Latest / Adventure Sports Podcast / Ep. 1145: Cycling Every Country in Africa in One Trip with Ron Rutland Revisited

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Ep. 1145: Cycling Every Country in Africa in One Trip with Ron Rutland Revisited · Adventure Sports Podcast

• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: your listening to the Adventure Sports podcast.
• 0:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: We talk with adventures from around the globe to give you the inspiration you need to get started in the outdoors or keep moving if you're already there.
• 0:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now here's your host, Kurt Lindville.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hello, Adventure Sports Podcast family.
• 0:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Today's episode is a revisited episode from 2021, Mason was the host, of course.
• 0:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Ron Ruddland is the guest, and he's talking about cycling to every country in Africa in one trip.
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: I can't wait to listen to it and I'm being really candid, I've not heard this one yet.
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm excited to listen to it as I produce it here and share it with you.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I wanted to visit with you a little bit about my own Averka Adventure.
• 0:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, I'm talking about the Kilimanjaro climb that's coming up in January.
• 1:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: We are climbing Kilimanjaro to raise money for We See Hope, which is a humanitarian organization that has been helping homeless children in Africa now for 25 years, and they have already impacted
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I made the announcement about this, a few episodes back.
• 1:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: The name of the episode is simply special announcement, Kilimanjaro, for we see hope.
• 1:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: I want to update you on the progress that we've made.
• 1:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the goal here is that everyone that is on this expedition to climb Kilimanjaro is raising $20,000 for we see hope.
• 1:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: each person and the goal was to have 15 climbers, so that's $300,000 for we see hope.
• 1:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I made the announcement about a week ago and we've even interviewed the founder of We See Hope, Phil Wall and I've shared all of that with you.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm very very thankful for the people that have given to this effort.
• 2:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I want to point out, none of the climbers are getting anything from this.
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you donate to this project, then,
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: We are not getting any of that.
• 2:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not paying our way to kill a manjaro or anything like that.
• 2:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everyone is self-funded to get there and to do the expedition.
• 2:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: All the money goes to we see hope to help these kids in Africa.
• 2:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm just going to be as open as I can.
• 2:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm struggling a little bit with this because I don't believe in guilt trips and I don't want this to be one.
• 2:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: I only believe in goals and aspirations and doing great things together and loving each other.
• 2:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's what this project is about.
• 2:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's about loving humanity, loving these kids who've got it tough in Africa.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I'm just gonna be completely open with you.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: One person from the Adventure Sports podcast family has donated thus far.
• 3:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are thousands of us in the Adventure Sports podcast family and I don't even know how many there are.
• 3:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I can see how many each episode get, 70 downloads, right?
• 3:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Each episode gets.
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I know that not everyone listens to every episode.
• 3:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I just know that there are several thousand of us and one person.
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I am very thankful for the person who donated, and I'm not really sure what this means.
• 3:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm kind of speculating here, the question is, this is an amazing cause, it's legit, it's the real deal, it's not like someone trying to scam people out of money, showing pictures of
• 3:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, I have vetted this organization and the work that they're doing, and having visited Africa, I know the need firsthand, I know it's real, I know it's a legitimate, and the question I have today is what is keeping people from becoming a part of this effort.
• 4:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: I can only speculate, obviously, but a few thoughts that have come to mind are, we used to be a giving society in the West, and specifically in the United States.
• 4:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: We used to be a giving society, and that was kind of tied into this idea that we were all in it together, and we were supporting each other through life, and I have some years on me now, and when I was a kid, that's the way it was.
• 4:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: People looked out for each other and gave and cared.
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: But in my life, I have seen so many times, you know, people taking advantage of others.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: There were lots of ads that showed starving children from around the world, and, you know, the money donated mostly went to some Swiss bank account somewhere.
• 4:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I get it.
• 4:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: There were lots of scams.
• 4:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was a lot of fraud, and that jaded people.
• 5:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then there were all the televangelists over the decades.
• 5:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's even dating me because it hasn't happened in a while, but the televangelists who just struggled and became very human and failed to be the upstanding people we would want them to be.
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they were on television.
• 5:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: trying to get people to give money, give money, give money, give money, and I just think we've become jaded as a society, but something else has happened.
• 5:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: We went kind of from a giving society to a very secular society who's very, very suspicious.
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I understand that because we've seen the scams, right?
• 5:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I thought, well, maybe that's it.
• 5:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe it's just that society has changed
• 5:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: or the other thing I thought of was, you know, there are all these memes about starving children in Africa, and I mean, we probably grew up with that, you know, it's like, oh, eat your food.
• 5:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, you're clean your plate because they're starving children in Africa.
• 6:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: What's crazy about that is that there are children in Africa that are seriously having a very, very rough go of it.
• 6:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we see hope is not a scam.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the real deal.
• 6:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're making a huge impact to help these kids.
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I see the whole human race together as one big family.
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then I started thinking, well, could it be that the listeners to the Adventure Sports podcast just don't have the means?
• 6:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then I realized I've interviewed a lot of people with the means.
• 6:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know that there are people out there who have the resources to make an impact in the world.
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then I started thinking about when I was in Africa and how the people in these villages would go to great extent to try to be generous with us.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I felt so guilty when I was there often because they would kill a chicken and make a special meal for us with ugali and chicken and so kuma wiki and and try and the fellowship you know the people getting together and learning about each other in the laughter and the smiles and
• 7:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: They gave out of their extreme need.
