Walking the Wall

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.

Emma has an article in this weekend’s Sydney Morning Herald Travel section, on page 3 (she did graciously mention me once or twice). Make sure to pick up a copy or two if you’re near a newsagent, and if you’re overseas or otherwise can’t pick up a copy, you can view her story online by clicking on “Wall to wall adventure.”

Mouth of the River Wei chicken and shredded potatoes

Our plane touched down right on time, we were waved through customs with a smile, took a few happy snaps at the Great Wall mural that greets arrivals at Beijing Airport (and it took a few to get one where we both look semi-human), and our luggage came off the conveyor belt safe and sound.

It was all very unChina-like.

Then the doors to the arrivals hall slid open and we caught a whiff of that familiar, homey mixture of cigarette smoke, petrol fumes, rotting vegetables and construction dust that can only mean one thing.

We’re back in Beijing.

The plan now is to head back to the wall in two weeks and pick up where we left off, just outside of Zhongwei in Ningxia Autonomous Region. Brendan’s foot has healed nicely but he still needs a couple of weeks before attempting rough ground.

Thanks to everyone for your messages of support while we’ve been away from China. It helps to know there are people out there keen to see us complete this walk. Keep logging back on to see some photos and stories about Beijing, and before you know it we’ll be back on the Great Wall!

Shortly after we decided to walk the wall, we realised that planning a trip of this scale would require a huge amount of work. At that moment, we vowed to offload as much of that work as possible onto others.

In the Acknowledgements section you can read about some of the wonderful and talented people who have helped us along the way. Each of them has contributed their time, expertise and energy to our journey, and for that we are grateful.

Please take a moment to have a look at their smiling mugs and join us in thanking them.

The Walking the Wall appointment book, Tuesday, September 12

8:30 am: Brendan at the chiropractor
8:45 am: Emma at the chiropractor
10:10 am: Brendan on the magic bone machine
10:40 am: Brendan’s physio appointment
12:30 pm: Emma at the physio
3:30 pm: Brendan at the gait analyst
4:15 pm: Emma at the gait analyst
6:15 pm: Emma returns to gait analyst to get her custom orthotic

And you all thought we were lazing away our time at the beach. For shame.

Since Brendan’s broken foot forced us to return to Sydney, we’ve been doing everything we can to get back on the wall as soon as we can – visiting the doctor, gulping nutritional supplements, working out in the pool – but rehabbing’s a slow business.

Finally, after over five weeks of waiting and assessment, we are starting to see good progress and get some clarity on how long until we can resume. It looks as though we’ll be returning to China at the end of September, and we should be able to start hiking on the wall at a slow pace by mid-October. Woo-hoo!

As we’ve mentioned before, Brendan’s injury was a stress fracture to the third metatarsal of his right foot, the portion of the toe bone that extends through the foot proper. Stress fractures are repetitive stress injuries; that is, they are caused by things like walking 1000 kilometres over rough ground carrying 20 kilograms on your back.

Or, as Brendan’s foot doctor put it: Imagine your third metatarsal is a wire paper clip, and you bend the paper clip back and forth repeatedly, just as you bend the bones in your foot as you walk. First the wire becomes hot, then it develops little cracks in its structure, then it breaks in half. That’s a stress fracture!

For the most part, treatment for a stress fracture isn’t real high tech. As with most broken bones, the most important thing is to rest it and let your body do the work. There are a few little helpers that can be employed, though. You can wear a removable cast like the one in the picture below. You can gobble calcium and glucosamine tablets. You can do little exercises to strengthen your toes.

The removable Aircast: function meets fashion

Best of all, you can use the magic bone machine, also known as low-intensity ultrasound, to emit ultrasonic pulses that may stimulate bone growth. The actual efficacy of the thing is debated – its proponents claim a 50% reduction in healing times; others scoff. What is not debated is that we really want to get back to the wall ASAP, so we’ll try anything. Especially when it has a cool name like the magic bone machine.

Picture yourself on a wave of ultrasound

Not to be outdone, Emma has been getting treatment for a knee problem that was not severe enough to halt our progress, but was causing her pain. It turns out to be a good thing she looked into it.

Dr David Ferguson, at Advanced Gait Dynamics, analysed Emma’s stride and found that she suffers from over-pronation. Or, in English, her foot rolls inward as she walks. This causes the lower leg to turn inwards, which puts the knee and hip out of alignment and causes just the kind of pain she was feeling.

The sad result of all those nights in stilettos – a computer image of Emma’s foot

To date, the knee had just been a nagging annoyance, but according to Dr Ferguson it had the potential to flare up into a serious problem once we hit the wall’s steeper sections. Fortunately, pronation can be corrected by an orthotic device, in Emma’s case a specially made insert for her specially funky feet.

Not just a cosmetic procedure – Dr Ferguson uses lipstick to mark the problem areas on Emma’s feet

Looking for the latest in Great Wall scholarship and news? The current issue of the China Heritage Quarterly, an online journal produced as part of the China Heritage Project at the Australian National University, is devoted to the Great Wall of China. The issue contains an editorial on conservation issues and tourism at the wall, profiles of some of China’s most important Great Wall scholars, a bibliography of Chinese-language wall scholarship, and more.

This special issue of the journal was produced in anticipation of the Powerhouse Museum’s Great Wall of China exhibition, which opens on 28 September 2006 in Sydney. Please click on the link in the first paragraph and have a look.

It’s ALWAYS Brendan

Brendan’s right foot is injured. It’s probably a stress fracture, but X-rays aren’t conclusive and we won’t know anything definite until an MRI is done in a few days.

We are likely off the wall for at least four weeks, possibly longer. Obviously it’s very disappointing for us. We’ve spent a lot of time and effort on this trip, and we were enjoying ourselves and making good progress. But so it goes.

As things currently stand, we plan to resume our walk as soon as we can. When that is we don’t know and probably won’t for quite a while, as our return date will depend on Brendan’s response to rehabilitation as well as the severity of his injury, whatever that turns out to be. Of course, we’ll keep you informed on the site.

There is a tiny silver lining in this dark cloud. We’ve been chronically behind in posting, and right now we’ve got about a four-week backlog of posts. Finally we have all the time we need to clear out that backlog.

So in one way at least, things will be pretty normal around here. We’ll write about things that actually happened weeks ago as though they happened yesterday and fantasize about that day when we’re finally caught up and can post about things as they take place. With luck, when that day comes we’ll be back on the wall.

Mei you internet (translation: we don’t have internet)

We’ve been beyond the range of China Unicom’s wireless internet service for about the last 10 days, in what we think is probably a taste of things to come for the next month.

As a result, we’ve been forced to change our usual practice of putting up no more than one post a day. From now on, we’ll be posting in clumps whenever we have internet access.

So be sure to scroll down whenever you see a new post to look for additional new posts, and read from bottom to top in good blog fashion. You wouldn’t want to miss any action photos of Emma now, would you?

Thanks to everyone for your inspiring and funny comments. We’ve read them and re-read them, and read some even a third time. It’s great to know that we can take you along with us on this journey.