The Great Wall’ker

I had no experience with using walking sticks before this walk. They felt strange to use in the beginning, but now it feels strange walking without them.

The Black Diamond walking sticks come in three sections. They can be collapsed using two flick lock mechanisms on each stick. Practical when travelling in a car, bus or train as they can be fastened to the side of the rucksack. Their length can be adjusted to any length up to 140 cm.

The sticks have steel tips which is good in hilly terrain. I also brought a couple of rubber ends for walking along roads. They quickly wore out. A clever Chinese man made me another pair out of the rubber from a wheel. These will last for the rest og my life.

The walking sticks help in many ways. Walking up steep sand dunes, walking down steep hills, checking the depth of water in a river, and how hard the surface under the river is. If extended all the way, they can increase the length of your jump when traversing small rivers. They are handy to keep dogs at arms length. Two or three times so far I have used them to whack dogs to prevent an attack. Right now the ground is covered in snow and sometimes ice. The walking sticks give me the two extra legs I need to walk confidently in places where I wouldn’t dared have walked otherwise.

This post is for those especially interested in cameras. I love photography and therefore it is hard to keep it short when I describe the camera I use while walking the Great Wall.

I don’t carry an SLR while walking the Great Wall as it would be too heavy. I carry two smaller cameras. Although the Panasonic DMC-LX3 has a limited zoom range, I use it for the majority of the pictures I take.

The camera has a metal body that both feels and, more importantly, IS sturdy. My camera has hit the ground a couple of times without being damaged. It is slightly bigger and heavier than the average compact camera.

It has a fantastic Leica lens that is both sharp and bright at F2.0-F2.8. This means I can take pictures in dark places without having to use a too high ISO setting or a flash. Teamed up with the optical stabilizer and a sensor with a lower pixel density than most small cameras out there, the image quality is very good also in dark places.

I record most shots in RAW format and use post processing to adjust the colour temperature, brightness, contrast etc. This takes a bit of time, but gives better control and hopefully raises the overall quality of the pictures.

The camera is small enough that I can take it out from my beltpack and fire off a couple of photographs without drawing too much attention. And attention is guaranteed in rural China when taking pictures with a digital camera. My camera has a lens barrel mounted in order to keep dirt, sand and rain from entering the zoom mechanism. This makes the camera more bulky. It also gets in the way when taking pictures with the pop-up flash, which I very seldom use.

Speaking of zoom - this is probably one of the few areas where this camera doesn’t match others. It’s zoom range is from 24mm to 60mm (35mm equivalent) so you have to get close to the subjects you are photographing. But in my experience, the best pictures are not taken from across the street or field. They are taken at fairly close range.

I like this camera because it has plenty of dedicated physical buttons giving me direct control. I decide on which shooting mode, aspect ratio and focus mode I want to use before raising the camera to my eye drawing attention after a short while.

I use three shooting modes: Intelligent auto that records in jpg in case I don’t have too much space left on the memory card and the scene is not too challenging light-wise. The Program mode records a RAW image as does the Aperture mode where I have stopped down the aperture to a minimum for maximum depth of field.

The switch for aspect ratios is placed directly above the lens. I often play around with these ratios before taking the picture. This makes me think before taking the picture. Maybe I move around a bit to get the best possible composition after having decided on the aspect ratio. I like being forced to think about the composition while taking the picture and not two weeks later when I am sitting in front of my laptop.

I always carry two batteries. This is enough for a week or two along the Great Wall in the summer, all depending on how much I have been photographing. But in the coldest periods the batteries run out quicker, so I have to save the camera for the pictures I want the highest quality on.

Many thanks to Nordialog for sponsoring this small but great mobile phone.

When walking the Great Wall, I do not carry the laptop. I carry the htc S740 which gives me all the functionality I need, apart from editing pictures.