• 7:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: These are people that at the time were living off of a few cents a day, literally a few cents a day.
• 7:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And by killing a chicken, they were killing the source of the eggs that they might have to live off of, and they did this because they believed in being generous, being generous with people that they met along the way.
• 7:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I always thought, wow, their generosity, giving out of their need.
• 7:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was the culture that I found in Kenya, specifically in Africa.
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then I started thinking about the United States and our economy lately.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not going to ramble on about this much longer bear with me.
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening this far.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: but inflation has been horrible and that's not a political statement.
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's math.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Your money isn't worth as much as it used to be by a large margin.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's tough.
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: but that said, the United States is still the most affluent large country on earth.
• 8:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that as we are adjusting to this new economy here, people feel a lot of angst about, you know, debt, how much money they're earning, how expensive it is to live, and I get all of that.
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I totally
• 8:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then I remember the folks in Kenya who lived in little huts made of cow manure and clay and grass, who gave generously beyond their means out of extreme need, and I think, wow, what a contrast.
• 8:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: what a contrast.
• 8:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't really understand it.
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not going to pretend that I do and I'm not trying to say that it's wrong not to give or it's right to give or any of that sort of thing.
• 8:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm just being very open with you about this project.
• 9:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: One person is donated, and I'm so thankful for it.
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Others, people that I personally know have donated, and the goal remains unchanged.
• 9:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think a lot of people think that someone else is giving, or maybe they just think, well, I'll get around to that, and they have good intentions, but then it hasn't happened.
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I want you to know that I think the adventure sports podcast family is amazing.
• 9:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I believe that you are the movers in the shakers in the world.
• 9:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: We are the people that appreciate a simpler life.
• 9:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're the people that appreciate connecting with nature.
• 9:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're the people that appreciate adventure travel.
• 9:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And seeing how other people around the globe live.
• 9:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're the people that appreciate health.
• 9:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: and the thrill of adventure, whether it's rock climbing or motorcycle riding or bicycling all over Africa, we are the people that are more likely to connect with the reality of this world, and less with the hyperbole of the media.
• 10:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know about you, but if I think about an individual child living alone on the streets in some city in Africa, who is hungry and struggling and worried about safety and where to sleep that night and even how to stay warm, it can tell you folks, it gets cold in Africa.
• 10:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: The equatorial regions might be in the tropics, but they have elevation, it does get cold.
• 10:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, all of that said, I think about that child.
• 10:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: five, six, seven, eight years old, you know, maybe 10.
• 10:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I see a person that could use a leg up, you know, someone that could use a place to sleep and a meal and some education and a chance at life rather than just being a beggar on the streets.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when I see that person, I think that's worth doing something about.
• 10:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when you think about how little money it takes to change a life, just a few dollars can get
• 11:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: that child off the streets and into a caring environment.
• 11:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's what we see hope is about.
• 11:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I am all in.
• 11:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've been there.
• 11:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've seen the need.
• 11:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love the people.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm all in.
• 11:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that's the status.
• 11:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you want to learn more about it again in the episode that explains it all is special announcement, Kilimanjaro for We See Hope.
• 11:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: and that's where we are.
• 11:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: We are $11,000 the way there to our $20,000 goal.
• 11:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I still believe we're gonna make it.
• 11:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: People just need to know that the other person may not be taking action.
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: We individually have to make the choice.
• 11:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So thank you in advance for your love, your generosity, for what you're doing, for we see hope, making a difference in the world,
• 11:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm not going to delay this episode anymore.
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for your patience as well.
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: So here's Mason and Ron Rutland.
• 12:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: And as I'm talking to you, it actually reminds you.
• 12:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: A lot of people coming saying Ron, you know, I'm married with kids and I've got this business.
• 12:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, I'd love to do something.
• 12:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: What can you recommend?
• 12:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: And honestly, I think it's for some people.
• 12:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's jumping on your back and going for a three-day weekend.
• 12:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Saku, some of you need a Saku.
• 12:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: Gunsleep on a hill.
• 12:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: Just take a sleeping bag.
• 12:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: I sleep under a bush and a tree.
• 12:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: I got sleep on the beach.
• 12:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: hey folks welcome to the adventure sports podcast i'm your host mason gravely uh... you might hear it rain and outside it is absolutely pouring so if you can hear that my apologies crazy thunderstorm outside but today anyway to get into today's episode uh... you know if cycling africa
• 12:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: wasn't already on my list of adventures I want to do.
• 13:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: I would have absolutely put it on here.
• 13:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I'm actually going to double up and put it on again.
• 13:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is times two something I absolutely want to do after listening to Ron's story.
• 13:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's from South Africa and decided as a way to stop selling himself short and start doing something that he's proud of, something that seems out of his realm of possibility.
• 13:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Honestly,
• 13:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: was to bike to every single country on mainland Africa, which is 48 countries in total.
• 13:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: And if you're familiar with how large Africa is, you know this is no small task.
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, this was the very first time anyone had ever done this.
• 13:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it took over two years to hit all 48 countries, cycling a total of 26,000 miles.
• 13:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: He didn't finish with all of Africa.
