Our guest today left college and made a career out of becoming a round the world adventurer… not very environmentally friendly you might think, but bear with us.
Alastair Humphreys has walked across India, cycled from England to Capetown, spent six weeks on the frozen Arctic Ocean, canoed 500 miles down the Yukon and so much more. But it is only since he stopped doing all of that that he has been recognised by National Geographic, because one day, as he was cycling around the world, as you do, he had an epiphany.
Aliser would it be right to call you an adventurer is that how you would describe yourself it sort of depends what company I’m keeping but yeah that’s probably a good start okay good and we’ll come on to more sustainable issues and all of those things later but tell me a bit about
Your story from the start because I mean you were a mega Adventurer weren’t you you you went from a point in your life of not exactly knowing what you were going to do with yourself to getting on a bike first sustainable move I have to
Say y so tell us about your early days so my early days I I grew up as a kid in the Yorkshire dalees nice normal happy running around climbing up trees sort of childhood but nothing particularly adventurous and then um I spent most of my time at University not doing any work
But mostly reading books about adventures and Expeditions and exploration and and that’s got me intrigued to have a go myself so when I uh graduated I um got on my bike and I set off to try to cycle around the world and I was away for over four years
Cycling 46,000 miles through 60 countries uh Crossing Oceans by boats around an airplane and the whole four-year trip cost just under £7,000 I my entire life savings what’s in what’s interesting about that with the relevance said that I thought you were going to say my entire student loan
The the relevance I guess of of this today is interesting to think that in all those four years going around the world bicycle boats no airplanes not once did I think oh this is a good environmentally friendly adventure and not once did anyone ever
Say that to me and that was uh 20 years ago so it’s interesting how the conversation has evolved since then and then since then my Adventures have gone ever smaller since then so I I for for a few years I still did big stuff so I I
Walked across Southern India um I rode across the Atlantic Ocean walked across the empty quarter desert um played my violin very badly through Spain to busk for some money despite not being able to play the violin so some sort of Big Adventures then I started going smaller
Um you had an epy didn’t well you had an epiphany moment I yeah pause because in the middle of that between macro and micro Adventures there was a bit of an epiphany tell me about that well I started to think that I I love these Big Adventures and I’d encourage anyone
Who’s lucky enough to have the opportunity to go do some massive Adventure but I realized that there’s a quite a difference between people who enjoy hearing about Big Adventures or reading books about them which is loads of people and then there are far few people far fewer people actually doing
Them and that of course is because of real life money family time jobs all that sort of stuff so I started trying to work out if there was a way to get some of the fun and the benefits and the just the great stuff you get from um
Traveling in the outdoors into a smaller more packageable way that people could fit in around their busy everyday lives um and that led me onto an era of what I call Micro Adventures so just trying to find short simple local alternatives to Adventures essentially sleeping on Hills
Uh riding your bike at the weekend jumping in rivers all that sort of stuff and I’ve been doing that for for years now trying to encourage lots of other people to get out and have Micro adventures and it was really being a dad that brought you to that
Point yes so that so there was there was a sort of realization that um I’d like to try and help other people to have the adventures that I was doing and then Along come um comes real life for myself as well so uh having kids and then suddenly um the possibilities for just
Gallivanting off for years on end go but I but in my heart I was still this adventurous free spirit so I had to try and find a way to combine being an adventurous free spirit guy but also a good present stay atome dad and I love
That I mean I’ve heard you describe that story where the tears just suddenly came out of me like this this Rift was obviously going on this little battle internally for a while almost Without You realizing it right yeah I think because I guess when I was in my early
20s dreaming of Big Adventures I sort of set these rules for my life for my life to be successful and meaningful to me I need to be doing tough difficult Adventures to prove whatever to myself and to feel that I’m fulfilled as a person and I kind of kept those rules
For life going um for a long time without really evolving them and then when I was a dad obviously life is quite different but I was still trying to live in this way that I’ve been doing for years and there was a real internal conflict between the two and eventually
I realized that something I had to give I could either be an amazing go off around the world Adventurer or I could be an amazing stay-at-home dad I couldn’t really be both and the choice when you see it like that is pretty clear pretty obvious so hence the micro
