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By morning the rain had stopped, but it had been replaced by fog.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.

. . . we reach Shanhaiguan.

For millions of people around the world, Badaling is the Great Wall of China. With its blockish watchtowers, uniform crenellations, and smooth brick and stonework, the Badaling wall looks like a Great Wall should – an endless, horizontal (and sometimes vertical) castle, twisting along knife-edge ridges and climbing dangerous peaks. It’s no wonder the place has become – and has been intentionally cultivated as – a symbol not just of the Great Wall but also China generally.

Now that’s what I call a Great Wall!

Ironically, though, Badaling was not directly on our route; we had to take a side trip to see it. Not far from the Yellow River, several hundred kilometres west of Beijing, the wall splits into inner and outer sections, which rejoin just outside of Beijing. When planning our trip, we decided to hike along the outer wall, as there are fewer long gaps over the route as a whole. Badaling is located on the inner wall, a significant detour from our path.

What we didn’t plan so well was the date of our visit. Bright and early on May Day, one of the biggest holidays of the year in China and maybe the busiest possible time to go to Badaling, we hopped into a cab and made our way to China’s Number 1 tourist destination.

The holiday bottleneck at the entrance to the Badaling wall

As such an important and symbolic site, Badaling comes in for its fair share of criticism, maybe even more than its fair share. First on the list of complaints are the crowds, which are legendary, and we can testify that this particular legend of the Great Wall is solidly grounded in fact. It took our cab driver a good 45 minutes to drive the several hundred metres from the entry gate to our hotel, and once we’d checked in and dropped our bags, we made our way to the wall and were swept into a human river so mighty our only choices were to go with the flow or drown.

Come on in, the water’s fine!

A second complaint, especially among Westerners, is excessive commercialisation; and there’s definitely no lack of money-makers – legitimate and less so – to be found at Badaling. You can buy Great Wall caps, T-shirts and certificates of achievement, not to mention countless baubles and trinkets that have nothing to do with the Great Wall, or even China. You can ride camels, horses and cable cars. You can go to restaurants where there are no prices on the English menu and the staff apparently feels free to randomly make up prices for customers who can’t read Chinese menus (or at least look like they can’t – after being absurdly overcharged for our lunch, we complained to management and pointed out that we’d been charged 30% more than the prices on the Chinese menu – we got our refunds but obviously the scam works most of the time).

Get one for every member of the family!

We thought we deserved a ride up

Giddyup!

Despite all this, we really had a good time at Badaling, and it looked to us like most of the other people there were having fun as well. The wall, which has been totally reconstructed, seemed more Disneyfied than necessary to us, but as for the crowds and commercialisation, it struck us as inevitable that there would be at least one site on the wall given over to mass tourism and the almighty RMB. Given its proximity to Beijing, that place was probably always going to be Badaling (we are less sanguine about some of the changes happening at less touristed spots near Beijing).

Not a bad spot to impress your honey

It also seemed to us that it really is possible to get a sense of the wall from a visit to Badaling. By about 4 o’clock, once the giant tour groups had boarded their buses and headed back to Beijing, stretches of the wall were surprisingly peaceful. Sure, the bricks weren’t original, the pavement was too smooth, and the handrails weren’t quite what we were used to. But the spring green was as fresh as it would have been 500 years ago, the afternoon sun threw lovely shadows across the pavement, and when we squinted and looked out to the west, we swear we saw a group of Mongol horsemen in the distance.

Badaling spring

You can always count on us for the obvious shot

Even Badaling has its quiet moments

(We are still married.)

. . . spring is here!!!

The northern China weather teased us with hints of spring for nearly three months. In early February, the temperatures rose, the rivers thawed, and some desert shrubs blossomed; then in early March a cold snap hit and we had two weeks of snow and sub-zero temperatures. In late March we had another thaw; early April brought freezing 50 kilometre per hour winds and more snow.

But in the last week of April, we descended from the high mountains around Zhangjiakou and walked down into spring. This time, it was here to stay.

Blossoms covering the hillside

After weeks of sporadically fertilising and plowing their fields, suddenly people were in the fields from sunup to sundown, planting corn and potatoes in the uplands and garden vegetables at lower elevations.

Like many farm couples, Mr Zhuang and his wife work the fields together

But only the husband gets to do the fun part

Mr Zhuang’s harrow is made of twigs wrapped around larger twigs

With the weather warming up, people were also outside just for the fun of it, cutting blossoms, riding bikes, eating, drinking and gossiping.

