Harder than Siberia in winter: Hong Kong adventurer conquers China desert

It’s over! On Saturday October 22, just before sunset, I finally completed my expedition across China’s most fearsome desert, the Taklamakan. In my memory, the final few weeks are a blur of desperate struggle.

The first challenge was walking along the Mazartag line, a range of mountains whose rock walls rise out of the sands like a prehistoric beast. As the area around it is a closed oil drilling region, I had to do much of my walking at night to reduce my chance of being spotted by the giant, roving exploration trucks.

Somehow I made it through, and the expedition finally ended on the desert’s far western side, where I reached a shepherds’ stream and let myself collapse, fully clothed, into the cool waters. I bade farewell to my cart, Odysseus, which despite now rattling and falling apart had served me with dignity. I walked with my rucksack to the nearest road and hitchhiked back to civilisation.

But I still had unfinished business. There had been two sections (one 30 kilometres, the other 90km) in the middle of the trip, where the police had caught me and forced me to board a truck which took me through their jurisdiction on a road (they didn’t want me to die in the desert, at least not on their turf). These two gaps in my footprints frustrated my sense of completeness. I decided to hitchhike back to these two sections and walk them in the reverse direction with just my rucksack instead of my cart (faster and less conspicuous). Thus I would be able to join my footprints and complete a continuous line for the journey.

It turned out this final week was one of the hardest of my expedition. It included sneaking covertly at night through agricultural communities, being caught and then released by police, carrying an implausibly heavy 35kg rucksack with three days’ worth of water, getting a stomach upset for 24 hours, wading across a river, and then finishing with a 15-hour hike up an oil road.