Adventures I I’ve still got this itch to be out in the wild let’s go sleep on the hill once all the kids are asleep for the night and then get home in time for breakfast that sort of thing and I love the way that you describe it as um
Particular when you tell that story because I was I was I was watching your stuff online when you tell that story about you had this moment and then all the tears came out and you decided actually this is my real life real life is family real life is home and I love
The way that you describe that and I think we all have these different chapters in our lives you know we go from that young free single what’s it going to take to build me up and you know what do I want to do and it’s all
About me and then suddenly we grow up and it’s not all about us anymore a very different world isn’t it and so what I’m getting out really is this new sense of the reframe that you did of okay well then what now is an adventure now I’m I’m thinking about
Other people thinking about the people I love what now is an adventure and it’s not what we think it is necessarily yeah or or it can be lots of different things as well as what you naturally think it is so I I definitely began my adventuring with quite an
Elitist mindset of I want to go out and show that I can be tougher than you and I can do something that you can’t do and that then will make me feel better about my own inadequacy so there’s a lot of that sort of Macho proving myself to
Myself stuff but a really um cathartic and interesting Adventure experience I had was when I um it’s about it’s my final big adventure really I decided to follow the root of um Lori Lee Lori Lee a travel writer in the 1930s walk through Spain playing his violin and
It’s a book that I’ve always loved um and I’ve always dreamed of doing that trip myself but I can’t play the violin literally can’t play the violin and the idea of trying to busk in public just fills me with Terror and horror um but I I realized that these Big Adventures
That I’d been doing for quite a few years were in some way my own version of a comfort zone my own routine and rut I knew I was good at that sort of stuff and perhaps if I wanted to be adventurous what I really needed to do
Was get out of my comfort zone again and do something that was new and uncertain and risky and with a high chance of failure but tantalizing thrilling possibility of success and what that meant at this time of my my life was not to cycle thousands of miles it meant to
Start violin lessons and then after just six months of violin lessons when I was still incredibly useless at the violin I uh spent a month following Lor Le’s route through Northern Spain with no money no credit card and just having to stand in V thinking you know if I want
To buy some bread today I’ve got to stand in this Village Square and until I earn a coin it was an exercise in vulnerability and and facing your fears admitting your weaknesses and just going for it and that broaden my definition of what is Adventure considerably because the adventure on
That trip wasn’t the walking 500 m and sleeping in the mountains and and cooking on Fires all that sort of stuff I’ve been doing for 20 years the adventure was just daring myself to just expose myself internally I suppose and just dare myself to try and play the
Violin to earn a banana well and you really get to see I mean frankly I have had children of mine learning the violin it’s not pleasant and it it can push you right over the edge I was amazed imag you got but I can imagine that you got to
Get you know you you got to get a good insight into people and are they paying you to stop at that point I think they might be I to give you an idea when I came home having having played for hours every day for
The month I was out there I still had to keep practicing in order to sit my grade one music exam me and a room full of six-year-olds so I really was absolutely useless but so it was fascinating just the generosity and the kindness of strangers who were support me perhaps
They were paying me to shut up but they were just being kind they saw that I was having a go I suppose and were willing to just throw a little gesture of kindness that way and then carry on with their day so it’s a lovely positive human experience as well and your
Adventuring wasn’t stopping there um and in fact you still had the great honor of becoming National Geographic adventurer of the year ahead of you even though everything’s scaling down scaling down scaling down how I’m guessing they didn’t give you that for the violin well so they actually the
National Geographic award which just was thrilling to me that came actually for the micro Adventures for trying for doing all these really short Small Things encouraging people to get out and sleep on the hills and go do stuff with their kids at the weekends um and it was
Interesting because I spent years trying to be like this big tough guy the new rold finds nobody cared at all the world’s got enough people like that in we got load of them and then yeah exactly there’s thousands of people like that um and I was dreaming of that no
One cared and then suddenly I start going on sleep on a little Hill in the suburbs outside London and I get this incredible Accolade so I felt a bit of a fraud but it was also really nice to realize that um you can do something useful here by just trying to encourage
