#136 Circumnavigating Jeju - Soesokkak to Namwon

Transcript

Alright, it is three days later, and I'm back on my plan to circumnavigate Jeju Island on foot. Last episode, if you want to set up, I had this idea as I realized that there's a coastal trail that goes all the way around Jeju Island. And Jeju, it's an island just off South Korea. It's its own little thing, but it's also part of South Korea. It's like self-governed and part of South Korea at the same time, so it's a domestic flight. And it's not that big. It's 200 kilometers all the way around. With a big volcano in the middle. Beautiful seaside stuff. Like the seaside is just gorgeous. And I noticed on Google Maps that the little dotted line, I think it's called the Olle Trail, goes all the way around the whole freaking island. So I started pontificating about like, can I do that? Can I just walk around the entire island? So I discovered some stuff about that, but I'll get into that in a bit. Basically, I ended off last time at Seosokak, which is only about six kilometers east of Segupo. Pretty small amount, but I kind of figure that's more or less probably the plan. You know, I'll just walk till I get tired of walking, and then bail out. Maybe a little more than that, but who knows, we'll see.

So I started from there, again, crossed over the bridge. It's like this river that cuts up into the island that's down in a pretty deep gorge. I crossed over that bridge, and then I actually, for the first time, the seaside path has been extremely easy to follow so far. The little bit that I've been both east and west of Segupo, tons of signage and ribbons and arrows. I never got even slightly lost ever. In this case, I had a bit of a tough time finding the trail, because I was up on the highway.

And I tried like going down one road toward the shore, and it was a dead end, so I went to the next one, but basically, that's the other nice thing about this, is in the event that I do lose the scent a little bit. You know, I just walked along the highway a little, and then just reached a point where I was just close enough to the shore that just between some buildings, I could just see the ocean. Oh, my God, cool. There it is. All right. Just walked down to the shoreline, and immediately I saw the ribbons again. So I'm not quite sure where I was supposed to get back on. But yeah, that's the beauty of this, too. Since this trail is right by the coast, the whole way, the coast itself is the backup plan. Even though it's pretty well signposted, you really can't miss the ocean. You know, if I do get lost a little bit, it's easy enough to just walk to the next point, and find the ocean. Right now, I'm actually I'm supposed to be up on the road, but I'm on actual rocks down on the shore, and it's cool, although it's tricky. It's very slow going.

But yeah, all the shoreline here, at least on the southern shore, it's all rocks. It's not there's no sand, but here it's especially. It's like these are for sure big volcanic rocks. They look like big pieces of charcoal. Big pieces of activated charcoal. Oh, and there's somebody gathering something from the seaside, but there's some steps back up to the road. So I'm going to go up to the road and not interrupt the person who is gathering things.

So yeah, first up, the reason it's three days later is the very next day I was feeling like, because you know, I was thinking my plan would be to take a bus. Though I've never taken a bus on Jeju, just these little things that are not a big deal, but seem tougher when you're just traveling by yourself and you're not with anyone else. I'll get into the bus thing later.

But the idea was just to take a bus back to here, but my last journey had been on a Friday, and I had a really hard time falling asleep that night. I was actually up until, you know, I started seeing the sun rising outside. It was like, you know, 5.30 in the morning, and I was like, oh, whoops, I fucked up. Go to bed immediately. So I didn't get a ton of sleep, and then Saturday is the day that I phoned home, so I got to get home early anyway. Those things combined as like, okay, take this off, and it's the weekend, you know. It seems like the shoreline, it's not going to be extremely busy. No matter what, there's little bits that are more touristy, but even just buses and stuff. The weekend's just not the right time to do anything. The weekend sucks, so lots of reasons to take the Saturday off.

