Charlie Walker: Cycling To The Ends Of Europe, Africa & Asia

Adventure Diaries Season 2 - Episode 2 with Explorer Charlie Walker.

Charlie Walker, a British explorer, shares his adventures of cycling 43,000 miles across 60 countries. He discusses his unconventional background and how he came to embark on this journey. He highlights the importance of human-powered travel and the intimate connections it allows with people and cultures. He shares stories of his interactions with locals in Belgium, Iran, and Tibet, emphasizing the kindness and hospitality he experienced. He also talks about the challenges he faced, including extreme cold weather and the struggle to find food and water in remote areas. In this conversation, Charlie Walker discusses his adventures across the world, including his journey through Mongolia, West Africa, Tibet, and Siberia. He shares stories of encountering nomads in the Gobi Desert, the problem of alcoholism in Mongolia, visiting refugee camps in Guinea, and wildlife encounters in various countries. Charlie reflects on the joyous moments of solitude in nature and the absurdity of his experiences. He also recommends reading travel books and talking to strangers as ways to explore the world. Charlie's call to adventure is to read and engage with nonfiction books, while his pay-it-forward suggestion is to support Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).

Takeaways

• Human-powered travel allows for intimate connections with people and cultures.
• Kindness and hospitality are universal, even in remote and unfamiliar places.
• Extreme weather and scarcity of food and water can pose significant challenges during adventures.
• Unconventional backgrounds can lead to unexpected and transformative journeys. Engage with the world through reading travel books and nonfiction
• Embrace the joy of solitude in nature
• Talk to strangers and engage in conversations
• Support Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in their humanitarian work

Transcript

Chris Watson (00:00.11)
One night in the Congo, I was with a buddy at that point and we were camped on the riverbank and a hippo walked between our two tents in the middle of the night and I slept through it. I didn't know what had happened then the next morning. But what I found more of a struggle is because I was not allowed to be in Tibet because I was there illegally, I'd snuck into Tibet without a permit. The only places where I could really stock up on food.

were the very, very occasional maybe one a week settlements along the road. And those also had police posts or military posts, so I couldn't really stop in them and I'd have to sneak through those in the night. I got lost in one particular blizzard. I could only assume the temperature was down in the minus 30s, roughly. I was quite high altitude at that point. It was too windy to even contemplate trying to put up my little tent, you know, if I'd...

taking it out in that wind. It would have either been whisked away, ripped away from me or just shredded. It was very, very strong wind. And for about an hour I stumbled through the snow, just getting colder and colder until I couldn't really feel any of my hands. I'm increasingly convinced that that was it. I was just going to die. And, you know, of course, I think as most people would, I didn't want to just kind of sit down and die. Maybe that would have come a bit later. But thankfully within about an hour or so, I completely by chance, and it was a mad coincidence, I just saw this. Welcome.

to another episode of the Adventure Diaries. Today we're joined by Charlie Walker, a British explorer whose adventures have taken him across continents on bike, foot and canoe. He's a member of the Royal Geographic Society, but he is also a writer and a speaker, who brings the thrill of his wild adventures and cultural experiences into our lives through his vivid narrative storytelling. Charlie's journeys are filled with captivating stories of adventure,

risk, chance and cultural immersion and just the raw beauty of our natural world. We discuss how a dash of hubris led to Charlie cycling 43 ,000 miles across 60 countries. He's also braved wild Siberian blizzards and has paddled through the heart of the Congo. His tales will captivate and inspire and I'm sure you'll love this episode. So settle in and enjoy this fantastic conversation with Charlie Walker.

Chris Watson (02:18.414)
Charlie Walker, welcome to the Adventure Diaries. How are you? Thanks very much for having me. Great to be here. I'm very well, thanks. How are you doing? I'm great. I'm great. Thank you. Yeah, very grateful and thankful for your time, Charlie. Just finished your book. Well, I've just finished the audio version. I had read a little bit of that before. I'm really excited to jump into some of your adventures.

and cover some of that through sand and snow. Before we do that, I just want to touch a little bit on your background, because I think quite unconventional, considering some of the people that I do speak to in the show, a lot of people that have a real adventure focused background, whether it's a family, or spend a lot of time in the woods and stuff, but you've came from a pretty different background, haven't you? You didn't really...

weren't really brought up with a life of adventure, were you? No, not at all. I'd say I had an outdoors upbringing, but not an outdoorsy upbringing, if that makes any sense. I grew up in a village in the southwest of England and I'm one of four siblings and we'd spend all of our school holidays outdoors all the time. But we weren't hiking or mountain biking or...

climbing or kayaking or anything like that. We were just kind of running around the village, throwing conkers at passing cars and that kind of thing. So kind of very just straightforward rural kind of idyll. I didn't really get involved in any sort of adventurous or sort of outdoorsy stuff until I was in my, well, really in my late teens. I started the Duke of Edinburgh's award, bronze award when I was 14 and then got thrown off the program for getting drunk.

and that was that really. So, yeah, no, I came, I came to everything a little bit later. Yeah. And that's what's intrigued me so much. I kind of thrown it up there, but the, the, the book through sand and snow, for those that don't know is, is your kind of, it's not an autobiography, but it's a kind of candid, very unvarnished account of your, I mean, it's an epic adventure. Let's put it that way, you know, four plus year bicycle.

Chris Watson (04:32.846)
tour across 60 something countries, 43 ,000 miles. But I think that the thing that really stands out, you didn't really have a plan, no budget, no maps. It was before smartphones, no real training. But young, full of hubris, a little bit of ego. And then, yeah, you know, how did that come to be? What was the catalyst for for for taking up that journey? It's a I mean, it's a good question, because in some sense, the

the sort of aim of that book is to try and answer why am I doing this in the first place? It was something that on any different day, if someone had asked me, why are you doing this while I was on that trip? And since really, I might come up with sort of slightly differing answers. I mean, hubris is a bit of a key word, I suppose. And I'd also by that point kind of been reading a fairly steady diet of adventure books for...

a fair while, among them quite a few sort of cycling adventure books. But it was just a sense of kind of, initially, it was a sense of wanting to kind of break out, get out there, just go and do something, because I was from a very sort of pleasant but unchanging place. There was no excitement as you might get in a city or even a town. I just grew up in a very sort of quiet, stable environment.

And I just grew more and more curious. There had to be more out there. And there was definitely an element of ego in the kind of the initial, I mean, the idea came to me when I'd had too much Chinggis Khan black vodka while driving across Siberia with a, with an arcoleptic Cornish man. And, you know, I kind of, I'd done a two week bicycle trip just shortly before that. And it sort of landed in my mind that.

This is a great way to travel. And I hadn't even enjoyed those two weeks, especially. But I'd seen the potential for traveling by bicycle. And I suppose at that point, exactly what I did, exactly how I did it and exactly where I went or where I did it didn't especially matter to me. What was most important to me back then was to go away for an extended period of time and have an experience to live, to sort of be out there.

