The Great Wall’ker

Today I walked as far north in the Liaoning loop as I had planned. As I made the turn southwards, I got the sun in my face - a nice change. Heading straight for the end point of the walk, I started thinking about Norway and all the people I am longing to meet again after almost two years in China. It was fitting that the landscape changed to match that of Nordmarka to the North of Oslo. A fairly soft landscape with hills covered with pine trees. All with a generous sprinkle of snow on top today.

I chose to follow small roads, and for many kilometres I was balancing in the tracks of a single vehicle that had used the dirt road. About 7-8 cm’s of snow. It was wet and slippery. The walking sticks came in handy.

As you can see, I have passed a small section of the Great Wall route today. The green line on the map in Liaoning depicts an educated guess on where the Great Wall used to go during the Ming Dynasty. The findings are few and far between, but confirm the general layout of the route I am following, which is based on a map from the Ming Dynasty. Thanks again to Kim of the Great Wall Forum for sharing his knowledge about the Great Wall in Liaoning.

Following the route closely in this section would have added a day or two with walking (this part is mountainous) and I decided to save time. I need to attend a newspaper ‘do’ this Friday.

Started walking early today, and kept going till an hour after the sun had set. At this time of year, it isn’t easy to get much more walking crammed in to a day. Time to wash socks now, and take a shower. I am very tired.

46 kilometres today

First a big thanks to my girlfriend Trude. She has been ever supportive of this project, and always offers encouragement and understanding when we speak, mail or text. Thanks for waiting for me all this time! She has also visited me in China twice on my trip, and apart from herself, brought vital equipment for the walk. Many many thanks! I’m looking so much forward to seeing you again in less than a month!!

As predicted by the forecast, about 3 cm (more than an inch) of wet snow fell this morning. I am still in very lightweight mode, and am still using jogging shoes. I waited until it had stopped snowing and started walking a little after noon. I got wet, but with nice thick woollen socks, it wasn’t too bad. The last three days, I have lost two walking days because of the weather.

From now on it should be good for a number of days. All systems working OK today. (That’s another way of saying that my body is still hanging together in one piece) The days seem to blend into each other, but as long as I use every daylight hour to walk, I should make it to Dandong before my Visa runs out.

I will bring boots for the final stretch to Dandong in about a week’s time. I mostly walk on hard surfaces now however, and therefore prefer lighter shoes to the heavy boots.

22 kilometres today

Note on the Great Wall route page - This page may not be updated for a couple of days. My brother is taking a well deserved break.
Note on pictures - because of the pace I have now, I have not been able to produce enough pictures for every day out walking. The ‘resting days’ / ‘walking days’ ratio is way too low. Will try to upload some more pictures at the end of next week.

11th of november

Today was cold, very windy with a mixture of rain, sleet and snow. I decided to stay where I was. Slept, drank and ate a lot, and then slept some more. Wouldn’t you know, the place I am staying has HBO on TV, so I saw the films Fargo, the Dark Knight and Into the Storm.

The latter one was timely as it is Rememberance Day today.  In the UK people commemorate the soldiers who fell during active service in war and wear their red poppies. Into the Storm is a convincing portrayal of Winston Churchill during the war years. What a colourful and eccentric guy he was. Good film.

12th of November

The day started wet and gray. I waited a while to decide what to do. At noon I started walking. The route of the Great Wall has gone close to a large river lately, and today I crossed it for the third and final time. As you can see on the map, I am pretty far away from the Great Wall route, which is necessary to get over the river.

Although it was wet and cold, it was quite comfortable to walk. Not too much wind. Looks like there may be more snow tomorrow morning, but then hopefully some better walking weather.

27 kilometers today

For 10th of november

It’s getting to the point now, where I have to portion out my energy for the remainder of the walk. Some days it feels like I can walk hard endlessly, but other days my body kindly asks me to slow down a little. Today was such a day, with 10 km less than I had hoped for. Not far to go now, but I don’t want to walk ‘crazy’ distances until I’m a little closer to Dandong.

Lately I have felt a tingling in my right achilles tendon. Not much, but it has been there for many days. If this is the start of an injury, and it is developing slowly, it could take a long time to heal, so I don’t want to overdo things, too much, too soon…

Forgot my walking sticks at the guesthouse this morning, and walked the whole day without them. It felt very strange after having walked more then 5000 kilometres with them. I hardly knew what to do with my hands! Although the speed only dropped slightly, I really felt awkward as if I had less control over my stride. I retrieved the walking sticks yesterday evening.

23 kilometers today

Started walking early, and for once was finished before sunset. I hopped on a bus quite spontaneously without really knowing where it was going. Got to a large hotel and have had an evening eating good food, taking my first bath in a very long time and relaxing.

Fantastic weather today. Although the smaller lakes have acquired a thin hard shell of ice, it was pleasantly warm. Much due to the lack of wind. Beautiful blue sky with fluffy clouds flying by that made photographing a pleasure.

I still have flat terrain on both sides, but in the distance I can see mountains both to the east and north west.

39 kilometers today

No rain this morning, and although I thought there would be a lot less dust, I was wrong. I have chunks of dust in both eyes, and am patiently trying to dislodge it without losing my contact lenses.

