Leg 38: Odokddaegi Study Hall to Solbaram Bridge

After a couple of weeks of gaining perspective, the extreme frustration of the last leg passed and I remembered how far I had come along the trail.  By this point I had traveled well over three quarters of the trail.  One very poorly executed leg, with poorly communicated blockages, was really not a reason to give it all up.

So I headed back to Gangneung and got ready to continue.  The trip back to the spot I had stopped at before was quite easy.  I was able to find the timetable for the rather infrequent bus and was at the spot by about 9:30 in the morning.  And a beautiful morning it was.  Warm and a bit cloudy, it was a great day for walking.

The path led the way through fields and along streams and ridges into town.  This was an old-style house for some poet or other.

But despite the beautiful day, and in the vein of the hugely annoying signage problems from the previous leg, the lack of signage continued.  Places that should have been a no-brainer for having some indication of the direction to go, had nothing.








This spot really needed an arrow of some sort.  Do I go left or right?  I chose left.  Wrong.  But, still smarting from the bad choices of the last time, I only went around the corner before deciding it was the wrong direction.  I came back and took the right path, and found a marker about two hundred metres away, in the forest and around a corner, not visible from the intersection.  I had told myself I wasn’t going to get annoyed about things like that this trip out to the coast, but with it happening again this early in the day I found it very difficult not to lose my cool a bit.

And when it happened again less than a kilometre farther on…  I really need to have a chat with the people maintaining this trail.  They have to be told they don’t know what they are doing.

After traversing the foresty section of this leg, I got into Gangneung city and along the river that led back towards the coast.

The trail led around a hill, beside an aqueduct (I didn’t know they had those here)…

…and past more fields…

…before returning to the sea and the beaches north of Gangneung, where the end point was found.  Was the signage fiasco going to finally be behind me?  Only time would tell.