Huangya & Simatai pre-walk

I really like this photo - it seems nicely balanced to me, with the wall leading off to who-knows-where, which was exactly how it felt on this first day.

The other thing I really like is that I can almost sense the wall dropping steeply away from under my feet, down and down so it go back up, up, up, into this photo. Er, does that sentence make sense? Well, it does to me, anyway. :-)

Also note, just to the right of the wall at the bottom of the frame, a solitary figure standing out on the hillside. What's he doing? Planting a tree.

This is a close-up crop from this photo. I think that's Judith climbing, but I'm not sure - any advance on Judith? Anyway, whoever it is, I reckon this shot captures the mood of climbing a steep section of wall quite well.

Here's the section of wall seen in this photo, but from its foot - and with a better view of the man planting a tree off to the right. This is early November, it's pretty cold, the ground must be frozen hard, and yet there he was, undeliably planting a tree. Cool.

For a close-up of the trekker at the top, click here.

I also really dig the little face in the bottom left. :-)

This isn't a particularly great photo - the light on the lift really bugs me. But just look at that wall, crumbling away - gorgeous, innit? It looks to me like the figures in the distance are descending, so we're looking back at the way we've come. Nice.

Had I been feeling as adventurous as I did later in the week, I might have had a look. But alas, this is an offshoot of the wall which we weren't walking on. Shame. :-)

Here's a close-up of the hawker seen in this picture. Look: she's got a bag in each hand, and a big wooden box on her back - all of which contained her wares. She shadowed us all day, taking short-cuts off the wall to pop up in front of us time and again. I've no idea if anyone even bought anything from her, the poor dear.

Cor, look at all that lovely wall. The bit going off to the left leads here, and the hawker at the bottom, who kept ducking off the wall, taking a shortcut, and reappearing in front of us, can be seen better here.

Here we can see the round tower at Huangya, which sat out on its poor lonesome self. However, I'm not very happy with this picture - it's rather boring, isn't it - so I may have to crop it, or find an alternative, later.

Taken towards the end of the morning's walk, after we'd come off the wall and started to descend a pathway on the hill, this shot shows the Barracks from above, very nicely I think. Quite a compound, isn't it?

The maze is at the very top-left, the Longevity Garden is to the right of the maze (with two trees in it), and the restaurant is off the courtyard the centre-front. Mine and Llew's room is somewhere near the middle.

Hmmm, there's lots to say about this, I think. I shall return.

Here we see a few trekkers descending the path at the end of the first morning's walk. From rear to van we have: Lola, Pete (?), Heather (seated), Judith, and, er, anyone?

The first morning's walk ended with lunch here, some sort of sports arena on the edge of the Barracks. I'd been lingering at the back of the group, and on the final stretch Harry asked me to go back with him up to the wall to help the last few people down, which I gladly agreed to. Consequently I was in the final group down from the wall, and as we entered the stadium we were greeted with cheers from everyone already there - a fantastic feeling!

I thought lunch was really good - a combination of being more than ready to eat, and not having had the same lunch every day for the past five days (ie by the end of the week I'd definitely had enough, as had everyone else!). I was particularly pleased to see the delicious sweet peanuts I'd come to know and love from dinner the night before and breakfast that morning. I did, however, foolishly ask "how am I supposed to eat these nuts without chopsticks?" before I realised how stupid that was. :-) Then someone gave me some chopsticks and I chowed down with relish.

Having arrived so late, lunch was pretty hurried for me - some people had been waiting for over an hour, having yomped round the wall really quickly, so they set off after I'd only been there about ten minutes. But that was OK, I was happy to be at the back again, in absolutely no hurry to stop walking the Wall.

Here's a boring attempt to be clever - doesn't really work, does it? This is taken somewhere near the start of the afternoon's section of wall, possibly at the bottom where the wall is the wall of the Barracks (see here to see what I mean).

For a much better example of this kind of photo, click here.

This photo and (even better) this one show the morning's section very well indeed - and complement each other nicely.

Note the path we descended at the end, after leaving the wall just before that last watchtower.

