There are 11 agents on my WeChat that look for me occasionally, and think of me because I’ve been in Beijing for a long time.   WeChat is the Facebook of Asia, and it’s a mobile app, one that I use for everything. I use it to scroll through the moments of pictures, which are usually all in Chinese language, and heart photos. Right now I have 452 contacts, and after three years, that makes sense. The agent’s messages almost always start the same way texting “Hi, are you in Beijing” 你在北京吗？” “It depends, what’s going on?” I reply, always eager.

A short voice message comes through and in a heavy Chinese accent I hear basic information about the gig. “It’s for a movie. I don’t want to waste time for audition. Can you do a video of yourself, like introduce yourself in English. Face the camera with somebody to help”

Sometimes there are two auditions or wardrobe checks for a set movie role, and so it makes me happy that these short videos will pass. Unfortunately, I’m neither beautiful nor a talented actress, and so gigs are few and far between. I got a tv show about art in China, and I do commercials, but larger roles are not common for women. The foreign actors who are men have a much easier time because they can play roles such as military, politicians, and husbands to Chinese women. It’s less common for women to get roles in TV shows and movies. I look forward to it as it brings me into this small niche community.

The foreign actor’s union tries to set some boundaries with the agents, and help young actors raise their rates according to industry. There are plenty of rumors about how much of a cut an agent can take, and often it’s more than the actors are making. Indeed, it’s not contracted work, and the agent does their best to negotiate the price of the work so they are paid well.   I don’t complain about the rates usually, because I lose the argument everytime.  I take what I can get as an American actress a European look and California accent. It is a very different underground system compared with that in America where agents will get a strict 10-15% and nothing more. It's easier to cut the agents out and work with the directors, and if you are well connected it's that much easier.

In the far back corner of an 100 ft. high industrial sized greenhouse is a small constructed, insulated, and heated room. The three vanity mirrors with five or six white light bulbs are placed around the room on separate desks, sloppily filled with bulk Chinese makeup supplies, lotions, curling irons, and hair dryers. An adjacent corkboard holds long straight imperial Chinese costume hairpins and other jewelry accessories. Covering two side walls are printed paper portraits, full face and side angle, of Chinese and foreign actors and actresses wearing  late 1860's traditional clothing and hairstyles. A five shelved bookshelf divides the room, with the lower shelves filled with men's ponytail wigs for historical recreation of Manchurian style shaved foreheads and temples.  

My agent, Xiao Yi (Small One) helps prepare me with stick on heating pads, which she prepared in advance. I slip them under my blue costume garments, and stick them to the underside of the shirt.  Xiao Yi is around four feet tall, long hair which she wraps tightly in a bun on top of her head, and I notice she always wears the same white long sleeve dress with a high neck and Chinese beads, and a white down jacket.  She only speaks Chinese, and so I get the chance to practice with her. Looking at her, she would look cute with a small high cartoon voice, but she has a local Beijinger’s accent with the way she pronounces certain words like “门口dooryway”, which she pronounces with a thick slur.  She’s young, 25, and from an adjacent province Shandong, where many of the Chinese living in Beijing are from. Most often seen on her phone getting worked up chatting, or standing around.

The weather outside is freezing, and there are only a few rooms in the greenhouse which are heated. Huge floor length down jackets, face masks, and heaters are the only defense against the cold. Changing clothes and filming is literally freezing, and I wearing a silk nightgown for half of the shoot. There are heaters in the makeup room, where I sit to have them do my makeup. The process takes over one hour, and I use the time to relax and reflect on my lines that I was given.  My hair is straightened and then curled on oneside and put under a hat.  I am playing a harlot, who was married to a drastically older Scottish captain who has been out to sea. I reunite with him, and then have an affair with his handsome Chinese assistant, which causes tons of drama between everyone. I was afraid of acting as a creative medium for my entire life, and perhaps of my introverted nature. I started acting in Beijing because I wanted a challenge, and to try something new,  not because I had refined my talent for acting and wanted to break out and hit the big time in Beijing. No. I’ve done a lot of on screen acting compared to some talented actresses in LA, because of the niche acting market here.  I get cast frequently without even trying since I'm connected to network of agents which help filter down jobs from casting directors.

