A rainbow above Xiakou

On a six-month walking trip, there are days when it all comes together – everyone you meet is friendly and helpful, the path is clear and your footing good, and you know that when you look back in the future that day will seem bathed in golden sunlight. On other days the stormclouds gather, every “Ni hao” you shout out is met with stony silence, and you wonder how you’ll do this for another four months.

And there are days like Xiakou – a little bit of both. We began the day by being outrageously overcharged for our cab ride back to the wall from Brendan’s kidney stone misadventure. Somehow, we stupidly forgot a simple rule that every tourist to China (except us) has down by the third day: never, ever, EVER hop in an unmetered taxi without negotiating a price first.

The fun continued with a tedious trudge through clumpy abandoned fields and a pointless two-hour, five-kilometre detour to refill our water bags that could have been avoided if we’d continued on the wall another 45 minutes. By the time we reached Xiakou’s city wall, nary a smile crossed Emma’s sunburnt face.

The entrance to Xiakou

Xiakou was a small but important fort, communications station and grain storage depot on the old Silk Road. The contemporary village directly abuts the wall’s south side, and is bounded on the west by the simple gate pictured above, and on the east by a more elaborate gate.

Xiakou’s eastern gate, built in 1574

The town doesn’t seem such an important place now. Vehicle access is over a dirt road and the buildings are mostly single-storey adobe brick. There are a few empty plots of overgrown vegetation and the two or three people we did see stayed well away from us. But the eastern gate is far and away the best example of a small-village fortification we’ve seen – structurally sound and with what look like original murals on the interior and an unrestored sign above the entrance.

Read right to left, the sign says “Wei zhen qiankun” (roughly, mightiest garrison in heaven and earth)

Though we got to Xiakou at about 6 pm, accommodation in town wasn’t going to be an option. So we walked through the gate and towards the wall, reaching the first serious hills of the trip. We climbed a few hundred feet and made camp in a small meadow as a beautiful sunset broke through the dull grey. At the same time, a few drops of rain in the distance gave us our first rainbow. This is what it’s like to walk the wall – one hour of beautiful light can make eight hours of painful walking seem worth it.

Sunlit wall fragment

Looking down on Xiakou in morning light, with the wall stretching across the plain

I couldn’t resist this heading when I thought of it. The moment went something like this:

We were walking along the wall around Xia’anmen. All around were fields of sunflowers, wheat and corn when I noticed a small group of wildflowers at our feet.

Me: “You know, there are so many flowers out now we really should write something about them.”

Brendan: “Yeah.”

Silence.

Me: “Hey, we could put photos up on the blog and call it Wallflowers.”

Brendan rolls his eyes. Flowers schmowers. He gives in and we take off our packs and pull out our cameras.

Wildflowers are relegated to second place in the Gansu Corridor. In the heavily irrigated stretch of land bordered by rugged mountains and deserts, sunflowers, watermelon and corn have, for hundreds of years, pushed the delicate wildflowers to the edges of the fields.

But the distance between the populated, agricultural areas and the desert is sometimes only a matter of feet. It is in this small area that we find the wildflowers, nowhere near as abundant as the crops, but a lot more colourful when you get down on your stomach and look at them.

Of course, not all the flowers we’ve seen are wild, and not all are at field’s edge. We’re not sure, but we think the flowers shown below are harvested for use in dyes.

And because sunflowers are so beautiful, we couldn’t let this photo go by without a showing. Or maybe it’s because the sunflower is the state flower of the mighty state of Kansas, we forget which.

Sorry New South Welshpersons, no waratahs out here

Old Man Fletcher is almost 41. Getting older hurts, especially when it involves passing a kidney stone in the middle of the desert.

The scene of the attack – a cave in the wall

One morning Brendan woke up complaining of a pain in his lower back. He thought maybe he’d slept funny, or packed his backpack poorly the day before. Neither of us paid it much mind.

The pain intensified and progressed to nausea, repeated vomiting, sharp internal knife-thrusts, and eventually, anguished cries for help.

Apart from Brendan’s yelps disturbing her peace, Emma was enjoying yet another fine desert sunrise. But once she’d finished her morning cuppa she figured she should do something to lend a hand. She dialed up International SOS – a company that provides 24-hour medical advice and translation services for their members (thankfully, that includes us). One other thing they do is organise local ambulance services and even emergency evacuations when needed.

