Andy's Great Wall Star Trek

For The National Star Centre College of Further Education

(Registered Charity no. 220239)

In November 2001 I joined 70 other walkers on the challenge of a lifetime, to walk 50 miles along the Great Wall of China, on a trip which took me to areas where few other visitors go. It was, from the very beginning, the best experience I've ever had, and this website is my record of the trek, and the events leading to it.

The purpose of my Trek was to raise funds for The National Star Centre College of Further Education (Reg Charity no. 220239) [website]. Located near Cheltenham in England, the College provides education and training for young people aged 16-25 who are physically disabled or have an acquired brain injury. Between us, the trekkers have (currently) raised over £130,000 - pretty good going, I'm sure you'll agree. This money will provide facilities for the college and its 140 students who come from all over the British Isles. As an independent charity the college has to raise its own funds for new developments and relies on public donations and sponsporships of this kind.

Great Wall Star Trek 2002: The National Star Centre is currently looking for 75 people to take part in the Great Wall Star Trek 2002, which is taking place from October 20th - October 29th. If you're reading this thinking "hmmm, sounds interesting", then I have to say: go for it! Seriously, the trek was the best thing I ever did, and I can't really think of more encouraging words than that. :-)

Site News

Friday December 6th, 2002

I've moved andys-trek.co.uk to a new web host. Things will be broken for the next little while until I get chance to fix them. I don't know exactly when that will be becuase I've just got a new job and moved to a new house and bought a new computer - too many variables to juggle!

Tuesday November 5th, 2002

Mark Hughes of Denver sent me a link to his marvellous pictures of the Huanghua section, which we visited on the third day of our trek, four months after the Hughes family were there. Click here to find out more.

Monday November 4th, 2002

Well, it's a year to the day since the trek began. This stirs all sorts of emotions in me, notably embarrassment that I still haven't uploaded all my photos, and regret that I've basically failed to stay in touch with anyone. It's been a rollercoaster of a year, to be honest, and while the trek wasn't the cause or even the start of that rollercoaster, it was certainly a big part.

For the past four months I've mainly been concerned with getting a new job, and buying a house (ramblings about which may be intermittently seen on Gimboland, my other - and main - website). I guess that's my excuse for not phoning Bec, Laura, Julie or Llew, and not getting together with Bob to walk in Pembrokeshire. On the bright side, we're now in the house, and I'll soon be starting my new job, so in a while I might actually get down to it...

Anyway, if anyone's reading this, happy anniversary! This site still isn't finished but one day it will be. Until then, xie xie for your attention.

Wednesday July 31st, 2002

Not much to report except that the new code mentioned in the last news item is now very much up and running, and being used to power my other website, and in particular my non-trek photo gallery, which is getting lots of content uploaded to it.

I still have it in mind to start using that code for this site, but that's going to be a fair bit of work which I haven't started yet. So it's still going to be quite a while before I've got all of my photos uploaded. Ah well... :-)

"The trek finished 260 days ago" - that's pretty incredible.

Wednesday June 12th, 2002

I'm reimplementing parts of the code used to build this site, using the albatross toolkit. This won't make any difference to the look or operation of the site, but it makes me feel good.

I'll upload some more pictures once that's finished. Promise.

Thursday March 21st, 2002

Only tenuously trek-related, but I've uploaded some banquet photos from a banquet after the trek which I helped run in return for help I received running my pre-banquet fundraiser.

I can't believe it's been a whole month since the reunion. How time flies. There's still so much to do... :-/

Friday February 22nd, 2002

It's the trek reunion tomorrow evening at the National Star Centre - looking forward to seeing everyone, chewing the fat, getting drunk, and acting the goat very much indeed...

And speaking of acting the goat, here's a lovely picture of me courtesy of Bec The Hat. Er, cheers Bec... ;-)

Tuesday February 18th, 2002

After an extended hiatus, I'm working on the site again - I've started uploading Beijing photos, so far just Tiananmen Square, will add Forbidden City stuff later. Gaaah, there's still so much to do though - I haven't even started writing up my diary, and of course the more time that passes, the more my memories fade so the less detail there'll be anyway. Phooey. What can I say? I've had other things on my mind I guess...

