I’m 21 years old and I’ve wanted to be
an explorer since I was about seven so
over the last three years at University
I’ve gone on three expeditions to Norway
across India and to Sumatra I’m going to
be talking to you about those today so I
went to university to study biology at
Bristol when I was 18 and for a variety
of reasons i took a six-month dive into
depression but i managed to recover
towards the end of that first year and I
scraped through my final exams I got
forty percent that’s exactly the great
boundary to not retake so I was relieved
but I also needed to escape so I went
home and I booked a flight to norway I’d
come up this idea I wanted to cycle than
the far south all the way up to the
Arctic Circle this was a really stupid
idea
because I don’t cycle and because I’ve
given myself 24 hours until the flight
so one o’clock in the morning I’m
desperately trying to plan this route i
just finished packing i actually gave up
planning that route because i realized i
was going to the Arctic and it’s north
and you can just take a compass it’s
easy next thing I know I’m in Norway I
have a borrowed by 25 kilograms on it
and it’s got a broken rear brake but I
set off first day great second day bit
less great third day I got lost 80
kilometers in the wrong direction it was
raining constantly I finished with two
punctures and it went on like this one
day I would have a baby moves outside my
tent in the morning the next day it
would hail 48 hours the next day i would
have lunch of mountain and the next i
would cry my tent because i hadn’t
talked to anyone but a moose in a week
my mate Nico the guy left me the bike
came out five days for the end and after
a month we reached the Arctic Circle we
arrived past midnight that’s the winter
Sun those summer solstice 24-hour day
like that photo is at one in the morning
it was incredible and the next year at
uni went much better because I wasn’t
freaking out about what I was doing with
my life I was planning my next
expedition I’d come up this idea that I
wanted to walk across India and that’s
much bigger that was going to take three
months and I’d spent three weeks alone
in Norway and almost gone completely
insane so I put an advert on facebook
today I want to join me and this guy
Angus said yes because he thought it
we went very light we have those packs
45 litre bags there were seven kilograms
as you can see no tent we were eating by
the roadside eating rice cakes those
cost 20 pence we were living on 70 p
each a day this cell route once again i
was avoiding planning a route so we just
followed a river the kaveri river it’s
the southernmost of the great sacred
rivers in india someone once asked me if
you’re so bad at route planning how come
you get lost all the time my reply is if
you don’t plan a route it’s impossible
to get lost we started in the state of
Tamil Nadu at the end of a four-year
drought that is a river mouth that’s a
bridge in the background it was
completely dry it was 40 degrees in the
day three days in I got heat stroke so
we switched to walking at night it’s
great idea two weeks later we’re coming
down oops through these Boulder fields
and Angus taps me on the shoulder points
behind me and oh there’s a leopard so
for the next hour we were followed by it
down to these boulders and have got to
next village where we climbed onto a
roof and we spent the night leopard
activity did not stop there this route
has a fairly obvious kink in it that’s
not a straight way to walk across a
country we were trying to cross this
mountain pass up to my saw and just
fully arrived there was two fatal
leopard attacks this leopard was not
caught and so we switched from a
hundred-kilometer mountain route to a
400 kilometer detour which took us
through away from beautiful rural India
the ribbon that did now thankfully have
ordered it at into bangalore and
Bangalore is a 60 kilometer wide city it
took us five days to walk across because
we’re walking in this it was a nightmare
they don’t have catalytic converters on
the cars and India so it’s just coming
out the back you’re wiping it off you at
the end of the day and we are still
sleeping rough at this point
but from here it got much easier we
moved up into elephant forest it’s high
altitude it’s lovely it’s much cooler
that is an elephant footprint on our
first day out of bangalore the night
after this photo was taken we were
setting up our camp at the corner of
field in the distance we could see the
tree line and we’re just going to sleep
when these farmers come over and they’re
like oh you’re sleeping here I’m like oh
so you know sorry but we can move on