This girl gave each of us a beautiful sprig of cherry blossoms before riding off without giving her name

Tree-lined streets, even in the countryside

If you can call it fun, some people were out walking the wall.

Over the whole of its route in western Hebei, from the Shanxi border in the west to the border with Beijing municipality in the east, the northern branch of Great Wall is made of stone.

In some places, especially near important passes like Zhangjiakou, the stone wall can be an impressive barrier, five or six metres tall with mortar still intact.

Stone wall plunging into a canyon; the city of Zhangjiakou is visible in the distance

The Great Wall’s famous “Da hao he shan” gate is also the north entrance to Zhangjiakou

The section of wall just outside Zhangjiakou has been developed as a public park

But for the most part western Hebei’s stone walls are piles of rubble no more than three to four metres high. We suspect that this may always have been the case, at least in remote places, though we certainly don’t know that for fact.

It seemed to us that the mountain country of western Hebei was plenty high and rough on its own without wall, and that invasions via the peaks weren’t terribly likely anyway. A stone barrier designed more to slow progress rather than halt it entirely may well have been enough in this region. It was certainly enough to slow our progress.

Does this look like a good place to invade China?

Emma picking her way through the rocks on a steep descent

Despite the rough footing, the stone walls of western Hebei were among our favourite stretches of wall to date. The wall certainly stood out from the otherwise smooth and mostly open hills, but because the stones were quarried locally, it also fit into its surroundings nicely and changed form and colour as the local geology changed.

These pink stones were some of the prettiest we saw

The birches on the north side of the wall offered some nice, sheltered campsites

We can count about 40 beacon towers in this photo alone

When we first laid eyes on (and christened) the Valley of a Hundred Fengsui, we didn’t have any trouble identifying the structures we saw. There was no need to speculate about a prehistoric race of supermen or alien invaders. No, we knew that we had stumbled upon a valley that was unusually rich in fengsui, or as we generally call them on the blog, beacon towers.

Emma filming the Valley

If you’ve seen The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King and remember the scene where Pippin sets a large tower alight, sending a message calling for help across an entire mountain range, you know how the system of fengsui worked. All along the wall, from Jiayuguan to Shanhaiguan, beacon towers were built so that a fire signal (feng) or smoke signal (sui) sent from one would be visible from the next in line, making it possible to transmit military information back and forth rapidly across the entire border region. According to one military manual from the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), when the system worked according to plan a message could travel 1000 kilometres in a day and a night.

So what’s the big mystery? Well, we might know what fengsui are, but we don’t know why there are so many – more than anywhere else we’ve been – in this broad, open valley northeast of the city of Datong in Shanxi province.

Normally beacon towers are most common where the terrain is rough and lines of sight are interrupted; in these areas, you might see a beacon tower on just about every peak or prominence. But for some reason, in the Valley of a Hundred Fengsui, where you could easily see a signal sent from five kilometres away, the Chinese decided to build more than 100 beacon towers over a distance of less than 20 kilometres. Between some of the towers in the valley, there would be no point in sending a smoke signal – in the time it would take to light a fire you could just stroll over to the next tower for a chat.

Sunset falls on the Valley of a Hundred Fengsui

If you can tell us why the wall-builders constructed more than 100 nine-metre high signaling towers in a valley as flat as a pancake (and be verifiably correct), you could be the proud owner of the world’s only Walking the Wall fridge magnet. If none of you can, then the raison d’etre of the beacon towers in this remote, windswept valley in Shanxi province will have to remain another Unsolved Mystery of the Great Wall.

The border zone where the Great Wall divides the provinces of Shaanxi and Shanxi from the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is coal country. Not far below the surface is the Shenfu Dongsheng coalfield, the seventh largest coal deposit in the world and potentially the most profitable.

Datong coal mine

Coal is the fuel that powers China’s phenomenal economic growth. The country’s coal consumption has increased almost 15% annually in recent years, and coal supplies almost two-thirds of its energy needs. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see China’s energy future, and that future is black.