Inside the heated waiting rooms, I associate with the other foreign actors who are part of the cast. Sometimes, we wait for most of the day in the waiting room to be called to shoot our scenes. On this particular set there are around 15 foreign actors from different countries like Germany, Russia, Spain, Ukraine, New Zealand.  We sit together on wooden blocks and makeshift furniture. Several of them are Russian or Ukranian guys, and the 2014-2015 war in the Ukraine was picking up, so they recount stories from the news, each watching the updates daily and criticizing the American government for funding it. I start reading in my free time to catch up on what was happening through a series of independent journalism sites criticising the western media for misrepresenting everything that was happening, and covering up Pro-Russian stances, or Neo-Nazi stances. I’m simply relating as a human being to the other people in the cast who are watching places close to home get bombed, and not so much an activist for anti-war movement. I should be. From their perspective, every American should know about every military dealing in the world where American government is involved, because if I’m not up to date about the war in the Ukraine, or Oman’s position in the Iran nuclear agreement, etc. in a place like Beijing, then your entire intelligence as an American will come under scrutiny time and time again.

The "greenhouse" film studio is a series of props and makeshift sets, surrounded by large hanging green curtains which work well as a green screen. I walk past the horses, the large makeshift ship, piles of wood, and extra props. The man who plays my drastically older Scottish husband, Scott, sits around the space heaters chatting with a few other foreigners. We're waiting to shoot. The casting director must have thought we looked alike because I do have Scottish ancestry. It's nearly Chinese New Year holiday, and he tells me some funny stories about Chinese new year dumplings from his neighbor where he lives in Tianjin.  His loud voice and laughter are somewhat abrasive. He’s a Scottish born South African, who was a ammunitions trainer for the military so he has a dangerous disposition. We sit around practicing our lines until we're called to set. There are a few makeshift props, a tent, and a fire. The director gives us scene by scene directions so we don't have to remember much. They shoot us from several angles and do close ups, with the crew standing watching us.

The post processing of the scenes are done so that everything looks incredibly realistic with CG, like a forest or the sea. The crews usually dub over our English lines with Chinese, so they don’t have microphones on us. Most of the TV series in China are done this way. Some of our scenes are emotionally intense with fighting and adultery that was going on. His Chinese assistant, Thomas, is there and I have to act as if I'm completely drawn to him and disinterested in my husband. There's a lot of drama, crying, getting in bed, fighting in bed, and getting tossed around.

Xiao yi is careful to rush over and supply me with my jacket and shoes as soon as the filming is finished. She also supplies me with ginger tea from a large vat provided freely throughout the day. Since I was so cold standing there in my silk nightgown wearing high heels in the freezing cold temperatures, her support is invaluable. The whole crew shuffles the lights and equipment around us, lifting heavy objects and not complaining. The directors sip hot tea behind the preview screens, and yell loudly at everyone occassionaly. Usually the directors do not speak English, so I take directions in Chinese on set. Often times, it’s confusing due to the language barrier.

The food on set for lunch and dinner is nice if you are grateful for it. Otherwise, it’s a series of large metal vats filled with rice, meat, and vegetables, which are dished out by several people into small red and black plastic divider take away dishes. Then the actors would all sit on the piles of wood materials used for making the set, or put their trays onto the unused set materials itself. Not everyone would get a place to sit so there. I’d sit there quietly amongst the Chinese actors, many dressed with the characteristic hair braid and shaven head that was characteristic of the time. Most of them were dressed like normal farmers or villagers, with tattered shirts and pants or minority looking clothing. I start talking to one of the village ladies in Chinese, who is wearing an earthy purple top with some green embroidery, and we get into a conversation about where she is from. We exchange contact information, and Xiao Yi starts yelling at her not to get my WeChat or phone number. Often times, Xiao Yi is paranoid that I am going to find the casting director and cut her out of the deal. She hawks after me the entire time making sure I don’t get anyone’s phone number.

