The Great Wall’ker

I’m happy to be back on the Great Wall. It has not changed. The weather has.

Getting off to a late start, I enjoyed walking up and down some steep hills by The Wall without sweating too much. Feels good. The evenings are a lot cooler. The leaves on the trees have changed colour.

I’m lying in a new tent, on a new sleeping mattress. I used more robust trousers for the first time today, and also a new GPS with a map giving a lot of information about roads, rivers and villages close by.

More about this later. Right now I just want to remind you of the article Bryan at the Great Wall Forum has written about the Great Wall Sections. You can see the link under this post.

6 kilometres today

I got off to a fairly early start today again and walked the remaining stretch before the five day section starts. It rained most of the time and sometimes fairly heavily, but it was great to walk, for once, without becoming too hot. I tried to follow a large irrigation channel, but some places there was too much scrub vegetation, so I had to walk around.

A good day in the rain and now all I have to do is wait for a cooler spell to continue walking the Great Wall. The next section will take about 5 days.

I walked 23 kilometres today.

I went to bed really early yesterday and got up before the sun at half past five. I started walking an hour later.  This time is was nice and cool, which was great! The light was beautiful, so I spent too much time photographing instead of making progress. The weather forecast for today said a high of 37 C in the shadow (99 F) so I wanted to get as far as possible before it got too hot. This time I had plenty of Ice Tea with me and peanuts and some dried fruits.

The Wolfberry harvesting season is at it’s peak and wooden frames full of red berries are to be seen all over. The Chinese call the berries Gou qi. As I started heading for the impassable stretch, I met three ladies talking. One of them was processing the Wolfberries. First beating them with a wooden plank, then holding them high and dropping them in the wind to separate the dry green stalk from the berries.

They looked pretty sceptical untill I showed them the end product, (The picture I took) and then they were in front of my camera wherever I pointed it!

By this time it was getting hotter. With only a few kilometres to the very challenging part of the Great Wall, because of steep mountains, I saw a mud hut. I needed to drink and went in and sat down. I was sweating a lot and it took quite a long time before I cooled down. Probably a good idea to let the body cool down when I have the chance.

It wasn’t difficult to see where the previous Great Wall’kers have deemed it too hard to follow the Great Wall route. The Wall went straight up a steep hill. Up until now it had been made mostly by rammed earth, but here, they had used stones instead. I wanted to see what the terrain looked like on the other side and managed to climb the steep hill. It was difficult, because the ground was full of loose small rocks. Some of them looked like slate, and I slid several times, but used the walking poles to keep my balance.

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To the left the Great Wall is made by rammed earth. Because of the steep hill, they have used stones on the right hand side.

Battlement on the Great Wall. The enemy territory on the other side. The Great Wall uses features of the hills to add to it's defencive capability.

The other side was pretty wild. Steep mountains and a very dry terrain. Not the sort of stretch to walk alone - certainly not in the middle of July!

25 kilometres today.

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.