The Great Wall’ker

Today I got off to an earlier start and was walking the Great Wall at about half past seven. It was fairly cool, which was a great improvement from yesterday. Walking the Great Wall was fun today. The first section was on the border of the desert. As it was cooler, I had enough energy to get the camera out and take quite a lot of pictures. The sun made interesting patterns in the sand since it was quite low on the horizon.

In one section, I walked in a large man-made forest. (It could have been made by a woman of course, but I only saw men there today.) This was ideal walking terrain as the ground was flat and the trees provided shade!!! There were even large patches of green grass under the trees. I was so happy to see grass again that I sat down and took a break, just to look at it.

About half way during the walk the Great Wall entered a valley with fields.  The Wall became more difficult to follow. There were lots of rice paddies and maize/corn plants. It was fun to see the rice paddies up close. Some of them were in about 50 cm’s of deep water, so I had to be careful to keep my balance when walking on the thin strips of land between them. Rice paddies are mosquito-land, so I have donated blood to quite a few of them today. The maize plants were so high that I couldn’t see anything when I walked through them.

After having lost The Wall trail for five minutes, I re-discovered it and started heading towards it. There was a mud house on top of it and a dog started barking it’s head off. I climbed onto the Great Wall and saw that the farmers were harvesting and drying Chinese Wolfberries. The area is well known for this berry. The dog continued barking and soon the inhabitants of the house came out. They invited me inside, as it was getting pretty hot by this time.

One man found a watermelon, cut it in half and offered it to me together with a pair of chopsticks. I thought it best to just go on explaining why I was there, as I have little experience eating watermelons with chopsticks. Luckily another guy picked up the other half and used the chopsticks as a knife to loosen the meat on the inside. It was delicious. I had forgotten to restock on water, so it was great to get some fluids into my body. They were very nice people and I showed them a printed page explaining what I was doing. (Thanks for the translation Sue!) They seemed to like the project and invited me to stay for a warm meal. Unfortunately, I had to decline the kind offer as it was getting hotter outside by the minute.

I left soon after and stepped straight on to the Great Wall from their front door. The dog barked me farewell. Towards the end of the day I really started noticing the consequences of walking 23-24 kilometres on just half a litre of water and half a watermelon in July in Ningxia. It was a good lesson for the coming days that are going to be more challenging with regards to the distance between villages and water supplies.