Walking the Wall

Quite a few people have written in asking about the size of the dreaded desert cicadas. The first time we encountered them we were so terrified we couldn’t get close enough for a photo that would accurately show their true dimensions.

Amazingly, we came across another herd last week. Drawing upon our previous experience with these dangerous beasts, Brendan managed to squeeze off a shot with the bug and Emma together in the frame.

Be warned: this one’s not for the kiddies!

This image may not be suitable for younger readers: Parental discretion advised

Thanks go out to our friend Mark Eadie in Beijing for the top photo-editing job (sorry if we’ve spoiled the effect by telling). We’ve never actually met Mark in person, but some of you may have noticed his well-informed comments on our posts. Mark has a couple of terrific websites that should be on the must-read list for anyone interested in travel in China or Chinese environmental and cultural heritage issues. His travel website is http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/68d05/. His site on tourism in China and Chinese natural and cultural heritage is at http://singleplanet.blogs.com/. We visit both sites on a regular basis to steal material for our blog, and highly recommend them.

Oh, and by the way, in real life the desert cicada is about the size of a normal cicada, i.e. about 4 centimetres. The second photo in our original cicada post is pretty true to scale.

The hipbelt buckle on my backpack broke. As we were leaving Mr Hou’s, I cinched the belt up tight, my belly fought back, and the plastic buckle snapped under the weight of years of beer, pizza and potato chips.

Anyone who’s carried a backpack knows what this means. The hipbelt, together with the backpack’s suspension, transfers the weight of your pack to your tailbone and from there to your legs. A properly functioning hipbelt is what enables you to carry 15 kilograms for 25-30 kilometres a day in reasonable comfort, and what makes it possible to carry 20-25 kilograms with a fair degree of effort but no pain.

If you don’t have a functioning hipbelt, all of that weight sits on your shoulders. If you tried to carry 15-25 kilograms hanging from your shoulders you would quickly develop intolerable back pain.

In other words, without a hipbelt that works, you don’t have a backpack.

After a few minutes of me ranting and raving, we settled down to figure out what we could do. We tried super glue, melting the plastic together with our camp stove, and throwing rocks. Nothing worked.

So we pulled out the big guns (i.e. our Swiss Army knife). We cut up the hipbelt – permanently ruining it – and substituted a smaller buckle from another part of the pack. It was a bit flimsy but it got us back on the trail.

Destroying my backpack in order to save it

The smaller buckles lasted only three days, and I broke three of those. Still, our patch job allowed us to walk while Joe Eberling and George Jackson at Wild Rampage outdoor equipment distributors in Shanghai shipped us some fantastic replacement packs. Thanks to their quick work, we lost only two days’ hiking time.