The Great Wall’ker

A big Happy Birthday to my mother back home in Norway. I hope you have a good day!

If you look at the Great Wall Route page, you will see a high mountain between yesterday’s and today’s blue points. The mountain is high, and it is also covered in snow. In addition there was still a strong wind today. I decided to follow the Great Wall walking around the mountain today.

I got a worrying text message today as I lit up the mobile phone with the Norwegian sim card. It was from Telenor - a Norwegian phone company claiming I have spent more than NOK 450 on data communication on the phone today. That seems slightly odd as I only use the phone number about ten minutes every evening to send a report, and check weather for tomorrow. I also check mail, and lately the phone has frozen at the “Send and receive stage”. It seems I am unable to stop this error from here, although I have tried.

It is getting warmer now (haha - how many times have I written that?) and the winter sleeping bag is getting too warm. Good news…

20 kilometres today

The sleeping mattress worked well. When I inflated it this evening, it felt like laying it on a row of nails as I am in a field with old hard cut straw, but hopefully it will be OK.

This has been a long and hard day. The wind has been so strong that it has blown me off balance a few times. The snow was more than ankle deep at places, and it slipped in to the boots. Very annoying.

Going to eat and listen to an audio book that I started last night about Julius Caesar. Thanks very much to Alfredo for buying and sending it to me! It is really great to listen to an exciting book before sleeping.

24 kilometres today

I wonder how many times I am incorrectly going to predict that the cold weather is over. Yesterday it snowed quite a lot in ZJK (the abbreviation for Zhangjiakou from now on) in the evening but I felt I could’t let the weather decide longer. If there is too much snow on or beside the Great Wall, then I will follow it from a little distance.

As it turned out, there is little or no snow where I am now. But the mountains to the North (see map) are covered completely white in snow. They are 4-500 metres higher than the place I am now.

I had a not so pleasant ‘first experience’ today. As I left the town just south of where I am now, I forgot my Ridgerest sleeping mattress. I have been using it in addition to the NeoAir inflatable mattress during the winter in order to stay warm enough and protect the NeoAir from thorns on the ground. By the time I had got to the Great Wall I didn’t want to spend time to return and collect it. The sleepng mattress was pretty battered, and I expected only to use it until I go to Hong Kong in a few day’s time. I can feel the cold seeping through from the ground now, but have some clothes and a small DnB NOR sitting mattress that I will put under the coldest spot. Probably my bum.

It is very windy here. It took longer than usual to set up the tent, and I’m glad I didn’t leave it till later as I was feeling cold by the time I was finished. I’ve have been wearing the down vest today, and it snowed a bit earlier on. It is strange to think that the forecast says it will be close to 30C (max) in a matter of days.

As always, I get a big wide smile on my face every time I return to the Great Wall. It has been a good friend for more than a year now!

7 kilometres today

I have been in Beijing and spent half a day at the Norwegian Embassy there. Thank you very much to the staff who went a long way in helping me both with advice and practical matters regarding my visa and insurance. I also met quite a few Norwegians that live in Beijing who happened to be at the Embassy at the same time. In fact I have not met that many Norwegians since I left Norway a year ago.

Thanks also to Kelly and Pingping for a good Beijing time together!!

After having spent more than a year in China I am no longer a member of the Norwegian medical health care scheme. I’ve been in Beijing and spent some days buying a new insurance.

I’m back in Zhangjiakou now. It has been a very grey and wet day with some thunder. The forecast for tomorrow is terrible with up to an inch of wet snow. Not the best conditions to continue steep walking in the mountains. I will have to wait until the day after.

It has been so hilly today that in many places there was no need for a wall to keep the enemy out.  Instead, natural high and steep ridges and mountain sides did the job.

I am getting more in touch with assessing the safety and sanity of what I am doing now.

After descending the mountain I camped on yesterday, I crossed a river. It had a pretty strong current due to rainfall the last two nights, but it was not so deep. All the same I had to lean heavily forward on the walking sticks and could feel the sand dissappearing under my feet if I didn’t move. At one place the walking sticks started shaking hard due to the current.

On the way down the mountains to the west of the river, I had spotted a place to climb up on the eastern side. It went fine for a long time, but then I had to get to the next mountain to reconnect with the Great Wall. Basically it was a wild walk - narrow with a high drop to one side and a vertical mountain wall on the other. There were loose stones and gravel. I used a lot of energy making sure not to take a wrong step. I was in a similar situation later on in the day.

Risk assessment is a personal issue, and it should be, as the potential consequences are also highly personal. After being close to the limit of my comfort zone more than once today, I might lower my comfort zone a little so that I have some leverage for the coming stretches. Part of my risk assessment is that I am walking alone and that I am going to be exposed to risk for a long period of time.

10 kilometres today plus 7 to get to a place to buy water

Today has been a really hard day. It felt like anything I stepped on either rolled away, slid away or crumbled away.

