Walking the Wall

No, no, no, silly, we’re not leaving the wall and going back to Australia.

However, it has become clear that we are completely, utterly, hopelessly and helplessly incapable of making an accurate judgement of when we will reach Shanhaiguan. We’ve tried. And failed. And tried again. Failed again. Tried a third, fourth and fifth time. You get the picture.

We give up. We surrender. We’re waving the white flag. We’re not going to try to predict our finish date any more.

The latest episode in our little scheduling drama came just yesterday, when we headed back to the wall under grey skies from a day off in the city of Zunhua, about 150 kilometres east of Beijing. The forecast was not overly promising – showers throughout the day – but we still had some hope of making it to Shanhaiguan by mid-June to meet our parents, so we decided to push ahead, rain or shine.

It began sprinkling within five minutes after we started up the hill, and within an hour we were walking through wind-driven drizzle. As we slipped up and down stones and got lashed by the wet tangle of thorns and brambles that cover the wall, we began to think that maybe walking along a narrow, crumbling five-metre high soaking-wet stone wall was not the most brilliant thing to be doing under the conditions. So we headed to the nearest watchtower to wait until the rain let up. Which didn’t happen all day long.

Drying our rain gear

By morning the rain had stopped, but it had been replaced by fog. Not great weather, but we figured at least we would have decent footing. So we set out from the watchtower and followed the wall through the mist. Until it disappeared into a chestnut orchard.

Normally this wouldn’t have caused much concern – the wall disappears for short stretches and reappears all the time. But usually we can see more than ten metres in front of us. And in the highly dissected terrain we were in using the crude maps we use, it’s not really practical to navigate using map and compass without having some visual targets to shoot for. So, after spending about an hour trying to find the wall again without success, we packed it in and headed back to Zunhua, where we are now, for our third day off in a row. When you add that to five days lost last week to flu (both of us, consecutively rather than simultaneously, natch), well, it adds up.

This morning’s pea soup

We are genuinely a little down about this, because it’s not going to be possible for us to meet our parents at the end. But for the sake of our safety and our sanity, we have to be realistic about the pace we can maintain, and we simply can’t maintain a pace that will allow that to happen. We will take a week off to spend time with our parents, of course – both sets will be here in less than two weeks – and being able to spend time with them was always most the important thing anyway.

And we’ll get to Shanhaiguan the day we get there, no sooner, no later.