But then why it took Sunday off, man. So when I very first got to this hotel on Jeju, one of the first things I noticed was that it all seemed pretty nice, although there were some dead bugs, like three splattered bugs on the walls of my hotel that I had to clean off. 5:00 I was like, you know, I mean, I booked it because it's the cheapest one. There's a shit ton of hotels around here, and I think I'm in the cheapest one. So it's like, hey, that's what you get. Other than that, it's been actually very nice. But also that kind of planted that in my mind. Like, what does that mean that there's bugs? And it's actually strange because there's no bugs bothering me right now. I really never notice insects that much at all outside. Maybe it's because when I'm by the shore, it's a bit breezy. I don't know. But I just figured, you know, hey, it's a tropical island in a warm part of the world. It's just bugged bugs, just what it is. But then I had my experience with the bugs wear that Saturday. I also had a similarly hard time falling asleep. And I was like, ah, shit, I fucked up again. I did the same thing. It's 5.30 in the morning. The sun's coming up. Go to bed, time to go to bed immediately. But then I went to go to bed. And that's when I realized there were mosquitoes in my room, somehow. I mean, there's a, there's a bug screen on the window, so I didn't know how that happens. But, ah, man, one thing with mosquitoes, because I always sleep with headphones in. I sleep with headphones in and I just put, you know, at a relatively low level, but I just put a looping MP3 of rain noise. Or I've got a shore one, too, somewhat like this real shore. But I usually do the rain one. And I just let it play. And I find it does a good job of, ah, you know, if there's somebody talking in the room next to you. Or if there's, ah, traffic and noise outside. It does a really good job of blending that kind of stuff. So it's not that you don't hear it, but I don't know. My subconscious just takes it all as one thing. Instead of it hearing some kind of sound that's keeping it up. Instead, it's like I'm hearing the rain. And within the rain, there's X sound or Y sound. And it really does help a lot. But, it's funny because like even it like, ah, you know, the airport and stuff. Like it can be some fairly severe circumstances. And I'm surprised how much the little rain sound MP3 helps. But mosquitoes, man, it is fucking crazy how loud a mosquito is in the absence of other noise. Because I was laying there with my little rain sands playing and then I heard, like it's like, what the fuck? How is a mosquito that loud? But when it's buzzing right by your ear, it's just incredibly loud. Whenever those little fuckers are doing to stay aloft, it is breaking the fucking. It's like that idea that like, oh, you know, through the laws of physics, bees shouldn't be able to fly or that shit that is not true. But it's how it feels of just like, they're basically breaking reality in order to fly. They're expending so much energy that it is wildly loud.

Oh, here's a sign, all A5. See, it was all A7 over by where I was. So I don't know when the numbers change or how often they change. I'll have to look into that a little. I don't know what that means. Exactly.

I don't suppose all A5 has a washroom or whatever it is. That would be nice. I don't see one.

So yeah, it was like, shit, what's going on? How did a mosquito get in here? And I was just like, maybe I could sleep through this. But then I quickly realized it wasn't just one mosquito. Somehow there was a bunch of mosquitoes in my room. And what I eventually noticed is that my window with the bug screen, the other side of the window, isn't secured. It can also slide open. And it just slides open, you know, openly to the outside. And it was. I don't know when that happened or how long it has been open, but long enough for seven or eight mosquitoes to get into my room. I was like, oh, shit, how did I not notice this till just now? Now that I'm trying to go to bed, I guess maybe they were hiding away when I was awake.

But way too many mosquitoes. It's like, I can't sleep through this, not just from the buzzing, but then they're going to bite me. They're going to steal my blood. So I was already like pretty exhausted, overtired from staying up too late. And that's when I realized like, fuck, mosquitoes, they're really hard to kill. I was just like trying to get them. And I just couldn't, I managed to like slap one right out of the air, like clap my hands together, like some Mr. Miyagi shit. 10:00 And I got one of them, but that was it. They would land on the walls. And I grabbed like a piece of toilet paper and tried to like use it to smush them, but they always flew away too fast. And I was getting quickly frustrated as well because I was so tired.

And I was like, damn, I can't get these things too fast. Maybe I got to go to Daiso and you know, buy a fucking fly swatter, but I can't do that till tomorrow, you know, not at fucking six in the morning.