The vision for tomorrow

A more realistic version

But if coal is important to the prospects of China as a whole, well, it’s everything in the mining valleys where we walked in northern Shaanxi. There’s not a lot of water in northern Shaanxi and it’s too hilly to irrigate effectively, so the agriculture’s pretty marginal. That means that coal is just about the only game in town. Almost every village is a mining village, and those few jobs that aren’t in the mines or the coal-fired power plants are in the businesses that service the mines and the power industry. Most of the traffic on the roads consists of massive trucks carrying coal between the mines and the power plants or distribution centres. Most of the young people we spoke to in the region who are going off to university are getting their degrees in mining engineering or a related field.

A truck stop between Fengzhen, Inner Mongolia and Datong, Shanxi

Up from Shanghai for a mine inspection

There are also smaller, informal economies that revolve around the coal industry. At the big truck stops, small armies of men gather to wait for pieces of coal to drop from the trucks as they take off; they then collect these and presumably sell them. On the more remote roads that get less traffic you can see older men and women walking along with old seed bags, gathering the bits that fall to the roadside on a much smaller scale, probably for personal use.

Men rushing to collect the scraps

Waiting for the next truck

While the mines obviously bring jobs with them, it seemed to us that life was pretty tough in the area, even by Northern China standards. Everything, and we mean everything, from the roads to the people to the sparrows to the sheep, was coated in soot. It was impossible to spend even a few hours outside without looking like a chimneysweep.

Sixteen tons, whaddya get, another day older and deeper in debt . . .

A typical roadside scene

As we’ve mentioned before, we found people noticeably less friendly in coal country than elsewhere. We don’t know why, but one guess is that because many mining jobs are filled by workers migrating in from elsewhere, levels of trust within communities are lower than in more stable villages. Certainly the number of vicious, unchained attack dogs guarding homes would support that.

We wanted a photo of an unchained dog, but when you’re fending off a loose, half-crazed German Shepherd with a walking stick it’s tough to get off a shot

Then there’s the pollution. The statistics are grim enough on a global and national level. China is about to pass the US as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases (though of course China comes nowhere near threatening the status of Australia and the US as the per capita greenhouse pollution champs). And air pollution, again largely from coal, accounts for over 400,000 (yes, that’s almost half a million) premature deaths in China per year.

But the local pollution impacts are especially nasty. When you consider that we were coughing up black phlegm after a few days in the region, you can imagine what it might be like to live there (and how damaging the coal dust must be to young, vulnerable lungs).

Two kids next to a New Year’s coal pyre

A lovely roadside stream of ?????

To add to the list of horrors, China’s coal mining industry is far and away the most dangerous in the world. According to official statistics, about 5000 to 6000 people die every year in mining accidents; independent estimates put the figure at 10,000 to 20,000. Although occupational safety standards in a poor country like China are bound to be different from those in the West, such a high accident rate is hardly inevitable. The death rate per million tonnes of coal produced in China is about 150 times that in Australia; the fatality rate in India, a considerably poorer country, is only 9% of China’s (if you believe the Chinese stats, which nobody does).

But hey, if it’s just all too hard for China’s coal mine owners to invest in modern safety equipment and practices, maybe putting up a slogan will do the trick.

Safety in production, unrestricted sales!

Near Xinpingbu, Shanxi province

Believe it or not, we don’t often get a good chance to take a panoramic of the wall. Walking on or near it doesn’t always lend itself to a good distance shot, and the wall doesn’t always cooperate in terms of angle and lighting.

But we’ve been playing around a bit with our pocket digicam’s panoramic mode (which allows you to stitch together several individual photos into a single panorama) and came up with this shot. We thought you might like to see it because it clearly shows the sinuous line of the wall and the track we followed that day. Click on the image for a larger version. (Now that we’ve worked out how to do it, stay tuned for some mountain panoramas).

As we struggle through the mountains, up hill and down dale, through thorns and over craggy cliffs, we’ve encountered another problem – no internet reception. This means we’ve been unable to keep the blog up to date. More importantly it means Brendan can’t check the NBA scores.

Please be patient with us while we get through this black hole. We have a hefty backlog of posts and photos waiting to be uploaded and will try to get them up as soon as possible. Uploading photos in a tiny village internet cafe such as the one we are in now is virtually impossible. You’d be lucky to find a working CD drive, let alone a usable USB port.

Thank you for your recent comments, it’s great to have people spur us on for the final push. We are coming up to the hardest part of the wall now (and we thought the first 2700kms were difficult), so every little bit of encouragement helps.