Chris Watson (06:55.854)
This is long gone now, but there was definitely a component in my brain back then that liked the idea of being seen as the kind of quixotic wanderer, kind of roaming slowly across distant lands. But yeah, I set the goal to travel to the furthest away point in each of Europe, Asia and Africa. And coming back more directly to question, I deliberately didn't get particularly bogged down with the planning, the route, et cetera, or buying especially good equipment.

or any new equipment. Because again, those things didn't matter to me. I was on a really tight budget. I knew that you don't need a good bicycle to cycle. You don't need a good tent to camp. You don't need a strong pair of legs to cycle not remarkable distances each day. So I kind of thought I'll just get going, take that first step and pedal stroke. And after that, things will just start to unravel and kind of roll with the punches. Yeah.

And on that, just in terms of the equipment and stuff then and your main character in the book is old Jeff, your trusted bicycle and your panniers. And I think, so what was it, what did you take then? Because what did you pack in your panniers? Just out of curiosity. I'm just really curious to know. Sure. Well, the broad strokes were sleeping bag,

Inflatable sleeping mat, a multi -fuel stove. So in that case, it was an MSR whisper light that could take petrol or diesel or lamp oil or probably vegetable oil. I've never tried. They burn anything. A couple of books, a notebook, passport. A change of clothes, really? I didn't have a lot of clothing. I didn't have padded cycle shorts.

Lycra shorts or anything. I was just wearing shorts and boxer shorts. you know, a beanie, a pair of gloves and a set of bike lights. That was really about it. I, when I, when I set off, I had a few more things that I thought would be useful. but the first two days, just due to the, the time that, PNO ferries kindly gave me a free crossing.

Chris Watson (09:15.886)
It didn't match up perfectly with the time I was departing, so I only had two days to cover the first 200 miles across southern England, which it turns out is all tightly packed hills. So it was just up and down and up and down and up and down. So I left a bunch of gear at someone's place and didn't really want for the lack of it at all. After that point, it turns out when cycle touring, broadly speaking, less is more. Yeah, you don't need much. The bike was secondhand. I got it for just over a hundred pounds on eBay.

it was all just very straightforward. And, and, and I, I do, although since then I've gone on to do slightly less lo -fi, slightly more expensive, expeditions. I do still love the, the, accessibility and the simplicity of bike touring. because, you know, kind of anyone could do it. You really don't need very much. Yeah. It's kind of a recurring theme in a lot of your adventures, isn't it Charlie? Like the human powered aspect of it. Quite, quite simple, but.

Yeah, that came about sort of, I think, you know, initially, I just liked the, the sort of struggle and the sense of achievement, I suppose, getting from A to B over a long period of time by the power of your own legs or arms or whatever it might be. But I have learnt over the years that arriving somewhere under your own steam, you know, struggling to get somewhere, it creates a level of, I think, intimacy and access to people you encounter along the way.

If you turn up in a small village on the shore of Lake Takana in Northern Kenya, if you turn up in a shiny four by four or even just a four by four or a helicopter or whatever it might be, there's immediately a sort of a signifier of wealth that is a kind of subconscious, I guess, barrier from both sides between you and the people you encounter. Whereas if you turn up somewhere walking or on skis or on a tatty old bicycle,

People, I think, kind of get that, they take to that. That seems, you know, maybe strange, but it doesn't immediately mark you out as some fabulously wealthy foreigner from the distant side of the world. And so that's come to be another reason why I quite enjoy, or rather tend to deliberately struggle to get to places. Yeah. And, you know, going through the book...

Chris Watson (11:40.654)
you had quite a lot of cultural experiences and a lot of characters that come through in the book. And I think doing the research for this, I really toiled trying to pick out certain topics for it. Because I mean, it is a fantastic read. I think you've got a very good way of telling stories. And I could probably talk to you all day about it. But just picking, not in any sort of logical order really, but if we start when you hit Europe, I think,

One of the things that struck me is the interaction. Was it look in Belgium when again, you're turning up on your bike, meeting some people and that kind of intimacy and some of the stories that came out there. I think something that really struck a chord was the conversation about the Allied forces, you know, from when it was occupied during World War Two and stuff. Could you talk to that a little bit? What was that like?

Sure. Well, Luke was this fascinating old fella. He was in his early eighties back then. This is about 13 and a half years ago. I was last in touch with him at the start of this year, I think, and he was still going strong. Luke was an old Belgian guy living in Bruges who had been a... I just met him in the square in the center of Bruges. He just kind of approached me and we got chatting. He was on a bicycle himself.

And we rode off along a canal path and then had a beer at some bar on the side of the canal and then off I went. But he told me about, yeah, his memories of being a child in occupied Belgium during the war. And the sort of the experience, the memory that he had of occupation and indeed of the German soldiers, the Nazi Wehrmacht soldiers.

It didn't really tally or chime with what I suppose we come to think of when we think of Nazi soldiers, Nazi troops, we immediately, our minds go to the gas chambers of the death camps on the Eastern front and in Poland. I suppose totally understandably, we tend to not really consider the, well, when you read history books, this is quite different because of course,

Chris Watson (14:02.126)
The characters on the German side of the war are humans and they have their own humanity, some of them much lesser than others and some of them plentifully. And he remembered as a child, the Nazi soldiers had just been people who had been sent there. They weren't especially malign. People tended to get on with them quite well. He was sure to point out that the gaping exception to that was the Jewish people in Bruges who were just sort of disappeared or were taken away.

But the average people tended to sort of get on okay with the German soldiers. There was no fighting. The city was seized bloodlessly. And so then they kind of just waited out the war until the allies came and liberated them again, pretty much bloodlessly, I believe. And so I just found his stories, his recollections, which were through the mists of time and may well have been oversimplified or misremembered as we are all prone to do.

His was the first example, I suppose, of differing perspective that I found interesting along the way. Another notable example was getting to Lucknow in India and discovering that what we in Britain refer to as the Indian mutiny, or the Great Mutiny in 1857, is referred to in India as the first war of independence, which of course it was because they were living under a colonial occupation.

So these interactions then, you know, so early on in your journey, did that give you a sense of validation that what you were doing was meaningful and it was going to be that adventure that you were seeking? It did. And now I'm wondering if I potentially could be prone to, you know, misremembering or, you know, myself, because this is a very long time ago. And that was, I mean, in Bruges was probably the third day or fourth day of

what turned out to be about 1 ,600 days. It's so long ago that my freshest memories of it probably come through writing about it years on as well. I traveled pretty quickly through Europe. I covered about 6 ,000 miles from Britain up to Nordkapp at the top of Norway and then down to Istanbul. I really whizzed through it and didn't have particularly many human interactions. There were quite a few and far between.