Other people to get Outdoors as well and get out into nature and connect with nature and spend time with their family and their friends and get some EX and get off their phones and all this good stuff that can connect with just adventuring and were those the factors that National Geographic considered when
They were you know was that what they loved yeah they they really have got better things to look at than someone sleeping on a hill in Su for the night but so so what what it was was it was the community explorers are the cream with the crop aren’t they and you know
So it’s a huge Accolade yeah it was it was fantastic so really was for the the community building side of it I spent a lot of time uh trying to build up um Facebook groups around the country where different groups of people would meet up and go and do adventures together
Because it can be a bit um nerve-wracking to go do something like this if you haven’t done it before so um some Facebook groups and Community groups and um H the Micro adventure hashtag was really useful because I could see them what other people have been doing and then amplify it through
My channels which is really helpful for show showing other people that it wasn’t just this middle class white guy doing this sort of stuff it was uh women and young people and old people and families and blah blah blah blah blah and and once you see other people like you doing
Something it becomes much easier for for you to do that thing too agreed and I think there’s an adventurous soul in all of us actually I think it is part of Being Human um very often and and I want to call you back to this word connected
It’s very often that part of us we’ve disconnected from I’ve been exploring some of that in my writing work um but we’ve also disconnected so much from the natural world and obviously that part that part of the cycling Expedition the foure cycling Expedition that part wasn’t really in your brain as you
Honestly said when you set off and nor was it in our our Collective Consciousness really but but a very different scenario now I mean looking back to to those four years and the years afterwards where you were exploring and adventuring what do you think you gained from because
Undoubtedly you must have had a greater connection with nature so what what what I when I think back to four years in my 20s cycling around the world I was outside for 24 hours a day for weeks on end and that’s just and living an incredibly simple
Life just ride your bike put some tent put up your tent eat some pasta watch the sunset watch the stars go to bed repeat if it rains you get wet if it’s if it’s windy you get blown around so I think that real immersion in a simple
Life out in nature um deep down just got me really passionate about wild places but I didn’t really care about nature particularly much I loved being in these wild places but I didn’t sort of make any connections and and that was a fantastic accidentally uh Eco Adventure
But after that then I happily just started jumping on jet planes and flying off to Adventures i’ flew off to the desert I flew off to near Greenland I was just loving it going to these wild places like a lot of adventurous people do and I was having a whale of a time
Going off to all these parts of the world um and gradually making it my job um and it was really um only as the as the years went by alarmingly recently really I mean within the last decade that I started to think hang on maybe flying around to all these wild places
And claiming to love wild places there’s some sort of jarring disconnect here might it be actually the case that if I love these wild places so much I should try and protect them by not flying off to them and that started to get my small little brain woring about the the impact
Of Adventure and travel I think a lot of us who we love travel we love nature we love these wild places we’re the ones who are wrecking them as well and that’s a discomforting thought I’ve been writing a book called wild woman and I had a really interesting
Conversation with a a woman who was a conservationist in Africa uh along the same lines and she said there’s a point where I realize I don’t need to be there in fact it’s better if I’m not you know right in in the forest um and I don’t need to see all of these
Animals to know she has seen them of course cuz she’s you know she’s older she’s had an amazing career but you know she said I don’t need to keep seeing them to remind me that they’re there to remind me that I need to do the work to
Help and in fact you know helping is not being there and of course it’s it’s a real disjunct isn’t it because like you said the human that evolved to be in those wild places responds and loves and even if it’s cold and windy you’re still living right you’re still out there
Living doing what humans have evolved to do from for millions of years but at the same time we need to start getting above and beyond that and really you know being thoughtful about our impact so what what do you do there you are with all of these amazing instincts you know to get
Out and feel it all and then no I’m not going to do that anymore how do you still satisfy that part of you because you I’m still not sold on Micro adventure go and camp on a hill sell it you’re not okay sell it to me okay I can
Sell this to you so one one thing that one thing that I I’m going to make some suppositions about you but I imagine you like being in Wild places you like nature you maybe like getting some doing some physical exercise getting a bit of get the blood going a little bit you
