Katie

If I could have seen into the future nine days previously and the predicament I would be lying in, alone and delirious, hundreds of kilometres into the Gobi desert, I might not have treated the kitchen tap with such complacency. I may have given the fridge and the larder a few moments thought instead of delving in as if they would always be there to provide me with food.

The previous week I had been at home enjoying family life. The dogs had been tearing around the woods with Wiggi flying from one empty badger hole to the next in an infatuated frenzy and Dorothy… well she did much as she always has and ignored me to the last. In the house Nan and Gramps had all the TV’s and radios going at the same time, all considerably louder than they needed to be. As the sounds from the TV’s found their way through the rooms they would arrive at your ears a fraction of a second out of sync, enough to drive you mad if you paid too much attention. The obscurely comforting drone of the dishwasher added to the daily mixture of sounds that fill our lives. What I would have given to hear any one of those familiar sounds in the desert.

Events had become strangely disjointed and it felt as though Tarka had been gone for days. The sun’s heat was so intense that every time it crept round the makeshift shelter, even in my weakened condition I scrabbled to follow the shade. Between these hauls, the frequency of my vomiting and diarrhoea perpetually intensified. I couldn’t understand where all this fluid was coming from, surely I was just an empty sack by now, it had been days since I had held anything down at all. I wasn’t in any pain and was unaware of the reality of death; all I could think of was Tarka, and whether or not he would ever return for me. What if he had collapsed too? All he had taken with him was a GPS, a map and a half empty bottle of water. The little water we had remaining had been left for me.

Tarka

After taking a GPS lock on the camp so I could find it again in the vast ocean of emptiness, I called in Katie’s location to our team so they could prepare an air evacuation in case something happened to me and I didn’t manage to get help. I propped her up in the shade with the sat phone, 4 litres of water, her own GPS, and gave her a kiss on the forehead before heading off.

To my horror, when I finally reached the road it was built up on top of an enormous mound of sand and I was going to have to find a ‘slip road’ for the vehicles to get off and out into the desert. Three kilometres down the road I found my best bet and started stopping the handful of vehicles that were passing. My first attempt was an articulated lorry; what the hell was I thinking? Being British I put my thumb up in the hope he would stop, as he got closer I started to wave frantically until finally he came to a grinding halt a couple of hundred metres past me. After trying to explain the situation to the driver and taking a look at the enormity of his overflowing trailer I realised I was being completely ridiculous and there was no way in the world he could venture out into the desert sand; he would have got stuck just trying to get off the road, so I smiled, stepped down from the cab and waved goodbye to him.

It must have been the best part of an hour before the next vehicle came, a bus full of people. I was becoming slightly desperate and not wanting to take any chances I stood in front of it, forcing it to stop. His initial swerves suggested that he was contemplating trying to go round me but thought better of it and stopped just short. The overwhelmed driver, who I don’t think had any idea of what was happening just sat absolutely motionless staring straight through me. He had, after all, been going along his usual route when the first westerner he had ever come across jumped out in front of him in the middle of the desert!

I jumped on board and tried to explain the urgency of the situation in my practically non-existent mandarin. The vocabulary needed to explain the problem was so far beyond me at that time, that I resorted to simple charades. Unfortunately this proved to be considerably harder than I had hoped; I exhausted every possible combination of hand gestures and actions I could think of to explain what was going on. Finally, in my frustration and in an effort to demonstrate the urgency of the situation, I grabbed the steering wheel and turned it to point the bus into the desert. There was a brief silence before he grabbed the gear stick and after a couple of attempts there was a loud grinding clunk and I was violently knocked back against a metal hand rail as we shot over the bank and into the sand.

Every single person on the bus was ready to help, even though not one of them had any idea what it was they were being asked to do. Despite this they were all ready with eager hands. Before the camp was even visible, every one of them had hustled their way to the front of the bus and there were now 20 passengers packing me against the flimsy door. It was just like being back on my school bus; In fact it’s a bloody miracle the door didn’t fall off!!!

