The extreme Adventurer & three Time World Record Holder who walked breadth of Mongolia; entire length of Madagascar, summiting its eight highest mountains; & the whole 6,363 KM of our Yangtze River, on almost giving up 5 days into a 352 day walk, but after 2 years of planning; and being an inspiration to millions around the globe in overcoming adversity.
“Already at this point, I had lost seven or eight members of the team. [They were] were being evacuated; altitude sickness, finding out that there were bears or wolves, or injury or it was too cold. On top of that, I had been pulled in 3 or 4 times by the local authorities. It was dropping in to winter season, so it was minus 20 degrees Celsius; there were snow blizzards. I was at 5,100 metres altitude, I had a horse that I had to take with me because the film crew ditched me and left the horse with me. I had all of this and then… I was threatened with deportation.
“I remember being on the satellite phone to my dad, saying, ‘What am I doing, why am I doing this again?’. But I had no choice, there were too many people relying on me, too much hard work that had gone in to it; time and energy. But it was that point which I had never been at before; even catching malaria or even almost dying in the Gobi desert. … One world first is enough for most people, two is tough to find, and I was now suffering and struggling on a third. And I was like, ‘I don’t need to do this. Why am I here?!”.
“A parent from New Zealand contacted me and she said, ‘About 2 or 3 months ago, my little boy wrote to you on Instagram, saying he was following your Yangtze journey. It was quite a deep message’, and she was like, ‘I don’t know if you remember the message; you probably get messages all the time’. I remembered the message. And she said, ‘He didn’t expect you to get back, but you responded. And from that, he continued doing what he did a year ago, before he lost his dad’. She said that after he lost his dad, he went down a spiral; he stopped karate, he became bad at school and then, it got to a point where she found suicide notes which also contained pictures of how he was going to kill himself.
“And she wrote, saying, ‘You’ll never know this, but a few months ago, your message transformed him; he started karate, he started behaving at school; his life has become brighter because of it’. And that I think is the deepest one.
“Other ones I’ve had are from people wanting to get out there and adventure more, wanting to pursue their goals. I’ve had people wanting to quit their job to pursue their passion and try to make that a bit of a career. I’ve had people just change their ways of living off the fact they heard one of my stories on the journey.
“People take from it whatever they want to take. I try to look at different angles, I try to make the story relatable to everyone; not just about one man walking. It’s just amazing to help people persevere; even some things simple like staying in university, finishing off their exams.
“I think it goes full circle. They see or hear the stories of mine that motivate or inspire them to do something, and they come back around eventually to tell me, which motivates me to continue what I’m doing which then motivates someone else.”
