In this opening segment of The Tyler Wagner Show, host Tyler Wagner (Speaker A) welcomes adventure travel writer Charlie Walker (Speaker B). Walker describes himself as an adventurer who spends 12–13 years exploring remote and challenging places worldwide, traveling by foot, horse, canoe, kayak, bicycle, or ski, then writing and speaking about those experiences. He recounts that at age 22‑23 he embarked on a four‑and‑a‑half‑year bicycle expedition covering roughly 43,000 miles across Europe, Asia, and Africa on a second‑hand bike. This extensive journey broadened his perspective and sparked his curiosity, leading him to abandon an unsatisfying job and turn adventure travel writing into his career. The host then asks Walker to share the toughest moments of that journey, setting up a discussion of hardships versus rewarding experiences.
All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode. Today we have Charlie Walker with us. So welcome to the show, man.
Oh, thanks very much. Thanks for having me here.
Of course. Grateful to have you on. I'm super excited for this one. So just to kick us off, can you tell us a little bit more about you and what you do?
Sure. I'm an adventurer or an adventure travel writer, I suppose. So I spent the last 12 or 13 years heading off to various interesting, weird, wild, and wonderful parts of the world. Um, often by quite sort of physically challenging means. So I'll travel by foot or horse or canoe or kayak or bicycle or ski, whatever really. Um, then I come back and I write about it and I give speeches about it, and that's me.
What was the moment that led you to, to do this?
When I was 22, nearly 23, I, um, set off on a bicycle, nothing special, an old bicycle I bought secondhand, from the UK, and I spent the following 4 and a half years cycling about 43,000 miles across Europe, Asia, and Africa. And that long journey just gave me such a kind of, um, you know, breadth of experiences and, and just further stoked my curiosity. So when I came back, I, I didn't find myself working too long in a job that I didn't care for before I started, um, you know, turning what I now do into my career.
On this first journey, was there any Was there ever moments where you, like, things got so rough or tough that you wanted to quit? And if so, what were some of those, like, worst moments? And then we'll go to the, to the better moments.
First particularly low period, um, was about 6, 6 or 7 months in, um, when I was crossing the Tibetan Plateau in midwinter. And, uh, the temperatures were, you know, they were down to the -30s Celsius. I, I don't know what that is, but -40 is where the two meet. So getting down to around about that kind of level, um, and I wasn't particularly well equipped. I didn't have the right kind of gloves, the right kind of boots, the right kind of sleeping bag, you know. I was, I was just wearing lots and lots of sort of basic thin layers. And, uh, there were a number of occasions where I, you know, was, was cold and fed up to the point of, no, I'm over this, I want to get out of here. I got lost in a blizzard one time where I, you know, became genuinely convinced over the course of a couple, well, an hour or so that I was going to die until I lucked out and stumbled upon some shelter. So yeah, the places where I most wanted to quit were usually the places where it was physically or mentally hardest, and that was often in the middle of nowhere. So be it up in the Tibetan mountains in midwinter or in the Sahara Desert in summer, or, you know, in jungle during the monsoon. And usually those places were the places where it was actually just logistically impossible to quit because I'd have to keep going for some time just to get to a point from where I could get out of there, where I could extract should I still choose to. And of course, every time you, you know, you hit your lowest ebb, a day or so later you realize that it's not all as bad as it was, and hopefully you start to rebound.
