Standing on the Great Wall of China in March 2019, I thought to myself, “Woah. Working with cattle has brought me here!”.
It was a warmish, hazy day at the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall of China. I’d booked myself onto a bus tour which took about twenty of us tourists from Beijing out to the Ming Tombs and then onto the Wall. Our tour guide was a young Chinese man who spoke English well. He said that we had two choices of getting up the Wall – catch the cable car and go to the section on the left, or catch the chair lift and go to the section on the right.
“Just meet back at the bus at 3.30pm”, he said, leaving us about two hours to explore the wall. Of my entire bus load, I was the only one who chose the chair lift, thus enabling me to walk the wall without my bus-friends, relatively anonymous. “Excellent”, I thought.
I’d arrived in China for the first time a few days prior, on a ship which I had sailed from southern Australia to China with two Australians, about forty Filipino’s, two Jordanian’s and 6,000 head of cattle. Aside from the approximate 5,995 heifers, I was the only other female on board. Our trip had taken around 20 days to reach the far city of Quinhungdao, where we unloaded our cattle from the ship over a number of days, and then disembarked ourselves.
Upon hitting Chinese soil we feasted at a local restaurant with the importing agent of the cattle and his associates, then spent a night resting, before we travelled by car from Quinhungdao to Beijing the following day. Jack, our head stockman, and the other Australian stockman had been to China before, so they chose to head straight home to Australia therefore upon reaching the outskirts of Beijing, we said a quick goodbye on the side of the freeway and I continued into Beijing while they went out to stay the night at the airport accomodation.
I’d organised with the exporter to stay a few days before I headed back to Australia myself. Tired, yet excited, I booked two days of touristy activities for the days to come, and then took a long bath in my hotel room.
The next day, I went out sightseeing, and on foot I walked up to Tiananmen Square and across to the Forbidden City, where I then tried my luck at downloading an app which would allow me to ride one of the many public bicycles I saw everywhere. I had success and soon was mounted on a Mobike, which cost me about 40 cents to ride ten or more km’s. Have wheels, will travel, and I soon was riding the streets of Beijing, smiling to everyone who stared at this blondie on wheels. I pulled up at traffic lights and said hi to the girl paused at the lights next to me. Her name was Lor, and she was a university student in Beijing. We decided to ride together and chat, which helped her English and gave me insight into life in a Chinese city (Lor and I would go on to catch up every time I came to Beijing, riding countless kilometres together, playing table tennis and enjoying that special companionship that comes with female friends).
Over the next two days, I had a tour of the Forbidden Palace, then onto the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven, experienced daylight robbery at a Chinese medicine clinic that our tour guide randomly took us to, and went to a traditional tea service that encouraged us to linger in the gift shop longer than necessary. All genuine locations to visit I’m sure.
The icing on the cake was of course the Great Wall of China.
Taking the chair lift up the steep climb to the Wall was a fun way to get to this incredible piece of historic genius. I walked along the wall, admiring how it was put together, poking my head over the side between great blocks of stone to see the surrounding terrain, and gazing out at the quiet, smoky sky haze.
I couldn’t believe I was there, and all it cost me was around $50 AUD for the entire days outing.
I reached a watchtower and it was the end of the section. The Wall continued on of course but it wasn’t maintained like this part was, so it was the end of the line. Along the way I had seen my name engraved in the stone, so when I overheard two American’s called Travis and Alex discussing whether to chisel their names into the watchtower, I told Alex not to bother. “Our name is already on the Wall down that way”, I said.
Travis and Alex were visiting China from the US on an entrepreneurial endeavour. We chatted briefly and I asked Travis to take some pictures for me. He took a series of photo’s for me with the Wall behind me and they’re hands down some of my favourite pictures ever taken.
As we strolled down the wall I told them how I’d ended up here – the voyage, the cattle, the trip from Australia, the nature of a stockwoman onboard a ship, and my own small business plans. They were fascinated. It was getting close to the time I had to meet the bus, but Travis said he would join me on the toboggan ride back down. As we waited our turn at the top of the wall, I asked what he did, and as he casually took a big drink from a plastic bottle of water he said, “I’m an entrepreneur too, like Alex”.
“I designed a water bottle in the US, which became quite popular. Then I sold the company for $220 million. The company is called Hydro Flask”, he added. Thinking that not only had I just had the most interesting day on the Great Wall of China, but now I’d just met one of the most interesting people I’d likely ever meet. In reply, I couldn’t help but make a quip about him being a designer of a world famous insulated water bottle but here he was drinking out of the Chinese equivalent of a Mount Franklin bottle.
While this was my first trip to China with cattle, it wasn’t to be my last. In 2019 I spent approximately two and a half months there, travelling over often to unload ships that I’d helped load back in Australia. When I first fell in love with “cows” as a young child, and then proceeded to pursue a career with them through tertiary education and then my first job as a pen rider in a feedlot, never would I have thought that they would lead me here.