The terrain has been challenging. It goes either up or down. The Great Wall follows ridges all the time. The ground has granite stones and other stones that look solid but can crumble or break off when stepped on. The Great Wall has mostly been too damaged to walk on. That leaves the steep sides of The Wall to walk on. The ground is scattered with crumbled rock ’sand’ about the size of a dice. In addition there are fist to head sized rocks. This makes the walking really hard as the ground can and does slide away every so often.

The watchtowers along The Wall have been great! Most of them had an entrance only on the second floor (or first floor as opposed to the ground floor) It looked strange but on closer inspection each entrance, high above the ground, had two solid rocks sticking out on either side. They were chisseled and acted as solid hooks. I can imagine they were used to fasten a rope ladder or such, to enable soldiers to get up and down.

The Great Wall has had it’s typical cross section square shape for a long time. Today however I saw a new style that was triangular. It is about 3 to 5 metres high, and only a foot or two wide at the top. The sides were skillfully crafted and smooth making it impossible to get over with a horse. A soldier, or ten, could however easily climb over it in the cover of night.

That is probably why the guards wanted the safety of sleeping high above the ground with the rope ladder pulled up.

It rained last night. Quite hard. It was the first rainfall on the tent since last Autumn, so I checked for leaks. There is a slight leak at a seam by the door. The tent has been harder to set up after I started using the extra ground sheet. I suspect it is pulling the six corners together too tightly. As a result there has been a lot of tension on the zipper sometimes. That probably caused the leak. Not serious, and it will be fixed with some seam sealer. Soon I will have a different solution for extra ground sheet which should solve the tension problem.

Small observations: Saw 2010’s two first butterflies today. They were yellow. For the first time I have seen that some watchtowers have plaques/signs above the doors. I saw the first birch tree along the Great Wall today. Made me think of home.

I am really exhausted now. I have only 1.5 litre of life-giving Ice Tea left.

20 kilometres today

The bus from Zhangjiakou left about half past one today. I was amazed that none of the guys lit up a smoke as we got going. There wasn’t a ‘Non smoking’ sign in the bus, but could have been in characters. Anyway - I enjoyed every bit of the ride. The bus wasn’t crowded. Another thing I noticed was that the driver used his horn a lot less than I have seen before. He only used it to warn people who were crossing the road without looking to both sides, that they were seconds from being run over. This happens pretty often, and I’m amazed there are not more accidents.

After some road walking I headed off into the mountains. Looks like I could have chosen one valley earlier than I did. Anyway - I hooked up with the Great Wall and started climbing up and up. It started blowing just as I saw a beautiful section of Great Wall ahead of me with stone walls. I thought it was best to set up the tent as the sun was setting (behind a layer of clouds) so tomorrow will start off with a scenic walk. What more can one ask for?

I have four litres of Ice Tea, two take away dinners, salty peanuts, Snickers bars and some cakes and biscuits I got at the bus station. These mountains are pretty remote, and there are very few villages around. I expect I will have to detour quite far from the Great Wall to get more supplies in a couple of days time.

Very happy I brought the winter sleeping bag. It’s only eight o’clock, but already chilly.

10 kilometres today

I have taken backup of pictures, eaten, loaded a new set of points to the GPS and uploaded more pictures to the picture gallery. The forecast says rain today, but better tomorrow. Am leaving behind the tripod, the largest camera and a few other things to lighten the rucksack a little.

Although warmer weather has arrived, it snowed only a few days ago, so I’m still packing warm clothes and the warm sleeping bag. I expect this stretch to be quite short, and then I go to Beijing to replace my old passport which is falling apart, literally speaking. (The Norwegian Embassy, who have been very helpful with the problem, say it is due to a fault in the production.)

Again - I want to thank the people who are trying to help me with the visa issue!! If I have to continue using a one month tourist visa with two extentions of a month each, then this trip is going to take so much longer than it would really need to. So I’m hoping for a six month visa next time I go to Hong Kong.

My girlfriend and I are meeting up in Hong Kong early May. Can’t wait to see her again - it has been such a long time since we were last together!!

Yesterday I collected my passport with the new visa extension in Datong. I went to the train station and bought a ticket to Zhangjiakou. Then I walked around saying goodbye to people I have become friends with in Datong. I am really going to miss some of the people I became friends with in Datong. They have been my ‘family and friends’ for quite a while now.

The first thing I noticed in Zhangjiakou was that there was less pollution in the air. Perhaps because the winds have been favourable lately, or perhaps because there isn’t as much coal based industry here. The heaviest coal industry is between Shenmu in Shaanxi and Datong of Shanxi.

I will spend time tomorrow reflecting over Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote: Of two things you can be certain; death and taxes. I plan to focus on the taxes part tomorrow. The day after I plan to return to the Great Wall.

Haha - yesterday I wrote that the winter had loosened it’s grip. It snowed tonight, and there were about 4 centimeters of fresh snow this morning. I was very happy to be in the lowlands. I would have had serious problems to walk the route I did two days ago under these conditions. Considering that the next stretch is also mountainous, and that I have to pick up my visa (extension) in Datong, I decided enough was enough. I’ll be back when the snow is gone.

