On November 14, my cameraman friend Leon McCarron and I finally set off from the Mongolian outpost town of Sainshand on our 5,000-kilometre walk home to Hong Kong. Our first challenge was to traverse the Gobi Desert from north to south. The Gobi is a place I remember learning about at school. On maps it was typically shown in shades of blue to identify it as a cold desert.
You could argue that walking into it in late November was asking for trouble, not just because of the fast-encroaching winter, but also the large amount of food, water and cooking fuel we would need to haul to reach the next town 250 kilometres away. These supplies weighed more than 80kg - far more than we could carry on our backs - and so we were grateful that British desert explorer Ripley Davenport offered to give us his old human-drawn trailer named 'Molly Brown'.
Molly just happened to be rusting away in a shed in Sainshand, and having retrieved her, we were delighted to discover that she was a sturdy iron beauty of a beast. So having loaded her up with supplies and clipped her to our rucksacks, we dragged her out on a southerly compass bearing, in search of a desert track we had spotted on Google maps.
I always find the first few steps of an expedition tremendously exciting, as my thoughts wander between thinking that I am crazy to be attempting such a thing, but also grateful for having a chance to at least try. We crested the final hill out of town, and before us rolled an endless yellow-brown sea of empty, ruffled sand. In the distance was a bank of epic wind-carved hills: the Gobi was waiting for us, daring us to enter.
We strode onwards into the emptiness, but within a few hours, our pace slowed to a trudge as we took shifts dragging Molly. During daylight on that first day the temperature was mild, but as the sun dropped below the horizon and we set up camp, the mercury plummeted to minus 10 degrees Celsius. We were shivering as we prepared food on a petrol stove, but before long we were in our sleeping bags. I drifted off to sleep, reassuring myself that it always takes the first week or so of an expedition to get camp drills down pat.
We continued south for the next two days, before reaching our first target - the pilgrimage site of Khamarin Khiid, where Danzan Ravjaa, a Mongolian Lama Buddhist saint from the 19th century, is laid to rest.