It's suddenly occurred to me that when viewing a single photo, you really should be able to go to "previous" and "next". I can't believe I've never thought this before. Gaaah...

Thursday January 31st, 2002

This site is now a member of the Beyond The Lens photography webring. The sidebar now has a line of somewhat cryptic links (in the External Links section) for navigating around the ring - have a play and see how it works. Hopefully this will result in more hits. :-)

Tuesday January 22nd, 2002

I've started uploading my sixth film, which finishes Mutianyu, and starts Huanghua - only Mutianyu pics so far, and few comments, but it's a start.

Thursday January 17th, 2002

Sad techno-geek that I am, I've added a page of technical notes. My excuse is that I was saying some of this stuff in photo comments anyway, so it would be useful to have a single page to link to, rather than keep repeating myself.

Tuesday January 15th, 2002

More photos! I've started uploading my third film, which covers the rest of the first day's trekking, and the pre-walk at Simatai. So far only I've uploaded the Huangya photos, and they're not all commented, but I'll get there, I'll get there... Right now, I'm particularly pleased with this one, for its excellent overview of the first morning's walk, and this one, for obvious reasons. :-)

Monday January 14th, 2002

I've added a close-up of the group from the statue picture, which I think is the best "group shot" I've got.

Friday January 11th, 2002

Since Anthony asked so nicely, I've added a note about the 2002 trek to the front page. I've also added a link to the trek webpage to the bottom of every page on the site. Well, you can never have too much overkill, can you?

I've altered the individual image viewer page so that the space for the text is always the same width as the picture, which is probably the most sensible option.

Finally for today, I've made all the thumbnail images a bit smaller, in the hope of a) making the image index pages load quicker, and b) making it clearer that you should click on them to see the bigger images, which apparently some people hadn't realised. :-) The photo index pages each now have a comment to that effect at the bottom too, but I don't really want to belabour the point too much, as I'd hope it was fairly obvious, or at least easy to discover. (Something else which people may not realise is that when looking at the large version of an image, you can actually click the image to see it on its own, without the comments and other information - but again, I don't want to clutter my pages with instructions so I'm leaving it for people to discover).

Wednesday January 9th, 2002

Well, it's been a busy day here at andys-trek.co.uk - lots of updates, some big, some small...

I've uploaded a load of pictures Llew sent me - if anyone else wants to send me some of their pictures for inclusion on the site, I'd love to have them!

I've finally commented the pictures on my second film, which have been languishing with "No description yet" for much too long.

I've replaced this image which was on the right hand side of the front page (nicked from here) with three of my own pictures - is this an improvement?

I've replaced the old master photo index with a new, automatically generated one. I have big plans for this: at present there's just one index per film, but what I'd really like to do is set up some "by-content" indices, eg "People", "Mutianyu", "Beijing", etc. But that's a big plan, and it'll take a while to make it happen.

I've ensured that the image viewer deals gracefully with the cases when you don't tell it what photo you want to look at, or when you ask for a photo which doesn't exist. The images are from this fantastic Japanese site.

Possibly most significantly, I've reconfigured things so that all of the images on the site are "progressive" JPEGs, which should make viewing them over slow links somewhat more present: the images should appear quickly but blurry, and then get sharper as more and more is loaded.

Tuesday January 8th, 2002

This website is now New & Improved! To the untrained eye, it may look exactly the same as it did before, but I've been hard at work revamping and rebuilding the code used to build it - and now I'm finished. The site is now being driven entirely from the new system, which means I can get back to the real work, ie uploading photos and writing up my bloody diary. :-)

I've also cleaned up the site a bit: I've removed a couple of pages which didn't serve any purpose any more, and I've moved most of the news that was on this page to its own news archive, which should make this page less cluttered, make it load faster, etc.

Oh yes, and happy new year, everyone!

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