• 13:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: He actually cycled to the UK to the 2015 Rugby World Cup to watch his team, the South African National Rugby Team play, Japan, unfortunately they lost.
• 13:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: So he bites all the way into the team lost, but he's made a habit of it.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: So for every World Cup, he cycles across continents to get their most recent one, with cycling across Europe and Asia for one of the Rugby World Cups.
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now he's doing it backwards.
• 14:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we're going to have him back on again, just to talk about.
• 14:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: What it was like to cycle across all of Europe and Asia as well.
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's such a great storyteller You know, it was an absolute pleasure being able to talk to them.
• 14:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that you know, no ads today So we're just gonna jump right into it.
• 14:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: So here is the interview with Ron Ron Rutland welcome to the show all my stuff.
• 14:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a great thrill for me So thank you so much and thanks for your patience.
• 14:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, as you say
• 14:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: I love my country, I love here in South Africa, but we do have our challenges and consistent power is one of them.
• 14:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: So thank you for your patience.
• 14:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, no problem at all.
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: So you know, we want to talk about one of your adventures, you've done other adventures, but I'd love to talk to you about one of your adventures is when you left on with the 30th of June 2013.
• 15:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Great.
• 15:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: So you're coming up on an anniversary of that.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: A good point.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah coming up I mean what is that seven eight years eight years not quite a decade, but still it's it's it's getting it's getting there You left Cape Town South Africa and is that where by the way, is that where you live right now?
• 15:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm not actually living cause it in a tell which is another province, so I live about 2000 kilometers from Cape Town, but I was living there for a few years.
• 15:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
• 15:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
• 15:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I tell you what, before we get into going into that story, tell us about where you grew up.
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: I usually always ask that person actually for God, but where did you grow up, where were you born and what kind of things did you do growing up?
• 15:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so Mason, I'm a born and breed South African.
• 15:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: I was born just outside the city of Durvin, which is the third biggest city on the East Coast of the country.
• 15:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: A beautiful tropical part of the world.
• 15:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: And my parents are actually both born in the UK.
• 15:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm a first generation South African, but I do feel 100% South African, it really is my blood and Spain's all my former two viewers in the country.
• 16:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: And growing up, I was a very keen sports person.
• 16:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: I played a lot of sports.
• 16:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: And my main sort of, you know, the sport that I excelled at the most, I guess, was rugby.
• 16:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, there's always a bit of a bigger bloke, and it's a sport that lends itself to...
• 16:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a place for everybody from the small skinny, fast people to the short fact people, to the tall fact people.
• 16:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: It really is a sport for all.
• 16:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, and it's a South African, it's a...
• 16:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: If you're a young South African male, it's kind of inevitable that you are going to play rugby, so I really enjoy it.
• 16:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: And yeah, which government school, a state school, just outside Derby, and a school called Westfall, I went to the same school my whole life.
• 16:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: And my parents never really had the desire, or frankly, the means to see the world.
• 16:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: So at the start, they were coming from the UK.
• 16:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'd never been able to see growing up.
• 16:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: We didn't do much travel.
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: We didn't live a very adventurous life growing up.
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I guess, I didn't know much different though.
• 16:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it wasn't that I was unhappy or anything.
• 16:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's just that we're in a disaster to see the world came
• 17:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, a lot of people are born with it and I think if you ask a lot of kids, they sort of, you know, love the idea of travel and adventure, things like that.
• 17:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I was just lucky enough to have it somewhere deep in my DNA.
• 17:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: When did you start getting into these massive adventures that you're, that you're doing now?
• 17:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mentioned for me, it was a bit of a mid-life crisis, I guess.
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: I was 38 years of old when I went a box of a trip from Cape Town.
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: So once I finished university,
• 17:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: I ended up working in Hong Kong and Thailand and the UK for many years, but I ended up working in finance and banking for my sons.
• 17:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, really something that I wasn't suited to.
• 17:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's kind of just, you know, I found myself falling into this career, and it seemed like a comfortable path.
• 17:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: A lot of my friends were into it.
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, it seemed like the world, the world, child and part.
• 17:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: But deep inside me, of me, I always had this desire to go and do a bigger, very short, big travels.
• 17:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it was actually moving back to Cape Town,
• 18:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's when things thought to slowly change.
• 18:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'd never lived in Cape Town before, but if there's a fantastically beautiful city, it's got table amounts in which it's fantastically well-known.
• 18:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the friends and the group of the circle of people that I came in sort of contact with and hung out with, a lot of them were into the trail running and mountain biking.
• 18:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I guess for me it was inevitable that I got sucked into that world of endurance sport.
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I say sport, you know, for me, I love just taking part.
• 18:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: I was never going to compete, but for me it was always think of myself as attractive as a Ferrari.
• 18:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, I'm a big guy when I found out I had a, I could tick over for a long time.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I'd go on these long slow rides or these long slow hikes.
• 18:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: It was a wonderful way to explore one new part of the world.
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: And as the more hung out and he's kind of circles, I started meeting some people.
• 18:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: They've done some pretty big adventures in their own rights.
• 18:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: I started meeting some adventure races.
• 18:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: I started meeting some people that had done some pretty big cycle trips around the country and up the east coast of Africa.
• 18:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I started looking at these people and I started realizing, you know what?