I’ve been somewhat versatile playing various roles as a mother, executive, and historical character for these TV shows and commericals. I’m not exactly on the circuit because I’m a student full time, but it’s a community I’ve grown into over time. It’s lucrative and some of the foreign actors are full time with much more life long stories of an opulent lifestyle to tell. For me, it’s a creative hobby. When I return to Beijing often times there’s a magical three day gig waiting for me with birthday cake and grass to lay on at a winery chateau. It’s an escape from my small university dormitory reality into a world of magic and play.

I went into the field today to set the camera traps here in 黄沙村， 联华 county, 江西 province, China. After waking up at 730, called to breakfast by the man in the host family I'm staying with I get ready with my field clothes. I finish packing the camera equipment, which is 3 camera traps, just in case we have time. I head to breakfast and he's still cooking the noodles and eggs in the bamboo fired wok. I sit by the fire drinking some coffee, staring into the fire with the caldron of water hanging above it. My field guide, a 68 year old man, arrives and sits next to me. He's got light sunken kind of eyes, but a youthful energy. I eat slowly, as they prefer... "man man chi 慢慢吃"... and then eat until I'm full.. "chi bao le 吃饱了" They say these same phrases to me every time I eat. They have a wok embedded into the counter with a fire slot underneath to put wood through. They eat a lot of smoked pork, hand made tofu that's also dried, and other meats including dog meat. One time I ate lichens!

After eating, I further put on more clothes, as the climate here is cool and damp with chance of rain. There is a thin mist that covers everything. As we walk along the bamboo picket fences towards the trail to start our journey, we pass many fields with cows, ponies, and dogs. The small village on the edge of the nature reserve has many houses and about 300 residents nestled within the mountains covered by bamboo, and conifers. The village appears to be doubling in size in terms of houses. After walking for a half an hour, another man joins us for the ascent to GaoTianYan （高天岩）, which means, high heaven rock. We begin walking in preparation for a long day. After several hours, we reach a crossroads to the Taoist temple, which is at the top of the mountain at around 1300m. I'm told we'll have lunch there, and one of the men takes that road to begin preparing. We still have several hours to place the cameras so I take off with the other man who guides me along a trail through the bamboo forests. The wet bamboo is blue, sagging with rainwater, amist deciduous trees with no leaves. It's in this area that the man I'm walking with tells me that he's 75 years old, although I would have guessed he was 60. Later in the day, I find him quite whiny when he wants to place the camera traps too close to each other, and I can tell he likes to get his way. I can barely understand what he says because he slurs a lot while talking. Chinese language is difficult enough to understand, and thankfully nothing we have to talk about is that important. He usually can finally simplify enough that I can understand. I'm also challenged with speaking Chinese, although I'm told I sound very good. This area reminds me of coastal California, where I was living before moving to China. The climate and tree types are similar. We place the three cameras after crawling along trails and through the mountains. 

Then, we reach the Daoist temple, which is a reconstructed temple, and so the deities inside are new. We eat a simple lunch of tofu, cabbage, and fried rice patties, with rice. They drink liquor and have a nice chat, and insist that I eat slowly and if I like something to eat as much as I like. We sit by the fire, and I fall into despair. Why did I come here to be with two elderly Chinese men to set these camera traps? This is philantropy at its best. We've already been working for 5 hours to set the cameras. The worst part about it, is that the design of the cameras is not systematic. There was no GIS and no real map for me to use here. The map has the wrong units, and so I'm having to make it up as I go along. Yesterday, my GPS wasn't working properly, so I downloaded an app onto my android samsung, which worked half the time today. We spend another 2 or 3 hours placing cameras despite my bad mood. The Chinese fir forests here are really beautiful. 

