The Great Wall’ker

Today I walked from the last stopping point to the bridge just northeast of Gaotai. A total of 33 km (20 miles).  Jon stayed in Gaotai for the day.

Since the rain had washed all the sand away, the day was very different to the last time we were walking. Less wind and the sky was clear blue. I had a great view of the mountain range to the southwest.

Most of the walking was in the desert. Some places it was the traditional image of a desert with sand dunes, but other places the sand was replaced with small stones and pebbles.

Several times today I saw beautiful watchtowers of the Great Wall. I also walked past what was probably the largest watchtower along the entire Wall. It was huge and just looking at it from the outside must have scared the enemies of the Middle Kingdom. It is now starting to fall apart. Large chunks have fallen down from the sides, but it was still monumental.

Later on I walked past a large fortress. Its walls were 6-8 metres high (20 - 26 feet). On the inside there was a dense forest and for the first time I saw all the leaves on the ground that, with time, will turn into soil. There seems to be a continual battle between the desert and people planting trees here. Some places the desert stopped right next to a road, while other places the planted trees stretched for half a mile into the desert.

Although the title of this post is ‘rest day’, we don’t sit on our bottoms all day long. Every evening I have written notes about the day, the pictures I have taken and the people we have met. So today I wrote everything onto the computer and took an online backup, charged camera batteries and telephone batteries, transferred pictures to the computer, tested a Chinese Nokia phone to see if I could get online with it to update this website when we are walking.

We also washed our clothes and made adjustments to our equipment. I installed a program for this web site that should enable me to make daily (!) updates of the site when we are walking. I will have to use the Norwegian SIM card and will have to check how much this costs after a week, to make sure it is not killing my budget for the trip.

A couple of hours after we had gone to bed on a mattress, the wind started increasing. After a short while it was blowing really hard, so hard that we both got up in the tent and tried to secure it by counteracting the forces of the wind gusts from within. It worked pretty well, but after doing this for more than an hour, it gets tiring.

The wind was blowing so hard that I was sure I could here the jet engines of a plane in the background. After trying to hold the tent steady for a long time I gave up,  laid down on the mattress again and hoped the tent would manage by itself the rest of the night, although the wind had the same velocity as before.

The next morning we were both pretty tired. Our tents and sleeping bags were full of sand and dust. It was still blowing in the morning but not as strongly as before.

We got up and headed for a nearby town to buy food and water. Then we walked through the town in search of the Great Wall on the other side. This was a hint from Andreas of the Great Wall Forum and his suspicions turned out to be correct. We hit on the Great Wall and followed it South-eastwards.

At this point it was still very windy. I went into the desert a couple of times to walk along some recognised stretches of The Wall. Later in the afternoon it was still blowing fairly hard and there were few places to pitch our tents in other than loose sand, so we decided to head back to Gaotai to get some sleep after a pretty sleepless night

I was very happy about this decision later on as the following night it became very windy and for the first time in a long while it rained heavily too. I’m happy we didn’t need to hold on to our tents again …

Today we took a bus back to the Doctor’s office and continued the walk. We walked about 14 km (9 miles) before trying to cross the river, only to find the path was closed for reconstruction. We didn’t want yet another detour so decided to go for it and just walk straight into the construction site and hopefully through it.

It worked well for a while.  We were then stopped by a guy shaking his head and pointing further on, indicating that we could not cross. I just nodded and told him as convincingly as I could (in Norwegian) that everything was OK and that we would cross the river. It seemed to work.  We walked on and managed to get ourselves over without getting wet feet or crushed limbs by the industrial machines at work.

We walked on a little further before finding shelter in a small gathering of trees. We spent some time debating whether it was best to put up our tents in the middle of the little man-made forest where there was nothing but sand on the ground, or towards a verge where there was a thin layer of grass. The latter would potentially expose us more to the strong wind but we decided it was best to pitch our tents there.

I sent off the GPS coordinates as usual, but this time from inside the tent. Although I got an ‘OK’ message that the position was sent, it later turned out that the message never arrived at the other end.

Then came the night, and the sand storm, but I’ll write about that in the next post.

We gave ourselves a whole days rest in Gaotai and the thing I will remember best from this day was the sadistic foot massage I received.  We found a foot massage parlour and the owner of the place massaged my feet while Jon got a massage from another younger woman. It seemed that the criteria for a successful massage was as many gasps of pain as possible. After an hour we were pretty drained.

The problem was, that after the blister on my left foot had become so bad, I had started favouring my right foot. This is turn meant my strides had uneven lengths. So my left calf muscle had stiffened completely and was like a solid ball.

Anyway, after an hour of pain, we walked slowly back to the hotel hoping that our feet and legs would be better the day after - which luckily they were.

The wind blew really hard through the night but we were safe in the Doctor’s premises. In fact we were very safe, because he had not only locked the door but taken down the metal barrier in front of the door too.

We were planning to walk on but we were both pretty beaten up after the desert crossing. Sticking to our plan of not overdoing things we thought it best to take a couple of days rest to get our bodies back in shape. We were sitting in the small shop by the doctor’s office when a very nice guy offered to drive us to Gaotai, after he had unloaded his truck with metal forms to make concrete elements for the irrigation systems. We were very grateful and were soon sitting in his truck with our rucksacks on the back, heading for Gaotai.

Shirley had called ahead and arranged for a place for us to stay. It’s nice to have a person with knowledge of Gansu to call ahead, so many thanks again Shirley! We spent the rest of the day relaxing, washing ourselves and the most dirty things in our rucksacks. In the evening we went out and had a nice meal.

Gaotai is not a very big place. It has a nice local atmosphere. In the middle there is a ‘city green’.  It looks like there is something going on there every evening. Lots of people, music and dancing in the evenings. It is a little hard to blend in though, as there is usually a virtual wave of people in front of us opening their eyes wide open when they see two foreigners walking down the street. I guess it is hard to blend in when we are both over 6 feet tall.