Chris Watson (16:25.518)
it, you know, I didn't yet know how different it would be later. So that didn't seem, you know, remarkable to me. Now I look back at it and I think, you know, I was, I was just by myself talking to no one, meeting, you know, a few people, learning nothing. But as soon as I got to Turkey where I A, slowed the pace down a little bit and B, started cycling through villages that I suppose, you know, are arguably on the cusp of the

developing world for want of a better term, just much less wealthy places, that people would just approach me in the middle of nowhere and start talking to me, which absolutely isn't the case in Europe. People tend to live quite sort of gated lives, quite separated psychologically as much as structurally or architecturally. So yeah, definitely from that point onwards, just the more and more and more and more people would just come and start chatting to me. And I just became more and more

of wooed by this way of life whereby you meet totally different people every single day, except of course for the odd month -long stint where you're in the middle of the desert or the mountains and you don't talk to a soul except yourself. Were you ever scared or just going on adrenaline? What was it? Because you're in isolation a lot of the time and then you've been in some very inhospitable environments which we'll come onto in a minute. But you know,

If you think, I'll get to the point really, you were in Iran weren't you, about the point of the Arab Spring or the uprising and what can be often seen as the west of a very fractured view of the likes of Iran, but your experience was very different, it was very hospitable and very welcoming, particularly during a time of conflict and uprising. Yeah, I mean I'd heard that.

Iran was a friendly place, but, you know, in fact, I'd heard that it was an extremely friendly place. But there was some element of my, I suppose, programming, you know, throughout my life, my childhood, that couldn't quite let go of the fact that Iran was apparently this sort of rogue pariah state, part of the axis of evil, as George Bush used to like to say.

Chris Watson (18:45.358)
And so it's still, even though I'd been told that it was an incredibly friendly place, it still came as some level of surprise to me that when I got there, people were just nice, normal people going about their lives. And I mean, I wasn't actually in Iran during the Arab Spring. When the Arab Spring sprung, I was by that point over in Southern China. But by the time I came back to Iran on the same journey, about two and a half years after my first visit there, so this would be in the start of 2013.

By the time I came back, the world had changed quite a lot. The Arab Spring hadn't happened. By that point, the UK embassy in Tehran had been firebombed and had shut, so there was no longer any British diplomatic mission there. Visas were a bit harder to get, but there was still this oddity that no longer exists. Nowadays, you have to be guided, accompanied on a tour with an itinerary. Back then, you could still, despite all the circumstances, travel freely.

And once again, I entered the country and spent three months just meeting the most jaw -droppingly kind people who would go way out of their way, who would really disrupt their lives to help me out in any way they could, even though sometimes I would desperately protest. No, no, no, it's fine. Please, I'll manage. Don't worry. It's all right. They wouldn't have a word of it. It is and remains the friendliest place I've ever been.

You were in Tehran as well, weren't you? Yes. Did you spend much time? What was that like back then? Was it welcoming as well? You know, white man westerner in Tehran when you've got all this political backdrop going on? Yeah, I mean, when people see you walking around, firstly, they don't know where you're from. You know, the Iranian, the sort of the rhetoric of the Iranian regime dictates that the British...

the Americans or Britain and America are the sort of twin great satans of the morally corrupt West. But if you're just a white person walking around, A, you could be from France or Canada or any number of places, Slovakia, Serbia, but B, you could be from Iran. There are loads of people in Iran who look little different to you or I, frankly. And particularly by the time I came back the second time, I had a big...

Chris Watson (21:02.478)
bushy beard and I had long hair and a scruffy ponytail. Occasionally people would come up to me on the streets and ask me directions in Farsi. It's a much more, I suppose, ethnically heterogeneous place than we tend to assume, I guess, in Iran. It has many, many different ethnicities, just for starters, all the way from the Azeris up in the Northwest, close to Azerbaijan.

down to the Arab people along the coast, on the Persian Gulf. I never really sensed any particular hostility from anyone in Iran. Tehran is a more brash, busy, noisy, built -up place than the entire rest of the country. By dint of that, less people just come up and start chatting to you, but it still happens much more so than it would happen in any equivalent Western European city.

So no, I never experienced any problems there except occasionally with the police. And if you cycle through a small village and you are, when you're on your bicycle with panniers, you're an alien object. You're very clearly not necessarily a foreigner, but different. I would often get pulled into a police station and questioned for maybe an hour and potentially be a touch frosty for a few moments here and there. But then once they were done and they were satisfied that you were allowed to be there, you're doing nothing wrong, you're causing no trouble.

then they would often as not say, right now, you know, stay, have some tea and we'll hang out for a bit. So, you know, every interrogation led to a nice kind of chat afterwards. Yeah, that's good. What was the kind of countryside like when you were going through that? Did you meet many kind of villagers and people like that, nomadic or anything like that at all? Because it was quite sparse lands that you were cutting through at points as well, weren't there? Yeah, more so the second time I visited. So that's not in the book you've read or listened to. But,

Yeah, in the remote areas, the smaller villages, you do meet less people, but Iran has a...

Chris Watson (23:04.974)
How do I put this? The very smallest villages, I would meet incredibly friendly people with whom I would struggle to communicate. I tried my best with Farsi or Persian and I could hold a very basic conversation, but beyond talking about how many siblings I had and how old me and the various people I was talking to were, it didn't go particularly far. But it's only the very smallest villages that still have no English speakers, no...

middle class, for example. So even in small towns in quite remote areas, there'd always be an English teacher who would emerge out of nowhere as soon as you arrive having heard that some exotic foreigner has wandered on into town. And so always within no time at all, the people who were best placed to be able to talk to you, but also by dint of being, I suppose, better educated, having had more exposure to the outside world, probably were going to be.

slightly less likely to have qualms about you being a foreigner. I am aware that the cross -section of people that I spent particularly much time with were not the most entirely representative cross -section of Iranian society. But I did still spend time with nomadic pastoralists in tiny villages who spend the shepherds who spend nights out in clay or mud -built huts. Even middle -class people I met had grown up.

in essentially one giant mud fortress that an entire village would live inside. It would be built up high with tall walls to protect against passing bandits. The dramatic, rugged, romantic image we might have of that part of the world is temporally really not very far away from us. You do speak very formally of it. It's great to hear. You've been back a couple of times, haven't you?

I have. Yeah. Yeah. I went twice on that bike ride and then I've been back once since then.

Chris Watson (25:08.91)
What was the food like? Were you welcomed or anything? The food in Iran is spectacular. The first time I was there, I was there a month. I cycled 1200 miles and I put on weight, which is really hard to do. But if you go to any restaurant in Iran, pretty much any restaurant, they'll basically just serve you shish and pilau, kebab, meat and pilau. It's in people's homes that the food really comes into its own and there's a really, really good sort of broad cuisine.

