end products themselves, although they're definitely marketed as such.
Jeju moves at its own pace and does its own thing. It's very obvious, right when you arrive on the island, that you're no longer on the mainland. The onslaught of palm trees begins immediately, from the moment you step out of the airport. Palms are everywhere; I feel bad for them because they're tropical plants, but Jeju is, at best, semi-tropical, which means the palms have to endure cold winters. I don't know whether the palms were originally brought over from somewhere else, or if they have deep roots in the island's history. Either way, I can only assume the palms have, over the vegetal generations, evolved to withstand wintry weather. The pace of life on Jeju is distinctly slower and less frenetic than the madhouse that is Seoul, and while Jeju can, at times, have its share of traffic jams, traffic in general is much less dense than in Seoul. There is a Jeju dialect, and while I saw written forms of it, I heard only snatches of it from older adults. My interactions with anyone younger than 60 were always in fairly standard Korean, and I was left with the impression that the Jeju dialect may be dying out, perhaps thanks to TV and movies, which have some bias toward a more standard, Seoul-ish way of talking.
I was struck, as I walked the island's perimeter, by the presence and power of repeated imagery, especially when it came to the nearly worshipful attitude toward the 해녀/haenyeo (lit. "sea-woman," female divers who harvest the sea, bringing back all sorts of shellfish and other sea creatures) and the dominance of the 돌 하르방/dol-hareubang, i.e., the statues of the cartoonish "stone grandfathers" all over the island. Another repeated image was that of the grist mill (on the mainland, at least, a grist mill is a 방앗간/bang-at-gan; I don't think I learned the Jeju designation). A grist mill is often used for milling grain, but I don't think I ever once saw a single rice paddy anywhere (go ahead—check all my pictures for rice fields), so maybe the local mills were for other sorts of grain. Even more curious was how completely this Jeju-centric imagery held sway on the island. On the mainland, you can find 장승/jangseung imagery everywhere (image), but jangseung were almost completely absent on Jeju.
A discussion of Jeju must include some insights about the weather. I arrived on the island at the tail-end of September and walked through mid-October (my final walking day was October 15, in fact). At first, the weather was quite hot, which I expected, given how far south I was (pretty much level with Japan, which was almost directly to the east). The weather was also very variable—unpredictably so. A forecast might say one thing the night before the next day's hike, then the day would bring completely different weather. It became impossible to trust any forecasts at all—or rather, if I wanted an accurate forecast, I needed to look only one hour ahead. Wind was occasionally a factor, but not as often as I'd been led to believe. There was more rain during this walk than I've ever endured during any of my mainland walks; one day in particular brought a full-on storm. This blustery tempest lasted barely half an hour, but I ended up thoroughly soaked and miserable. As the month plodded on, though, the weather did seem to become a bit more stable—both cooler and less rainy. I began to wonder whether I had chosen the wrong time of year to come. Should I ever do the Jeju walk again, I'd want to start around mid-October and walk until early November.
One of the things I was sad not to see was the harvest (a regular feature of the Four Rivers walk in the fall), but it didn't take long for me to realize that, with weather conditions being so much warmer on the island relative to the mainland, Jeju's harvest would happen late. Some sort of harvest was going on when I was there, though, because various roadside stores were selling tons of tangerines. You may recall that I did see crates of harvested tangerines at one point, but for the most part, what I saw were tangerines still on the trees, many of them still green. Persimmons, too, were everywhere, but not ripe enough to pluck.
As with the mainland's east coast, I passed by plenty of sashimi places, but there weren't as many on Jeju as on the mainland. Otherwise, Jeju seemed to have a variety of restaurants similar to what one might find on the mainland, but with a definite stress on black pork. I ate black-pork products three times, and I hate to say it, but I think the meat is overrated. It's not bad by any means, but it tastes like regular pork to me. Maybe I just have an unrefined palate. As I think I mentioned earlier on this blog, I'd love to see a TV show featuring a taste test among experts to see whether they can tell the difference between regular pork and the meat of the black pig (흑돼지/heuk-doeji). The variety of eateries meant I was never bored, and I ate many different styles of food, ranging from convenience-store crap to a vaguely American-style pulled-pork sandwich to Korean food to Korean-style Japanese food.