Maybe get a bit frustrated life bit annoyed at boring stuff at home and emails emails and and just and maybe you just want to go Howl at the Moon every so often so maybe rather than getting too bogged down by the 9 to5 grind 9 to5
9 to5 grinding us all down maybe what you need to do is one day um at 5:00 pm think about what opportunities for adventure can still fit around your busy working day and then you pack a little ruck sack um and a little sandwich or whatever you fancy for your tea maybe a
Small little bottle of mini bottle of wine if you wish and then you head out to somewhere near you because I can guarantee that Within half an hour of where you live will be some beautiful little woodland or a nice Hill or somewhere the great view or the
Seaside or something and then that’s it you’re out in nature you turn off your phone for the night you sleep out Under the Stars this story doesn’t work very well if it rains it’s a lovely clear night the stars are fantastic and bright you wake up with the tweeting of the
Birds at Sunrise uh you make yourself a little coffee on your camping stove maybe run down the hill jump in a river if you dare jumping in a river is always good for the soul back on the train bus bike whatever back to your desk ready for your next 9:00 a.m. podcast
Interview the next morning perhaps looking at little bits of sleep disheveled and the old Twigs in your hair but at least then when people say to you oh Philip have you done anything interesting recently for once you don’t have to lie and pretend to have done all
Sorts of exciting stuff and you can say yes I had a Micro adventure and I can guarantee that in a year from now you will remember that as being a memorable experience so it’s about trying to squeeze in all those things wildness and slowness and simplicity and nature in
Amongst the framework of busy life does that sound interesting or does it still sound ter it okay you sold it don’t do it when it’s raining the dipping in the the dipping in the water thing you always do feel like you’ve interacted with the world with a bit of wild
Swimming as we as we like to call it in this country normal swimming is what most countries call yes exactly but that I think though that’s a really interesting point the fact that in recent years while swimming has become quite popular swimming in rivers and and it’s become quite trendy
And you can read endless Guardian articles about it but the fact that we call it wild swimming and somehow that has to be differentiated to going to a blue chlorine rectangle full of Wii that we’re so disconnected from nature that it seems like an unusual and striking
Thing to do so yeah I’m a big big fan of wild swimming or swimming and it gives you that dopamine I mean you know from a from a purely evolutionary point of view we’re dopamine Seekers on the whole we need a little bit of that and we you
Know we traditionally did get it out in the wilderness so there’s a is’s a really interesting element to all of our Evolution I think there’s an old travel writer called der L Murphy she was one of my early Inspirations she was a tough old Irish woman and she cycled from
Ireland to India in the 1960s when it was a pretty rare thing to do carrying a pistol and she had all sorts of crazy Adventures and she’s written 20 travel books of crazy Adventures but one Line’s always struck me which is that she didn’t always want to go for a swim but
She never ever regretted having a swim afterwards so I I bear that in mind a lot and there’s a lot of um a lot of things are solved by a quick Plunge in a chilly bit of water done safely of course oh I like the sound of her you’ll
Have to send us um some information on her books okay yeah Dera Murphy she also she’s a lovely old lady yeah we we’d like that and then we can put we can post them and everyone can have a have a good read I’m guessing are they still in
Print oh the books are very much still in print I’m slightly can’t I slightly think she died about a year ago but her books are very much still in print and I’m sad I’ve never met her because uh actually actually I think she has died
Because I I was I remember being sad not to have met her she was a tough Irish lady you like drinking Guinness very non nonsense adventuring but yeah very much still impr print and the thing about adventuring is is it is akin to our link
To Nature to our need now to think more sustainably um so your micro Adventures of course are not just about being close to your family and those practical measures and fitting it into our 9 to-5 day but they are also so much about how do we make ourselves
Sustainable yeah very much so um and then again in terms of the timeline of all these things so when I started micro adventuring in about 2010 that was not on my radar one bit um but within the within the time since I’ve been doing micro Adventures that’s become
Increasingly apparent to me how yeah this is a really good way to live and to connect um and actually I’ve moved over the last year a step even smaller than micro Adventures to a year just exploring the single local map that I live on um going out once a week to
Explore really locally just trying to encourage more people to search for nearby nature and Tiny pockets of wildness and to try and build that into a regular routine rather than just thinking when I get to my holidays in a couple of months we’ll go for a nice