Chris Watson (25:43.822)
lost you still there? Yep, still here. Yeah, that's great. So from Iran, where did you go to? Did you go back, is that when you started heading over to east, over towards like Tibet and stuff? What was the route from that route? Remind me, Charlie. From Iran, sadly I was denied a Pakistan visa, so I had to fly from eastern Iran over to Delhi, where I picked up.

and headed north through to Nepal and then up into sort of Western China and then through to Tibet. And that's when the winter came and things got, you know, tougher, I suppose, physically and from a psychological perspective, because that was where I had the least, you know, the least opportunity to interact with anyone at all. Yeah, Tibet was a very hard time.

Yeah, because you arrived in Tibet in the winter, didn't you, in January? That wasn't by design though, was it? Or was that just... It wasn't by design, but as I started to realize that the time was going that way, the thought quite excited me. I'd never been in real cold before. I doubt I'd experienced anything below about minus two or three before. And suddenly I was in minus 30. And, you know, that was, I wasn't particularly well prepared. You know, I had a cheap,

sort of a 50 pound, I think, big bulky sleeping bag I'd bought in Kathmandu and a big jacket from the same place. Both were fake sort of rip off North Face or something. And then Wellington boots, which it turns out are not the right footwear. And I didn't feel my toes for about three months, the tips of them. So yeah, I was not well prepared, but I did quite, I suppose, I'd read a lot of books. I was quite sort of enamored by the sort of the...

the struggle of cold weather. You read the recollections of the Edwardian explorers to the North and South Pole, or even further back, the Victorian Franklin going on up to Canada and every single man dying. And of course, that's not what I wanted to happen to me. But I was fascinated by just how hard real cold weather might be. And I was totally unprepared. Nowadays, I can cope with it fine. A lot of it is having the right kit. But I think more than that, it's with being

Chris Watson (28:04.686)
Well, I mean, it sounds a bit trite, but being mentally prepared, knowing what to expect and knowing how to kind of cope with the requisite level of patience that is required to do anything in those cold temperatures, particularly when it comes to camping and cooking and sort of that side of travel. Yeah. I mean, when you think about it, you know, the Tibetan plains, Wellington boots, an old bike, you know, minus 40 degrees or whatever it is, it's just a recipe for disaster.

It very nearly was. Yeah, it very nearly was actually. So talk us through that. Because you got frostbite, didn't you? And you looked like you were on, or you sounded like you were on the verge of death when you got a bit of respite. Yeah, well, I got lost in one particular blizzard. I can only assume the temperature was down in the minus 30s, roughly. I was quite high altitude at that point.

It was immediately within minutes of this snowstorm starting, it was too windy to even contemplate trying to put up my little tent. If I'd taken it out in that wind, it would have either been whisked away, ripped away from me or just shredded. It was very, very strong wind. And of course the wind chill pushes down the sensation of cold that much further.

Close to an hour, I think, in total, I lost the road, the road buried over visibility, pressed into, I think, probably about 10 or 12 meters. And for about an hour, I stumbled through the snow, just getting colder and colder until I couldn't really feel any of my hands, increasingly convinced that that was it. I was just going to die. And, you know, of course, I think as most people would, I didn't want to just kind of sit down and die. Yeah, maybe that, you know, potentially that.

That would have come a bit later. But thankfully within about an hour or so, I completely by chance, and it was a mad coincidence, but I sort of in the whiteness, like trekking across the inside of a ping pong ball, suddenly I just saw this gray shape sort of loom out of the storm. And it was a tiny little hut that a Tibetan family lived in.

Chris Watson (30:20.078)
And I just lurched on into their living room, so I've interrupted them in the middle of their kind of day of hunkering down in the warm with their stove and terrified the children who I think took me for the Yeti because I had a beard full of ice and I was just shaking and too cold to talk and just sort of looked like a strange wild man. But of course they immediately realized that I wasn't the Abominable Snowman. I was just an idiot who needed some help. So they took me in that night.

And thankfully, due to them, I survived the storm. Actually, I found their default reaction to look after me, to nurture me, was pretty much the global default. People are a lot more friendly and helpful than we often perhaps cynically allow ourselves to believe. There are very, very few people on the planet, I think, who would stand by and watch someone else struggle when they could do something to help that would essentially cost them nothing.

Can I ask a favour? If you're enjoying the show, can you give us a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel on YouTube? And if you happen to be listening to the audio only version, can you give us a follow along there too? It'll really help grow the channel. We've got some fantastic guests coming up with some truly inspirational stories. Now, let's get back to this episode. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're probably still wondering what on earth happened that night.

This crazy guy turning up at the death door. I think I recall in your book, did they feed you some soup or was it mutton or something? Yeah, they gave me some soup, some yak butter tea, which is an acquired taste. The butter goes rancid and then they salt it and melt it in tea. Soup, yak butter tea. And then yeah, they had some mutton bones, presumably from their own.

sort of flock. And they gave me one of those and gave me a big old sort of knife just to pair bits of meat away from the bone, which I struggled to do with my fingers. My fingers were really cold, so the father of the family kind of essentially fed me. And the culmination of the meal was leaving the bone on the stove for half an hour and then cracking it in two and drinking the marrow out of the interior, which I'd never done before, but can heartily recommend. Yeah, that sounds great actually.

Chris Watson (32:43.47)
Sounds great. Can I ask, what was your fitness like at that? Because obviously high altitude there as well must have been very draining and very difficult on the lungs as well as cycling and then being in that state. Because you didn't do, I mean I thought you set off on this journey from what I recall, you didn't really do much training and stuff. None at all, yeah. Did you find your fitness getting better?

Because it's madness to go cycling through an area like that as well. You know, the wilderness alone, but the altitude and stuff. Yeah, I found my fitness got, you know, it developed rapidly once I started the journey. By the time I got to Tibet, I had cycled about 10 ,000 miles, I think. And yeah, I had, you know, sort of thighs of steel. I was able to cycle more or less all day without.

really feeling particularly fussed by it and that's cycling a heavily laden bicycle. But yeah, altitude definitely played a role. It gets a lot harder. The road I was following took me up a few times as high as 5 ,500 meters, which is roughly, I think it's Everest Base Camp in Tibet. It's about 200 meters higher than the Nepalese side of the Everest Base Camp.

and, you know, it certainly slows you down. You, you just move more slowly. I found, I think a bit more slowly at those altitudes. you wheeze a lot, your breath kind of rattles a little bit. But what I found more of a struggle is because I was not allowed to be in Tibet because I was there illegally, I'd snuck into Tibet without a permit. the only places where I could really stock up on food were, you know, the very, very occasional, maybe one a week settlements along the road.

And those also had police posts or military posts. So I couldn't really stop in them and I'd have to sneak through those in the night. And as a result, I couldn't get more food and I lost, you know, I've had to sort of, you know, really cut down on rations and I lost. Well, now currently I weigh about 80 kilograms, I think. By the time I left Tibet, I weighed, if I remember this correctly, 57 or 58 kilograms. So that's sort of like cutting off one of my legs at the hip now, I guess, it's a very, very big difference.

