Tengger dunes with the wall in the foreground

About 25 kilometres west of the city of Zhongwei, the Yellow River emerges from its steep-sided canyon (see One Step Forward, Two Steps Back), and for the next several hundred kilometres the river flows across a wide floodplain. Under natural conditions, the river would have flooded and spread across this plain annually, dumping the sediment picked up from its journey through the mountains to create deep soils.

Although it doesn’t rain much here (a bit over 18 cm annually), the flat terrain, fertile soil and easy access to water make the area perfect for irrigation. Over the past few millenia a series of cultures, not all of them Chinese, have lived on and farmed this floodplain. The wall was built along the perimeter of the agricultural area, protecting the fields from invaders and, coincidentally, separating them from the Tengger Desert to the north.

The wall and a beacon tower, northeast of Zhongwei

Unlike some of the arid country we’ve been through before, the Tengger is classic desert – endless waves of sand dunes broken only by the occasional rocky crag. It seems devoid of life, but we were lucky enough to see a critter we call the Wall Owl. Wall Owls seem to be fairly similar to North American burrowing owls: they’re active during the daytime, likely live in burrows (as there are no trees to nest in), and probably feed on rodents and the large insects (beetles and desert cicadas) that run around on the dunes. We’ve seen them often on the drier portions of our route, but the little guys rarely sit still long enough for a portrait.

Perched on the wall

The dunes at 4 pm

The wall climbs over a hill that juts out from the sand

While the dunes may be good hunting grounds for owls, they’re not so great for railway transportation when they migrate over the tracks. In order to ensure the free passage of trains along the Baotou-Lanzhou railway line, the Shapotou Desert Research Station of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has managed a dune stabilisation project in the area since 1956. To begin with, straw checkerboards one meter square are placed in the dunes, then after four or five years drought-tolerant shrubs are planted along the checkerboards.

The Shapotou dune stabilisation project. You can see the electrical lines of the railway in the upper left corner of the photo.

The poor wall, however, does not merit this kind of effort. In some places it’s buried completely beneath the sand and we can follow it only by walking from beacon tower to beacon tower. In other places some remnants are visible, but only just.

A tower pokes through the dunes

The crest of the wall with sand piled along the sides

. . . and we’re still married. Happily. Most of the time.

What, me worry?

Note: This post describes events that took place back in the summer, from July 30 to August 1. We’d intended to put it up when we reached Zhongwei, but after I broke my foot we just couldn’t get motivated.

When you have 3000 kilometres to hike, there’s only one thing worse than backtracking, and that is getting lost.

Given this, you’d figure that we would occasionally backtrack, distasteful as it might be, in order to avoid getting lost. But noooooooo. It just doesn’t work that way.

Whaddya mean this doesn’t look like the right way?

For the week before I broke my foot, we were scheduled to walk from the town of Jingtai to Zhongwei. Our plan for the first few days was to follow the wall from Jingtai to the Yellow River. From the point where the wall meets the river, so far as we know, there is no existing wall (and quite possibly there never has been). For this segment we intended to stay as close as we could to the bank of the river until we got to Zhongwei. The only potential sticking point was that our road maps, which are just cheap provincial atlases, didn’t really show the terrain.

A page from the Walking the Wall Atlas. The crenellations show where the wall is (supposed to be).

But we didn’t let that trouble us as we walked on our merry way. On our first day out of Jingtai, we saw some stone wall, the first bit of wall we’d seen that wasn’t rammed earth or adobe. We had a campsite with a view, and reasonably comfortable weather for August. Everything was going according to plan.

Some of the westernmost stone sections of the wall

Until we hit the river. It was immediately apparent that a nice little stroll along the tree-lined banks of the riverside wasn’t really in the cards. This wasn’t a huge surprise; the lack of villages and roads along the river, which the map did show, was a tell-tale sign that the terrain might be difficult. Still, we had hoped we might be able to make our way, but even at our most ambitious, climbing along cliffs had never been part of our plans.

Huang He – the Yellow River

At this point, we had two options: backtrack to Jingtai and walk along the road to Zhongwei, or go back a few kilometres and try to make our way cross-country while staying roughly parallel to the river. Guess which option we chose?

Hey, that way doesn’t look too bad

Now why wouldn’t they have built a wall through here?