The coastline caters to seaside tourism. Along with the above-mentioned restaurants, there's plenty of lodging, coming in all shapes and sizes. Unlike the east coast of the peninsula, there isn't quite the same obsession with pensions; motels, hotels, and minbak are all available as well. I had scheduled a couple minbak to stay in, but upon arriving at the ends of certain trails, I saw that regular old motels were available, so I chickened out and stayed in those instead.
I had worried, before coming to Jeju, that the place would be such a tourist trap that the trails would be full of people. While there were some crowded and popular spots, much of what I walked—a combination of bike trails and the local Olle-gil—was quiet. Of course, by starting in the early morning almost every day, I was guaranteed some quiet time, but even when I was out the door as early as 4:30 a.m., there would still be other random people who had gotten up earlier than I had. Most of these early risers were old, as is true everywhere in Korea.
Sticking to my original walk plan proved impossible, but Jeju is so full of lodging that it was easy to make changes on the fly and not worry too much about where I'd be staying for the night. The quality of my lodging ranged from grungy to almost posh although, as you'll recall, even the posh places could have toilets that didn't work. The pensions I stayed in were generally nice, although one pension was, in reality, nothing more than a motel miscalling itself a pension. The place that JW found was W58,000 a night, and it was easily one of the best places I crashed in; the only problem was that getting there meant walking an extra 3 kilometers after I'd already walked over 40 kilometers. But when you're with JW, nothing ever happens linearly or easily.
One of my greatest disappointments was the discovery that much of Jeju's coastline is polluted. I did what I could, when taking photos, to minimize the visual impact of all that filth, but there was a lot of it. On a few rare occasions, I'd walk along a stretch of relatively untrammeled coastline, and the cleanliness would feel like a boon. But for the most part, Jeju's coast and beaches proved to be cluttered and strewn with detritus. I remember seeing, one day, that team of old people bravely collecting garbage along one section of rocky beach, and I found the sight touching because I knew it was both a thankless job and a losing battle. There really needs to be a campaign to revive pride in Jeju's coastline, which truly does possess its own craggy, natural beauty. The island deserves better treatment than it's getting from the careless locals (who throw their fishing gear all over the rocks) and tourists (who leave all the usual wrappers and containers everywhere). I should find out if there's someone I can write to about the problem.
Jeju seems to take solar and wind energy very seriously. I saw solar panels and solar farms everywhere, and plenty of wind farms as well. It was while I was watching the wind turbines, though, that something curdled inside me. I noticed that, in many cases, there'd always be one or several wind turbines that simply wouldn't turn when the wind was blowing, and the thought rose up within me: what useless pieces of shit these wind turbines are. Many forms of alternative energy have not yet solved the problem of intermittency, i.e., the problem of an energy source that is on-again, off-again. You can't control when the wind will appear even if you've picked a high-wind area in which to plant your turbines (see other problems with turbines here). You can't control how cloudy a day is going to be, so you never know, from day to day, how much sunlight to expect. Even something more reliable, like hydroelectric power, is subject to the capricious vagaries of nature. Guaranteed constancy can only come two ways, as far as I can tell: via solar energy collected in space, or via geothermal energy. The problem with the first energy source is that we haven't yet built such a collector. The problem with the second is that you're limited by geography: we can't simply drill anywhere on Earth to get down to where it's hot. The deepest man-made hole goes only 7 kilometers; the earth's crust can be as much as 100 km thick. Geothermal works where there's a lot of volcanic activity not far below the surface; this limits geothermal's usefulness geographically. Best solution: go nuclear!