It was very windy from the word go, and it felt like I spent as much energy making sure I walked in a fairly straight line as walking forwards. Twice, and this is funny to write, but it did happen, the wind blew so hard that I was stopped by sudden gusts of wind so that I stood still with one foot in the air. Must have been a funny sight.

My comfort for the day was that in only a few days time, I swing back to a southward direction. From then on, any cold wind from the North will be blowing me in the right direction!

Have found out that Snickers Bars are becoming more popular in China now, and have been feeding on them as small energy meals. When I have none left, I visit about 4-6 shops before finding a place that sells them, and I can stock up. Have had two warm meals, and quite a few bananas today - and the Snickers Bars.

43 kilometres today (The point for today was registered before I was finished walking. I do this now and again to save some time)

The forecast said rain all day long. There was no sign of it when I started walking this morning. I asked a guy if he thought there would be rain, and he said yes - but just a small drizzle he had read on the net. That was good news as a small drizzle is not a bad thing to walk in.

There was a thick fog. I passed a lot of small oil pumps. They looked like retired giant robots, their large counterweights spinning silently around in the fog.

At a little over one PM I was happy having covered a good distance, and still no sign of rain. Twenty minutes later, it started raining lightly. I continued, wanting to reach a road crossing before deciding what to do next. Then the drizzle became rain, and by the time I got to the crossing, my clothes were wet through.

I found a small restaurant that served me some yummy hot food, and I took the liberty to take off my wet trousers, wind jacket and shirt. Then I put on my down vest to keep warm. There is a pretty high acceptance to walking around in your pyjamas in China, and I had my long johns on and got no reaction. I asked if there were any guesthouses in the area, and they said there was a nice place three kilometres down the road.

I got a taxi, and in no time I was in a nice WARM room under a duvet after having taken a long shower. It has been raining hard all evening. I’m listening to Michael Palin’s Pacific Adventure on audio book and eating Snickers bars. Couldn’t be much better! Just hoping the rain has passed by by tomorrow morning. It came half a day later than expected, so it may hang around tomorrow morning.

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Did you go for seemingly endless walks with your parents when you were young? You got tired and asked in a resigned voice: How far is it till we get there? They answered: ‘Not far honey - just around the next corner’…

Well - that’s where I am now. One rather large corner from the goal of this walk!

32 kilometers today

Got back to the route today at noon. Surprisingly warm weather, and a wind from behind.

The forecast says rain all day tomorrow. I’ll wait until tomorrow to see what to do. If it is close to zero and raining heavily, I’ll wait a day for better weather.

The observant among you will see I spent two days in Shenyang. One day was too little. There was a lot of mail to catch up with, and I wanted some rest too. I washed all my clothes and fixed the windproof jacket.

28 kilometres today.

The going has been very good lately, as has the weather. After two weeks of walking, I decided to take a breather in Shenyang. Tomorrow morning I head back to Liaozhong which is where I left the route.

Walking pretty long distances for a long time is tiring. I’m noticing how there are not really that many hours of light. I’m trying to eat and drink plenty to keep the old machine working properly. In the evenings I eat a large meal and then check my feet, massage my legs, talcum powder sore places and use cream to moisturize the dry skin on my feet. Skin is cracking on my hands also because I’m using walking sticks, so I put on plasters here and there, just to keep the skin humid enough so it doesn’t hurt too much. Sometimes I wonder if I am on an adventure, or in a beauty parlour.

I don’t think many white people have been in this area before me.  Very often, I am the center of attention wherever I go. Cars come to a halt on the road side. Some follow me for a long time, and it becomes slightly irritating. It also creates some dangerous situations as it means the flow of traffic is hindered. Sometimes people ask if I want a lift. I thank them and explain that I have to walk, and therefore cannot take a car ride.

Sometimes mothers will run into their houses and drag out their baby or child so they can get a glimpse of this foreign novelty moving slowly through the terrain. Once I was sitting in a little shop at the end of the day eating and drinking. I was speaking to the owner of the shop when a girl of 12-14 years came in to buy some sweets. She didn’t see me until she turned around to go out. She got the shock of her life and started crying and screaming loudly! I didn’t know what I could do to make the situation any better. So I just sat there quietly until the owner explained that I wasn’t a dangerous man. A little too much attention sometimes.

Now and again I ask people if they have heard about any signs of the Great Wall here, but they just laugh and talk about Shanhaiguan. The area I am walking through is completely flat, and has been an agricultural area for many centuries since the end of the Ming Dynasty. Perhaps when I hit the mountains to the north of Shenyang, the chances of finding or hearing of something interesting may improve.

33, 32 and 31 kilometres the last three days.

A long days walk today. Got off to a slightly late start. Lots of local fog in the morning that cleared up by noon.

The area I am walking in has lots and lots of rivers and ditches going in different directions. There are large rivers that are not marked on my map or GPS. I may have been able to stay closer to the route today, but if I had I would have been taking chances and could easily have lost valuable time. My Chinese isn’t good enough to decifer the answer to questions about directions. At least not when we are talking about this maze of large and small roads, dirt roads, ditches and rivers. So I played safe and followed the road to Taian.