Finally a day of rain. I've been working constantly outside for the past 10 days, and I feel like I'm getting a bad case of runners knee. For someone with another month of hiking, this is not good. I'm happy to have a break so I take time to research China's environmental policies and protected area conservation to prepare for my next research report. The place where I'm staying is an informal kind of hotel/restaurant that is run by the sweet couple who I stay with. They are always cooking Jiangxi style foods with a lot of peppers. Many of the dishes are meats in a sea of red or green diced peppers,which is how the people of Jiangxi prepare their foods. They also cook a lot of greens and wild mushrooms, which have been very delectable. 

Today, a group of people from the local government arrived along with the police to get my passport number to fill out some kind of foreigner registration form. They protect the forests here apparently, so I ended up telling them about all of the illegal tree poaching that I saw in the nature reserve; although, it was not a clear cut operation but simply someone cutting groups of 10-20 trees down at a time and hauling them down the mountain. One day I even found the really small small mill where they were milling the wood in the middle of a mountain area that wasn't exactly protected, but no one's land either? Apparently it was a thief and the local authorities seemed very interested that I told them about it. They told me if I one day found him to take a photo. Luckily for me, the group brought me a lot of fruit, filling one small table. They brought me a huge bag of raisins, which are so much better than the raisins in the US. The raisins from Xinjiang are green and so sweet. I usually can't stop eating them. They also brought dragon fruit, bananas, a bag of tiny mangos, and two large grapefruits. It was a significant gift which I thought they brought to me as a favor, but when I tried to give money they refused. How kind. I actually really needed the sugars in my diet. The other day I found a whole pack of Vietnamese coconut candy sitting in the road, which was a godsend because I had no fruits and no sugars to eat that day, and then I ate half the pack in one day and the other half that night. I must have eaten 15 pieces of candy.

Sometimes I find it quite daunting to walk in the forest for 4-5 hours a day. When I first began doing fieldwork I admit that I didn't like it whatsoever. I thought that fieldwork was mundane labor work that pays very little. Now, I even have runners knee or something that aches, so I worry about doing permanent damage doing this much hiking. I have really flat feet from doing fieldwork this long, and I kind of wish I was beyond doing fieldwork after 10 years of doing it, but no. Sometimes I wonder why I don't up for a career change if it's going to be harmful to my health and I don't get paid a lot. I make about $10 a day here. All of my peers seem to be going through the same thing. We're working on this really important ecology work, and we don't get paid well enough to make us feel valuable. It's a rough career to have when compare yourself to other friends with office jobs in computer science or finance making 6 figures or more. It still is mundane and boring for me so I take an mp3 player loaded with talks about self-improvement, comedy, Chinese language, or sometimes music. I try listening to other audiobooks but I can't usually follow them enough unless they're a live speech or something. Climbing the mountains everyday is really rough work. I'm hiking through the forests with no trails, up steep hills, through brush, under brush, up the hill again for 30-45 minutes with a backpack on that weighs 8 or 9lbs. It's not that bad, but not easy either... exhausting 7 days later for sure. I'm getting in great shape in a way. I have been hiking a lot lately after a month of yoga and hiking in Thailand and Myanmar. I'm sure when I return back to Beijing my Taijichuan teacher will be impressed. At first when I began this project I felt like I was in the wrong place, and I may be. I had no map to work with, and no idea where I was. So I set the first 3 traps, but the GPS was broken so I had to go back and take them out again. Then, after setting half of the traps I had a better idea of where I was on the map. I'm a little discouraged from the field site. The locals here are even more discouraged and haven't seen or heard of clouded leopard for nearly 10 years. I may be too late to this place. I'm setting the traps around a village nestled in the mountains. Taking on clouded leopard conservation in China is no easy task. It may take me a year to narrow down a decent field site to find them, let alone study them and their ecology. This place has the elevation and enough connectivity in the forests to where there maybe a small population here, but it's a long shot. I find that I'm mostly on a wild goose chase to find clouded leopards, and that the nature preserve design, governance, and local education is somewhat lacking the proper knowledge to preserve wildlife anyway. They have a few 65+ year old men in this village alone trapping the deer and wild boars for food. 

