Leg 35: Okgye Market to Jeongdongjin Station

After a nice lunch in a little kimbap place, I headed off on the next leg of the trail.  I left the little town of Okgye into a new round of rice fields, on the way back to the coast.  It was a tad bit difficult to follow the trail in the town.  Once again, the signage left a little to the imagination, and my imagination once again led me in a couple of wrong directions.  The people in charge of the trail really need to get someone who has never seen it before, and have that person try to follow the trail.  I suspect they would be very surprised by how badly marked it is in many places.  Either that or they would consider many people to be idiots who can’t follow such an obvious trail.

After clearing the town, there was a nice boardwalk through the pine trees, before I rejoined the coastline.

A lot of the area through the pines was dotted with old grass mound tombs.  There seemed to be hundreds in that stretch of forest.  I wondered to myself who had been buried in there.

Back on the coast there was more evidence of heightened security measures.

There’s nothing like walking in a cage… I wonder if it’s like a lion in a zoo.  Well, I’m hardly a lion.  Maybe a gazelle…  Ha ha!!

The coast in this stretch of Gangwon province is far rockier, and some of it has been used in shaping the coastal road.  It’s good to see that not all of Korea is shaped to the will of Koreans.

 

The rough seas suggested that there would some unsettled weather later on.  But it put a dramatic backdrop for a couple walking on the beach.

At the end of the leg, I arrived in Jeongdongjin, a coastal resort hamlet, and a fairly touristy-seeming sort of place.  I decided to stop there for the night, hoping that I could find a reasonable place to stay for a reasonable price.  I went to check in a couple of motels to see, before finishing the leg properly, just in case I couldn’t find anything good and had to press on a bit further.  But to my surprise I found a place for only 30 thousand won, about 30 dollars.

Then I headed out to finish the leg.  But I got sidetracked by a time museum on the boardwalk by the beach.  It was quite interesting.  And there were some really nice clocks in there, as well.

I finished the leg, found some food in a supermarket and ate my dinner on the beach.  The noisy surf from earlier did prove to signal an incoming bit of weather, and I sat and watched the clouds build for a small storm that came and passed overnight.  It was a really nice end to the day.

And Jeongdongjin is highly recommended for a little rest if you ever get there.