Chris Watson (34:57.902)
So that was probably a bigger challenge than the altitude. How did you find your planning with supplies, food and water? What were you doing for water along the way? Were you looking for any sort of wells or water sources or how did that work? In Tibet, do you mean? Or generally? Yeah, in Tibet. In Tibet? Well, there was snow everywhere, so I would just melt snow. It was straightforward enough. The most important thing was just have enough.

enough petrol to power my stove, which thankfully I did take sort of a large contingency of. Yeah, so water wasn't much of a challenge and planning where to next get food with the exception of places like Tibet and the Sahara. Besides that, it was really quite straightforward. There aren't many places in the world that don't have, there aren't many roads in the world that don't have a shop within 500 miles along that route.

And 500 miles, you can cycle pretty comfortably in a week or so. And you can carry a couple of weeks food on a bicycle, surprisingly easily. Water is more challenging. And I think at one point in Sudan, I was carrying about 20 liters of water and that weighs a lot. That's a real struggle. And you know, you get through again in no time at all. But yeah, generally food and water was, it was quite straightforward and I didn't particularly plan with it. I just took what felt like.

slightly more than enough to get to the next place where there should be the chance of topping up. You're experiencing the Gobi, Charlie. Was that part of this expedition or was that a set -up when you crossed the Gobi? Yes. I arrived in Beijing, spent the winter there, and then continued in spring and walked from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital. That was about a thousand mile walk.

It took about six weeks. The stretch across the Gobi was basically besides Sudan in the Sahara, the one other place where supplies was particularly a challenge because I was on foot. I didn't have the carrying capacity that a bicycle provides. I just had a backpack. I set out from the border town between the two countries off into the desert with a massively...

Chris Watson (37:19.63)
bouldering shopping bag in one hand, like I was just on my way back from Aldi or something, because my backpack was absolutely stuffed. So anything extra was just in my hands and I carried literally everything I could that way. But thankfully there are, and you can't rely on exactly where they will be, but there are nomads scattered thinly, but scattered sparsely across the desert. So if you see one of their yurts, myel gurs, as they call them, miles off in the distance, then...

make a beeline for it and you'll get a top up of food and water and likely be politely force -fed vodka until the small hours. Yeah, on that topic, I think I've heard you talk before about the problem with alcoholism. You talk very formally of Mongolia, I've had a few guests that have been and done some expeditions there that do the same and highly recommend it. I've never been, but I think you touched on a bit of a, I think you like to party, but also there's a bit of a problem with alcohol.

Yeah. Mongolia, if you go into the average Mongolian supermarket in a small town, there'll be two aisles. One aisle is vodka and the other aisle is everything else. So, I mean, that gives some indication. People drink a lot there and they drink sort of to destruction. The sense that we have when we hear the phrase binge drinking is kind of...

It's a pretty normal phenomenon in Britain, but it seems even more so in Mongolia. I should say that I haven't been to Mongolia for about five years now. So that may have changed. It may have developed. I suspect if it has, it probably hasn't been widespread changes. But yeah, I don't know if it's a legacy of nomadic pastoralism or of being a Soviet satellite state.

or of the, you know, terrifyingly cheap vodka that is on offer. I'm not entirely sure, but sadly, one thing that it could be connected to is that there are a lot of people with a lot less to do than there would traditionally have been herding, you know, a few hundred horses, goats, sheep, camels, you know, delete as appropriate. Used to be, used to take quite a lot of people if you're just on horses.

Chris Watson (39:45.422)
Nowadays with motorbikes and binoculars, you can keep an eye on your herd, or the herd's quite straightforwardly and you only need really one person to do it most of the time. There's that and there's also the kind of people drifting to towns and cities who kind of hang up their riding boots and sort of give up the traditional life and that often leads to kind of unemployment and the...

know, the challenges that alcohol can provide there as well. Did you ever feel unsafe as a result of that? Yeah, a couple of times. I don't think particularly badly, but I definitely felt threatened on a couple of occasions. Well, I definitely was threatened on a couple of occasions, but nothing came of it, thankfully.

On the topic of horses, if I remember rightly, did you buy a horse? I did. Yeah, I sort of threw a kind of a contact of a contact of a contact. I managed to buy a horse in, just outside Ulaanbaatar. I spent a day driving around the sort of pastures with some drunk nomads, like on, you know, just driving over the grass.

checking out a bunch of horses and I didn't know, I'd never ridden a horse before. I didn't know what I was looking for, but I thought, you know, I should check out the hooves, probably be careful around the back hooves. You know, they can kick, look at the teeth, you know, is long teeth good or bad? I'm not sure long in the tooth is a bad thing, but I didn't really know. You know, I've checked these horses out and yeah, I go, Hmm. Yeah. So I knew what I was looking for. Cause I didn't want to kind of lose face essentially. but between every kind of stop at a different herd is kind of, you know, encampment.

or at each stop, we'd drink more and more and more vodka. But eventually I agreed to buy this sort of quite, you know, strong looking, but docile seeming, I mean, kind of a nag really. And it was all agreed and arranged and I was going to pay, or did pay, I think it was 120 pounds equivalent in Tukorog. And then two days later, I came to pick up the horse. And the first thing I noticed is that the nag had grown a penis and a pair of balls.

Chris Watson (41:56.814)
It was just an entirely different animal, the same color. I think they thought maybe the foreigner won't notice that it's a different gender. So I was in the end sold a kind of an angry young stallion, I guess, and he didn't particularly want to be ridden. So I spent much of the next two months walking this horse, which was not what I'd envisaged, but it was pretty idyllic nonetheless. Yeah, makes for a good story.

That's crazy. Have you been back to Mongolia since? Yeah, so I first went before I went off on that trip back in 2009. Then I was there again in 2012 and I was last there in 2018 where the capital had certainly changed quite a lot and developed quite a lot. The countryside still seemed similar, but what they are having now is a lot more

of catastrophically cold winters followed by dangerously dry summers. The combination of the two is known as a zoot. Historically, they would happen every 50 or 100 years and maybe as much as a third or even a half of the country's sort of livestock would die. Then they'd slowly replenish over the coming decades. They're now having these events all the time, every few years. The last time I was there was in the summer and they'd had a zoot.

that year and the countryside was just littered with corpses. It was really heartbreaking. Just carcasses in every direction and the smell was quite something. That's harsh. That's harsh. So after Mongolia, in fact, switch over to West Africa if you don't mind, because there was a story in there. So what was your experience in...

Because obviously you're quite young at the time, weren't you? And then in West Africa and Guinea, and you came across the refugee camps and there's a lot of conflict in that area. I mean, historically there's been a lot of militia and conflict and stuff, but particularly at that point there was fighting and you had quite a heartbreaking experience, I think, in one of the camps, didn't you? Yeah, that's right.