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I took a few graffiti photos in China, but I think this is the coolest, just because of the heart. :-)

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This photo and this one show the morning's section very well indeed - and complement each other nicely.

This is probably the most interesting of the two, as it really does take in almost all of the Wall we walked that morning. Fix your eyes on the top-right quadrant, where a distant grey line curves gently upwards before stopping against the mountain on the right. Well, that's Wall, and the bottom of the curve is where I was standing when I took this picture. The grey fuzzy patch underneath it is this, ie that's where we started. From there the Wall is obscured by mountains, but you can trace a lot of our route to the path back down to the Barracks. Note the bridge at the bottom of the path, the closest end of which can be seen in this photo.

Curious thing: if you'd asked me where this photo was taken from, I'd probably have said "at the lookout at the very top of the icy stairs" - except that can't be right, because this shot occurs earlier on the film than ones I took at the bottom of the icy stairs, before ascending (eg this one). Therefore I reckon this was taken at the bottom of the icy stairs, not the top, which raises the question "what was the view at the top of the icy stairs, and could you see the wall?". Answers on a postcard, please.

The afternoon's walk basically consisted of going straight up, up, up, and then coming back down, down, down, on the section of wall visible here. When the wall ran out (because it rammed into the vertical mountainside), there was this icy stairway up to a lookout point (and some wild wall which, alas, we didn't get onto).

Being a laggard, I got to the bottom of the stairs just in time to take this picture of Kit, Becca, Bob, Llew, Chris and Pete on their way down from the top. It's a bit fuzzy due to camera shake with a long exposure, but short of having a tripod on you, what can you do?

These stairs were steep, icy, and fun. They'd have been bloody dangerous without the handrails, as it was they were merely "slightly dangerous", and painful because the handrails were so cold! :-)

Also see the view down the stairs

This is the view down the icy stairs seen here - you can see how icy they really were. Fantastic - climbing and descending these steps was one of the most fun parts of the first day, for me at least.

This photo was taken from the right hand side of the gap I'm standing in front of in this photo. If you looked straight in front, instead of straight down, you'd see this.

I think this is a pretty boring photo. It's possibly redeemed by the multiple horizons fading into the distance, but I'm not sure. It was taken pretty late in the afternoon, hence the shadows. Hey ho.

This was taken at the top of the icy stairs, and you can actually see some of the hillscape in the background in this photo (eg the bumpy bit to the right of Kath is in the centre of this shot).

Here I am with Harriet, the trek doctor, and Kath from Silk Steps, hoping neither of them decides to push me down the stairs I'm standing in front of.

This photo was taken using my baby tripod and my camera's self-timer. Not bad, although Harriet seems to have underestimated the width of the frame. Or maybe she just wanted to lean in my direction. It's understandable.

This is a long exposure, about 4 seconds I believe, taken on the morning we left the barracks, at breakfast time. This is the restaurant - you can just see the fuzzy shapes of people through the windows. The green fuzz at the top is weeping willow branches overhead, swaying in the breeze.

This was very much an experimental shot. I'm pretty pleased with the way it came out. I'm half-tempted to crop is slightly, mind.

A disappointing photo, which could have been so much better. Here's the story:

On the first day we arrived at the Barracks I had a look round while the light lasted, and took a few photos (eg this one and this one), and this slab, with its lovely inscription caught my eye. Unfortunately it was in its own courtyard, and when I tried to enter, a Chinese chappie came out, holding out his hand for something - money I presumed. I tried to indicate to him that I just wanted to take a photo of the slab, not go and have a look at whatever was behind it, but he kept shaking his head and holding his hand out, so in the end I gave up.

After breakfast on the morning we were leaving the Barracks, I was walking past the same spot and noticed that the chappie was absent, so I took the opportunity to take the photo. Unfortunately, it being early in the morning the light was poor, so I had to use my baby tripod for a long exposure, something like four or ten seconds or so. Alas, I seem to have got the focus all wrong, probably as a result of the camera being on the floor and hard to get my face behind to set it up properly, so the photo didn't come out as well as I'd hoped. Ah well, live and learn, eh?