When we returned to Ningxia in November to resume our hike, we were a fair bit less self-sufficient than before. At first we weren’t able to carry our backpacks, so we needed drivers to ferry us to and from the wall every day. We stayed in hotels instead of camping, and we ate in restaurants rather than boiling up a quick dinner. So we found ourselves in need of assistance almost every day.

Luckily, Ningxia was home to a whole host of wall angels (people who help us along our way; for an explanation, see Wall Angels, Gansu Province). Starting on our very first day back.

Dong Jia Xing

Dong Jia Xing and her cab

While we were still in the first phases of rehab, we based ourselves from towns and hired drivers to take us out to the wall and pick us up at the end of the day. This process was more complicated than it sounds – it involved finding drivers who 1) didn’t smoke incessantly (very difficult) 2) were patient and could cope with finding our destination as we went along (ditto) 3) wouldn’t yell at us (not as easy as you’d think) and 4) drove safely (by Chinese standards). As those of you who have taken Chinese taxis know, setting such stringent requirements leaves a pretty narrow field. So how did we go about finding our drivers? Sexist as it may be, we looked for the women.

In Dong Jia Xing’s case, we didn’t have to look hard. She appeared right in front of us, well-dressed and smiling kindly, seconds after we hopped off the our bus back to Zhongwei, where we had stopped our hike in August. On our way into town, Mrs Dong recommended a nice hotel for us, so we kept her mobile number and called her again the next day when we needed a lift to our starting point.

That first day was a bit trying, for her at least. When we’d finished for the day, we called her and told her we were on the highway about two kilometres east of Yingshuiqiao. About 30 minutes later, she called back and said she couldn’t find us, so we handed the phone to some guys on the roadside and had them explain our location. About 20 minutes later, we got another call, and again we handed the phone off to a local for an explanation. When she showed up five minutes later, laughing and in great spirits after spending an hour driving around who knows where, we knew we had our woman.

She Tia Jian and She Tia Hong

The brothers She

Sometimes it’s not the actual helpful deed that makes a person a wall angel, but when they do it.

On our second day back, we were walking between the Desert Research Station at Shapatou and the town of Zhongwei. There was only a brief section of actual wall to walk along, so when it disappeared into the desert we hopped onto the train tracks. We could see a little workers booth up ahead and men wearing the trademark blue and gold rail uniform walking around.

When we reached them it was obvious they were excited to see us and wanted to talk. She Tie Jian and She Tie Hong were brothers and had a third brother who lived in Sydney, so the conversation quickly moved to money and how much we spent on phone calls to Australia (they knew a great deal on a phone card; we were paying way too much). When we said we had to keep going, after about 20 minutes of chatting, they forced a bag of delicious local apples on to us and filled Emma’s camera bag with nuts.

Now, this sort of thing happens all the time, and while we always appreciate it, this post would get a bit long if we wrote about every person who pressed an apple into our hands. But the railway guys were different. On our second day back, we were feeling a bit angst-ridden. We more than a little unsure of Brendan’s foot, we didn’t know whether returning to finish was the right thing to do, we didn’t know if we wanted to spend basically another half-year doing this at just around the time we’d originally expected to finish and get back to our normal lives.

Not that the She brothers were able to answer those questions or anything, but the apples sure were good.

Wei Jing

Wei Jing with her brother, Wei Peng, and Emma

Not sure if it’s because Brendan is a Westerner or the fact that he still looks about fifteen, but excited, bouncy schoolgirls are a dime a dozen when he’s around. It’s not strange to see one grabbing his arm and jumping up and down with excitement.

Wei Jing’s family owned the restaurant next to our hotel in Zhongwei. When she would see us walk past she would race out and excitedly invite us in, where we were fed huge plates of dumplings, given cups of goji leaf tea, and looked over her English books. Due to the school schedule many students have here, we had to arrange to meet her a few times at 9:30 pm when she got out of class (after having started at 7:15 am, with a break in the afternoon). ‘Course, with a tight schedule like that, the teachers can’t always squeeze in all the necessary lessons in the hours available to them, so sometimes class ran past 9:30. Still, Wei Jing would come hurtling into the restaurant a few minutes late, completely out of breath, having run all the way from school to meet us.