like reading find different field if
this is if this is an issue no no my
friend my friend of course not you know
very well can stay here I just wanted to
let you know that I came down last
tuesday at six in the morning and tiger
so he kept walking and we didn’t find a
village this time but what we did find
was a bus shelter an indian bus shelter
that brilliant their concrete 15-foot
tall tiger proof they’re all so
wonderful on top your lovely little
ledge as Angus with his phone and you
get a five-star hotel view from the top
of an indian bus shelter and yet fruit
bats in the morning from here we moved
up into the western ghats mountain range
on the west coast the monsoon hit at
this point how do you sleep outside with
no tent in a monsoon you don’t you go
and you get eaten by leeches but after
two weeks of this we did reach Cass
regard it’s a coastal town on the
Arabian Sea and we’d walked across India
it took us just over two months in total
India we faced some fairly sketchy
moments some moments when there wasn’t
anyone we could particularly ask for
help and there were fairly serious
consequences to making the right call in
those situations and when I try to
remember when i’m back in the UK is that
ninety percent the stuff that was
happening my third year at uni with
units and such like if i fail one of
those it’s not really a big issue I’m
not going to end up on the street I can
ask my tutor for help it’s like climbing
with the right versus climbing without a
rope the point isn’t that you can fail
so you should fail it’s that you’ll
climb much better with the Rope because
you push yourself right to the limit of
your ability and it’s no big deal if you
do mess up and most people don’t have
that safety net so I try to take it as
some sort of responsibility I have to
try and push myself because I can afford
to take those risks so norway was just
an adventure india we combined adventure
with complete submersion in a foreign
culture for three months I wanted to
bring in science so my girlfriend who’s
a biologist and I decided we would go to
Sumatra and we would conduct a
biological survey we got in contact with
local researchers and they said oh
you’ve got to go to this valley we’ve
been looking at for ages it’s 40
kilometers long we think there’s a rang
at Ang’s there no one’s ever been there
absolutely unspoiled pristine no
research we’re like brilliant started
trying to get permits two months I’ve
just constantly being denied we flew out
with no permits when we got there bad
news we got denied when we arrived and
the valley had been logged and it had
been poached the officials were in on
this and that’s why we’re being refused
research permits so we went to plan B a
friend of a friend was making the first
a sense of mountains in the province of
a che so a bit about HJ it had come out
of a civil war 30
long in 2005 the Civil War only ended
because of how many people died in the
2004 tsunami because of this the
mountains run client because of this the
forests are still pristine so we came up
with this plan with side and Roy what
we’d do is we’d walk out to an unclimbed
mountain climate and then come back and
on the way in we’d record data on the
way out we would record we would repeat
our data so we set off unlike India
you’ve got to carry everything in
because we’re in completely isolated
jungle we would bury it as we went if
you wonder how you find a buried bag in
a rainforest you don’t always we never
saw that bag again s’okay 25 kilogram
packs each waiting upriver for the first
three days it only gets really difficult
when you move off river this is sought
trainer in its crawling more than
walking it’s horrible you have to cut as
you go sort of thing it’s just a giant
bramble patch so machetes you’re hacking
through this stuff it’s rotten it’s what
a conservatory furniture is made of but
that’s the baby stuff this is the real
deal so stick as your family it’s
usually at eye level and I guarantee if
you slip in the mud and you reach out to
grab a nice handy branch it will be this
stuff water is another big issue it
rains a lot in the rain forest but
there’s a lot of leaf litter so it
drains way almost immediately and it’s
all sucked up by all the trees so you
dig for water the one on the this side
is our drinking water that side is our
kerosene for our camping fuel so all of
this we were doing 11 hours a day and we
were walking about 2.5 kilometers so
that’s some idea so all of this doesn’t
put in a very good mood to do data
collection but we did try and what we
did find was absolutely fantastic we
found I think over 50 bird species just