Katie

If this situation had been in Africa, I suspect that it would have been about now that the vultures would have started gathering. Keeping their distance, biding their time as they waited for the last drop of life to be sucked out of their dinner by the burning sun. Thankfully there were no vultures to be seen; in fact there were no birds at all. The only trace of life was a lizard, a small one at that, intent on crawling over my face. With every bit of strength I could muster I would brush my hand across my face, moving him off in the hope that he would be frightened and disappear into the barren land he had emerged from. Despite being little more than five inches in length he had obviously weighed up that right now he was in a far superior position than I, and again and again he came, determined to explore this alien object in a land that sees next to no change.

That was the last thing I remembered until I heard the sounds of an engine. The thought of being rescued flooded me and I felt a feeling of relief swell up inside. With my back to the direction in which the noise was coming from and barely able to move my eyes let alone my body I couldn’t turn and look, but I knew that for a vehicle to be out here in the desert Tarka had to have brought it.

I could hear him behind me; his voice so distinctive and so very, very welcome amongst the jumble of mandarin words being thrown back and forth. As I was being carried to the bus I looked around to see the hustle of twenty or so passengers running around shouting at each other. Every single passenger was busily executing instructions and packing away our kit into the bus. Without a word, due to our lack of mandarin, Tarka was managing to orchestrate these perfect strangers, each one running off to help with something else after completing their individual task. Then we were off, the bus driver tearing across the uneven arid scrub.

I have the strangest and most vivid memories of the smallest details of that bus. It was old, 15 years or more I guessed. A considerable amount of ‘freelance’ work had been carried out on it. The door was held shut with a reformed coat hanger and the seats rested in their positions rather than being bolted there. The paint that had once been a vibrant ‘sunset’ orange was now a washed out brownish yellow with huge scars running along its body work. Its condition however was unimportant to me; it was my ticket to safety.

I lay across the back seats and my immediate thoughts drifted from the bus to focus on the passengers who were now all sitting calmly in their seats as if this were a daily occurrence. Did this happen regularly to them? Surely not! Many of them had never even seen a westerner so why were they all being so calm?
I assumed it was all going to be ok now. I was no longer on my own in the desert; I was racing towards the nearest hospital in a bus with 20 other passengers and Tarka. How wrong I was, for the first time since my ordeal began, real fear began to set in. A vague tingling in my hands started for no discernable reason and rapidly turned into pins and needles. Before I realised what was happening they had became rigid and lifeless, the feeling in my fingers left me and my hands were frozen. I couldn’t hold back and I broke down into a blubbering mess crying out to Tarka “My hands, I can’t move them”. He had a comforting calm about him which although didn’t help me hold back my tears, was soothing inside.

Through the onslaught of tears and my swollen eyes I caught sight of a small, frail, elderly lady, making her way slowly along the aisle towards me. She sat down beside me and taking my hands in hers she began to slowly massage the arteries in my wrist. I must have looked such an idiot. I didn’t want to cry but despite my best attempts to fight it, my eyes filled and I sobbed over and over again, “Please don’t let me lose my hands.“

Tarka

The old lady started to pump the blood through Katie’s arteries manually with a gentle repetitive massage. Although her condition was manifesting itself in a way I had never seen before, she was showing symptoms similar to those of people who I had suffer from extreme dehydration. With nothing better to go on, I made an educated guess that her condition was a result of her blood having thickened and was now struggling to be pumped through the small capillaries to her fingers.

As we reached the outskirts of Dunhuang the ambulance we had called to meet us en-route could be heard up ahead. Everybody jumped up and leant out the window, waving frantically at the flashing blue lights to let them know we were on board. I’m still not entirely sure why, but whilst I was transferring all our equipment from the bus to the ambulance one of the passengers was insisting that I take his water melon!!! His intentions were no doubt good but I didn’t understand, nor did I have time to, so I apologetically declined his kind offer and jumped into the ambulance. Just as we were leaving I leaned out the window and shook the bus driver’s hand leaving him with a thank you contribution for his kindness and help.

