Leg 15: Homigot to Heunghwan Medical Centre

 By the time I arrived at Homigot, the sky was clouding up a bit. It looked like there was rain on the way. But the sun wasn't completely gone. I pondered for a little while. I decided that if the sun was still out, I could get most of the way through the next leg before it really started to rain... if it was really going to rain. The cloud cover had been coming and going all morning and just when I thought it was going to sock in and start raining, it would clear again. I might be lucky and not get rained on at all. I chanced it. I kept on with the leg 15.

 

The Homigot area is a tourist area and there are a number of things to keep one occupied while there. There is also a little lighthouse museum. It's quite interesting, in its way. It is something you might consider if you ever give the area a visit. Of course, all the explanations inside are in Korean, so you can only look at the various pieces of equipment used in lighthousing. But it's interesting nonetheless.

After that short interlude, I headed on up the trail. The trail broke what had been mostly “the rules” up to this point. It headed inland on the little peninsula and into the hills. I'm not sure why it left the coastline in this spot. There was a road following the coast around in the direction of Pohang. Yet the trail headed up and over the hills of the peninsula instead. It was a welcome reprieve.

The trail first skirted a fair-sized reservoir. There were a couple of ducks swimming in the reservoir. I guess winter really is more or less over here.

 

Then I passed an old folks home. This seemed a bit odd to me. It is in no way convenient. It's 3 or 4 kilometres up in the hills, at the back end of a fresh water reservoir, not on any road that could be considered major, and between two smaller cities in the country. If I were the cynical sort, I'd say someone was trying to hide away the old people where nobody could see them. There didn't seem to be many people there though. I'm not sure what might mean.

Then it was on into the hills of the peninsula. And it was so nice. It was late wintertime, of course, so there were no leaves on the trees, and there were only a few birds about. But the air was clean and fresh. After all the industry I had been seeing up to this point, it was a very welcome change. I was still mostly following a dirt and partial cement road across these hills.

The best part was the water. There was a lot of running water in these hills. It was actually a bit surprising since there was really no obvious place where water could be coming from. I guess there must be a lot of springs in the hills around this peninsula. But after a couple of years of not really seeing a lot of running water in Korea, it was very nice to hear it rushing down these hills. Korea has been in a drought and many of the rivers and creeks I see where I live are only trickles these days.

Then I heard a bunch of what I thought might be nesting birds. When I got closer to the little slough where the sounds were, I couldn't see any birds. And nothing was startled by my presence. I think it must have been perhaps frogs, but it was a rather hypnotic sound. I stood listening for a few minutes before I roused myself by the ever thickening cloud cover.

I hastened down the road to the end point (and once again never found the sign...). When I was about two hundred metres from the end point and the road, I saw a bus coming down the road. If I had run, I think I could have made it and caught the bus. But I was just really tired. And in my tiredness I told myself they wouldn't put an end point on this trail on an inconvenient bus route. I wouldn't be badly off by missing this bus. Right?

Wrong. I let it pass by and then went into the little store that was there and asked when the next one was. Excuse me? Two hours? Oops. It was a good thing that my tablet was charged. I could just sit and read for a while waiting for the bus. And that I did.

Shortly after I arrived at the end point, it started to rain. Good timing, I thought. The bus stop had a shelter so this wasn't particularly problematic. It was unfortunate that I had missed that bus, but I wasn't going to get very wet for it.

After about an hour and a half, suddenly a great gust of wind started up. The wind was throwing stuff all over the place and whipping fabric signs around. More importantly it was pushing rain almost sideways... right into the shelter. Hmmm... I went and huddled in the lee side of a building and waited, while cursing my dithering at Homigot about whether I would continue or not... and cursing the choice to walk through a lighthouse museum with stuff I couldn't read... and cursing standing and listening to all those frogs for those precious minutes. Not doing even one of those things would have put me on that bus I had missed and I wouldn't have been huddling in the lee side of a building while a wild wind roared about. Sigh!

But the bus eventually came and I got back to Pohang and found another nice little motel to stay in and got myself warm again.

I really enjoyed this day's hiking.  It was natural, in many ways, and really what I thought this kind of trail should really be about.  Highly recommended!!