Walk in the countryside on our holiday that’ll be great um I think trying to find nearby nature is a way to find it literally in your lunch break today to go find somewhere close to where you live you’ve never seen before never paid attention never slowed down to be
Curious about the random little plants growing in the corner um in the same way that is you know if we found ourselves in Sydney we’d get out our guide book and our map and we’d say oh go we got two weeks what we going to go and see
And I love that you know you’ve done you’ve you’ve really formalized it haven’t you you’ve taken a section of the map around about where you are and encouraging other people to do the same thing how does it work how how big how big an area are we looking at yeah so
First of all I’m I’m so glad you said that about going somewhere and getting the guide book I I think a key key thing to being a local Explorer is is to remember how curious and fascinated You Are by every aspect of daily life when you go off to some distant exotic Place
Everything in life is just fascinating and crazy and stimulating isn’t it but when you come home uh home boring and then you put your blinkers on and you switch off so well also when you’re a grownup there’s loads of jobs to do there tons of jobs to do so you don’t
Really think in the same way as you do on holiday when you’re just staying in a hotel and there’s going to be dinner cooked somebody’s going to do the washing up that’s not me and somebody else is already washed the bed that’s not me you know all of those
Jobs I’m not mowing the lawn at the hotel yes or even yes so yeah it’s a different we’ve got to get ourselves into a different mindset as well haven’t we yeah absolutely so then the structure of what I did was I bought the the Ordinance
Survey map for where I live you know the sort of maps You’ get if you’re going to go for a walking trip in the Lake District the whole country whole of Britain is covered by these maps and they wherever you live you can get the
Map for with your house on it and they measure about 20 the area is about 20 kilomet by 20 kilometers so pretty small local area um You probably generally think you know the area quite well it’s divided the maps are just divided up into 400 kilometer grid squares so
Little grid squares of 1 kilometer by 1 kilm kind of small little area and my plan was to spend a whole year only exploring this map to not go off adventuring far and wide to try and contain my wust and get to know the town a few miles down the road that I’ve
Never been to as well as I might know usbekistan or Alaska so every week I went out to explore one grid Square on this map chosen at random and to try and see everything in it one kilometer by one kilometer to see every footpath every street every behind the factory
Every bit of Woodland just to see everything and to slow down and try and notice the nature was there and find interesting stuff and I worried at first that this might be quite a boring idct I live just in suburbs outside the city not very interesting but I soon realized
That actually there’s so much in one kilometer if you slow down and start to pay attention to it and what were the nicest discoveries do you think well something that helped me enormously was I have an app on my phone called seek it’s made by by ey
Naturalists and you point your phone at a plant or an insect or whatever you find and it tells you the name of it and so this for the first time in my life really started to educate me about nature so rather than just thinking oh there’s some random plants uh i’ now
Started to learn their name and once you know the name of something you start to connect to it a bit more and care about it and then you see it again and again and suddenly you start to get some sort of ownership of where you live so I
Really enjoy you think oh it grows in kinds of places you know like see in old factory sites and things like that you know oh that’s where this one I see it quite often in this kind of situation and but what you said there leads me on to you you asked what what
Was some sort of surpris I like what I discovered I loved was the the sort of rundown Factory Wasteland stuff the sort of things that you just zoom by in the car and think that’s bit ugly these became my favorite places to wander around the back of places the sort place
I never normally go and to see the bud the wild plants the trees pushing through broken tarmac and it gave me a lot of Hope really for reing like wow if you just do nothing for nature step back it comes back on its own and this got
Made me really hopeful that if we don’t mess things up too much then nature is incredibly resilient so I I came to love those dirty scuzzy broken down sort of Landscapes and finding the Beauty and the wildness within those places do you take a camera with you
So another aspect of me trying to make myself slow down generally I’m just quite hyperactive and I tend to charge around everywhere and but the more I could slow and pay attention the more interested everything was so a way I helped myself do that was by taking a
Camera with me not just not my phone because I wanted to be on my phone as little as possible an actual camera and then I would try to take lots of beautiful pictures every week and I tried to find the beauty in everything whether that was a a burned out car or
Some graffiti or some smashed bottles or some beautiful snow drops or or the bud of flowers so yeah photography was a big part of making me pay attention and appreciate I mean I think that’s one thing that we weirdly we’re not hardwired always to do we have to remind
