This morning, I was jolted from my slumbers by a woman yelling: "Get outta there!" and firing two gunshots. At first I thought it was because I was camping on her land without permission, but I peeked outside and she was nowhere to be seen, so she was probably scaring birds or something.

It was the first time I'd used my tent since August. Then, it had been hot and humid, so I'd left the flap open and spent hours batting away mosquitoes; last night it was a couple of degrees below freezing and I was wrapped in every item of clothing I had. But it turned out to be a surprisingly good night's sleep.

As I continued along US 180, I saw an unexpected sight: someone else walking. I knew as soon as he appeared over the brow of the hill that it was going to be an interesting encounter, and so it proved to be.


Seventy-year-old South Korean Ahn Yong Min (left) is walking from Los Angeles to Washington DC to express the friendship between his country and the United States and hold Christian missionary events. He set off last October in the company of his wife Park Sungja, 67, and support car driver Lee Yung Ho, 64, and plans to reach the capital on July 4.

Ahn is a larger-than-life character. A former national TV news anchor, Vietnam war reporter and manager of South Korea's archery team, he's already walked 1,600 miles from Shanghai to Seoul, and spent two months in 2002 visiting all of his country's world cup soccer venues on foot.

I walked through Funston. There's precious little fun to be had in this dilapidated and largely abandoned village of half a dozen houses and a church. It should be renamed Junkston and rebranded as a tourist attraction: the world's largest free yard sale.

It's de rigueur in large parts of this country to have in your front yard the rusting remains of every car your family has owned for the past four generations and, for some reason, an old school bus. However, the people of Funston seem to have taken this preoccupation to new heights, perhaps in some act of collective psychosis.

Every square inch of the village is littered with decaying cars, tractors, refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, school furniture, books, toys, lawnmowers, and filing cabinets.

I pictured it slowly disappearing under mountains of junk, the inhabitants pathologically unable to throw anything away, until at last a vanload of white-coated, needle-brandishing psychiatrists arrived in the small hours of the morning to take them to a place of safety.

Anson, where I am now, is not much better. Parts of it remind me of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, and I wondered whether it had been hit by a tornado, but it doesn't appear to have been.

I've also crossed off another item in the I-Spy Book of Texas Clichés: my first tumbleweed. All I need now for a full house is a Mexican with a moustache and sombrero dozing beneath a stovepipe cactus, and a roadrunner beep-beeping along in a cloud of dust.