There's some air rows pointing me away. This is good too, like there is a trail that keeps going along the shoreline here. But this is like, I was saying extra volcanic and super rough. And there's an arrow saying, no, no, no, go up, go up to the street. Thank you, arrow, I will.

But yeah, I guess what I figured out, what I realized, is if I took one of my old t-shirts out of my laundry and folded it in half, I could make a whip. What's up? Good job.

And luckily there's, I don't think there is anyone in the room next to me right now. I haven't heard anyone in a couple of days because talking about noise, man, the speed that you need to whip your shirt at to hit a mosquito who's chilling on the wall before it can fly away is very loud. And I just fucking stalked around. It's like, okay, I'm up, turn on all the lights, stalk around with my t-shirt, whack, whack, make a noise.

But eventually I got, I got most of them. One of them went into the bathroom and I lost track of it, but I closed the door. And it's just like, I'll get you later asshole. And I did. I closed that door and then the next day when I woke up, I stalked my way in there and found them.

But there was still one more in the room that I just couldn't find. He stopped flying around and I lost track of him.

And I did eventually get him the next day. But I did eventually just like I gave up. But also at that point, like I'd been up with all the lights on, stalking around, doing stuff, and also filled with fucking anger and crazy annoyance at these goddamn mosquitoes. Like when I met my lowest emotional ed because I'm so tired and I just wanted to go to bed and then I had to deal with this. I was just filled with frustration hormones.

Basically, I was just like, I can't go to bed now. Fuck, so I just did some other stuff. And I was up till like 11.30. It was just awful, like 11.30 in the morning.

And then I woke up around 2 in the afternoon and just could not fall back asleep for the life of me. But I still had that feeling. I was just imagining where I left off on this journey and like, I want to go across that bridge. I want to see what's next. I want to keep going. I briefly considered it despite the fact that I just had like zero fucking sleep. But after an hour of being awake, I was like, there's no fucking way. I'm fucked.

And that was a weird day. And what a miserable day. I just couldn't fall back asleep and just fought my way through it. And just like, oh man, total zombie. But I did eventually get that last mosquito. And there's none now. Now it's mosquito free. But, yeah, those bug smears on my wall. I mean, they were kind of bad because the actual bug corpses were still there. It was clear nobody cleaned them at all. In my case, I did clear off all the mosquitoes but the smear of bug guts and occasional blood if one of them had gotten me already. That stuff just isn't coming off. It's like these bumpy, stucco kind of walls. And yeah, it's just like I cannot with what I've got. Just, you know, getting my t-shirt a little damp or using toilet paper or whatever. I cannot get this shit off. Maybe I'll go to Daiso and buy myself like a big sponge before I leave to get all this stuff off. So I don't leave it for the next person. But it's like, yeah, shit.

This is not easy to clean up, but also very gross with the t-shirt. You know what I mean? My laundry is like super sweaty clothes. Anyway, it's not like it's nice. But it's still just sweaty clothes. We're now, oh man, like that shirt. I had to ball that up extra good and put it way at the bottom. And just like, make sure I never touch that again till I've done laundry. Because it's now it's covered in bug guts and gross shit. It's like a fuck. Anyway, that was unexpected.

And not my favorite day of all time.

I'm a little further on down the road now. There's a sign here that says, base camp, the black. And I guess it's for a restaurant, because they're showing, although it's raw, raw meat they're showing. But I guess base camp is a restaurant, or maybe the black is the restaurant? I don't know if that's funny. The black. I think I brought that up before, but you see that a lot more in Japan, where they just put the in front of things to make it seem amazing. The coffee, or the latte, or whatever. The black. But you do still see it sometimes in South Korea. I thought it was at a big river, but I couldn't find its name on the map, and then I see I think it's just an inlet. It's not actually a river. There's this huge bridge that I'm walking up now. With no people on it, but now that I look, I see that there's like this walk out to a lighthouse. And I thought it was just one of those like, yeah, you just go out to see the view from the lighthouse, and you got to walk back. But I think in this case, actually, I could have kept going. I think there's a sea wall over there. But I missed that, so I'm on the bridge, but this is cool too. Yeah, you just get the ocean on one side. Now as I'm rising up a bit over the buildings, because the buildings are not especially tall here on Jeju. And the volcano is especially tall, because it's 2,000 meters. There it is. Mount Hallisana on one side.