Mr Zhu

Mr Zhu with his wife and Brendan

Zhu didn’t meet each one of our ideal standards for a driver, as he smoked, but he had one outstanding ability that continues to boggle our minds to this day – in a country where few people have a solid grasp on the whereabouts of any place not in their daily routine, and where taxi drivers have a more tenuous grasp than most, Zhu knew just about every inch of every little road, down to the rockiest track, between the villages along the Yellow River and the Helan Shan Great Wall.

It’s hard to convey just how lucky we were to find Mr Zhu. The places we needed to go were not really places at all, just points on a map – for example, our first destination, Kouzimen, consisted of a few crumbling adobe foundations at the mouth of a canyon. While most taxi drivers wouldn’t have been able to find Kouzimen for a thousand dollars, Zhu didn’t bat an eye.

He was also a great guy. For some reason that we never found out, Mr Zhu knew a lot about the wall and where to find it. He had an interest in what we were doing, an interest in the wildlife we saw, and an interest in the historical towns we went to. Finding these remote sections of wall actually felt like something he also wanted to do.

On our last day with him, he and his wife asked us if we could get a photo taken with them. We were imagining standing outside his shop while his daughter used our camera. Not so. Just down the road was a small photo studio with a backdrop of a tropical scene. In the photo above there are two cameras going at once, so people are looking in different directions; fortunately, the ones the professional photographer took for Zhu, with all four of us in the frame, turned out nicely.

The staff at the Ji Long Hotel

In front of the hotel with Emma

Back in November, we happened to mention to one of the workers at the Ji Long Hotel in Qingtongxia that we were staying in the expensive suite for the night ($50 AUD) because it was Emma’s birthday and we felt like a treat. Comments like this usually get glossed over, but not at this hotel. When we came back from a day of hiking, the manager and a handful of staff all turned up at our room with a beautiful bunch of real flowers (hard to find at this time of year and probably quite expensive) and presented them to Emma for her birthday.

(Here we should mention that Brendan had also snuck out and had a cake made for the birthday girl).

Wang Fang

With Wang Fang with her mother after dinner at the Wang home

Here’s a curious phenomenon: whenever we stepped out of our hotel in Yinchuan, not looking for a taxi, about four would stop for us. Whenever we stepped out of our hotel looking for a taxi, none would stop for us. Guess it’s not that curious, just annoying.

So we asked the doorman of our hotel if he could help us find a driver. We were going to be based in Yinchuan for a long time, so having a good driver was crucial.

We were so pleased when he called Ms Wang. She fitted all the above-mentioned criteria, played good music in the car and even had a wry sense of humour that we sometimes understood. She chased after antelope with us, drove through huge wind farms and waited hours for us as we walked the long remote stretches.

Ms Wang wasn’t the fastest driver; in fact, we suspected she had never driven on a dirt road when she maintained a speed of about 15 km/hr on our first day. But as she gained experience she also gained confidence. And in China, driving too carefully is hardly the greatest fault you can find in a cab driver.

Sheng Jiang and the staff at Shui Luo Bo

The staff of Shui Luo Bo and Sheng Jiang, who is the man in the black shirt, second row, laughing as usual

Despite its Buddhist traditions, China is not exactly what you’d call vegetarian heaven, especially provincial China. In a country where genuine famine is within living memory, and malnutrition is a contemporary reality in the poorest areas, foregoing meat is bewildering to most people.

Neither of us is vegetarian, but we both like a good vegetarian meal, so when we found out about this restaurant online, we thought we’d like to check it out. We were a little disappointed when the waitress pointed out their special “pork sausages” that seemed to actually be pork. But when the “chicken” wasn’t quite like chicken, we asked what we were eating. Our helpful waitress pointed at the dishes and said “Bu zhen de” (not real), then brought over a little informational sheet with cartoon drawings of lambs and cows saying “Thank you for not eating me.” It was only then that we realised, the pork wasn’t pork, the chicken wasn’t chicken, and we were eating strange combinations of tofu and vegetables that not only tasted like meat, but had something approaching the texture of meat.

So what makes Sheng Jiang and the staff at his restaurant Wall Angels? Well, good customer service is hard to find out here in the provinces. When we realised that Mr Sheng was both a great manager and a great boss to his staff, we knew we had found someone who could qualify for a Wall Angel. Plus, one night we had a great meal, a fun conversation (about soccer, but Mr Sheng made it fun), and then he treated us to the whole meal for free. Expect to see him in Sydney soon; we had to counter with an offer to stay quite a few times.