in the first week also by this point
about weekend we were in areas where
even the village hunters aren’t going so
if we go in a cave everyone has ever
been there before if we see monkeys
they’ll freak out and come and stare at
us for an hour because those monkeys
haven’t seen humans before absolutely
fantastic and after ten days we arrived
at base camp
where we’re setting up at a base mount
Couric herein lay a problem we had
planned for an equatorial country at low
altitude so we were wearing you know
shirts shorts no 10 no real reindeer and
base x 2500 meters it was five degrees
in the day I remember when I took this
photo I just come out in the morning I
find Roy by the fire I was like how’d
you sleep last night and he says I
didn’t i SAT and prayed for morning and
that was how it’s going to be for the
next week so the biggest issue are maps
I maps of the area were completely
inaccurate it turned out we only
realized that after about ten days
they’re off by a few hundred meters so
we’d expected a ridge going up to the
peak of a 3000 80 meter unclimbed
mountain what we got was a series of
vertical faces we couldn’t do it we
tried to find alternate route whilst
we’re doing this Roy well it was just an
awkward accident he was going to whack a
tree trunk with his machete and it
wasn’t a tree trunk it was a boulder
with moss on it and it worked back up at
him and it kind of got his finger pretty
badly Roy was then stuck at camp and
actually a moment on this ya boy is
devout Muslim and he despite this had
agreed to come with us even though it
was the middle of Ramadan so he wasn’t
eating or drinking in the day he wasn’t
taking painkillers in the day I was very
impressed he was sort of curled up by
the fire meditating but say dearest and
myself we decided to climb a neighboring
mountain mount lambert 3050 meters this
mountain is not own client we knew it
had been climbed before by colonial
dutch during the dutch attorneys war
almost 100 years ago and when we got to
the top we dug down to about a foot of
moss I found this this is a concrete
slab left by Dutch soldiers that says
March the 31st 1931 and we will have
been the first people to have found that
since they were there almost a hundred
years ago it’s fantastic what was more
fantastic
was the view that is 650 square
kilometres of pristine rainforest and
what’s even more brilliant about this
for me was that we just crawled on our
hands and knees and through thorns and
everything under the canopy you don’t
see this when you’re in a rainforest you
see all these beautiful BBC footage when
you’re actually there it’s dark and it’s
cold and it’s wet it’s horrible so you
need to be up high and suddenly this
just falls away in front of you it’s
fantastic they were Gibbons calling up
in the mountain below it was also the
first time I’d got signal in a week I
missed graduation to go to Sumatra and
my brother had texted me smiley face 21
/ sad face Rex it and I don’t care what
your political persuasion is but my
girlfriend Arastoo is with me she’s from
Austria and it was not fun to break her
that to her we won’t continue for
another month we walked down to the
Indian Ocean we were walking still
through RJ and just tiny bit more in
Aceh actually is ninety-eight percent
Muslim it has Sharia law and like said
just come out of a civil war in 2005 I
was genuinely scared before I went there
I ended up being a bit ashamed of how
scared I was because it was the
friendliest place I’ve ever been once we
came out the jungle we had three weeks
where every single night every village
we arrived at we’ve been invited into
someone’s home we’d be given food and be
welcomed into their family it was 100%
hospitality it was wonderful for me
waking up on an expedition every single
day I’m waking up with a purpose and
every minute of that day is purposeful
because I’m working towards that purpose
even if I’m just suffering along
staggering along as long as I keep
moving I’m just getting closer to that
goal and that makes you happy doesn’t
matter how horrible it is you’ve just
got this general background feeling of
accomplishment and it’s wonderful so for
me it’s not about when we talk about
purpose it’s not about finding some big
life goal what’s my overwhelming life
purpose that I aim towards it’s like
this misty thing off in the distance no
it’s about finding something you can do
every single day it gives you a sense of
purpose and a sense of accomplishment
and that’s what makes me happy but I
know what will make you happy so we
leave that with you and for now I’m just
going to keep going on expeditions thank you very much