He was kidnapped by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and blown up by a mine in Mozambique, but it seems nothing stopos Chris Moon. As his charity walk passes through the North-East yesterday, he tells Nick Morrison what's keeping him going.

IT'S been - quite literally - a painfully slow day for Chris Moon. Due to arrive in Northallerton just after midday, it's three hours later by the time he makes it. Progress has been hampered by a bug he's picked up along the way, not to mention the difficulties of walking with an artificial leg.

"The last few days have been very difficult because I've had a tummy bug. I'm really struggling to put one foot in front of the other," he says. "It is all blurring into one; it is just a whole series of footsteps. I can't remember where we've been."

He's just under the halfway stage - Day 11 - of a 25-day walk from John O'Groats to Land's End, although he's not doing it the easy way. He will cover 1,284 miles, compared with just under 900 for the direct route, the equivalent of two marathons a day. Today's trek takes him from Middlesbrough to Alne, near Easingwold in North Yorkshire.

You get the feeling that "difficult" is about as close as Chris will ever get to despair, but in the next breath he says, "It is going well. I'm still going, and going is good.

"I will get there and the only thing I'm wondering is whether I should spend a bit longer shaking buckets in the towns."

Chris, 41, who lost his right leg and right arm in a landmine explosion nine years ago, is walking in aid of disability charity Leonard Cheshire. His objectives are to raise £1m and to raise the charity's profile, both nationally and regionally.

"Sometimes we would rather turn our heads and look the other way," he says, and it's not hard to imagine that he's talking from experience.

He went to agricultural college but in 1986 joined the Army, graduating from Sandhurst and then took a commission with Royal Military Police. After leaving the Army, he went to work for the HALO Trust, which specialises in mine clearance.

It was while clearing mines in Cambodia that he was abducted by the Khmer Rouge, along with two other aid workers. But he refused to become a victim, and continually tried to engage his captors in conversation. After three days, his powers of persuasion paid off, and he became one of the few Westerners to be released by Pol Pot's guerrillas, also negotiating the release of his Cambodian colleagues.

He then went to work in northern Mozambique, clearing mines laid during the 20-year civil war. He was walking in a safe area when he was blown up; the mine was probably a booby trap, buried beneath metal detector range.

"I remember everything, absolutely everything," he says. "I remember walking along, then 'bang', then looking at my right hand and seeing there was a hole in the back of it, and thinking 'What's the worst that could have happened?'.

"My left lower leg was still there, but my right lower leg had been completely blown off, but already it was not as bad as it could have been. I still had my left lower leg."

It is perhaps this determination to look on the positive side which helped keep him going. The surgeons said it was only through will power and his exceptional fitness that he survived.

He was taken to hospital in South Africa, where he had six amputations on his leg, each time having it chopped back a little more, until the remaining stump ended just below the knee. He lost his right arm just below the elbow.

Chris returned to the UK and went to Roehampton Hospital to be fitted with artificial limbs. Normally he wears a hook, and an artificial hand for special occasions, but today he's keeping the stump of his arm free. His artificial leg is attached to his stump with a gel to make it easier for him to walk.

Instead of lapsing into self-pity, quite remarkably, he used his convalescence to his advantage.

"I decided to focus on still being able to see my family, and the things I could do. I saw my friends, who I hadn't seen for ages, and that was a tremendous time, and I saw my elderly relatives before they died, and then I decided to do something entirely different."

This was to take a degree in security management, which he later put to good use running his own company specialising in helping clients solve human resources and security management problems, calling it, appropriately enough, Making The Best. He also decided he would run a marathon within a year of the accident.

"It was important to me to run it within a year if possible. I'd watched it from my wheelchair in hospital and I thought, 'Next year I will do that', and I wanted to raise money for a project helping disabled people in Cambodia."

He did do it, of course, swimming every day to build up his muscles and ignoring the curious stares in the pool. He's followed that with several more marathons, as well as becoming the first amputee to complete the 250 kilometre Great Sahara Challenge, running six days in the heat of the desert, carrying all his own food and equipment, including his hook, in case he needed to repair his leg.

He's also run 200 kilometres in four days with the Australian Army, and ran the length of Cambodia, 700 kilometres, and his charity work saw him given the unusual honour of carrying the Olympic flame in Japan for the 1998 Winter Olympics.

It would be very easy for him to concentrate on his own life - he met his wife, Alison, six months after he was maimed, and they have two sons - but the very idea seems far-fetched.

"Occasionally I was taken to church as a child, so I developed a strong tree-hugging and basket-weaving tendency," he says, and he insists he's not joking.

"If you can do something that adds value and meaning to someone else's existence, you will also add value and meaning to your own. Why not be adventurous? Why not get out there and make a contribution?"

He says he's never succumbed to despair, not even for a moment, which seems astonishing, but is hard to doubt.

"Negative emotions are like weeds," he says. "We all have them, all the time, but we're all greater than that. We have got all these emotions and feelings and if you focus on the wrong ones and you think about the wrong things, you will believe you are off course.

"What I should think about is what I'm going to do tonight, and tonight I'm going to get there. If I was walking up the road and thinking what time the buses were, what kind of head state do you think I would be in? That is just me."

One of the small entourage supporting Chris along the walk told me earlier that even if Chris was struggling he would still get there, even if he had to walk until midnight. Tonight his destination is Alne, tomorrow it's somewhere else. Chris can hardly remember their names, but he's not going to stop.

"Do you know what I have learned?" Chris asks. "I have learned that maybe it is not so much what happens to you that is important, it is how you deal with it.

"If I can't keep up with the schedule, I will slow down, but I will get there in the end," he says, and you wouldn't doubt it.

* You can help Chris reach his £1m target by making an instant £1 donation by texting Onewalk to 88010. Or to sponsor his walk, call 08444 411111 or go to www.onewalk.org.uk