Ocean on the other. Pretty fucking nice. My only kind of concern with this route really, at this point, is washrooms. I haven't seen a single washroom yet on this leg of the journey. And I'll get into the scatological details, but that's a bit of a concern today especially. But other than that, this all seems pretty great. But yeah, what I figured out is on that dreaded Sunday, aka yesterday, when I was just completely whacked out, super tired and couldn't sleep. I did do some bus research. I'm like, all right, well let's at least figure this out, because so my initial idea, like it's funny, is I was just formulating this plan. You can hear it in real time last episode. But I was way over thinking it, because I was just like, you know, just exploring in general. Like, oh, I can walk along the shore this way. And I can walk along the shore that way. And then I saw that the dotted line just kept going and going and going and looped all the way. So I was like, whoa, you can go around the island. So my initial thoughts were, wow, you could set up hotels all along, all around the edge, and just keep walking around the island, around the island, around the island. Though that was again, just adding stress, unnecessary stress to the plan of like, yeah, but then you have to plant things out early and, you know, get to the next one in time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I was thinking like, oh, yeah, I'd have to carry all my stuff with me. That occurred to me of like, I'd have to put all my stuff in my book bag. And like right now, I'm just walking with my little day bag. And the sky's pretty clear today, but there was potential possible overcastedness. So I've got my weather-resistant jacket with an umbrella in it just in case, but that seems unnecessary. It's actually super humid. I'm sweating my dick off. But it's nice. Just nice, nice walking, where if I had to carry my big, heavy book bag, not nice walking, not fun, no longer, no longer a joy. But I was also kind of thinking like, Juju seems small. I don't know, but it's just hard to gauge that type of thing, where I noticed even when I only went, you know, six or seven kilometers each way, I could see my little dot on Google Maps seem like it had actually gone in a appreciable distance. You know, at least one percent of the way, which is just that's just a little afternoon of walking, like that's not even a long walk. So it seemed like a pretty small island, but on the other hand, it's an island. I don't know. And it's like, it's hard to gauge megastructures of things like that, you know? I don't know, but then I looked up the actual numbers. And it actually is small. 30 kilometers from top to bottom, 73 or four from east to west, 200 all the way around. It's like, yeah, that's actually, that is actually pretty small. That's not a big deal.

So on Juju, there is no subway or no trains. It's all buses. And I hadn't taken any buses. I had taken one bus one time in Jetcheon when I was there. So I at least had some sense of how the buses work, but it's one of those things that like, yeah, it's certainly no big deal to take a bus. 20:00 It's like, hey, whatever, dude, just take the bus. But it is funny, like I find traveling by yourself. It does make little things, anything that could potentially be a little sticky or is a potential area of a social friction or possible embarrassment. It's just so easy to put off.

Like I think it's not even close to 50-50 of like, oh, 50 percent, I could just do it. It's not a big deal. 50 percent. It's a, it's a little uncomfortable. It only has to be, it could be 90-10. It could be 95-5. You know, if it's 95 percent, not a big deal. And 5 percent uncomfortable. That's more than uncomfortable enough just to not do it, just to put it off, you know, just to avoid stuff if you can avoid it is what I find. And yeah, that's another thing when you're traveling with people. It's just like, you wouldn't hesitate. There's no way two people would both come to this neurotic decision together. Oh, let's not figure out how the bus works. You know, you would not at all. You just do it. And then if anything was a little tricky, you'd just figure it out together. Where I find that's one thing I like traveling by myself. I like being on my own itinerary. And I can just do weird shit like this, for example. But it does make it a lot tougher, I find, to do many things. I'm not just going to go to a restaurant and kind of fight my way through the menu. I'm not going to, I'm just not going to, anything that I don't have to do, I'm just not going to do it. And the bus is the perfect example. The subway is so easy. You just go scan on a card. You never have to deal with a person.

