For 80 days between December and March, Christopher Schrader lived the life of a Kazakh nomad, eating Kazakh food, wearing Kazakh clothes, herding animals and hunting for wolves in bitter temperatures that sat between minus 15 and minus 60 degrees Celsius.
Schrader's nomadic adventure was inspired by another expedition last summer when he trekked across Mongolia's Gobi Desert with 13 international adventurers. Along the way, he met a local nomad Alibek and decided to stay with his family in an isolated mountainside home, outside Bulgan Sum, deep in the Altai Mountains.
'I wanted to see what it was like to live like a nomad and learn to be spontaneous,' recalls Schrader, 19, a former student of Li Po Chun United World College in Sha Tin. 'On a typical day, I woke up at 8am and had fried dough and tea for breakfast. Then I would get on a horse and take 1,000 goats and sheep into the mountains to graze.'
Every few days, he would have to wander deep into the mountains looking for water for his herd, or venture off to collect the yaks and protect them from wolves.
'It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack,' he says.
Schrader, who's originally from the Netherlands, is a founder of Hong Kong's Youth Endurance Network which organises an annual 24-race to raise awareness about the problem of human trafficking. He says living in a nomadic culture with no Western comforts or modern technology taught him about real hardship.
'It's such a hard life,' he says. 'They have to work with hundreds of animals. There is no time for recreation. Alibek's two younger brothers who are 10 and 12 years old need to look after the animals far away from home on their own.