Ourselves you know whether it’s because you we’re thanking a God or we’re thanking you know whatever the universe or but but appreciation is something we don’t automatically always do isn’t it yeah and for me personally that was a really important aspect of it that exact
Word CU I don’t really like where I live I wish I lived in the the mountains or by the coast with surfing or some all I spend a lot of my life wishing that I was elsewhere was one of my traits and so this was a exercise in just
Appreciating this is where I am and actually there’s some cool stuff here there’s lots of there’s history there’s nature there’s all sorts of things so I can appreciate what is here rather than lamenting or about all that is not here so that was a big part of it was slowing
Down and appreciating it and noticing the seasons moving on as well that was a really nice part of it it’s another shift of mindset it’s another reframe we’ve seen you reframe and reframe and reframe it’s another it’s another reframe and I’m interested to know what’s the reaction to this I mean
Obviously National Geographic had a very positive reaction to it but what you know from just a an interaction with with people point of view who’s interested who does it who you know yeah okay so well First National Geographic don’t know about me just now spending my days nosing around the back
Of Railway yard so this is a new this I have I’m yet to I’m well I’m yet to achieve a receive a a an award for this so but so in terms of so I’ve just been doing this just just this last year but um what I find
Is that people I thought when I had this idea that it was a sort of weird thing that I would enjoy but actually I found that talking to lots of people people thought oh yeah that’s a interesting idea oh I’d like to try that or oh I’ve
Done a little bit something similar to that I’ve walked around my town a little bit and so it does seem to be a bit more universally appealing perhaps even than sleeping on hills and jumping in cold Rivers is I think that and because I think a really good thing about this map
Is that you can see your map in whatever way appeals to you when I started exploring my map what I thought I was was going to do was micro Adventures version two here’s some fun ways to go hiking biking camping that sort of stuff fun adventure Al stuff but actually what
Interested me when I started to pay attention was the nature for the first time in my life was noticing wow this is how we use all our land wow we’ve got no nature left in this country wow our rivers are really polluted stuff that I sort of knew about of course but hadn’t
Viscerally come to care about or take ownership of but if somebody else went to explore their local that they might think wow there’s loads of historical churches around here or look at the history of the Railway arts or whatever so or the folk music on this place so
It’s about slowing down and finding what appeals to you and I think that’s something that anyone can find on their map if they slow down and concentrate is something that will spark your own curiosity have you had any nice feedback have you had people bring you some nice
Stories well I i’ I’ve written um a book about this that’s just coming out now and I just had my very first email feedback yesterday from a reader which is always an exciting thing and they said I’ve just started reading a book it might be a long time before I finish it
I almost threw it in the bin and uh this was a reader getting quite angry because I’ve talk about the way that we use our land for intensive farming and some of the problems that intensive farming lead to and uh he got a bit cross at me so my
First feedback was terrible so I don’t know if this is a good advert for me to persuade your readers to buy my book but uh I kind of actually like that because one thing I wanted to do is provoke people to realize some of the issues that our natural landscape faces and to
One once you once you know what’s happening then you of course can make your own choices what you do about that but I think I think it’s on upon all of us to be informed and then we can make our choices and I mean I’m guessing also
You could make a bigger project you know you get feedback good and bad obviously um when you write anything and put it out there but you you know with a lot of information potentially coming your way you could build quite a big profile o of the
Secrets yeah well I got I just got so fascinated with my map I would I I um would every week I’d go out and i’ take photos and then I’d write notes um I didn’t want to Google the not Google what I was Finding when I was out there
Because that would distract me so when I’d come home i’ then Google all the stuff that I’d found and just went down so many rabbit holes you know I learned about the maximum possible size raindrops can be and why they have this Limited in size I learned about the um
Different kinds of manhole covers and why they’re the different shapes just once you start to not everything has its sort of interesting things and then you can go diving down internet rabbit holes um my when I wrote the my book at first it was 250,000 words and I had to delete
150,000 words of it because it was just far too much random depth of information but but it it was interesting to do the research I became a curious Learner in a way that school and University never managed to make me just from going out there and being