Chris Watson (44:13.902)
So this was a sort of a flashback, if you will, in my book, but it was back to when I was a student. I would have been only 19 backpacking around West Africa. And I ended up in Guinea and went down to the far south of Guinea, close to the Liberian border. And in a town, I think it was in Kisidugu, I forget, in this town, a woman came up to me and sort of

opened a conversation in English and you know, Guinea is a Francophone country and I hadn't really spoken English for a little bit by that point. I'd come from Mali beforehand, also Francophone. And it turned out she was a Sierra Leone refugee. She had fled Sierra Leone about six, no, four or five years earlier during the civil war when the, you know, the RUF, the rebels just started. I mean, it was a sort of murderous campaign really. And.

She said, there's about 900 of us living out in the forest, come and visit. So I went with, I bought some sacks of rice for the camp and we got a couple of guys with motorbikes to drive us for about two hours along footpaths into quite deep in the forest. And I arrived in this sort of technically abandoned refugee camp. And by abandoned, I mean the UNHCR.

had officially closed it. The idea was that the Sierra Leoneans there should return to Sierra Leone because the war was over or integrate into Guinea and into Guinean society. But most of the refugees believed, probably for pretty legitimate reasons, that if they went back to Sierra Leone, they would be persecuted or murdered and deemed to be kind of new.

RUF collaborators who had been hiding out all this time. So they didn't feel like they could go back and they were sort of actively discouraged to integrate in Ghanaian society. For one thing, they don't have any common language. They were very much not welcome and the Ghanaian troops would constantly turn up in the camp. The camp, the school had been pulled down by the troops a few months before I got there, I think. And they had no food. It was the first time I'd seen real

Chris Watson (46:36.462)
abject suffering first person. And yeah, they just had nothing. And then the troops arrived while I was there and Ellen locked me in a cupboard and I sort of sat in that cupboard while the troops searched the camp. I don't know if they knew there was a foreigner there and they were looking for me or if they were just on one of their sort of regular rounds of intimidation, trying to kind of scare the Sierra Leoneans back into Sierra Leone.

I'm not really sure, but it was a terrifying experience. And that was for me who had much less at stake, frankly, than the people there did. The people there had just absolutely nothing. I struggled to put words to how shocking and upsetting it really was. Yeah. I know what you're saying. It really stood out when I was reading that. I was kind of toying with it, whether you bring it up or not, because I didn't want to stir up old memories. But did that...

Did that spark any sort of journalistic stuff in you to maybe go and report on and try and do anything about it? I mean, what can you do when you're there in that environment? I mean, buying rice and helping out with whatever provisions you can is great, but it's so harrowing, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, at that point I was having my sort of first pretensions to journalism.

And so part of going to visit the camp was I thought this could be an interesting story. I'm happy to follow any lead and go and chat to people. And after I left and a few weeks later, when I got back to the UK, I was absolutely determined that I would do something. There's some way I'd be able to help. And I...

I spoke to various aid agencies, I contacted people at the UNHCR, I spoke to a couple of journalists and I had all, you know, I'd taken lots of photographs of all the documentation of the people there and their own personal stories. And I mean, Ellen's story I won't get into now, but it was the most shocking thing I'd ever heard, her experiences at the hands of the RUF. But, you know, I came back and I found it not just difficult, but really impossible to find anyone who

Chris Watson (48:49.358)
sort of cared at all. And, you know, I'm frankly ashamed to say, but back then, aged 19, within about half a year of not really being able to do much with sort of toying and looking at the idea of trying to start a charity to help with that, I got nowhere and eventually dropped it. And I have managed to find out now and then over the years, the odd sort of update on, you know,

what happened there, but not very much. It's quite sort of scattered information. And it's definitely one of my most shameful, most shameful of my life's memories is I'm not ashamed of not being able to do anything, but the kind of the eventual just giving up because I've got my own, I was studying, I had my own life to kind of get on with. And it turned out for...

that I kind of had nothing that I was able to offer or was only willing to kind of upend my life so much to be able to do so, which is, I suppose, quite a sort of sobering realization.

But I mean, you're only one person, Charlie. We can't all change the world. And I think at least by sharing these stories and raising awareness and like I said, I didn't work in too much of the story. And if anyone's watching or reading this, I think it's, you know, buy the book, read the book, get awareness of it, because you can still help out these regions and these people through many means, which will come on to when we get to the end of the show and some of the closing traditions. So, but yeah, again, I mean,

keep plugging your book, I'm not on commission for this honestly. But yeah, it's a fascinating reading. And like I said, I like the fact that it's not an autobiography. It doesn't kind of jumps around a little bit, maybe a bit like this interview as well. But there's a lot of real, let's say unvarnished truths and experiences in it that anyone that's interested in adventure would get a lot from.

Chris Watson (50:59.598)
So with that said, a little bit of a pivot then, because I'm curious about what type of wildlife encounters did you come across? And, you know, if you think of West Africa or even Tibet and stuff, because you were camping out and, you know, a little tent weren't you most of the time? Do you have any experiences? Well, I mean, up in Tibet, the kind of, you know, the threat was, you know, potential for wolves. They live up there. There are bears, but they are...

passingly rare. But the only encounters I really had in Tibet with wildlife were dogs, a lot of stray dogs or just kind of dogs at a loose end in the small communities I passed through, some of which were Tibetan Mastiffs, very big, frightening dogs that would chase me for miles at a time. And that's the only time I was glad for Wellington Boots because the rubber seemed to, they did try and bite me a couple of times and didn't.

breakthrough. Yes, the dogs were pretty frightening. There was one night when three dogs surrounded my tent. I thought they might be wolves. I was inside the tent and suddenly I heard panting and scuffling and then just barking and baying and howling for probably an hour where I was just lying in my tent, clutching a cooking knife, ready in case they should break in.

So besides that in Tibet, no, I didn't really have any particular encounters. I mean, on the whole, on that whole four year bike ride, I mean, the most, the most sort of notable encounters of wildlife tended to be snakes and spiders that, you know, particularly once I got to Africa happened pretty commonly. I had a sort of a, actually in Egypt, a fox sort of robbed me one night. I woke up in the middle of the night. I was sleeping outdoors just on the, on the Red Sea coast. I wasn't in a tent and I, I.

woke up to a noise and I looked over and there was a fox just standing facing me and in its mouth was the handle of one of my smaller, my front panniers. And that was the one that had my wallet, my camera, my notebook, and my passport. Everything that mattered to me was in that bag. And we just stared at each other back and forth in the eyes for a few seconds. And then I kind of flinched at it and it dropped the bag, thankfully, and ran away. So there was that. I ran into the old elephant in, particularly in Botswana.