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: that tunnel these creative ventures and me, is that those people that made the decision to do it.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: And for 38 years of my bloody life, I've looked at these people of a lack of these people, I've gone, you know, they must be stronger, they must be richer, they must be brave of them me.
• 19:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: And yet it was so simple, the answer was sitting right in front of me, the only difference with these people had their dreams and ready to start to do them, and I'd always find excuses.
• 19:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: So once I started starting getting into the mountain biking and I started meeting these people,
• 19:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: It sort of thought I had the sort of slow realization that if I put my mind to it, I could actually do something myself.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so that was it.
• 19:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I took out the map of Africa and I looked in an afternoon of cycle from Cape Town to Kara, the East Coast of Africa.
• 19:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a relatively well-adocumented route.
• 19:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: People do it, you know, I'd say relatively frequently and four by fours, land rivers, motorbikes, bicycles even, but for me, I never done anything like that in my life.
• 19:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: two nights of my life in a tent.
• 19:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: So for me, this was a big bold brave step, I guess.
• 20:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: And yeah, and I sort of became obsessed with this idea.
• 20:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: And my initial plans would sort of take a six months of medical from my job.
• 20:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: I thought I could negotiate that.
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: But as I looked at this map of Africa, and as I looked at all these countries in Africa, that I wasn't going to, my route became more and more zigzag.
• 20:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: And eventually I plotted a route from Cape Town to Cairo,
• 20:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: that was the least direct repostable, in fact, a route that went through every single country on mainland Africa, so all 48 countries.
• 20:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: So all of a sudden, I started a six month sabbatical plan.
• 20:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: I realized it was getting thrown out the window and replaced with this dream of cycling through every country in Africa.
• 20:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that's already a huge adventure to go from Cape Town to Cairo.
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: That is a major, major adventure.
• 20:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And something that takes a lot of audacity and a lot of ambition.
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: But you turn the dial up to 11, Ron.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that's unbelievable.
• 20:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: So let me ask you this, growing up in South Africa.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: playing rugby, what was just, you know, being in the same continent?
• 21:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: What was the rest of Africa viewed as where you're from?
• 21:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And how did you view it?
• 21:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Was it this scary place with lots of, you know, on civil unrest and things going on?
• 21:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Or what was it a place that was encouraged to explore?
• 21:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, nice and, yeah, I think, I think the answer is somewhere in between.
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I think we all lucky in South Africa that we,
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, and at university, I had some friends who came from the Zimbabwe and Malawi, some of our neighboring countries.
• 21:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I did one or two shorter trips, you know, I would sort of hitchhike up into Zimbabwe and go and visit their families and, you know, so I got a little taste of some of our surrounding countries and I guess I'd met, you know, in South Africa it's quite common for people to sort of get in sort of overland vehicles and four by fours and go up, you know, up to Tanzania,
• 21:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, Gupton and Mobia.
• 21:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: So certainly, you know, the sort of the relatively sort of sub-saharan African countries.
• 22:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: But there is this perception for sure, even in South Africa, there are a lot of the rest of Africa in inverted commas.
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Is this big scary place?
• 22:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think, you know, so often these countries are only ever in the news when there's bad news.
• 22:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, you're only ever here of Ethiopia when there's a famine outbreak.
• 22:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: You'll only ever hear about Algeria.
• 22:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, when there's a bomb in Paris and somebody and the person, the terrorist in a voter commerce is from Algeria or Kabhaz Algerian roots.
• 22:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's anytime people ever hear about these countries.
• 22:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I've also heard people talk about South Africa like that, you know, and people have got, oh my god, goodness isn't such a violent country.
• 22:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yet, you know, I choose to live here in thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands, but in the people choose to live in South Africa, and we have our frustrations,
• 22:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: It is relatively safe play.
• 22:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: It said, you know, people go trekking and hiking and adventure in all the time and have, you know, nothing ever goes wrong, you know?
• 22:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: Other than the normal stuff that goes wrong in the wilderness.
• 23:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so yeah, if there was a certain, I guess I was relatively pragmatic about it.
• 23:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I traveled enough, I guess, in even other parts of the world to realize that often your preconceived idea of a country is so different to the reality on the ground.
• 23:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, but, yeah, so I guess,
• 23:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: For me, it was, I had a lot of people asking me, Ron, are you sure you want to do this?
• 23:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: Are you sure you're going to be safe?
• 23:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: And of course, they were concerns.
• 23:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: But you can't sort of paint the whole continent with one brush stroke.
• 23:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: You shouldn't, but plenty of people do.
• 23:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, no, of course, you know, 100, you know, they do.
• 23:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: And, but I sort of looked, I sort of drilled down and I looked at different each individual country and I sort of, you know, did as much research on the particular countries and what was going on.
• 23:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, there were certain parts, there were certain parts of some countries that are specifically avoided in my planning and obviously, you know, you keep it close to the ground as you go, but sure, yeah, yeah, I think once once I got going and once I was on the road for a couple of months and everywhere I went over and over again, I was just, you know, welcome the strange white guy in a bicycle in the middle of rural Mozambique or the strange white guy in the bicycle in the middle of rural Angola.
• 24:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: And yet the people, there was no like, look at him and he's a walking, you know, money machine, let's hit him over the head and take him for everything he's got.
