19 km yesterday where 3 were not along the Great Wall. 28 km today.

I’m lying in the tent now with the tent doors completely open. At 2.000 metres above sea level I can see the green valley I walked through today, to the west. To the north, in the distance, I can see the amazing Tengger Desert. The sand dunes look like waves in the ocean. There is also a very large Great Wall beacon tower on a hill in front of the desert.

Behind me to the south is a beautifully situated Temple. It has several buildings that are placed on the ridges of the mountain it lies on. The mountain is covered with trees that seem to grow naturally. If I had had the extra energy, it would have been fun to climb the mountain to ask if I could spend the night at this Temple. I miss the forests in Norway. Out here almost all the trees have been planted manually, to break the wind and thus the sand. They usually stand in lines along roads and fields where the water runs in irrigation channels.

I have started listening to the Fluenz Mandarin language course on the mp3 player. When I get to Jintai and can recharge the phone, I’ll watch the actual course on the htc mobile phone too.

Luckily there was both a wind and some clouds today, so walking the Great Wall has been good. After crossing the valley, I got to a large irrigation channel that was too wide to cross and had to make a detour to get to where the Great Wall continued.

Towards the end of the day, I got to a place where they are building a natural gas pipeline from Xian to Shanghai! (Jon and I heard a couple of days ago that it goes all the way from a country who’s name begins with ‘Kirg’, and ends with ‘stan’. Any suggestions?) It is at least a metre in diameter. They must have had some massive machines to dig the hole, because many places it is 15 metres deep and then the pipeline is another 4-5 metres lower down. Sad to say – in this section, the Great Wall was smaller than the earth that was moved away for the pipeline. I tried to follow the Great Wall and had to take several detours to get past valleys that have been formed because of water erosion.

I got to a dead end once, because the loose gravel from the pipeline had cut off my detour route. I had to backtrack and ended up talking with a gang of workers for the pipeline, who pointed me in the right direction to get out of the maze.

It feels good to lie in the tent looking out at the surroundings. There is a small village to the north which I may visit tomorrow morning to buy some more food.