Technically speaking, we never got lost, since we always knew where we were, where we were headed, and roughly speaking, what we were aiming at. But when it’s 43° out (that’s 110° for the non-metric types), you’re running out of water, and you’ve taken 24 hours to walk a grand total of about 10 kilometres, you feel lost. When we made the next village, we raised the white flag, and as you can see below, backtracked to where we started (more or less).

Our route for the days July 30-August 1. We walked about 80 kilometres to make about 10 kilometres’ progess.

A beacon tower at Mei Li Gong Yuan, a public park outside Zhongwei. The black dot on the right is Brendan.

Over these first few days back on the wall, we’re finding that one of the “benefits” of Brendan’s having broken his foot is that we’re forced to take things a bit more slowly.

It also doesn’t hurt that we’re not carrying full packs (wall to the right of the photo)

To start out, we’re only hiking about 12 kilometres a day, every other day. Gradually we’ll add in extra days, so that we go two days, then three, four, etc. between rest days. On a parallel track, we’ll increase the lengths of our days, to 15 kilometres a day, then 18, 21 and 25. After about a month we’ll go back to carrying our full packs, starting again with modest daily distances and building from there. By mid-January we’ll be back to full strength, i.e. 25+ kilometres a day, though with no weather-related reason to finish quickly (it will only get warmer), we won’t have the incentive to stick to any particular schedule as we tried to do in the summer.

Although the weather’s remained mild, you can see autumn in the grasses . . .

. . . and over the past several days the wind has blown the leaves from the trees (wall on the left of photo)

On our second day back we left the highway and sauntered north into the bush, following a section of wall that had been adopted as an aqueduct. Gradually, the wall petered out into nothing, hardly surprising as it’s not marked on any map we’ve seen. With no wall to follow, we jumped on the railway tracks until we came to the next section of wall, which was a lot more prominent than the first but also unmarked on our maps. As usual, there were beacon towers placed regularly along the wall or situated on a rise nearby.

A beacon tower showing steps leading to the top

Eventually we came to a public park where the wall is developed for tourism (see the photo at the top of this post). Probably not coincidentally, this is where our map shows the wall resuming. From this point, as the wall changed from a north-south direction to an east-west, it was covered with small sand dunes, which sometimes obscured the wall entirely. However, where the sand had blown away or been cleared, we could clearly see the layers of the wall’s rammed earth construction.

The wall buried under sand

Sand cleared to reveal layers in the wall

Emma, could you please try to contain your excitement

We’re BAAAAAA-AAAAAAACK!!!!!!

After more than three months of twiddling our thumbs, reading crime novels, dreaming up new topics for the blog, and of course, rehabbing, we are finally, officially back to walking the wall. Yesterday we set out from Shapotou, at precisely the spot we stopped the day Brendan broke his foot.

And how far did we go, you might ask? Drum roll, please . . . .

Almost 9 kilometres.

Yep, we just about hit double figures. If we keep up this blazing pace, we should reach Shanhaiguan sometime November 2007.

Rolling down the highway

But at least for this day, distance was not a concern. It was a perfect autumn afternoon, 20 degrees under clear blue skies with a cool breeze. What we expected to be a mind-numbingly boring stretch of road walking turned out to be a fun stroll along a landscaped parkway, with vivid autumn colours and a pretty duck pond.

Did you know that if you dig long enough, you’ll come out in Australia?

Why head south when it’s 20 and sunny in November?

Strangers waved, birds sang, children laughed (okay, we’re making up the part about the children).

Hay, welcome back!

Best of all, we unexpectedly found a bit of wall, the first we have seen of the Great Wall of China since back in July. We climbed around a bit and considered following it north, but since we’d already nearly hiked the length of time we’d allotted we decided to declare victory and call it a day.

Whose idea was this stupid pose? Us, with the wall in the background

It was an amazingly fun, encouraging day. Brendan’s foot felt great and we both enjoyed ourselves as much as we have for months.

As exciting as the day was, we are far from assured of having a successful journey from here out. We haven’t dwelt on this on the site, but we have not always felt certain we’d be able to return to the wall. Even now, Brendan’s foot is susceptible to being reinjured.

So thanks for sticking with us while we’ve been off the wall. It’s been great having folks on the blog throughout the long, frustrating recovery process. With yesterday’s great start, we’re finally beginning to have some hope that we may be able to take you the rest of the way.