We hike for hours and yet only place one camera trap. When we get to the eastern side of the mountain there is a lot of tree poaching, and this is something I see everyday. There are 9 or 10 trees cut down. It seems like a new operation that's only begun recently. There are a lot of these micro-clear cuts in the forest that I now have seen everyday that I've been hiking. In the springtime in Jiangxi the rain is falling lightly, and every few days the rain will fall again. 

The people I'm working with are really great. Sometimes it's one person, sometimes two or three. It seems they are really hardworking. I notice they wear blazers to work, very classy!

Yesterday was raining, and today we didn't go out until after lunchtime. Fortunately two groups of over 10 people came to lunch each day. I've become the Jiangxi gourmand, eating at the small hotel/restaurant where I'm staying. The feasts have a lot of different dishes/flavors. One of my favorites is the soaked wild bamboo, which becomes tender with a slight crunch, or the wild mushrooms which are harvested from the mountainside then sauteed in oil with green onions. Most of their meat dishes are full of red and green peppers. The ham slices have a huge portion of fat on one end, with a slight bit of tough dried meat on the other end. Usually they make a plate of sauteed greens as well as a large pot of rice. I notice that they use most of the animal parts. Their chicken soup has chunks of meat cut off with the bones still inside, with the head sitting in the soup pot as well, which most times I see people eating with no problem. I've been offered dishes with only the intestines of the chicken, which are then covered in an oil and red peppers. Pig feet, with their tendons and ligaments cooked down to a softer pliable form. It's common to eat a dish of julliene potatoes which are then sauteed with a bit of green onion. Eating liver is a common dish of course covered with red peppers and oil. For breakfast, lunch and dinner, we're usually huddled inside the kitchen area that uses a woodfire wok, and a hanging cauldron. The rice usually cooks in the cauldron, afterwards a plate of slices of pork will be kept warm. The daily burning of the wood keeps us warm, and keep the drying pig meats on the rack above properly smoked. The dry hot air from the fire fills the small room and covers the inside of the building with a thick black charcoal.

I read somewhere that some of the best trips happen by accident. Linxia was like that for me, and I had discovered it while on a trip with my university professor, Dr. Kun Shi, who is a wild cat researcher here in China. He wanted me to see more of China, and Gansu, China was definitely not on my list of vacation destinations, at least, not for January.  Linxia simply happened to be on the way to another destination I was visiting after I had finished travelling and working with him. Southern Gansu became very interesting to me because of Linxia. It's in between the capital of Gansu and the currently largest Tibetan Buddhist Monestary in China.  I had known that towards the border of Qinghai there was one of the largest Tibetan Buddhist monestaries in China, but I didn’t know that 2 hours away from that monestary was one of the more historical religious places to the Hui Chinese, who are traditionally Muslim, and is particularly Sufi Muslim. 

I went to the provincial museum for Gansu the previous week, and although they talk about the silk road, Buddhist culture, dinosaurs, and Neolithic culture there weren't any artifacts or exhibits dedicated to Muslims in Gansu. There are over 10 distinct ethnic Muslim groups in this part of China.  The Hui Chinese are an ethnic minority in China, and they have a population of nearly 10 million people dispersed throughout China. They have been recognized as being Hui because they are descendants of foreign Muslims from the Middle east, although they speak Chinese and not Turkic languages ( like the Uyghurs). Linxia has many Hui Chinese, but they perhaps aren't as recognized because the adacent region Ningxia Hui Autonomous region broke away from Gansu province and became it's own region dedicated to the Hui Chinese, which are one of 56 nationally recognized nationalities. 

Linxia city is the center for the Qadiriyyah and Kufiyya Sufi orders, and within the city there are over 100 mosques, which in the past were educational centers for saints bringing doctrines from the Middle East. On the bus towards Linxia, I saw many more mosques that are part of the district, which numbers over 1000 mosques. This area is an object for pilgrimage by foreign Muslims, as well as urban Hui in China who wish to explore a historic Sufi area, which holds institutions from the late 17^th century, as well as several sacred tombs. These places pivitol to the Sufi reform movement of the 16^th century are dedicated to Sufi masters, called menhuan which can be translated as “saintly lineages” or Chinese Sufi sects. This wave of Sufi culture revitalized an already growing Muslim population in China, which began in the Tang dynasty near 619 AD.