It's so anonymous and so simple. Where are the buss, you know, especially now that I've taken the bus today and now know how the bus works. Yeah, it's not a big deal. But, for example, well, even taking the bus from the airport, you know, I scanned my card and tried to get on. And the guy stopped me and I didn't understand what the problem was. And he didn't speak any English and he had to point to a sign that showed the different stops. And I remember deep in my memory banks. Oh, yeah, I did hear that somewhere. That you have to tell him what stop you're going to. So he knows how much to charge you. And the stop that my Airbnb thing said to get off had didn't exist. They called it something else. But I found the closest one. You know, they called it Segwapo something, Bay or something. And the closest I could find was Segwapo Harbor. That was what they meant. But it was the wrong name. But I'm like, yeah, okay, I guess this. But that, for example, is how the airport shuttle works. I presume maybe because people are paying in cash more, maybe people coming from the airport don't necessarily have the little t-money card that you use to take transit. So they got to charge you up front for how far you're going.

Whereas with the bus, you do scan the little card to get on. But then I was wondering, do I have to scan when I get off? Because there's a base fare, which is crazy cheap. It's like a dollar 50. But I did see that depending on distance, it could go up. Or that for 40 minutes, you can transfer, you can transfer up to two times. But do you need to scan yourself out? Because I definitely did not scan myself out in Jetshon. And I don't know if maybe I was supposed to and I didn't realize or maybe Jetshon small enough that there is no other zone. Maybe everything is a flat fare. And then I was thinking back to Vancouver when Vancouver first rolled out their little transit cards. They have three different zones in Vancouver. And if you go into different zones on the subway, they cost more. So initially they did the zones on the bus as well. But people had to scan out of the bus. And they weren't doing it. They were forgetting to. So the bus thought they had stayed on the bus all day and charged them the maximum possible fare. When realistically, you know, if you're going those distances, you're probably not going on the bus. So very few people were legitimately in the position to be charged to these extra fees. But a bunch of people were getting charged them by accident. So to the Vancouver Transit Authority's credit, they just gave up on that one. They just made bus fare one amount for anywhere that you go. So you didn't have to tap your card as you left the bus. But that's just an example of just like, I just don't know. I don't know if I have to or not. And it's just that little stress of like, geez, now if I get on the bus, I could watch people and see if anyone gets off the bus before me, which no one did. So that wouldn't work today. But luckily, I found a YouTube video about taking transit on Jeju. And it's 25:00 funny because even the lady on the video, it made it as they were doing it. She was taking one from the airport. And she's like, you know what? I'll be honest with you. I've never actually done this. I've lived on Jeju for years and I've never taken a bus. So we're going to do it together. But at the end of her 10 minute video, she mentioned, make sure you tap your card on the way out. So I was like, finally, okay, finally, I've learned I do need to do this. So again, none of this is a big deal. Again, I could ask the guy, I could just go and figure it out as I went. But it's definitely an opportunity for just awkwardness and unpleasantness. And I'm holding up the bus and I feel ashamed that I don't know what's going on. And even if it's only 5% of me that is worried about that, that to me is way more than enough to just not do it. So again, I don't know if anybody else if this seems overly neurotic, if anyone really identifies with this. But there's just little things are so much harder to do, I find, because you just want to avoid friction. And these systems are just so many variables. Something as easy as taking the bus is not obvious when you haven't done it yet. I mean, even the subway is a little weird, but it's a lot less weird. And in that case, you're just dealing with a turn style. You're not dealing with a person and a bus full of people that you're actively embarrassing yourself in front of. Back by the shore again, man, man, it's gorgeous. It is beautiful. But anyway, so I found that video. I had that all figured out. I'm like, okay, I think I get this. I think it's okay. Should be no problem.