Katie

A smile was all I could muster, for even the word thank you in mandarin, which was not only the first Chinese word I had learnt, but one of the only words I knew at that stage, had been pushed back deep into my distant thoughts, unable to be plucked out in such a stressful time.

Once on board the ambulance the nurse seemed to carry out her standard procedure, by fastening an oxygen mask to my face. She paid little attention to my persistent efforts to remove my mask to explain I was losing the use of my hands again and my feet were also beginning to shut down. Her response each time was merely to replace the mask once more, paying no attention to what I was trying to say.

Since the moment when Tarka had loaded me into the rickety old bus, a very personal fear was at the forefront of my mind; What if the acute diarrhoea should come back? Where would I go? The previous diarrhoea incidents had been so quick to progress from that initial ‘I need to go’ thought, to the point where it was all too late, whether you were ready or not. There would be absolutely no time to indicate through yet another short game of charades to stop the bus, get some one to carry me out and lower my trousers, and therefore I would have to go on the bus somehow! Vomiting was not a problem, Tarka had placed our food bowl on my lap just in case, but dealing with the other end, I was terrified! Although I fretted about such an incident arising all the way to the hospital, thankfully I arrived with my dignity intact.

Tarka

When we finally arrived at the hospital, Katie was taken into their equivalent of an A&E treatment room whilst I hurriedly unloaded all our kit out of the ambulance. A young nurse very kindly came to help me gather the sprawl of bags and cameras from the forecourt before another ambulance arrived. She had a very petite build, and the last piece of equipment I had expected her to try and lift was our packs. There were plenty of cameras, walking poles and cold weather suits lying around, all of which she could have lifted without a problem. Unbelievably she decided she was going for Katie’s back pack. I felt terrible; the bag never even left the ground before she let out a sharp yelp. I don’t think she expected it to be quite so heavy and despite my offers to help her to a seat she insisted she would be OK and walked somewhat awkwardly back into the hospital holding her lower back.

When I finally made it back to the treatment room, one of the doctors broke off from his frenzied discussion and through yet another intense game of charades explained that he needed a stool sample (I will spare you the details of exactly how we managed to arrive at that conclusion). The way he left the small pot on the desk in front of me and vacated the room confirmed that he was expecting me to procure it for him!
To my astonishment, whilst I was trying to recount Katie’s symptoms over the past couple of days to the doctors, the driver of the bus turned up. In the heat of the moment he thought that there had been some confusion with what I had given him and had come all the way back to the hospital to try and return it. Not wishing to offend him I spent quite some time explaining that what I had given him was not a reflection of my gratitude for helping save Katie’s life, for which I could not put a price on. It was simply for services rendered and to repair any damages that his bus may have sustained during the excursion. We concluded with a hug before he accepted and I headed off to find Katie again.

The hospital was so incredibly efficient and so very thorough with their diagnosis and treatment, that by the time I had finished filling out all the paperwork, Katie was lying in a clean bed with a drip in her arm and a nurse sitting beside her.

Katie

I would like to share with you my acute sense of embarrassment when left having to ask Tarka, through a muffle of pre-emptive apologies and nervous tears, to collect my stool sample! I wasn’t sure whether it would have been easier if a complete stranger had done the job. At least I would have been safe in the knowledge that I would never see them again. Asking Tarka to help me collect the sample left me wondering if he would ever look at me in the same way again, and if passion would ever be likely from this point on!
The nurses were perplexed. Despite the extensive course of intravenous fluids I had been receiving, my condition had not improved, in fact it was a further four days and 10 more glass bottles of fluid before I had sufficiently recovered.

I was beating myself up inside about how much time I was consuming from our precious schedule, and seriously doubting my capabilities of achieving this monumental task I had undertaken. I was fully aware that back in England, although my family and friends were supporting me, they all expected me to come home crying in the first few weeks, having failed! Maybe they were right, who was I kidding! I didn’t have any experience, and I was facing a 6 month battle with mother-nature, in a land where she displays some of her less forgiving attributes.