Chris Watson (53:23.726)
I saw one crocodile in the Congo, big old crocodile while paddling down a river. One night in the Congo, I was with a buddy at that point and we were camped on the riverbank and a hippo walked between our two tents in the middle of the night. I slept through it. I didn't know what had happened. Then the next morning my mate said, the hippo walked between the two tents and I don't think he slept for...

few nights after that. So yeah, there were, you know, over the years, quite a few animal encounters, but, you know, most of them would have just been, you know, a snake that accidentally creeps up on me while I'm having a rest under a tree after lunch. And, you know, we kind of surprise each other. You know, those things happen quite a lot. You'd hear wolves howling, sorry, lions howling occasionally in some parts of, particularly East Africa. And I heard wolves, in Mongolia, there's a lot of wolves. So you hear them howling at night sometimes. I only saw one.

to from a distance. But yeah, they're definitely around. Yeah, wow. So look at so kind of wrapping all that four and a half years up, then I think there's a I think there's a quote in the book. I think you were seeking out a bit of hardship and pain and stuff. Wanted to be a little bit of a hero as well. But looking back on that all these years later, do you think it did it meet your expectations? Yes.

And it's probably not in the way I'd expected, if that makes any sense. I suppose that the reason or a larger part of the reason, and this ties back into how we got going on this conversation, I guess, a larger part of the reason for me wanting to start was to sort of prove myself in some sense. But very quickly and increasingly, as the whole journey unfolded, it became clear to me that I was the least interesting thing about the journey I was on. And of course, the thing that's interesting about traveling all over the world is the world.

people, the places that you encounter, the stories you hear, and to some extent, the experiences you have, but more so the people and the people you meet and their stories. By the time I got home, the difficulty, the hardship, the struggle, the type two fund that I'd set off for sort of paled into insignificance compared with all the stuff that I had, I suppose, in some sense, notionally expected, but hadn't quite anticipated how

Chris Watson (55:49.39)
sort of grounding and, you know, forming character, forming, you know, those would be. How did you find the Western world when you came back? Did you find it changed or that you had changed? How did the transition go? I had undoubtedly changed, but other people are better the judges of that than I am, I suppose. The main things that had changed in kind of, you know, Britain or Western Europe,

But in much of the world, by the time I got back was the fact that most people by that point, 2014, end of 2014, had smartphones and more or less ran their lives with these devices. And it was quite new to me. But also I'd been away a long time and I'd been almost exclusively in the developing world during that time. And I'd been hot and cold and uncomfortable and hungry and thirsty the majority of the time in some way or another.

So actually coming back was, you know, it was a big relief. I was, I was excited to get back. I was looking forward to kind of the next, A, the next challenge, but B, just a, you know, a period of normality in between. And so I never really found a particular difficulty of adjustment getting back, which a lot of people sort of expect or assume would be the case. But no, I kind of slotted back in quite happily, sort of, you know, quickly put on weight and, and started thinking about what might be next.

Excellent. And you've done a host of adventures since then, haven't you? You've been to Papua New Guinea quite a few times, haven't you? And you've done an adventure there. Was it cycling, hiking, pack rafting from the interior? Yeah. So I was actually, I was back there just this summer for the third time. The first time I went was about four years ago. And I tried to climb the three highest mountains in the country.

third highest eluded me. I spent about a week on it, but just in the jungle really with a couple of guys. And then hiked to the source of the longest river on the island and then hiked down that river until it was navigable and then paddled down that to the sea. But that was all in two months. It was quite a compressed timeframe due to just visa logistics really.

Chris Watson (58:12.302)
But yeah, Papua New Guinea is an otherworldly place. I've never experienced anything quite like it and that's why I keep getting drawn back. I'm just finishing off a book at the moment, but the next book I write will be about Papua New Guinea and I can't wait to get stuck into that because there is so much to learn. There's so much to tell about that place. It's absolutely unreal. Yeah, exactly. Are you planning a documentary about that as well? Did I read that right?

No, I've got a couple of great ideas should anyone want to make a documentary there, but no, I certainly haven't. I certainly haven't sort of got a, you know, a commission to go out and make one. It's something I'd love to do at some point. I do think it's a country that's very ripe for that. But no, nothing currently in the works. Well, maybe when you finish your book on that, that we can have a follow up chat and dive all into Papua New Guinea. Sure. Excellent. So.

Kind of mindful of it. One thing I just want to touch on quickly, it's been documented, I mean, countless times, I think, in many of your interviews, your experience in Siberia. You know, I think you went there in search of some indigenous peoples. Was it reindeer herders? The Saki and the Iwenki people? Yes, the Saka and Iwenki people. Yeah. And that was cut short because...

You were essentially detained and imprisoned. I actually got to the end of what I was, I spent two months doing the hike I was planning. And it was at the end of that, that I was arrested and locked up for a few weeks on sort of pretty spurious charges of journalism against Russian state interests and photographing military sites. Of course, I wasn't doing any of that, but that doesn't really matter in Russia anymore. The truth is a secondary concept.

Yeah. Had you been to Russia much before that? That was my third or fourth time in Russia. And I've been arrested in Russia a couple of times before as well. In Russia, if you go to remote areas of Russia, you get arrested very easily. It's quite sort of a path for the course. But this was the first time things had sort of got that serious.

Chris Watson (01:00:30.926)
Yeah, I mean, we won't dive too much into that because it's been, I mean, for anyone that's hearing this for the first time, it's, you know, it's well documented. I think, you know, and a few other podcasts and there's plenty, you know, Joe Rogan, for example, I think you covered it all in that as well. So has that changed your view on Russia at all? Would you go back when your ban is up? I would love to go back to Russia. I hope to go back to Russia one day when, you know, in better times.

Of course, I stand in total solidarity with the people of Ukraine. But I also think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that regardless of what public mood or opinion may be or seem to be, and opinion polls are famously difficult in Russia. Putin does seem to be popular and supported, but this is in a complete information vacuum. This is where people have no access to, not all people, but many people have no...

access to the truth, or even if they do, or even if they're aware that there is an alternative truth out there, that there is nothing to gain. There's only things to lose by speaking out. I know that that is an oversimplification. We're short on time. Big changes happen, revolutions happen when people do speak out en masse and the power of the people is always there.

they are living in a militarized police state where you might be locked up for many, many, many years just for the simple act of saying, I disagree with this. A time will come, hopefully sooner rather than later, when Ukraine ends up with the majority of its territory back, hopefully all of its territory back, but a sort of a reconciliation will have to begin.

And, you know, Russia as a state won't necessarily be immediately or have to be immediately sort of welcomed back into the bosom of the international community. But in some sense, people will have to sort of remember again that Russian people are people in the same way that, you know, in any country, people are people. And there's very few kind of sadists and psychopaths out there, more than is ideal, of course. But, you know, most people are just, you know, trying to make the best of it. Yeah, it's such a large.

Chris Watson (01:02:56.494)
country in terms of how the population is so desperate as well. And you think that the irony in those charges, conducting journalism, potentially 15 years in prison for spreading potentially fake news when it's what they do to their own population. Yeah, don't get me started on the hypocrisy. It's incredible. But like you say, people are people and unfortunately they live under that.

that influence, unfortunately. So a couple of things, reflections then Charlie, looking back over all the adventure you've done to date, is there anything that stands out as your most joyous moment or even the most absurd moment? Not to deduce everything that you've done, but just think is anything that comes to mind that's particularly joyous or absurd?

