You would think that finding the Great Wall of China would be easy. I had seen it on the pages of our Chinese road atlas for some time, marked clearly by a jagged symbol. However, on my iPhone's Google Maps, even when I zoomed in, the wall was indistinguishable from a dusty road. I suppose this dispels the myth that you can see the Great Wall from space.
It is also a myth that there is one wall. Rather there is a network of walls, built and rebuilt by various dynasties (especially the Ming) throughout the centuries. My expedition partner Leon McCarron and I plan to follow it for 200 kilometres west to the banks of the Yellow River, as part of our 5,000 kilometre walk home from Mongolia that began in November.
We knew that it was on the border between the provinces of Inner Mongolia and Shaanxi. This was apt, as the walls had been built primarily to keep out the steppe peoples who regularly raided the Middle Kingdom throughout the past three millennia.
As we walked closer to this provincial boundary, we started to ask the locals we bumped into if they knew where the wall was. It was a lost cause (even at about 20 kilometres away from the wall), everyone told us that as there wasn't one in the area we would have to go to Beijing, more than 300 kilometres away, where the famous, rebuilt stone sections of the wall are.
A couple of days later, having stayed overnight in the town of Fengzhen, which was just five kilometres from the provincial boundary, we set off at dawn. As we were leaving our budget hotel a young man stopped to watch us. I said hello and asked him about the wall. 'Beijing,' he said.
We pressed on and came to a 50-metre-long road tunnel underneath the railway, where we met an old man with a toothy smile. I asked if Chang Cheng (Putonghua for Great Wall, literally translated to 'long town') was near. When I showed him the Great Wall symbol drawn on my hand, his face lit up with recognition. In his northern accent, he said to me what sounded like, 'Ah, Chur Chur', but then pointed in the opposite direction to where the map indicated.