I got off the bus at around 11am after a relatively smooth ride from Lanzhou, with no wait time because a bus leaves every 30 minutes. At the bus station, I feel slightly awkward simply walking away from the bus, as if there’s more to be said or done there. Nonetheless, I depart, surrounded by strangers carrying their knap sacks and holding babies. At the entrance of the station and above the city on the mountain I can see a large Taoist temple with some kind of vertical pagoda. I’m tempted to go there immediately to see the view of the city, but instead start walking down the street. I reach a Muslim restaurant, which like most of these restaurants, serve beef noodles for lunch. Muslim noodle restaurants are characteristic in most cities in Gansu, with mostly young men wearing their traditional white muslim hats working inside.

I hop in a taxi and the driver asks me where I’m going. 

“qingzhen si (清真词)“ I reply, which is Chinese for Islamic temple. The direct meaning on qingzhen is pure and true Islam. They use the words qingzhen on their restaurants and stores as well. It’s kind of like the Chinese version of Halal for the Hui, and they use this word as a reinforcement of their religious habits, diet, and customs. Whether qing zhen si should be regarded as a potent symbol, a handy catch prase, evidence of Hui identity, or a manifestation of a power that really exists, I cannot say. 

In Chinese, the driver asks which one, and I tell him I want to see the oldest and most favorite qingzhen si. I also ask him to show me a reasonable hotel for the night. I get driven around on a short tour in front of the yu baba shrine, and then dropped off in a neighborhood with a few hotels. He smokes in the cab, which is typical of most drivers, although he’s so friendly that it doesn’t bother me. 

Unfortunately, I’m in the wrong place because only certain hotels in China are permitted to cater to foreigners, and the one he's dropped me off at doesn't cater to foreigners. A woman with her baby notices me looking lost and perplexed in front of the hotel and begins to ask me where I’m going etc. I tell her I’m looking for a hotel. Many Chinese muslim women have a way of dressing with sparkling accessories, and are usually adorned with rhinestones, sequence, flowers, or necklaces worn on their heads over their traditional headdress. I noticed on her she has tight black pants with a silver metal tiger embedded. Her hat is dull peach color adorned with red flowers and sequence. She takes me over to her mother who has recently killed some chickens and has set them out on a table and is picking off the rest of the remaining few feathers. Then she gets ahold of her brother on the phone who speaks fluent English.  Across the street there’s a fur vendor who has animal fur vests hanging on the wall. Nearby there are several carpet makers.  I can’t find a hotel yet, but this lady is being so nice she even offered me a place to stay at her house after another hotel turned me down for being a foreigner. Although I'm intrigued by her and her family, I decide to find my own place to stay and wind up staying at Hehai Mansion, which does cater to foreigners and is slightly upscale with rooms for 200 yuan a night. I don't expect to find a cheaper room, and in hindsight, staying with that funny lady would have been more enjoyable. Next time, I would probably take the offer. 

I finally get to exploring the nearby mosques and shrines. At the Yu Baba Shrine one of the caretakers is sweeping the stone walkway. The gongbei complexes are shrines for the Sufi master. They include a grave topped with a dome. I found an interesting article online “Muslim Tombs and Ethnic Folklore: Charters for Hui Identity” which was interesting and gave an in depth perspective on the Muslim culture, especially on the tomb culture,  which visiting this place alone could not provide for me. There are many significant tombs in Linxia which the Hui people worship, and make pilgrimage to. They worship tombs, and also pray in graveyards, which is not typical of Muslim mosque culture, nor Chinese. The Qadariyya in China was established in China by a twenty-ninth generation descendant of Muhammad, Khoja Abd Alla, and he would come to Linxia periodically to preach.   This path became firmly rooted in China by one of his disciples, Qi Jingyi, who is buried at Da gongbei. The most influential Kufiyya menhua, the Huasi branch is surrounding the tomb of Ma Laichi, who studied extensively in Yemen at Naqshbandi hostels.  No where in the shrines do I see old framed photographs as rememberance of these saints, but what I did find was several stone carved dioramas with tiny people etched into the stone. They are perched in classical Chinese style on mountains, or fishing in lakes, often reclining and relaxed like a Tao or Zen art. 