Reality hit hard when I first tried to stick to the Olle-gil. I discovered a limit I didn't know I had: balance problems related to last year's stroke. I walked the Korean mainland's east coast last year, a few months after the stroke, and never once had any balance issues despite some very challenging hills, but this trip, I found myself gingerly picking my way over rocks and boulders, or fearfully fumbling along steep mountain trails or rocky steps before sunrise. It was just too much. Losing my balance was a constant fear on this trail, but as time went on, I got better at knowing when to leave the Olle path and veer over to the bike path, which was generally separate from vehicular traffic and therefore fairly safe. While I felt some peril while walking along uneven surfaces, I never felt that I was going to get crushed by a vehicle. Jeju's trails are, I would say, remarkably safe on that score. I'm glad I learned my new limits, though: I now know not to waste time planning a Baekdu Daegan trail hike. I've heard scary things about that trail, and knowing what I now know about myself, I know there's no point in tempting fate. So I'm pretty much just a bike-path distance walker now, which is what I've always been.
Things I Learned on the Andong Walk
I had suspected that the Andong walk, which took four days plus an extra day to see the top of the dam (that last day wasn't a distance-walking day, so I'm not counting it as part of the walk from Sangju to Andong), would be more to my liking than Jeju, and I was right. As much as I enjoyed my Jeju walk, which turned out to be more appealing than I'd thought it would be, I liked the Andong route better for several reasons. First, I do enjoy the Nakdong River. It's big, calm, and beautiful, as is the river valley it's in. When you walk the Four Rivers path and pop out of the Saejae portion, you find yourself in a different part of Sangju City, but the end of the Saejae is where you meet up with the Nakdong, and the Nakdong River portion of the Four Rivers path is the fourth and final portion of that walk. This final portion, from Sangju to Busan, is almost half the entire distance of the Four Rivers path, but the one thing you don't get to see is the part of the Nakdong River that leads east to the Andong Dam. The route I took was about 88 km in length, but had I been a biker biking straight from Sangju to Andong, I think the route would have been closer to 80 km, possibly less. My route was as long as it was because I had to dodge inland to find certain motels.
The Nakdong is curvy, but it trends generally eastward, and at the end, you find yourself at the great dam, beyond which is Andong Lake, which looks, in overhead shots, like a bloated centipede or a fat Asian dragon with too many legs. The lake doesn't have any bike trails around it, and while there's a road that follows at least one side of the lake, I didn't see any easy way to walk the lake's entire perimeter. I think the lake might best be explored via boat.
While Andong Lake isn't the ultimate source of the Nakdong River, I've come to think of it as a proximate source. The river you encounter at Andong is the same river that flows all the way down to Busan. With Andong Lake being at the southern edge of the Baekdu Daegan mountain range, you can see how the force of gravity makes the water flow from Andong to Busan and out to the sea. My theory has long been that the Baekdu Daegan mountain range is why the Nakdong flows southeast to Busan, and why the Han River flows west through Seoul and vaguely toward Incheon before swerving north and emptying out a bit before North Korea.
Except for that annoyingly long stretch of trail where vehicles illegally appear and share the path with you, most of the Andong path is remarkably quiet and peaceful, at least at this time of year. I didn't encounter (m)any fellow walkers, and while there were some bikers, I got the impression that the Andong path is little used and little known. You do end up dipping back into civilization here and there, but as I documented, the urban areas along the route are calm and fairly spread out—at least the parts I encountered. Lots of wide sidewalks and what appeared to be more careful urban planning than can be found in a haphazard mess like Seoul. The final few kilometers of the path led along wide, spacious riverside parks. The river was a playground for jet-skiers and fishermen; there was that one weir-like structure featuring those great, carved images of ceremonial Korean masks—another sign of the region's fealty to tradition.
The terrain was flat until the walk's final day, which is when I encountered those two hills, the first being good spiritual preparation for the second, which was an ass-kicker. The walk took me past farms and some suburb-like areas; the parts that closely followed the riverbank were all gorgeous, and that's at least partly because, unlike in Jeju, autumn was evident in the region. One thing I sorely missed in Jeju was what Koreans call danpoong/단풍, i.e., the appearance of fall colors in the trees. The presence of danpoong during the Andong walk was one of the reasons why I expected to like this walk more. That and, of course, the all-important harvest, which never ceases to amaze me.
