Last week, my cameraman Leon McCarron and I entered the legendary karst landscapes of the Li River, near Guilin. We have now walked about 4,000 kilometres, and have fewer than 1,000 to go. It's the beginning of the end. Over these six months of walking, surviving and slogging, a big part of each day has been finding food. These are the top three meals we've had. Mongolian noodles in a magical ger A week after departing Mongolia, we were walking through the frozen hills of the Gobi. There had been a terrible wind all day. With the sun setting and no settlements in sight, we were dreading another night in our icy tents. Suddenly, I spotted a dog scampering across the barren landscape. A dog meant humans, and then Leon exclaimed: 'A ger!' It was like a magical Christmas scene - a beautiful round white tent against a hillside, with a small smoke trail gently floating out of its chimney. We hurried over to meet an old man who was just returning home with his goats. He invited us inside, into the glorious warmth of a stove-heated room. The relief to our shaking bodies was incredible, and we burst out smiling as the kind goat herder and his wife offered us a patch of warm floor to sleep on. While the man used a car battery to power a single light bulb, his wife cooked us Mongolian winter fare - thick noodles (a bit like tagliatelle) with soup and goat meat. It was fatty, tasty and hot - a perfect end to a long day in the Gobi. Family feast on Lunar New Year's Eve On January 22 - Lunar New Year's Eve - we were in the third month of our expedition and walking along a road above the frozen Yellow River. Darkness arrived, I was cold, and my bruised feet were aching badly, and we were still two hours from Hequ. When we arrived, it looked like all the adults were inside enjoying a big meal, while the children were outside setting off fireworks. Suddenly, as we neared the city centre, an SUV pulled up, and a middle-aged man leaned out and invited us back to his house for his family dinner. We marked our exact spot to start walking the next day, jumped in his car, and 10 minutes later were being welcomed into a little house full of smiles. Several women were busy cooking, while several men were sauntering around a well laid-out table. Soon we all sat down, and the dishes appeared - plates of pickled bean sprouts and cabbage, fried chicken wings, tasty soups, incredible dumplings (with coins hidden in them), and bottles of Canadian ice wine. We ate, drank and toasted the evening away, and when it was time to go, our hosts drove us to the nicest hotel in town, and insisted on paying for us to stay the night there. Fragrant meat at a truckers' paradise In March, we approached the Yangtze River on a road that ran around the spurs of an enormous valley. At nightfall we entered a horrible truckers' town full of mud, dodgy looking hotels and big trucks. We found a place to stay, and went to the restaurant across the road to eat. Our food vocabulary was still fairly limited, so we often ended up eating some variety of fried rice or soupy noodles. But that day, Leon had been listening to a Chinesepod.com lesson about meat strips in 'fish-flavoured' sauce, and so he blazed forth with his best tones, and to our delight the cook understood us, and gave us a brilliant bowl of yu xiang rou si. And the worst meal? You may have noticed that all of these 'top' meals were not cooked by myself or Leon. I am not the world's greatest cook on the best of days, and on a walking expedition, it is impossible to carry more than basic ingredients. The worst meal of the trip was on our final night camping in the Mongolian Gobi. It was my turn to cook. I pulled out our petrol stove, two packs of instant noodles, some water bottles and a tin of beef. I then discovered that all of our water had turned to ice, and our tin of beef was so frozen I could not get my tin opener into it. After a 40-minute struggle, I filled Leon's bowl with some warm mush, and we tucked in. Unfortunately, the mixture of burned instant noodles and barely melted dog food-esque meat tasted as bad as it sounds. So we went to bed still hungry that cold night in the Gobi - thankfully without food poisoning. Rob Lilwall's previous expedition, Cycling Home From Siberia, became the subject of an acclaimed motivational talk, a book, and a National Geographic TV series. Every week in Health Post, he will write about the progress of his new expedition, Walking Home From Mongolia, which is in support of the children's charity Viva. Join his May 30 welcome home party - details at www.walkinghomefrommongolia.com
