Flat landscape 1


There was dense fog the first couple of hours of walking today. Then the sun broke through and warmed up things. I was excited to reach a part of the route where there probably was some Great Wall.

I got there, and first followed a ditch in the landscape. There were some signs of a wall now and again, but it looked too modern to be Great Wall. Then I followed a road and dirt road for several kilometres. Every now and again I would walk from side to side to see if there were any signs of a wall. There were none.

This looked like one of those finds that are easier to see from above on Google Earth than from the ground. Perhaps in some years they will find something here if they start digging, and more importantly they are looking! The route continued over some fields, and I walked from side to side looking for signs of the Great Wall, but found none unfortunately.

The landscape here is flat. Lots of really large fields with mostly corn on the cob plants. The farmers are more than half way finished with their harvest. I’m seeing a lot more mechanised farming machinery now. Larger tractors ploughing the fields, whereas before there would be people with spades. There are more trees around, and they get to stand longer and are mostly untouched. In provinces farther west, there has been heavy foraging of trees for firewood and animal food. In many areas the trees were left with only a few leaves right at the top. Not the best practice if you want to keep the world’s third largest desert at a comfortable distance.

From the maps it looks like I will be walking primarily in farmland from now on until I am at the most northern point of the route in Liaoning. The coming days have a lot of quite large rivers. They might force me farther off the route than I would like. But when there are 3-4 rivers to be traversed in one day, and they are most likely impossible to wade over, then I’ll have to use large bridges.

From the most northern point on the route to North Korea, there are lots of mountains! It feels so strange to write North-Korea in a sentence knowing that now the border is very close. Not some distant destination far away.

35 kilometers today


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