The Andong route felt very much in the spirit of the Four Rivers walk. It was a new route, yet it felt familiar and comfortable to me. I enjoyed all the new sights, to be sure, but that underlying sense of familiarity made me feel connected to the area in a way I didn't experience while in Jeju.
Jeju vs. the Mainland's East Coast
With Jeju having been a coastal walk, it's inevitable that I compare this year's walk with last year's. While last year's walk brought with it some new sights and some enjoyable experiences, it was, overall, not a walk I would want to do again anytime soon, for a number of reasons.
First and foremost was the question of traffic. The east-coast path didn't do much to protect walkers and bikers from traffic. The Jeju route, meanwhile, almost always provided some sort of road shoulder, separate lane, or separate path, so I never felt in danger. Being safe the whole time made a big difference in terms of stress.
The second reason that Jeju was better than the east coast was that you got periodic breaks from civilization. There were plenty of stretches between towns and cities where you could walk quietly, breathe freely, and not worry about the constant press of humanity. The peninsular east coast, meanwhile, proved to be utterly built up—it was wall-to-wall civilization, with everything that that implies from restaurants to pensions to wharves to ports to all the roads needed to allow vehicular traffic to drive up, pick up loads of seafood, and cart it inland. I think I wrote, last year, that the east coast felt like a single, sprawling megalopolis running from north of Gangneung all the way down to Busan.
A third reason to prefer Jeju to the east coast is that Jeju, despite having so much coastline, doesn't seem nearly as aggressively devoted to the fishing industry. Along the east coast, I could expect to see squid boats, with their shining lights, way off the coast almost every morning. On Jeju, squid boats were a rare sight, indeed: I might have seen them only once or twice, although I did often see such boats moored in local wharves. Jeju has these "fisheries" buildings that appear at intervals all around the island's perimeter, but even these had a rather understated presence. They certainly never stank of fish. In fact, as I began to realize that there wasn't much of a fishy smell at all on Jeju; the odor dogged me last year along the east coast, but on the Jeju walk, there was almost no odor at all, just as there was almost no odor of the sea itself. (There was, however, a strong smell of seaweed near the end of the Jeju walk, but it wasn't unpleasant.)
Imagine the situation this way: if you were to flip around everything that was bad about the east coast so that it became something good, you'd have the Jeju walk. Jeju presented me with annoyances and difficulties in terms of initial terrain and inconstant weather, but in terms of sights and later terrain and safety, Jeju easily beats the east coast on every count.
Jeju vs. the Andong Path
After such an exotic and educational experience on Jeju, why on earth would I like the Andong path better? Well, it comes down to a lot of the reasons I alluded to before: Andong felt comfortable and familiar; fall colors that I'd missed in Jeju were in evidence along the Nakdong River valley; the Andong path was, overall, much quieter than the Jeju path. Maybe I'm just more of a landlubber, a mainlander, than an island person. John McCrarey asked twice about whether I'd consider moving to Jeju. The place has incredible views and a slower pace of life than what you'd find in Seoul, but I'm not sure how much I'd like the ever-changing, unpredictable weather. My buddy JW pointed out that another complaint about life in Jeju is the way the place jacks up prices; the cost of living there could definitely be cheaper, but the place is at least partly a tourist trap, hence the inflated prices. I did find plenty of things that were more cheaply priced while I was there (recall those water bottles at the beginning—W350 versus W950 on the mainland), but in general, I found pension and motel rates to be comparable to what they are on the mainland. All in all, Jeju ain't cheap.
The Andong path was also much cleaner—less polluted—than Jeju was. Not to say that the Andong path was totally pristine, but there was certainly a lot less litter relative to Jeju-do's coast. This may have something to do with the Andong path's being less well known, but whatever the reason, the mainland route felt neater and cleaner. As a result, it was, despite its more pedestrian beauty, markedly easier on the eye.