Inspired and has this I mean we go back to uh real life as as you called it you know and I and the reason you gave out the macro adventuring have you managed to involve your son with this stuff yeah yes so I’m generally this the stay-at-home dad as
You’ll know Philip from finally delaying this podcast cuz I had to do one of those emergency runs to school to pick up a sick child so thank you we get it yeah so so another reason for doing this local Adventure was to how can I still get my nature and Adventure fixed whilst
Also doing all the real life stuff so generally I would do all of this during school hours U which is my uh my time of right drop the kid off run go see some wild Places come back write them up so but what we we do um we get out into
Nature as much as we can and we do fun adventure stuff but I equally I’m always at pains to point out that I just because I’m an adventurer I’m not some sort of uber super perfect naturalist parent and actually my kids would mostly rather spend all their days on fortnite
And Tik Tok so I’m deep in deep in that battle yes I mean we we would be showing ours you know wild otters out of the kitchen window and they’ be going can we go and play on the Wii now you know I mean and and you’re you’re thinking how is
This my child how can I but there’s got to be something right you’re planting seeds which I’m sure you do see you do see the fruition of that um and I think that it’s really important for all children to have access to some natural point near to them that they can
Experience um and and and certainly when it comes to caring about the natural world and how we move forward looking after it yeah it’s it’s and you read this terrifying statistics about children spending less time Outdoors than prisoners and um there’s a a another podcast don’t want I don’t want to
Advertise rival podcast on your show thous thousand hours outside it’s an American lovely lady in America who realized that kids spend a thousand hours a year on screen so she’s trying to get people to spend a thousand hours outside and the fact that I think when
You first hear that it’s like wow a th000 hours outside that’s a lot oh that’s going to be difficult and yet we all manag to spend a thousand hours a year on Instagram or something so this again this is a disconnect and one of the things I kept finding time and again
As I was um going around my map was realizing how many of the problems we face as a society come from not going to run around the woods enough there’s physical there the connection between say your physical health and mental health and spending time outdoors also just knowing about the wild places and
Therefore caring about them a little bit realizing that the way our land is used is is terrible for nature and that a lot of that is connected to what we eat and what we eat is connected to how our physical and mental health and round and
Round it all goes so um yeah I became quite passionate about just trying to get more people outside more often wherever you happen to live in whatever tiny periods of time you have in amongst all of your busy busy commitments of life and I love that you I I mean I love
Your story because you you know you’ve started as as this Adventurer but you know in your travels you’ve gotten to know yourself as a human and what you know those common qualities of what do we need and what do we love and what brings us out of our shell um and then
Board it home but also in you know what is that phrase that we were always told you know you can travel you can travel for as long as you like and then there countless fairy stories based on that idea of going out there but actually coming back to yourself and coming back
To your home and that being the Ultimate Adventure really because where you go you take yourself with you right yes yes so I think this I think part of my Big Adventures was running away from life and then yeah come home and as oh actually I was with me all the
Time so I didn’t man to escape from that and then uh my book about playing the violin through Spain I ended that talking about I’d gone all the way around the world to look for Treasure and realized actually it was right home with my family and then this this book
I’ve done now I started with that TS Elliot quote of the end of all our exploring is to return to where we started and know the place for the first time and that really resonates with me that I spent years thinking that if I want to have Adventure I just need to go
As far away from here as possible because home is so boring which is a fairly common trait for youngish people I guess and yet coming home to realize wow there’s so much right outside my front door that I’d literally never even noticed in my life before so
Maybe a single map is enough exploration for an entire lifetime who knows wonderful and inspiring us very much to Value what’s right outside there you know it’s not just all about the um the big species far away but it’s very often about what we’re doing and what we’ve
Got right outside our front door so thank you so much alist really appreciate your time and we’ll let you get back to your child thank you thank you for having me who came home early but it’s doing all right really aren’t they I suspect by the time
We’re off this podcast he might have made a miraculous recovery to be in front of his PlayStation is my prediction com home yeah nothing like a bit time off school to make you feel suddenly miraculously better exactly and who can begrudge a child a bit of that thank you I know