Day 26 – Chagat-jae to Beol-Jae

Distance for the day: 10 km
Total distance: 384.7 km

It rained on us all night and it hadn’t stopped when we left camp. We packed up later than usual, hoping for the rain to stop…   
Not only is the next section of trail a closed one, but it is also one that has plenty of scrambling sections with fixed ropes. Since it is raining, we decide to skip this section and walk the road to the next open section. We head down the valley towards the village of Ansaengdal. As we are going down we see that the dried streambeds where we were looking for water yesterday are all flowing this morning!

  As we get to Ansaengdal there are lots of signs and ropes on the trail to prevent access to this closed section. Not taking due care, we walk right in front of a CCTV camera… We hope everything will be ok.

We walked in front of the new expensive restaurant mentioned in the notes accompanying the guidebook. It was closed in the morning.  

The temple in Ansaengdal.  

Walking down the valley to join the main road.
We went by two jeongjas that would make good camping spots. Toilet blocks were located close by.    

Walking on the main road, we keep looking at the Baekdu Daegan ridge, thinking about this challenging section that we will be missing… A truck driver that keeps driving by us stops twice to give us food. He seems to like the fact that we are walking. A man also stopped by to offer us a ride, which we declined with many thanks. 

  

As we are walking on the road, a Korea forest service truck stops next to us. “We are busted!” we both think, sure we are about to get a fine for going in the closed section. A lady gets out of the truck and makes us understand that we are not allowed to walk the ridge by pointing at it… We explain to her that we are walking the road to Dongno-myeon. She repeats that we are not allowed on the ridge and we nod. The employees leave us but later drive a second time by us, making sure we are doing as we said. Did they see us on the CCTV? We’ll never know..

Finally reaching Dong o-myeon!    

We resupplied in the two different grocery stores in town and sat in the jeongja next to the police station to sort our food. There is a toilet block with power next to it.  

One of the main streets in town.  

A cold dish of noodles for lunch at a local restaurant, served on ice.

   

We end up spending a lot of time in town. We visited the medical clinic (very modern, two employees out of three were fluent in English), the bank (No way to withdraw money nowhere on trail with our foreign cards it seems.. we’ll have to solve this issue eventually, in the meantime we pay everything we can by credit card), the two grocery stores, the police station and a restaurant. We also sat for a couple hours in front of a building that had unprotected wifi to update the blog. We were attracting a lot of attention in this little town that must rarely see strangers! Some people stopped by to talk to us or give us candies.

 As we were preparing to leave our free wifi spot to head to Beol-jae, someone came out of the building in front of us with cups of coffee for us. The man was the owner of a wine company that is based there and invited us inside and served berries and onion juice. He also gave us beer and fruits to take with us on trail.  

The owner called one of his friends and told us that they would like to invite us for a dinner. His friend came to pick us up at the wine place; to our surprise the owner did not join us as he said he was busy! And off we went to have dinner in an unknown locaton with unknown people. 🙂

  

It ends out we were headed for Banggok-ri, where we had a BBQ dinner and a wonderful evening with some friendly artists.

    

The place where we were having dinner was also the store/showroom of one of the artists and his father. We had a tour of the gallery before having an after meal tea.

          

Korea keeps amazing us in a good way! We know that at this rate Marilyne might not be able to complete the whole trail (She has until July 18), but we rather not miss these wonderful opportunities!