By now, the question is, now what bus, how do the buses work? I had theorized just by looking around with my peepers that there were three types of buses. And I was exactly right. The red bus is airport type shuttles that go to hotels and things. The blue bus is the one I got on today that is just basically from neighborhood to neighborhood. City to city goes all around, you know, relatively major routes. And the little green buses are the ones that just dirtle into tiny neighborhoods.

And I don't know how many routes there are, but they said there was something like 800 some buses going around the island. There's a lot of buses.

I'm just passing a little putting green. But yeah, apparently they revamped this whole system in the recent past to have these different colors and to make it easier for tourists and easier to follow and reduce the price. Like a buck 50 is crazy. Cheap to take the bus. But yeah, despite that, you know, it's not complicated, but still just nothing, nothing can just be known. You know, you have to learn things. They've got to do it the hard way the first time. And then even if it's a simple process, you know, you still can't just know how it works. But I felt pretty confident like, okay, now I think I do know how it works. This should be no problem.

Now, the one unfortunate thing is I would always refill my tea money cards in the subway stations, but there are not refill machines here or in Jeju. They're only in big cities that have metros. So at some point, I'm going to have to get money out of an ATM and then go into a convenience store and ask the person to recharge my card. Again, probably no problem, but I would rather do it through a machine if I could, but no dice here, unfortunately. The question was, which bus do I take? So I've been using Google Maps just because I wanted the offline map. I don't have a data plan. I'm usually offline. So I'd heard that Google Maps was not the best option for South Korea, but I've been using it the whole time because I just wanted the offline map. And it hasn't really mattered too much. I went everywhere basically on foot in Jeju, although in hindsight, maybe I should have explored the buses more. If I ever go back, I will.

I probably could have seen some more stuff that would have been cool, but in the bigger cities in Busan and in Seoul, just having the subway map was fine. It's so nice how, yeah, South Korea, I mean, Asia in general, I've found between South Korea and Japan, very good for transit, very easy to travel everywhere. I'm pretty confident, no matter where I go that it's not going to be that tough. But South Korea is especially easy. It's definitely easier than Japan, even. And like, despite Seoul being enormous and the subway being crazy huge, I never had problems where I definitely did in Tokyo. I mean, it happened on this podcast several times. And I had major problems in New York. I fucking hate the New York subway. Just chuck that up to another thing about New York. I don't like so fucking complicated and so confusing and not like you can't just connect the dots and expect it to all work. 30:00 Maybe it'll work. Maybe you're there at the wrong time of day. Maybe things have been rerouted. Maybe just never fucking worked in the first place. Fucking sucks. And Seoul's just not like that. You know, you just connect the dots. You just go from here to here and this goes to this and this goes to that and it always works. And Busan was smaller, but the same thing. So I was okay with Google Maps, but for buses, I'd always heard neighbor maps and kick-how maps are the things. But I briefly looked into them and you need to be online to use them. And you know, you can set them to English, but quote unquote English. It's still not quite. I wouldn't quite call it English, but it's close enough because I got on neighbor maps and figured out how to check buses. And I was like, alright, from where I was yesterday, back to my hotel, what bus, pray-tell? If I were to take a bus, which bus would I want? And it said, you want the 201 bus. It doesn't go all the way to my hotel, but it's only a 20 minute walk from my hotel. And then it goes along the highway, right along where I walked home last episode. And I was like, cool, alright. So now, say I was to go further and I just picked a point further along the coast. Let's say I have a good day and I make it all the way up here. Then my bus, what I want to take. And it said, you will take the 201 bus. And I was like, hmm, hmm. What is the route of the 201 bus? And it is fucking perfect. It goes along the entire coast sign all the way around the island, all the way up to Jeju City. And if you want to go on the west coast, it's the 202 bus. And that's it, you know. That was one thing as much as, you know, I started off with the, what if you set up hotels the whole way and what if you took your luggage and what if you did it like some kind of epic journey. And I kept breaking this down more and more. Like, okay, what if you don't do that? What if you just take buses? But I thought I still might need to try to find Wi-Fi somewhere and figure out which tangle of buses I might need to take to get back home. You know, I thought it would still be. That's why I didn't want to push it last episode. I didn't want my first experience on the bus to be at night and possibly having to transfer and blah, blah, blah. Because, you know, when I was looking up like how to get up to Mount Hallisans since there's not a good approach from the south of the island, there was quite a bit of talk of transfers in that case, if you don't start from Jeju City. But for this idea, for this idea of walking along the coastline, I don't have to worry about any of that. I literally only need to know the 201 and the 202. And that's it. Any time I want to bail out of this walk, I just go over to the highway, which is never that far from the coastline. And I just find the bus stop for 201 and I just take it home. And then when I want to come back and continue the journey, I just go to that stop 20 minutes from my hotel. And I just get on the 201 and I go back to wherever I was and it's like, holy fuck. It was almost disappointing in a weird way. Because none of the stuff I do is like a true adventure, you know? And it's like, oh no, I got lost in the mountain and I'm in a golf course. So I got lost in the mountain and I'm in a construction site. You know, I guess I get lost sometimes. But I'm never that far from society. It's never really dangerous. The stuff I do is like easy. It's not hard. Even just like going up Mount Hallisan here, which is also easy and not hard. Just long, just a nine hour trek. I'm like, that'll think so. It's too long. Everything I do is easy. But this one, I guess because I built it up so much in my mind of like, what a crazy idea. Could I walk all the way around? Wow. Wow. How would I carry all my stuff? How would I arrange the logistics of setting up hotels? Wow. You know, I was overthinking it. I had blown it up in my mind because, you know, because I just came up with the idea. I didn't understand all the parameters yet. And now that I've actually figured it out, it is so much easier than that. It is crazy. This is trivially easy. It is so easy. So I was almost a little disappointed in a way that I was like, damn.