• 24:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: It was more like, well, here's, you know, obviously the language barrier was a big thing, but people would see me and they would, the first thing that they would do is offer me food and water.
• 24:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: And yet that's their most valuable resource, you know, and you haven't seen a river or a pump or a well full days.
• 24:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: And yet the first thing you get into a village is
• 24:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so once you've experienced that for the first few weeks and months, it does change your perspective.
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: And you start assuming the best in people.
• 24:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: And honestly, 99.9% of the time, that's exactly right.
• 24:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: And you rewarded for that assumption.
• 24:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is such an enormous adventure.
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: I honestly don't even know where to start.
• 25:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a little mind-blood, but take us through.
• 25:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: I tell you what, let's start here.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Take us through what did it feel like to, because I'm looking at your map in the way you went and you're going through South Africa.
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: And once you start to get towards the border, what was going through your mind?
• 25:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: What were you feeling?
• 25:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Did you feel comfortable in what you had set out to do?
• 25:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Or was it
• 25:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: still this thing that said, you know, I don't know what the road ahead is going to hold and that and that terrifies me.
• 25:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Mason, I think one of the key things for me is that when I left on this trip, I went through a very deliberate process of, you know, people talk about burning the bridges or burning the boats and I literally sold everything in the world that I owned to make this trip happen, you know, and when I say everything, I wasn't, you know, I didn't own an apartment or anything, I was renting an apartment, but I sold my car, I sold every
• 25:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it was partly to help finance the trip, but also for me it was like if I think in the back of my mind If I'd left a whole lot of stuff at a mate's apartment and Cape Town when it's garage It would have almost for me being like I'm hedging my bit, you know, let me go and try this trip Let me go and see how far I get, but you know what if something goes wrong Well, if I don't like it, I could always go back to Cape Town and pick up where I left off But in my mind this trip was gonna take me well over two and a half years or well over two years
• 26:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I said, if I'm going to be serious about finishing this trip and getting to caron, ultimately getting to the UK afterwards, what is the point of leaving a whole lot of stuff in my mates' garage?
• 26:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's weird, like having never done anything like this in my life before, I mean, the bicycle that I bought, I'd never ridden that bike until the day that I started this trip.
• 26:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it was fully loaded with all the paniers, 35 kilograms of all my gear and I actually broke my wrist a few months before I left, so I had done no exercise and I'm that sort
• 26:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: start getting fat.
• 26:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: And also, like, I was living on a mate's couch for the last, you know, in his, on his couch for the last few months before I lived, I was eating rapidly.
• 26:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I really was like the fetus and I'm fit to start my life when I started the trip.
• 27:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: But deep inside of me, I just, I was just, I was all in, like, I quit my job, I've sold everything, and in my heart, like I committed everything to this journey.
• 27:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like I said, you know, I've dreamed of doing something
• 27:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: And for the first 38 years of my life, I darted myself.
• 27:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: For the first 38 years of my life, I actually realized how I'd solved myself short in different areas of my life before.
• 27:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I've said, Ron, this is the first time on your life you're doing something truly, are your comfort zone.
• 27:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's the first time your life, you're really just living, I don't know, living truth to yourself, like deep inside of my heart, like this is what I wanted to be doing.
• 27:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I said to myself, I literally get squashed by a truck
• 27:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: you know, some corner of Africa.
• 27:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: I am going to find a way to finish this journey.
• 27:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's weird like it's it's it's it's I just had this quiet confidence that, you know, things would work out and that is because I had the sort of single focus and single purpose.
• 28:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: I would get there but it does come with a big but you know, but they won I was as I say, I was in terrible shape and was the only day of the trip that I actually planned in terms of a start point at end point because I had some friends came to see me off
• 28:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: And this is after six or seven months of planning, a lot of people telling me, you know, almost joking, some joking, not some not joking, going run, let's see how quickly it is before you, you know, you back here, it's how quickly it is before your bike's stolen, you know, let's see hopefully you survived malaria.
• 28:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: So people are sort of like saying, good luck, Ryan, well done, you know, good luck, well done for taking the plunge, but almost like, almost like betting how long it would, you know, you would actually last, you know.
• 28:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, but at the same time, they all came out to support me to see me off.
• 28:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I think they're wanted me to succeed,
• 28:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: There was a sort of undercurrents of like, God, you know, I hope he's going to be a rock kind of thing.
• 28:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: But, you know, and as you say, like a little bit of like, if it doesn't look so prepared, you know, maybe this is not such a good idea.
• 28:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: But, you know, anyway, I got to that day one, and it was 80 kilometers, which, you know, now that I look at it, you know, should have been so easy, but fully loaded touring back, totally unfit, I've never ridden it back, and it was a long, long day art, and I was even cramping towards the end, you know, a lot of the wives and girlfriends and boyfriends
• 29:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, they went to the town that we were cycling to and, you know, we had range of big barbecue at Langstarm and we arrived like three hours late because of me.
• 29:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: And, but you know, it was amazing.
• 29:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: I finished day one and the next morning I woke up everybody left and I stayed in my friends house and I got up my bike and I rode like 30 or 40 kilometers a second day.
• 29:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: My legs were sore, my rear end was sore, but the adventure started and then day three I rode and I did a bit further and day four went up further and
• 29:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Somebody would put me up, but I went a farmer would put me up at his house and he would tell his friends 100 kilometers down the road and they would put me up at their house, the next night and give me a good meal.