These Chinese Muslim places are adorned with wood and stone carvings, large pieces of rock, and other tao elements as decoration. They create tablets like the Taoist, and add Islamic writing on the top. The building are decorated and painted like a traditional Chinese temple or park, with teapots, lotuses, grapes, and animals create ornamentation.  Arabic script and symbols are found on doorways in place of Chinese characters. There are large prayer halls with chinese rugs with chinese scripts, and large stones on their prayer altars. They make their own incense which is sometimes thicker than my fingers. I look inside of their prayer books and they are Arabic and Chinese. At some of the mosques they are reciting and chanting together, and there is hardly a Chinese accent. The Hui Chinese also incorporate confucism, Daoism, and Buddhist folk rituals into their practices and lifestyles. I go from taxi to taxi asking to see their most favorite and oldest qingzhen si's. I'm taken down backroads and through alleys to see various gongbei.   

The Chinese character for city is the same as the one for wall - cheng.  Several decades ago Beijing was surrounded by a high wall around the city with defined the boundaries against the countryside. Remnants of China’s city wall construction still exist today. One place in Beijing to see old style walled city construction is in the Forbidden City, which was once home to the emperor. The remnant courtyards, pavilions, and buildings arranged in a proportional grid.  This type of walled construction was how administrative buildings and imperial buildings were kept separate from the rest of the city. Of course, then beyond all of these walls was the Great Wall, which protected the country from Mongolian invaders, which is where we are travelling today from Gubeiko to Jinshanliang; from a dilapidated part of the wall to a part of the wall restored to 1984.

I sit slumped in a bus seat, looking out the windows at the terrain flowing by. Charlotte, Jirka, and I are tired, our eyes drooping. Charlie, short for Charlotte, and I met one week ago. We both got Chinese government scholarships to study wild felids in China at Beijing Forestry University. She invited me on this trip with her Czech boyfriend Jirka. We are on a bus from Beijing to  a small city with several hotels and restaurants, and in that passage there was a certain purification. Things are easier to see, there is no more smog. There is chance to final breathe. So we breathed. (Beijing is very polluted with air smog). We are finding a better way to live for the weekend.  We stay in the Green Tree Inn, wandered around aimlessly until we ate some dumplings, and woke up the next morning there to a huge 15 preparation Chinese breakfast that only costs 10 yuan, and knowing we aren’t going to have another chance to eat like this again we eat enough.

We hop on another bus to Gubeiko, where our trek will begin. As we roll north, the city begins to disappear and the land became fertile with visible foliage, and it was as if we were driving back into the past. The villages became smaller and the settlements became more rural. Gubeiko was a small village, and we stop there to load up on water and supplies. Spicy tofu vacuum sealed in plastic, fake meat no doubt loaded with preservatives, eggs vacuum sealed with the shells broken, crackers and breads filled with grape or bean paste, small chestnut filled sweet deep fried and packaged, which is all that is available. The drinks all contain some kind of sugar or artificial sweetener, except for the water. We stock up and begin our journey.

We pass through the tiny village. Before us are the rolling hills and craggy outcroppings on top sits the Great Wall. In the far distance, the wall climbs a huge expanse of higher mountains which are like mirages in the distance. The slope we ascend grows steep, until we are on the flat old worn section. Perhaps this was the true and original fifteenth-century brick, and not a copy. Or were they reproductions, I wondered? This part of the wall was never reconstructed apparently. Some of the sections here are dilapidated, and the mud that surrounded the brick remains in thin sections which we walk across slowly. Here we see the journey ahead of us, with the rock towers fortifying the summits. A cheerful group is on the wall ahead of us, yelling at the top of their lungs from the towers above us. The woodland scrub is full of fruiting hawthorn trees, vigorous and studded with thick thorns. We see the Gubeiko town at the bottom, clustered around the foot of the wall.