This really is going to be easy. You know, I was saying how, you know, it's best not to do stuff. You know, just do stuff because you want to do it because you want to have the experience. Don't do stuff to hope someone else will be impressed because they're not going to be that impressed. You could go to fucking Mars. And no one's actually going to care for more than a couple of minutes at a fucking, you know, over a martini at a mixer. He's like, oh, you want to Mars? Cool, man. What was that like? No one actually cares what you do. So no one was going to care if I circumnavigate this fucking island. So doing it continuously in one unbroken loop, certainly not necessary. Splitting it up into days. Yeah, okay. But then, yeah, just like realizing it's just this one bus line. And it's so, so easy. I was like, yeah, this is really, this is nothing. 35:00 As far as, you know, earning an achievement or whatever. But that's fine because again, I had to remind myself like nothing I do is impressive in that way. And even if it was, no one would care. And yeah, I mean, it's actually a great thing that this is this easy. I need things to be easy. There's no reason to want them to be harder. Because yeah, like right now, perfect, amazing, beautiful. The coastline, the rocks, the gorgeousness. It's gorge, man. It's fully gorge.

The good part of this plan, the actual part of this plan, the actually doing it part. I mean, the coast is going to be the beautiful coast. Nothing's going to change that. And why I think it's extra good that this actually is easy, why it's like I shouldn't, I should not look a gift horse in the mouth. I should be very pleased that it's easy. It is, like I was saying before. So I had to take a couple of days off, because my crazy insomnia then smashed up against a mosquito war raid. And I just really fucked my sleep schedule and it was ludicrous. So today, I was like, yeah, there we go. Now I'm, you know, quote unquote, back to normal. I went to bed at 3.30 in the morning, woke up around noon. There you go. That's how it's supposed to be. That's better.

But then I went down to the kitchen of the hotel I met. I got a little packet of free noodles, took my Tupperware container of kimchi, which I did actually find some saran wrap to put on top. Because yeah, like a Tupperware, it's just no match for the powerful smell of kimchi. Really was not containing it. So I took measures to help contain the power of kimchi. But I had that, then I had a big energy bar. Got all set, because I guess I was thinking about like, you know, farmers and stuff with a huge breakfast so they can fuel up for the day.