• 29:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: So that first few weeks I came in South Africa, my way to the Soutu, which was the first country outside of South Africa, I think it was a little bit of a honeymoon period, you know, your telephone store works, you still understand the money, you know, you can always, you know, with your Google maps, you can tell where the next town is, so there's a sort
• 30:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: of still being on your home ground advantage, I guess.
• 30:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's sort of, over those first few weeks, my legs started getting used to life, you know, getting used to riding five or six hours a day.
• 30:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: So by the time I got to Lassutu, it was three or four weeks in the trip, and it was exciting the first time I ever crossed the border on a bicycle, you know, and I stand for now, I remember the thrill of, you know, getting my stand, you know, leading South Africa, getting into Lassutu.
• 30:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: And as any of the sutra for a few days, before popped out the other end, it's landlocked by South Africa, so back into South Africa, then into Swazi land, then back into South Africa, and then going into Mozambique, I must admit that's when, I was probably six weeks into the journey.
• 30:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'd cross South Africa, cross the other two small countries, now I was leaving South Africa for the third and final time.
• 30:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it was the sense of like, wow, I'm now going into the rest of Africa, and I wonder what lies ahead.
• 31:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: So there was a little bit of like, you know,
• 31:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: but also to be honest, a bit of excitement at the same time.
• 31:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: I just can't even imagine, if you want me to be honest, just how much, how big this felt.
• 31:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's amazing to me, an entire, people don't realize just how large Africa is and I know I don't understand just how big it is and how diverse it is and varied it is.
• 31:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: What was the biggest transition for you in the sense of maybe, maybe the land or the terrain or the climate or the culture, what was the biggest
• 31:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: I am not in at home anymore situation.
• 31:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, so I think for me, there's two, I'm going to give you two examples.
• 31:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: The first was relatively closer to home.
• 31:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: So the 5th or 6th country I went into was Angola.
• 31:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Angola is the first country on this journey that I hadn't been to before.
• 32:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's also the first country as a South African that we actually need to visa for.
• 32:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we have a visa for your arrangement for our neighbouring countries.
• 32:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: where people that had been there had told me how rubbish it was.
• 32:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, I know your previous president had acquired a description of the countries in Africa.
• 32:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: You never want to, you know, make some money.
• 32:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: Would say the same thing.
• 32:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: They go wrong.
• 32:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: And girl is a, it's whole country, you know, and they've done business there and they've traveled there.
• 32:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Or, and I think there's something about a bicycle.
• 32:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: And this is what I did learn.
• 32:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's something about a bicycle that makes you relatable.
• 32:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's something about a bicycle that makes you,
• 32:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it just creates this connection with people.
• 32:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I was on the border with Angola.
• 32:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've been on the road now, probably three months, four months.
• 32:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I had some crazy wild experiences in Zimbabwe and Angola, actually in Mozambique, in Zambia, in the Mubia.
• 32:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: I had some wild, crazy experiences.
• 32:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: But as I said to you before, like the same, I had to, but everywhere we had gone, people had been wonderful to me and welcoming.
• 33:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: But there was still the sense of preparation when I crossed Angola.
• 33:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, I managed to get the visa.
• 33:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: People told me we'd be very difficult.
• 33:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it wasn't easy, but I got it, you know, in the end relatively easily, people told me it was corrupt.
• 33:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: I crossed the border, not in any issue at all.
• 33:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: But it was a very remote and wild part of Angola.
• 33:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: There is absolutely no English whatsoever.
• 33:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it was the first time on the trip where I realized that, you know, to some people, you know, I was going to explore Africa.
• 33:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: I was going to go and look at the different cultures.
• 33:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, experiences, as you said, the diversity of the continent.
• 33:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: But it was the first time that I actually thought like, I was giving people an experience of that as well.
• 33:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like it is such a remote part of Angola that I can imagine they've seen very few white people and they've definitely seen very few white people on a bicycle.
• 33:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it was, you know, it was the first time that I saw kids they're almost too scared to come and come and speak to me.
• 34:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like they're almost hard behind their parents' legs and almost like their each other to come and touch me or to come and speak to me.
• 34:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it was like, I felt like a little bit of a freak in a circus show, you know, but it, yeah, for me that was maybe, it wouldn't say uncomfortable, but it was just like, wow, like, I really am in a part of a continent where, you know, I stand out.
• 34:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: And yeah, I'd say it was, I was never made to feel, I'd welcome, I was never made to feel uncomfortable, but it was quite a bizarre situation when you realize that
• 34:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm in my own continent.
• 34:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm actually not decked far from South Africa.
• 34:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: But here, there are people that are looking at me and, you know, with utter bewilderment.
• 34:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: So that really sticks with me.
• 34:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: That experience in Angola.
• 34:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm actually going to come back to Angola now.
• 34:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to talk about one of my favorite stories of the trip.
• 34:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: If you don't mind.
• 34:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Please, please do.
• 34:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but I'm going to jump ahead to Ethiopia.
• 34:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Ethiopia was, you know, up north east of Africa.
• 34:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that was, for me, was such a dramatic change.
• 34:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: which is in itself wild and remote.