The htc S740 is sturdy and has a steel frame around it. It is slightly larger than a regular phone and weighs 140 grams (4.94 oz). It has a regular small keyboard on top for dialling numbers, sending short messages and answering calls. But underneath it has a slide-out four-row keyboard. This keyboard is very easy to use and writing my daily reports on it goes quickly. The keyboard is illuminated from underneath so I can write the reports without the need of any light.

I have bought two additional batteries for the mobile phone and these three batteries last between seven and ten days depending heavily on how much I talk, and how cold the weather is. I turn it off while walking the Great Wall, and in the evenings I turn the screen brightness down to the lowest level. I bring an ultrashort USB cable so that I can charge the batteries when I get to a computer along The Wall.

In addition to updating the website, checking mail and the weather, making calls and sending messages, I have a Fluentz Chinese course on it. It has a large microSD memory card, and I plan to transfer music and books to it so I have something to listen to on the odd rest day along the Great Wall. I also have a small Excel sheet on it that I use to convert GPS positions from the format on my GPS to the format Google maps uses. (This is how the Great Wall Route can be updated)

When I am invited to stay overnight with Chinese people along the Great Wall I like to show them pictures of life in Norway. I might transfer these pictures to the mobile phone to save some weight. The phone has a 2.4 inch screen which is good for writing reports, but perhaps a little small for pictures. The plus however is that the 2.4 inch screen doesn’t use too much battery power. Another plus is that the screen is not touch sensitive as they often don’t work well in cold temperatures.

To update my website I usually write the report locally firest on the htc S740, then log on to my own website using an interface that was designed to be very lightweight in terms of the amount of data being sent to and from the server. This keeps my costs down. Then I update the blog entry and log off. I usually also check my main mail account, and then check the weather for the next couple of days. All these things help me stay sane while out walking, and can prepare me for bad weather.

For some reason, I cannot answer emails on the phone because of the sim card. But in one way this is a blessing as I can always text friends and family, and don’t want to spend lots of time writing long mails in the little tent.

I keep the mobile phone in a protective envelope. The sand in the desert is a killer, and I want to keep the S740 away from it. In sub zero degrees the envelope keeps the moisture from getting in to the itsy bitsy parts of the phone. I have lost the phone by accident to the ground a couple of times, and luckily it survived these falls.

So - to sum up - without this phone in the field, I would lose all contact with you readers, friends and family!

Many thanks to Lenovo Technology Norway for sponsoring a laptop for this project.

Many thanks to colleague Christian Haug at DnB NOR for putting me in contact with Lenovo. In 2004 IBM sold it’s PC division to Chinese Lenovo. I am very happy to be using a Chinese laptop while walking the entire Great Wall of China.

The ThinkPad is a solid workhorse with a conservative design, but lots of horsepower under the keyboard. It is one of the most reliable laptops out there. My Lenovo came with a solid state disk (SSD) which means that it is far less vulnerable to sudden movements or being dropped, than those with moving parts in hard disks. My version weighs just above 1,5 kilos. I have a slightly larger battery than standard. This gives me five hours operation. If I turn down the brightness of the screen, even longer.

Absolutely all pictures on this, the Chinese and www.picturesfromchina.com are made using this laptop. I have taken several thousand pictures and more than 90% of them are taken in the RAW format. Each picture is about 12 MB big when imported from the cameras and 50 to 100 MB big when I have finished editing them. I use advanced photographic editing programs in my workflow, and thanks to the X200 this is no problem at all. With 4 GB of memory, a fast processor and disk, it happily churns away although the workload is high.

When I kayaked the length of the Norwegian coast, I also used a ThinkPad. Small details like a LED light to illuminate the keyboard in dark conditions and a system to easily drain water away from the keyboard make this a good companion on a long walk like this.

It is difficult to get much more functionality out of such a small lightweight laptop. A bigger SSD disk would be practical, but this is a matter only of cost. Also a screen that separates colours a little more would be nice.

All together, I would be very happy to recommend this computer to other adventurers looking for a laptop they can trust.