Each morning Tarka would wake and immediately ask how I was feeling followed by the dreaded question “When do you think you will be ready to start walking again?” I was being stretched in all directions, on the one hand I didn’t want to hold us back and use up too many of our allocated rest days, but if I were to start again too early, only to return back to hospital once more, it would have truly been the end for me.
On top of this, as I lay there in the safety of a bed, my mind continually conjured up horrific images of what could have happened in the desert, leaving me with a terrifying fear of returning and starting our journey from that same desolate spot. That endless horizon I had stared at, waiting and hoping for Tarka’s return, had begun as a physical battle but was becoming a mental one; the first of many.

On the fifth day, although not feeling one hundred percent, I felt strong enough to return to the desert and carry out half a day’s walking. Before this could happen we had to go through the whole taxi saga once again. Despite the fact that we were offering well over the odds we couldn’t find anyone willing to take us into the desert, let alone leave us there! Forty minutes or so passed before we managed to get a ride.

Other than the airport at which we arrived in Gansu province this was the first time I had seen any hustle and bustle, our route had yet to take us through anywhere even remotely built up. To occupy my mind and drive out all my negative and fearful thoughts about what lay in store over the next twenty four hours, I gazed out of the car window and watched the world pass by. Motorbikes were often piled six high with passengers, tiny children precariously stacked on the fuel tank and clinging to the handle bars. Apart from the frenzy of bicycles, and the occasional bus, similar to that of my saviour, motorbikes seemed to be the sole forms of transport.

Our progress was somewhat slow, not through the fault of our driver, for he was eagerly, if not a little aggressively, revving his engine in a bid to complete our journey in good time. However we were caught in a stream of sluggish tractors pulling bulky overloaded trailers of cotton. It then dawned on me that I had never even thought about how cotton would look in its raw form, and was quite surprised to see that it is picked from the plant looking more or less like a cotton wool ball. Much like those I used at home to remove my make up every day. I momentarily thought how enticing it would be to plunge from a great height into one of the containers of cotton. I then began to think that there was probably a huge difference between my silky pink and white cotton wool balls laying dormant in my make up case and those raw cotton pods. The latter looked like it would be home to millions of little fleas! Its amazing how at even the slightest thought of fleas my body instinctively begins to itch from head to toe.

Up until now, there had been next to no vegetation of any kind on our journey through the desert. Yet in this built up area, a hub of irrigation networks was busily replenishing field after field of cotton plants with the much needed water that the sun continually attempted to strip them of. It was obvious with the intensity of work going on out in the harsh unbearable heat that these cotton plants were the basis of survival for these people.

Tarka

Katie didn’t say a word on the taxi ride, she just stared quietly out of the window watching the last traces of civilisation pass by as we headed back out into the desert. That morning we had a conversation where she expressed her desire not to go back to the spot in the desert where I had left her. I explained as sympathetically as possible that she would never forgive herself if, come the end, she had missed out a section because she was feeling a little apprehensive at the time.

The tyre imprints from the bus were still perfectly preserved in the sand. The taxi driver’s intentions were good and he only meant to help as he exclaimed that he couldn’t possibly leave us here because we would die, but it was not exactly helping Katie feel any better about the situation. When he finally left, waving his arms around frantically and making sounds and gestures of intense disapproval, the sun was beginning to redden as it dipped over the horizon. I had no wish to spend the night there and needed to get Katie’s mind away from the events that had happened there a few days earlier so I explained that we were going to walk for a few hours, slowly, before setting up camp.

The closing entry in my Diary that day, Saturday 14th October 2006, reads:

“…. Every day she continues to fight against the odds and does her level best, right to the very last. It is a difficult decision, to make her face up to her fears when I see tears in her eyes but I can only go by what I believe to be right. If she is to succeed on this trip, and indeed in life, she must dig deep and find the strength to deal with adversity. If only I could convey how proud of her I am.”