• 35:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I crossed into Ethiopia on what happened to be the 31st of December 2013.
• 35:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: And obviously, coming from where most of the world, that's a significant date.
• 35:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I crossed the border and I got to this border town, which was about 16 kilometers inside of Ethiopia.
• 35:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I thought, you know what, it's what an amazing, you know, I'm here in the middle of Africa, the southern tip of Ethiopia in New Year's Eve.
• 35:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: They'd go and try and find a restaurant to a bar and enjoy a couple of beers.
• 35:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it wasn't exactly a heaving town, but, you know, I found this restaurant, you know, straw on the floor, you know, no walls, you know, very, very basic.
• 35:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I thought there would be some people out in the mountains and I, you know, I had one or two beers, but no one was like our celebrating, there's nothing really going on and I thought, you know, I thought this is a little bit strange and then, and their restaurant owner let me sleep on the floor of his, of his restaurants and I work up next morning and I carried on.
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it was only when I got to the first major city in, well, yeah, relative to terms city in Ethiopia, that someone actually explains to me that Ethiopia has a used, we used the Gregorian calendar, you know, most most a little, but they actually use a different calendar, and I can't remember the name of it.
• 36:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: But so, for us it was the 31st of December, but in Ethiopia it was like the 14th of February, or something.
• 36:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, their calendar is like six weeks off of ours.
• 36:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they tell time differently, like we used midnight as the basis of our time.
• 36:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: So if I say, I'll see you at approximately morning,
• 36:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: you know, I'll see eight tomorrow morning, it's eight hours off the midnight.
• 36:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: There, if they say I'll see it eight tomorrow, it's actually two in the afternoon because they for them six a.m.
• 36:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're equivalent to six a.m. or our equivalent to six a.m. is the effect of the they are not.
• 36:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the people look different, the food is fantastic.
• 36:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it really was a very, very distinct difference between the sub-Saharan Africa, that I was born and brought up in and you know, our neighboring countries and Ethiopia, which was, and it's
• 36:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's a very unique part of the world.
• 36:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let's take a quick message break in here from the folks that help make this show possible.
• 37:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: That is plenty of that for now.
• 37:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let's get back into the episode.
• 37:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, you can imagine the differences and just the level of stories that you have, is there something on the trip that sticks out to you?
• 37:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is very something unexpected that happened, whether that be with the weather, with the terrain, like I said, or culture, or people, like was it was anything that just caught you off guard?
• 37:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I think
• 37:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to refer to Ethiopia again, and specifically, as I say, that initial culture shock, which really was, now, other countries, there were nuances and slightly different food and different languages, but, you know, there's really, you know, Ethiopia really was distinctive, different difference.
• 37:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: But what really blew me away was the semi-annemounts and the northern Ethiopia.
• 37:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, I'd read a lot about, as much that could about the different countries are cycling through, but, you know, to research 48 countries in deep detail as difficult, you know, as I say much you can do,
• 38:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: I, you know, I was lucky in Northern Ethiopia and the Simeon mountains have got to be some of the most dramatic, dramatically beautiful and remote and wild mountains have ever seen in my life.
• 38:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, our group in South Africa was thinking of Ethiopia as a country just a desert, basically.
• 38:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, I don't know how old you are, Mason, but, you know, in the early 80s, you know, in the mid 80s, there was larvae, and there was all these, there was this big famine in East Africa.
• 38:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, at any time, that part of the world
• 38:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, these kids with big tummies and flies around.
• 38:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so let's sort of, I guess, in the back of my mind, some of the, what I kind of, not really expected, but sort of what would burn to my memory.
• 38:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: And yet Tara was in these mountains and Northern Ethiopia, that wouldn't have looked out of place, you know, and maybe not the Himalayas, but certainly in the Alps, or maybe in the Rocky Mountains or something, but it was just dramatically dramatically beautiful.
• 38:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, wild, wild, wild.
• 38:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, pictures right now, and that is, I've never, never seen this before.
• 39:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: so crazy.
• 39:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then I think more from a people and culture for one of you, if you look, if you've got a map in front of you, so the Republic of Congo, which is the smaller, the two Congo's, I actually came in from the north, from Cameroon, Central African Republic into the northern Congo.
• 39:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then it's got to be some of the most remote wildest, you know, rain forests of in Africa, and there it was just, it was mind-blowing, you know, it's, it's some of the hardest writing of
• 39:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now, being on the tropics around the equator, it's always wet and muddy.
• 39:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: The infrastructure really isn't very good at all.
• 39:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: But you come across these villages and they're obviously, that's where the pigneys of Africa, that's where they're from.
• 39:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: And you end up camping with these pigneys.
• 39:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's just like, I cannot believe this is happening to me.
• 39:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's like, he's like, people and cultures that are only ever read about a national geographic magazines or seen on the discovery channel.
• 39:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: And here I am, like this.
• 39:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: complete novice adventurer cycling in the northern Congo jungles and I'm stumbling across like the Pygnies.
• 40:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I just went, this is just like that.
• 40:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: There was a pinch of me, one of those pinch of soft moments.
• 40:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mean, Africa has stands to be corrected, but something like two and a half thousand languages.
• 40:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: And some of them are only spoken by, unfortunately, a lot of them are dying very quickly.
• 40:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there's only a few.