Yeah, I mean, for joyous, there's a particular sort of, it's more a type of memory than a memory really, because it was played out repeatedly in different countries across the world. But basically, any time when I was setting up camp in a big, open, empty space in warm weather, at the end of a long day's ride and I had enough food and enough water, and I had a valley to myself or the desert to myself or, you know, a

the mountains to myself. I wasn't cold. I was happily tired. I was about to eat a good meal. Just something about the peace that comes at the end of a day of knackering yourself and just feeling content at ease and happily alone. That sense of solitude in the wild where there's not a rushing road going past. There's no one else around. There's no settlement. You can't see anyone.

I should probably come up with a name for that sense memory essentially because it is from Kazakhstan to Burundi. There are all places all over the world I experienced that and that is one of my favorite experiences. I appreciate that. It doesn't involve any people and I have gone on about how the things that I've loved most about these trips have been people, but to have a single experience played out again and again and again to be...

Chris Watson (01:05:23.246)
So similarly enjoyable and yet in such different settings has been particularly enjoyable. Fantastic. Is there any unrealized adventures, anything that's on your horizons that you can talk about? Yeah, well, I won't go into it in detail now because there's still a few sort of details to be finalized. But in a few weeks, I'm off to West Africa on the bicycle you see behind me.

which I'm trying to keep out of the girlfriend's way by having in my office. And yeah, I'll be, I'll be riding for a few weeks around West Africa. So that's next. But for unrealized journeys, a list as long as my arm really, there's plenty of ideas of things I would love to do. You know, whether I will get around to, you know, many or half of them or whatever, just depends on, you know, time, health, budget, et cetera.

Can I ask what happened to old Jeff? That's not old Jeff behind you, is it? No, old Jeff actually sadly was stolen in Cape Town. So while I was still on that journey, he had held out well for three and a half years. He was stolen, but I was sort of donated a bunch of old bikes by none of them, particularly rideable in Cape Town. And so I, with help, built a bicycle and that.

managed to get all the way back to the UK and then was stolen in London a few weeks later, which happens. It was fairly unreadable by that point anyway. Yeah, so that was the outcome of old Jeff. Okay, so thanks, Charlie. We're coming up on time. So I want to move into our two closing traditions that we've got in this show, one of which is a call to adventure. And it's an opportunity for the guest to give a suggestion of an activity.

place or a person or something, a call to adventure to get people inspired and go and get away from the screen and do something fun. What would your call to adventure be? Well, I mean, quite simple really. I would say, I mean, for one, read. You know, read travel books, read, I mean, novels are of course are wonderful escapism, but

Chris Watson (01:07:39.342)
read nonfiction alongside novels, and it doesn't need to be travel books, it doesn't need to be adventure books. If you want those, then I have very good books available for you. But no, reading is just a great way to, I suppose, get a sense of the rest of the world to help foster the understanding of how the universals, the positive universals of humanity and then the interesting differences.

And besides that, I would say, sorry about that. Besides that, I would also say that talk to strangers. And if you are a child listening to this, don't necessarily talk to strangers right away. But one of the things that I've most relished and probably have taken away from the trips I've been on is the habit of being that person on the train, for instance, who just starts talking to the person next to them.

And maybe three times in four, you'll piss people off. You'll speak for two minutes, not piss people off, mildly irritate people. You'll speak for two minutes and that's that. But the other one time in four will easily make those three slight awkwardnesses worthwhile because you'll, you'll get chatting, you'll meet people, you get to know people and they won't necessarily be from the same town at the end of the line that you're going to. they may well be from, you know, the far side of the country or the far side of the world or the far side of the town that you're going to that you never would have encountered anyway. so yeah.

chat to strangers, open conversations, you know, even if it does just start with the weather as it always inevitably does. Fantastic. Most people have something interesting to tell and it's better than striking up a conversation with someone. Excellent. Fantastic. Any books that you would recommend other than your fantastic, well, I haven't read your second book, to be fair as I can, I don't want to be here, but yeah, other than this, what would you recommend?

I'm a huge fan of the travel writer Redmond O 'Hanlon. He is a very different type of traveler to me, but he goes off on madcap journeys for which he, by his own admission, is woefully ill -suited to. He's a sort of bookish don of ornithology, I remember, I think. As a university, I think somewhere in Oxford he lives.

Chris Watson (01:10:04.846)
And he'll go charging off into the jungle in Borneo or Congo or wherever, or go aboard a trawler ship in his late 60s in the North Sea in rough seas for several days and kind of struggle to live and observe the life of trawler men. And he's hilarious and he's got a wonderful eye and I suppose empathy for the people he writes about and encounters. I'd also say.

Well, I should know that. I'll leave it at those. Those are fantastic. Excellent. Thank you. We'll check that out and get it listed. And then finally, the final tradition is pay it forward. So a suggestion for a worthy cause or project that you would like to raise awareness of, what would your pay it forward suggestion be? Well, I think anytime, but especially now, I mean, often when you think of important causes,

You try and think of ones that are the most opposite, the most important, the most universal, and there's nothing I can think of that is more universally important than MSF, Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors Without Borders. The world sadly in so many areas is sort of not improving currently. There are so many active conflicts around the world, not least new ones in the last couple of months.

And MSF are always there, absolutely on the front line, risking their lives to save people, regardless of who those people are, what side those people might be on. And so I've never really come across a better, more universal cause. Fantastic. Yeah. Doctors without borders. Excellent. Thank you, Charlie. And I couldn't agree. I couldn't agree more. Yeah, I could not agree more. I've had that come up a couple of times recently, particularly because of the...

the recent conflict in the Middle East as well. So anything universal that people can do, it's very universal. So anything they can do because they are active in that conflict zone at the moment. Thank you. It's been epic, Charlie. I've thoroughly enjoyed this. Hopefully it hasn't been too onerous me throwing questions and.

Chris Watson (01:12:24.974)
Very inquisitive. I've thoroughly enjoyed your audiobook, including your accents as well. They bring in the characters. Let's not talk about those. Go on, give us your best Scottish accent. That's one that I would not dare do on a podcast. I struggle with accents a lot. I'm very aware that the audiobook, there's plenty of little Easter eggs for people who like a badly done accent.

Yes. Yeah, I recommend the audio book. Thank you, Charlie. That's been a pleasure. Where can people find out all about Charlie and his adventures? My website is cwexplore .com and my Instagram and Twitter handles are both at cwexplore. So those are the best places to check out what I'm up to. Excellent. Thank you, Charlie. It's been a real pleasure. Thanks very much, Chris.

Thanks for tuning in to today's episode. For the show notes and further information, please visit AdventureDiaries .com slash podcast. And finally, we hope to have inspired you to take action and plan your next adventure, big or small, because sometimes we all need a little adventure to cleanse that bitter taste of life from the soul. Until next time, have fun and keep paying it forward.