Every Step Counts

01 Feb 2012

Rob Lilwall

Originally from the UK, Lilwall now lives in Hong Kong with his wife. His previous Cycling Home From Siberia expedition became the subject of a TV series on the National Geographic channel and a book published by Hodder & Stoughton. He set off on his six-month-long Walking Home From Mongolia expedition in November 2011 to raise funds for the children’s charity Viva.

 

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The second month of our expedition saw us starting from the middle of Inner Mongolia. We continued to walk south, and the landscape continued to change gradually but definitively – the desert started to disappear behind us, replaced by valleys of cultivated (though frozen) fields, and mud brown villages where gruff farmers chopped wood, and pigs lay snoring loudly next to haystacks. We also started to spot towns from a great distance on account of the phenomenally huge chimneys which grew out of them, spewing massive plumes of steam and smoke into the cold winter sky.

Thanks to these pockets of life, we were often able to find cheap little hostels where we could stay the night in the warmth, rather than camping most nights, as we had done in the Gobi Desert.

I have been learning Mandarin through listening to ChinesePod lessons as I walk, and so it has been brilliant fun to interact with and learn to speak with the people. Very few foreigners seem to visit these areas, and on a regular basis drivers will screech to a halt in the middle of the road just to stare at us, and people will stop in the street to gawk. One time, a man stared at us so intently that he walked straight into a tree – which gave us an excuse to start chatting with him and make friends.

When we reached the town of Fengzhen, a few kilometres north of the Great Wall, we set off into a frozen dawn, excited to see China's most famous landmark for the first time on the expedition. We weaved our way through the bustling street scene that is replicated every morning in almost every town in China – a sea of people rushing to work on foot (well wrapped against the cold), on rickshaws, bicycles, motorbikes and in swerving cars.

We asked people we passed where the Wall was, and it was interesting that not many seemed to realise that it was just a few kilometres from their town, telling us instead that it was near Beijing, which is where the most-photographed stone section of the Wall is. But as we continued to walk, we met some labourers who confirmed that the Wall was indeed nearby, and gradually, increasing numbers of people on the street confirmed that we would soon reach it.

After weaving past a giant power station, and along a road lined with huge piles of coal, we turned a corner, and finally there before us was the Wall. It did not look like the one in Beijing, but was instead a 3m-high mound of earth, covered slightly in grass. We climbed up onto it, and the sight before us was still impressive, as it snaked away from us as far as we could see in both directions. A hole had been made in it for a road, framed by a simple gate announcing the provincial boundary, and thus our gateway into Shanxi Province. Over the next week,we walked through a valley lined almost continuously with coal mines. Shanxi is where most of the Middle Kingdom's (a literal translation of zhong guo, China’s Mandarin name) coal comes from. Giant freight trains rattled past us several times an hour, bound either for the ports, or to feed China's rapidly expanding power station network.

We have since passed the coal mines and over the past few days, have been walking through rolling hill country, shrouded in fields and forests. Tomorrow, we are going to hunt for another part of the Wall, which, judging from Google Maps, we will be able to follow all the way to the Yellow River, about 10 days away.

In case this walk is sounding too idyllic, I should point out that the temperatures are still pretty brutal, dropping to about -20°C at night, making camping a tough and uncomfortable experience. We continue to cover about 25 or 30km a day – which, while not a huge distance in itself, is enough to give us regular aches and pains from the steady, brutal impact of the road against our feet, knees, backs and shoulders. But even when the going seems tough and relentless, we must continue to struggle onwards knowing that every step takes us closer to home – though my home and my wife in Hong Kong are still a distance away.

Join me on my journey via monthly updates here on silverkris.com.

walkinghomefrommongolia.com

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