We hike through the towers one by one; walking up stair after stair until the view changed slightly from the next tower on the wall. It's magestic and beautiful to see the wall go on for miles and miles ahead of us. We are surrounded by unspoilt wilderness and beauty.If you're going to do this hike be prepared for lots of stairs going upward. We hike for nearly 4 hours and come to a small town from which we will have to hike another hour and a half to a resting place. We are strained, fading, and becoming worn out.  We’d hiked and scrambled all morning seeing lizards, scorpions, raptors, and insects. We get to a military area where the part of the wall is closed and we need to hike through a valley to rejoin the wall after the military area. It's wild, and there are a few wells and man made pools along the way.

Exhausted and hardly able to walk after 6 long hours hiking up the stairs of the Great Wall, finally we find a tower to sleep in and we eat our vacuum sealed tofu, twinkie like cakes. It is not quite completely dark, think blue moonlight threading down through the open canopy of the tower. It was through a kind of twilight that we looked down to the Great wall’s ridge ahead of us.  A huge explosion woke us up instantly. The sound was a huge bomb going off.  I thought I was in physical danger, inside of the tower of the Great Wall, I thought I was going to die for a second; my heart stopped from the sound as it jolted me awake. We slept next to a military area, and we suspect it was a bomb from inside of the mining area.

Nice touch. Thanks.

I lay there quietly and was silent for several minutes. The entrancing beauty vanished from the surroundings; for that split second the beauty had become pure nightmare. The sounds and shadows in that tower became suspect.  I felt like someone was in the tower, although the sounds were softer than a man’s body, probably a rodent. I was beginning to suffer from slight hallucinations. I still thought it was a military person sneaking around so I move closer to the group. Another bomb goes off, luckily the last one for the night.  At first, I was merely listening to my own breathing and counting the beats of my heart; but then I tried again to fall asleep and succeeded.

We wake up to two people entering the tower we are sleeping in to take photographs of the tower. This entered my mind very quickly, and was interrupted by my consciousness that the light was changing.  They are being loud. I get out of bed to discover a beautiful, silent and peaceful view over the great wall. Trees jutting out of the hillside look like classical chinese paintings. A moment later, from the valley in which we now stood, we see the mist covered land spring itself like a moving hillside down and around the slopes of the wall ahead of us. The orage haze of the morning is reflecting off the bricks of the wall. We can see for miles from our vantage point. 

We all fall back asleep for an hour or so, and upon waking then are approached by a woman who wants to us to by a Hebei ticket for this section of the wall. We oblige her and pay the 65 yuan she wants. It is advised to pay these people for tickets as they are required tolls. If you didn't buy a ticket at the beginning someone will eventually ask you to pay, and no they are not trying to scam you. It really is their job.

 We begin walking towards Jinshanliang town, which will end our journey in nearly 2 hours of hiking. The closer we get to the end, there are visitors also walking on the staircases and climbing on the towers. Charlotte, tireless, sprints up the stairs. I cling to the stairs with my hands and labored up and up, keeping count of the number of towers until the end to ease the struggle of continuing until the end. I was afflicted with dizziness on parts of the wall which required balance. Soon I could only grope and crawl from stair to stair on all fours, that being said I am out of shape from my former desk job., and after a full day of 2 days of climbing stairwells I'm entirely exhausting my muscle strength. 

The tower chambers were cool and brick, and this section of the wall had some development and reconstruction which happened in 1983-1987. To us it was a timeless realm.  In the end, we walk down a short hike and eventually come to the bus station where we begin our 2 hour journey back to Beijing. On the way, we found a wild Marijuana plant, which is quite exciting for someone with a botany background, like me.  I collected some seeds of this wild China stray, and wondered where it could have come from. Locals perhaps? or was it simply a native undiscovered and unrecognized? Either way, for me it's a great ending to a long weekend.

 See photo collection below. Several panoramic shots and a few group shots.