The cars, mopeds, tractors and trailers whizzing past spewed out a lot of pollution. I switched sides to the right hand side of the road to stay out of reach from most of the fumes.

Very few rests today, but it looks like my body is getting used to longer distances.

No electricity in Taian when I got here. Hopefully it will be back soon. I want to check the route for tomorrow more thoroughly.

41 kilometers today

There was dense fog the first couple of hours of walking today. Then the sun broke through and warmed up things. I was excited to reach a part of the route where there probably was some Great Wall.

I got there, and first followed a ditch in the landscape. There were some signs of a wall now and again, but it looked too modern to be Great Wall. Then I followed a road and dirt road for several kilometres. Every now and again I would walk from side to side to see if there were any signs of a wall. There were none.

This looked like one of those finds that are easier to see from above on Google Earth than from the ground. Perhaps in some years they will find something here if they start digging, and more importantly they are looking! The route continued over some fields, and I walked from side to side looking for signs of the Great Wall, but found none unfortunately.

The landscape here is flat. Lots of really large fields with mostly corn on the cob plants. The farmers are more than half way finished with their harvest. I’m seeing a lot more mechanised farming machinery now. Larger tractors ploughing the fields, whereas before there would be people with spades. There are more trees around, and they get to stand longer and are mostly untouched. In provinces farther west, there has been heavy foraging of trees for firewood and animal food. In many areas the trees were left with only a few leaves right at the top. Not the best practice if you want to keep the world’s third largest desert at a comfortable distance.

From the maps it looks like I will be walking primarily in farmland from now on until I am at the most northern point of the route in Liaoning. The coming days have a lot of quite large rivers. They might force me farther off the route than I would like. But when there are 3-4 rivers to be traversed in one day, and they are most likely impossible to wade over, then I’ll have to use large bridges.

From the most northern point on the route to North Korea, there are lots of mountains! It feels so strange to write North-Korea in a sentence knowing that now the border is very close. Not some distant destination far away.

35 kilometers today

First a big round of applause to my brother Jon! He has been helping me on this walk from the very start. In fact we walked the first weeks together in the desert during the early summer last year. Since then Jon has made sure that the GPS point I send out in the evenings magically appears on the Great Wall Route on this website. He also keeps a watchful eye on the ‘Pictures from China’ site making sure that there are enough pictures, and that a new picture appears magically each day.

Jon has lived many years abroad - amongst others three and a half years in China, so he knows how nice it is to have a little chatter with a familiar voice from time to time. Even if only for a couple of minutes.

Many thanks for your support in this project Jon! Looking forward to seeing you again.

Today was a nice walking day. I tried to keep my walking speed lower than usual, and kept an eye on my left shin. Looks like the problem is over. All systems functioning again. Thank God for that.

Nice warm weather, clear blue sky and almost no wind. I came across some Great Wall like structure today (heart beating very hard as I discovered and approached it) but it turned out to be ‘just’ a small town wall.

As I am on a pretty tight time-budget, I decided to save some time walking an hour to and back from a point we expect the Great Wall to have been several hundred years ago, and instead use that time on a section tomorrow that has been identified as very probably Great Wall. This seems to be the last known section of Great Wall until I hit Dandong, so I want to record it properly.

After that I will continue asking people I meet if they know of any old walls in the area. They will most likely shake their heads and tell me I am in the wrong Province, but I don’t mind looking like a fool - there are probably still many Great Wall sections to be found here in Liaoning.

A little footnote. It is a great pleasure to observe the farmers bringing in their last crops to safety before the winter hits for real. Looks like most of the work is done, and that it has been a good season. A lot of cheerful faces to be seen which makes me cheerful too.

37 kilometers today

Woke up late and was amazingly feeling good again. No more high temperature. The shin felt better.

I went to the largest pharmacist in town and got Ibux painkillers and a thick cream. Painkillers for the shin, and cream for my heel and two fingers. The climate is getting very dry. So dry that my skin is cracking up making for semi painful cuts in the skin. From now on I’ll be massaging thick cream on my heel so the skin doesn’t crack even more.

The walk today went better than I had hoped for. The shin hurt a little in the beginning but warmed up and stopped complaining. Although I kept a watchful eye on it, I was able to walk until one hour after it got dark.

Big thanks to sister Tone to whom I spoke to yesterday. She lifted my spirit and gave hints to help the shin problem. Many thanks Tone.

26 kilometres today

Small observation - ever since I got to Liaoning when I ask for a Gong bao ji ding, they say they have it, but then come back and say they don’t have chicken, but would I like another meat. I would of course, but it’s strange that consistently they don’t have chickens at the ready. I walk past lots of chickens every day Perhaps they don’t use chicken that much in Liaoning?

Have walked 29, 40 and 0 kilometres the last three days.

Yesterday I was in bed all day long with a high temperature, and getting better from a strange tendonitis in my left leg.

Luckily the fever is over today, and the leg feels a little better, so I will head back to the route and walk for some hours and see how it goes.

Will write more this evening.