It didn’t take long to get a phone diagnosis of kidney stones, which eased our minds if not Brendan’s pain. Despite the difficulty of explaining where we were (um, about three kilometres past the big petrol station where the wall crosses the highway) there was an ambulance parked on the nearest drivable road within an hour. Two attendants in white uniforms hopped the barbed-wire fence and followed Emma to the cave.

It all seemed a bit over the top for a kidney stone, but we were grateful nonetheless (as it turned out, the ambulance was cheaper than a cab would have been – and cabs are cheap in China).

Good morning sunshine – Brendan at Shandan Hospital

The ambulance sped to Shandan Hospital where Brendan was given an ultrasound. He had a 4 mm stone, a smallish one, which had passed to his bladder while the ambulance was on its way, greatly diminishing the pain. By noon he was dismissed from hospital, though not without some haggling. The doctors had wanted to keep him for three days on an IV drip, but with some persuasion and the assistance of our bilingual (English and Chinese-speaking) doctor at International SOS, they let us go.

Emma charging up a hill southeast of Xiakou (the double line of earth in the background is the wall)

Some of you might have noticed that we haven’t written about the wall for a while. Partly this is by design; in our minds this trip is as much about the people and places along the wall as about wall itself, so we go out of our way to write about a variety of topics.

However, we also haven’t written much about the wall because we weren’t on it for quite a long time. From Tiancheng, where we left Mr Hou, to about 30 kilometres east of Zhangye – a distance of almost 200 kilometres – we passed only a few fragments of wall.

That is not to say that the area we passed through, which includes the extensive irrigated bottom lands of the Hei He valley, was left undefended in Ming times. Along the northeastern edge of the valley, there are dry, inhospitable mountains that were likely impassable by any large military force. On the peaks of these mountains, every kilometre or so, there are beacon towers. At any one time we could usually see two to five beacon towers as we walked the valley floor.

One of many beacon towers overlooking the Hei He valley

The natural barrier of the mountains, plus the added security provided by guards keeping watch from the beacon towers, was probably thought adequate to defend the valley; and it seems likely that little wall was ever constructed along this stretch of our route.

We met up with the wall again at the village of Xi Tun, about halfway between Zhangye and Shandan and well before any of our maps indicated we would find wall. It was about 5.5 to 6 metres in height, in reasonably good condition, and fairly continuous from Xi Tun to Shandan.

Brendan measuring the wall near Xi Tun

East of Shandan, the wall is fully intact and perhaps 8 or 9 metres in height (it was too steep to climb up on). The Shandan section is quite well-known and is among the best examples of “rammed-earth” method of wall construction. This method was the earliest adopted in China, and was used to build virtually all sections of wall we have walked along to date, with the exception of some adobe wall around Jiayuguan Fort.

In the rammed-earth method, soil, sometimes mixed with straw, was poured in between planks 15 to 30 centimetres high. Then the planks were pounded with pestles to create a dense and durable layer. The process was repeated, layer by layer, until a wall of sufficient height was built. A wall constructed using the rammed-earth method has a trapezoidal shape – sometimes modified so that the outer side of the wall is steeper – and in the wall’s better preserved sections, visible layers.

This cross-section clearly shows the layers of a rammed-earth wall segment (click the picture to see the layers)

We also encountered some new (to us) and more complicated features of wall in the section east of Shandan – lengths of double and even triple wall, wall constructed adjacent to deep natural canyons to create a more effective barrier, and small forts.

This road (our path) runs between interior and exterior walls

Three lines of wall are visible in this photo

This dry riverbed serves as a natural moat on the north (exterior) side of the wall

A small fort about 25 kilometres southeast of Hexibao

Emma doing her best Aurel Stein inside the fort pictured above

Not all of the interesting aspects of the wall are original. In the time since the wall has lost its military function, shepherds and farmers have dug out numerous caves, which they and their livestock use as shelter from the hot summer sun. They come in handy for hot, tired wall-walkers, too.

Brendan calling in an equipment order from the inside of a cave in the wall