But now I'm thinking, is that actually the best method? Is it actually a good idea to super duper pack yourself full of food before you go on a hike? It seems logical, you know, to have fuel, to have energy. But I should look into what real hikers do, because I found even though I just do city hiking and urban hiking generally, it's surprising how applicable it can be. When I watch hiker channels on YouTube, it's kind of neat how often I can apply the stuff they're doing to what I'm doing, because we're doing the same thing. It's just that I'm walking on easier terrain with less baggage and with an ability to refuel at convenience stores and fully bail out at any time. But fundamentally, we're just walking around.

So I wonder, do hikers generally?

Oh, that's unexpected. Man, thank God for these arrows. So yeah, I'm just going away from the shoreline a bit. And to the right seems like the logical way to keep going. But there's probably just nothing there. Whether it's just total private property or more likely, it's just that the shoreline with all these big ash black charcoal rocks is just like impossible at this point. So yeah, the arrows saying go left and there's a ribbon, a little down the road confirming. And I love how this is set up. Thank God. Because if I just made up this plan on my own, I mean, I wouldn't have. Because I've learned through, you know, like the Toronto shoreline. Or even Japan, like in Chiba or whatever, you generally, you cannot walk along shorelines. In the modern world, they're just too developed. There's just some crazy thing is going to happen. A big factory is going to happen or something. I wouldn't try to do this on my own. But the fact that somebody else already set this up ahead of time with all the little arrows and the indicators is fucking key.

Or even this is a walk along. There's like a little path in the woods that's like, hey, what about that? Where's that go? But further down the street there's another ribbon that's like, no, no, no. Whatever that is, it's not going to take you anywhere you want to go. Follow the ribbon. It's so good.

But yeah, I'm thinking maybe, maybe taking it lighter. A lighter approach is a good idea because I left the house and I was walking the 20 minutes to the bus stop. And I started feeling a little queasy and a little weird, a little heavy in the gut. But I couldn't quite identify quite what it was. But then as I got closer to the bus stop, it was clear. It's like, oh, I need to use the washroom. Real bad. And luckily there was a public washroom near there. And I stopped in and it's just full on diarrhea. Like bad diarrhea. And I don't know if it's just coincidence. Or if this is a holdover from how I was sick last week. 40:00 This is a tail end of that. But luckily it was a deserted washroom. No one else was anywhere around. So I took the time I needed to clear out the system. But then I went to the bus stop and I had to do, it's kind of cool, the bus stops. They have these LCD screens to tell you which bus is coming and stuff. But I think there's a post to be able to work as a touch screen. But I've tried a couple and the touching never works. Like there's a little language option and stuff. I've had no luck actually being able to activate these things. So I had to use Google Translate on the LCD screen. But I only used it once. I just needed to find out which number was time left. Because there's a time left and right next to it is the zone that the bus is in. So I figured out which one was time left. How long till the next bus? And it was like 20 minutes. It was a little time. But then this is where I was like maybe I should put this off another day. Is I felt the rumbling again. I was like oh no. So I went back around the corner, back to the bathroom. Round two, much smaller round. But round two of diarrhea. And I was like man, that is not good at all. That happened back to back. Like should I just not do this? But then I was thinking but, you know. That's where this is a great thing. That this is not a big deal. I had been finding washrooms pretty consistently nearer cyclopo. And yeah unfortunately today it's been different. I literally haven't found a single one. But I didn't know that yet. And I was like oh they'll probably be washrooms. And yeah this has become, has gone from an epic journey to like a trivially easy journey. It's going to take time. It's going to take me a while to make it all the way around if I in fact do make it the whole way. But there's nothing tough about it. It's just a matter of time. One bus, just literally one bus. That'll take me along the whole route. Right back to wherever I need to go. Amazing.