Walking the Wall

Well, we’ve rambled our way across our final jurisdictions, Hebei province and Beijing municipality. These eastern areas we hiked through were different in many ways from the western provinces - more populous, greener, much more mountainous. But the overriding theme of our time in the east was the return of summer.

It’s hard to believe we were camping in snow just over two months ago. By the final two weeks of our trip, the corn had grown high, people were selling vegetables from their courtyard gardens, and the first wheat harvest was already underway.

Most people still harvest by hand

Busy like a Brueghel painting

Summertime is also vacation time, and for once we weren’t the only tourists out on the road. The wall traces a giant semi-circle around most of Beijing’s weekend getaway spots, where we joined thousands of Beijingers taking their holidays. We also had some distinguished holiday guests - Dean and Brenda Fletcher - who traveled from Kansas to spend a week with us!

Dean and Brenda (Brendan’s parents) with us at Jinshanling

Emma with a cool summer lunch of fresh veg, dipping sauce and cold roasted chicken

At the little fishing villages everyone is issued a bamboo pole . . .

. . . and if you catch one they’ll grill it on the spot

All the restaurants serve wild mountain herbs - here, try some!

You can have too much summer, though. In mid-June the weather turned extremely, even dangerously hot. Every day we had temperatures between 35° and 40°, up to 41° on one day. Add in 50-60% humidity, and you have hiking conditions that are always uncomfortable, often punishing, and present a real threat of heat exhaustion.

Brendan after cooling down under a waterfall

This baby goat had collapsed of heat exhaustion. It began to recover shortly after Emma took it to the shade of a nearby watchtower, where its herd was resting.

But on the more temperate days, summer gives everyone a chance to get outside and do the sorts of summer things people do anywhere - go to outdoor markets, throw a bit of meat on the fire and have a beer, or just hang out on the side of the road. Whether we’ve spent days getting to know them or just a few minutes chatting under the shade of a tree, one of the great joys of our trip - and probably the thing that will stick with us longest - has been meeting the wonderful, generous, friendly people of rural China. We will miss them.

A weaver and his loom

Yarn piling up in front of a wheelbarrow

And we thought our packs were heavy

Sprinkling spices on some chuanzi’s (mutton skewers)

Demonstrating proper chuanzi consumption technique

A man on a mission

The Australian Ginger Rogers and . . . the Chinese Ginger Rogers

Fresh produce and a new bag of tobacco - what’s not to smile about?

GET ME OUT OF HERE!!!

On any extended journey – a really long trip, several months or several thousand kilometres long – there always seems to be a trough in the middle. You’re far away enough from the beginning that the novelty’s worn out. You’re too far away from finishing for the end to be in sight. Every day is just another day of plodding through a mental and physical rut, and it seems that the only thing on the horizon is more horizon.

Along the Great Wall of China that trough has a name. It is Shaanxi.

To say that Shaanxi has not been our favourite province is . . . well, enough said. Or at least once we’ve finished with this post enough will have been said.

Oh! To be in Australia!

To be fair (not that we intend to), it wasn’t all Shaanxi’s fault. After putting up with winter in December and early January, we really didn’t need another six weeks of it. The BRRRR! factor when we checked the thermometer in the morning wasn’t impressive any more, it was just cold. Falling on our butts as we crossed icy rivers wasn’t that funny (except when Emma did it), it just hurt.

Not exactly Christopher Dean

But she does a passable Jane Torvill

Of course we could have taken consolation in the scenery. If there had been any. We love the desert as much as anyone, but after 1500 kilometres, is it too much to ask for a tree? One?

We meant one that was ALIVE!!

If it weren’t for the difference in texture between rammed earth and wind-blown dunes, we wouldn’t have known we were on the wall

OK, all right, the red bushes are pretty

Actually, it wasn’t all bad. It was lambing season, and “kidding” season, or whatever you call the season when baby goats are born; and the cute little guys were jumping, literally, all over the place.

You gotta be kidding me

The proud billy

Village life was often picturesque, despite the poverty, which was considerably worse than in other areas we’ve visited, and which we’ll write about in a more serious post down the road.

The tiny village of Cai Xiao Gou Cun. The slate on the rooftops is taken from an adjacent cliff.

Yulin, the largest city in northern Shaanxi, was one of the nicest cities we’ve visited, with vibrant street life and a beautiful old section of town.

A “pedestrian” mall in Yulin - for some reason it didn’t stop the traffic

A Yulin nut vendor

And, as always, whenever we got down (or needed an uplifting end to a whiny post), the children of China were there to lend a hand.

No wonder they’re hiding - the slogan on the wall says “Study to the best of your ability, over and over, every day”

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