My cameraman, Leon McCarron, and I are now nearing the final stages of our long walk from Mongolia to my home in Hong Kong. Today, we have at last reached the outer edges of Guangzhou, and from here it is just a few days' hike to Lo Wu, so the end is really in sight. One of the highlights of this expedition has been to see the incredibly changing landscapes of China, which can be roughly divided into the drainage basins of the three great rivers of the mainland.
The first was the Yellow River, known as both the Mother of China (for in its flood plains, Chinese civilisation was first recorded as growing) and the Sorrow of China (because of its terrible floods). We met the river in early January after a week of walking along the Great Wall through the curvy, yellowish, loess mountains of Shanxi province.
Here the wall is almost never visited by tourists, yet it is a place where it still marches onwards, relentlessly to the west, up and down and over thousands of hills. Millions of people in this region still live in yaodong, or cave houses, built into the sides of the hills, and in the cold weather we were grateful that they would refill our almost frozen water bottles with warm water and sometimes even invite us to stay the night. As we walked south beside the Yellow River, we were often stunned to see it entirely frozen over, and in other places it carried giant, car-sized blocks of ice rapidly downstream.
Two months later, just south of the plains of Xian, we walked through China's longest tunnel in the Qinling Mountains, which turned out to be quite an ordeal because of the carbon monoxide fumes we inhaled. It was here that we crossed our next watershed and entered the Yangtze River basin. The landscapes of the Yangtze were so very different from those of the Yellow. Gone were the smooth yellow hills; now we were walking through an angular land of limestone peaks covered with thick temperate forests.
Spring had arrived, so we sent our tents home and, when in the countryside, camped out in lightweight bivvy bags. The hills started to fill with blossoms, and we wound round the spurs of huge valleys where farming communities grew crops on terraced hillsides that were the steepest I had ever seen. The farmers were mostly elderly men and women who worked nimbly on the precipitous terraces; I would have wanted to wear a safety harness just to venture onto them. We eventually descended to the Yangtze River, crossing it just upstream of the famous Three Gorges, in Chongqing municipality.
South of the Yangtze, after yet more giant limestone mountains and just before Guangxi, we crossed into our final drainage basin - that of the Pearl. While the Yellow and the Yangtze are the most famous of China's rivers, the Pearl River is the third of the giants that run through the country. The landscapes of these Pearl tributaries included the famous limestone karsts.