In the end, I think I'm more of a river-valley person than an island person. The Olle-gil itself may have something to do with my opinion: those first few days of navigating difficult terrain didn't exactly predispose me to liking Jeju's trails. If I hike there again, I'm probably going to stick to the coastal bike path and the farm roads. JW wants to go back and do Halla-san, but frankly, I no longer trust JW's intuition when it comes to hiking anywhere; he always ends up choosing difficult routes that I, in my post-stroke state, can no longer handle. So I'll leave Halla-san to JW if he's so keen on doing it.
I like Jeju and deeply appreciate what I learned about the local culture and agriculture. That said, the Andong path was inevitably more appealing to me. It didn't hurt that the weather during the Andong hike was pretty much perfect.
Conclusion
I came away from Jeju and Andong having learned a lot from this experience. Thanks to my previous distance-walking adventures, I was fairly well prepared for most of the curve balls that Mother Nature threw at me. There were unanticipated difficulties (including the unpleasant discoveries of post-stroke bodily limitations), and certain plans had to be thrown out the window, but adapting to new situations proved to be easy enough. Despite the changes in plan, I was able to circumnavigate Jeju just fine by using a combination of the Olle-gil, the bike path, and the network of quiet farm roads that connected everything to everything else. Jeju is full of beautiful sights, some of which I got to see, and others of which will have to wait for next time. The Andong path had its own quiet beauty; both Jeju and Andong ended up making a deep impression on me.
I didn't talk much about my health up to now. I can't say that I lost much weight during this trip; maybe just a few easily regainable pounds. (It doesn't help that I'm currently resting my feet for two weeks. Another chance to regain weight!) While there were some challenging hills and mountains that took the wind out of me, I didn't encounter anything I couldn't survive. I got sunburned as I usually do, although my toshi protected my forearms during the Jeju portion of the trip. I forgot the toshi for the Andong walk, but my forearm burns didn't end up being too severe thanks to the often-cloudy weather. My feet came away from the experience pretty achy, and as you know, my right big toe is fairly messed up, but I have faith that everything will heal in time. There was the usual toughening-up from being outdoors all day, over many days, but now that I'm back in civilization, I expect to lose all of that as I do every year. In terms of skin condition, my forehead is incredibly pale thanks to my bandanna; I'm too embarrassed, right now, to take the bandanna off in the office, but I know I'm going to have to shed the headgear to allow my facial skin tone, top and bottom, to equalize.
The most practical lesson I learned during this walk was that Naver Map doesn't tell the whole truth. When you're planning the trip and reviewing your options for lodging, Naver Map doesn't show every single hotel, motel, etc., on the ground. It's when you reach your destination for the day that you realize, all of a sudden, that hey—there's another motel right here! or something to that effect. The discovery of new lodging affected, in a limited way, how I circumnavigated Jeju-do. It also gave me ideas for the next time I walk to Andong from Sangju.
Both Jeju and Andong deserve subsequent visits. In fact, I think I'll be going back to Andong within the next couple of weeks to test out the possibility of walking up the Andong Dam's south side to see whether I can get on top of the dam. The view won't be much better than the one I already got, but it'll be a moral victory, of sorts, if I can get onto the dam's spine. JW and I discussed doing a connect-the-dots hike of Jeju (to see certain major sites) that might take us zigzagging all over the island's interior, keeping us largely away from the coast, but for the moment, that's just an idea, not a real plan. I honestly don't know when I might go back, although I vow not to take another 36 years to do so.
If I were to trust my pedometer, my total distance walked, over both trips, was 498.1 km. That sounds a little high to me, and with my pedometer seeming to exaggerate distances by 30%, if I multiply the above distance by 0.7 to bring it down a bit, I get 348.7 km, which seems a little low for the two trails. The average of the two distances is 423.4 km, which seems fairly realistic. That number is close to the 444 km displayed on my tee shirt (based on initial calculations).
Whatever the distance was, both walks were well worth my time, and I'll be exploring both Jeju and Andong again in the not-too-distant future. Thank you for following along with this year's walk. Expect more walk-blogging next year!