Waiting with a group of people that were heading for Datong, a woman from another bus came over and said that there were no buses to Datong today because of the very slippery conditions on the road. She said I should hitch a ride with their bus, and take a bus from their destination to Datong. I saw her reasoning, but just to be on the safe side asked her to point out where they were heading. They were heading to a smallish town in Inner Mongolia that was farther away from Datong and had absolutely no better way of getting to Datong. This made me angry, and I expressed this. This is the second time in a short period that I have been ‘tricked’. The other was when a motorcycle driver said he had driven me 20 kilometres and wanted money for this, when I knew from my GPS that he had only driven 7 or 8.

I’m going to keep my ‘guard’ higher up on the remainder of the trip. So far I have had no big worries that my belongings would be stolen. I have trusted people to a great degree without regretting it. But I am getting closer to more commercial places now where it is more customary to trick foreigners.

The bus ride to Datong was wild. The bus had to cross the same mountains I crossed by foot two days ago. There was ice and snow on the road, and many times, the whole rear end of the bus would slide from side to side. All the passengers let out a big sigh when we got up and down the mountains without bumping into anything else.

This feels like a big day. I finally got to Hebei! Now that the winter has loosened its grip, walking the Great Wall has become easier. Am tired now, and will write more tomorrow.

It snowed this morning, but only a little. When I packed the tent, there was a thick fog and behind me I could only see the first couple of watchtowers that I had passed on the way down from the Erlang mountains. Yesterday I took some great pictures showing lots of watchtowers and the Great Wall in a mountainous terrain.

Speaking of “Terrain”. I have added a Terrain button on the Great Wall Route page. This makes it a lot easier to see the topography of the areas I will be walking through in Hebei, Beijing and Liaoning. I have set it as a default view.

If you zoom in, it might be more interesting to look at the satellite images. Just press the “Satellite” button in the top right hand corner of the map.

In the small village Xinping Buzhen, I had a large meal, and then looked for a small guesthouse. It was only about noon, but I wanted a night in a guesthouse, and thought I could leave the sleeping bag, tent and other non essentials for the rest of the day there. I ended up in a home where I had a room for myself paying only 10 RMB which was a good deal.

Then I went back to the Great Wall and continued northwards only to be stopped by a river that had enough water in it to stop me. The large meal made me unsure of whether I needed to go to the ‘toilet’ or not. (That is a nice way of saying finding a suitable place no-one can see you) After three tries in a row, and bowels that were giving conflicting signals, things settled down. I managed to hitch a ride with a farmer on his cart over the river leaving my feet and boots nice and dry.

Walking eastwards, the Great Wall clung to the next set of mountains. There were a lot of small villages on the southern (protected) side of the Great Wall, and it was fun to see people out and about enjoying the warmer weather. The strange thing though is that I do not always feel so welcome. I like to say Hi to people in Chinese when I’m walking, but more often than not they just look at me with a a face without much expression. I suppose it is that I may very well be the first white person they have seen, and they are unsure whether to run for it, or to run in to the house, and come back carrying a small child, so it can get it’s first glance of a foreigner. (Both happen!)

My brilliant plan of hitching a ride back to the guesthouse didn’t seem so brilliant when it turned out that the road going to the south of the Great Wall was not connected to a larger road to the east. I had avoided it opting for smaller dirt roads and fields and therefore had not observed how little traffic it had. It was getting dark already when I started walking on the road heading back to the guesthouse. After only 10-15 minutes, a small van with workers pulled up and offered me a lift back ‘home’. Thank you!!

I have seen three geckos today. They ran away as soon as they saw me. Even saw a snake today. Quite small and dead. It looked like it died recently.

A farmer came over as I packed my gear. He was particularly interested in the tent, so I showed him step by step how I took it down. He helped fold one of the tent poles, and was surprised at how light it was.

Today started with a sharp ascent straight into the mountains that the Great Wall has been skirting the last days. It was very hard going and got worse. Towards the end of the hardest part, I was unsure which side of The Wall to choose. Started up the right side which revealed a stoney area that was very steep. Took of my rucksack to examine closer, and found out it was too dangerous. The other side was better. It is often difficult to choose the correct side as one cannot judge properly until actually standing at the spot.

Got to walk on top of the Great Wall for a fair distance of the day too. In the beginning it was 4-5 metres wide, and great fun to walk on - even with the wind.

Once I was up, The Wall took loads of twists and turns to keep on high ridges. It was hard going and I took a few proper rests.

Towards the end of the day my right knee was aching. Don’t know if it is because of today’s walk, or a fall I nearly had yesterday. Tomorrow will be a nice day with a slow descent into the next valley, and then a walk to, and along, the next range of mountains.

17 kilometres today

Because of very unstable connection, just a quick one. Have walked 17 km in very hilly terrain. Flatter day tomorrow.