Walking the Wall

Rambling across the dry bed of a reservoir near Hexibao

One of the first words you learn in a beginner’s Chinese class is guang. Like many Chinese words, guang is often repeated for emphasis in conversation, i.e. guang guang.

Invariably guang is translated in textbooks as “to ramble,” meaning, according to Merriam-Webster Online dictionary, “to move aimlessly.”

Now, we don’t know about you, but in our experience, “ramble,” at least in the walking sense of the word, doesn’t come up a lot in contemporary English usage, allowing for the important exception of 70s rock songs.

Lord, he was born a ramblin’ maaaaaaaan . . . yeah

We’ve never figured out why Chinese English teachers think “ramble” is one of the first words foreigners need to learn (as opposed to learning, for example, how to ask where the toilet is, which has never come up in the months of classes we’ve taken).

But given what we do every day, and this blog, guang guang works well enough for us. As we reach the end of each state, we’ll put up a guang guang post where we can just ramble ramble a bit and stick in the odds and ends that didn’t quite fit anywhere else.

Just before before Brendan broke his foot, we finished Gansu province. Right now, we’re only two days from heading back to China, wondering what’s changed since we’ve been gone, and thinking about all the things that changed while we were there.

Obviously it will be a lot colder, and the corn harvest will probably be long past by the time we’re able to start hiking again. Even in the two months we were on the wall, from the beginning of June to the beginning of August, there were lots of changes.

Our first few weeks of hiking were unbearably hot – usually 35 degrees or warmer – but by mid-July northern China was in the midst of what passes for the rainy season, at the very limit of the influence of the monsoons to the south.

The sun was so intense at the start that Emma wore UV-protective handguards

The wall and a beacon tower through the mid-July mist

She’s only happy when it rains

Just before a late afternoon thundershower

When we started, the fields and pastures around Jiayuguan were brilliant green with ripening wheat and young corn, but by late July, the wheat had turned golden and the corn was high, the highways were filled with convoys of combines and the wheat harvest was well underway.

Wheat and garden plots northeast of Jiayuguan

It’s not all about grain: early season watermelons

Some rare well-watered pasture

Not quite old enough to ramble on his own

By mid-July the wheat had turned golden

An older man harvesting dryland wheat

This irrigated wheat benefits its location at the mouth of a mountain canyon

A combine for hire rolling down the highway

And of course, the character of the wall changed as we wandered east from Jiayuguan. What began as a humble, often fragmentary line of rammed earth had, by the Yellow River, become an impressive rampart of stone in parts.

Brendan walking along wall ruins next to one of the largest steel factories in China

A shepherd’s hut built against wall fragments

Stone wall just east of Jingtai

But one thing never changed, from the first day we were on the wall to the last. The children of China were always a wonderful, zany delight.

Bustin’ a move near Gaotai

Emma gets the rock star treatment

The children of Majinwei