• 40:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, tribes and maybe some cases, you know, one tribe speaks one language, you know, you know, there are any people that speak these languages.
• 40:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, I mean, the diversity of Africa is just enormous.
• 40:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's just, you know, it's quite sad, I think that often people just think, ah, you know, you're from Africa.
• 40:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they sort of have a mind what you look like or what you're going to be like.
• 40:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: But my goodness, it's a diverse continent.
• 40:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: What would you say one of the biggest lessons you've learned from that experience and maybe a story that goes along with teaching you that lesson?
• 40:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I think for me it's one of the key lessons and I alluded to it earlier is to assume the best in people and I'm going to give you an example and that's this is what I actually want to talk about with Angola so going back to Angola being the first time you know the first country on the trip ahead and being to the first country that people had really warned me about
• 41:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it was, I got into it, I got into it and got into it, it was remote and it was wild, but it was exciting.
• 41:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I was like, I spent a lot of time cycling along the Zambezi River, and it's beautiful.
• 41:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's exactly what you dream about when you cycle through, you think of cycling through Africa.
• 41:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: But there was no villages, no villages, no villages of significance, no getting supplies was very difficult.
• 41:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: And after about a week on the road and then go, I got to the small town, which, as it turns out, was the only town that I got to it all in and then go.
• 41:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: on the eastern bit that sort of sticks into Zambia.
• 41:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've got this town, I was pushing my back down this, I guess the high street, you know, it's just a dirt road.
• 41:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I was looking for a store to get some supplies.
• 41:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then all the sudden this policeman comes out from a guard hat on the side of the road.
• 42:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he's a bit discrathfully dressed, then he comes over to me.
• 42:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: He starts talking to me in Portuguese and he starts just glating and quite excited.
• 42:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then he, I look at him like,
• 42:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then he sort of rubs this time and forefinger together.
• 42:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I thought, ah, I know what that means.
• 42:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's the international sign language that it's looking for a little bit of a toll fee.
• 42:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: So let me pass.
• 42:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: And people will warn me about, you know, sort of this kind of low-level corruption if you want in Africa.
• 42:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I made up my mind that if I ever encountered anything like this, I was not going to even enter negotiations.
• 42:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, I think, often they, people will pray on your impatience.
• 42:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I went through my routine of like patching my pockets and going, oh, no money.
• 42:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Sorry, no money.
• 42:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, and he looks at me again and he's like, and you can see he's like quite compute computing.
• 42:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we go, you go to the process again and he grabs his thumb and fourth finger together.
• 42:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I go this cheeky guy.
• 42:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I would know, no money.
• 42:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then we go through the third time.
• 42:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the third time he does it, actually puts his hand into his pocket.
• 42:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he pulls out a few crumpled notes.
• 43:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he actually pushes him towards me.
• 43:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I thought cheeky burger.
• 43:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's not like, you know, showing me exactly what he wants.
• 43:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I actually like, yeah, so I actually like, I mean, I wasn't a Chris, but I like, I sort of, you know, push his hand gently.
• 43:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then he looks, and again, he looks at me.
• 43:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he sort of shakes his head, and he then sort of simulates the drinking, like drinking out of a bottle.
• 43:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he goes, no, no, Coca, Coca.
• 43:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I suddenly realized that this policeman, who probably earns $3 a month, $4 a month, I have no idea, but it won't be much more than that.
• 43:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: But he was actually offering me money to buy a Coke.
• 43:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he was going, Coca, Coca, you want money, you want Coca?
• 43:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I promise you, Mason, I have never been more mortified in my life, that art allowed my preconceived ideas of what a policeman and girl I would be wanting from me.
• 43:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it all he was doing was actually saying, oh, you want money, you need money.
• 43:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I could go and buy a coke.
• 43:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I honestly, like, and all of a sudden, you know, I said, I don't know what, you know, after pleading poverty, all of a sudden, I've no worries, I've got many, I've got many, and he wouldn't accept you would not insist it on buying your code.
• 44:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I've never in my life been more, I was, and I can bear it, doesn't even begin to, some of that, like, I had been on the road for three months.
• 44:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'd experienced so much of the goodness of people, over and over and over again.
• 44:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, sub-sore in Africa is the purpose,
• 44:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: You judge well.
• 44:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, anyway, but if you look at the IMF for these fancy economic economists, you know, sub-sire and Africa is technically the poorest place in the world.
• 44:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: And over and over again, I've come to villages in the middle of nowhere.
• 44:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: People that don't have running water, there's no stores to buy food, yet the first thing people would do would be off of you food and water.
• 44:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're most valuable resource, you know.
• 44:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I'd been on a receiving end of all this goodness and all this positivity for three months.
• 44:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: And yet, deep in my mind, like I love the sort of
• 44:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: The warnings that I had before this trip like people are corrupt, people are going to want money from you and a girl and it was directly the opposite and I actually made a point.
• 45:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: I said to myself, Ron, from this moment on, you are going to assume the best in people for the rest of this trip.
• 45:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: And honestly, Mason, I can count on one hand, you know, in 800 and something day is in the road, you know, the number of times that I had issues with people.
• 45:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I was never robbed, nobody had hit me over the head, so it was nothing major.
• 45:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: But, you know, from that death look for me is a moment and wasn't didn't just change my attitude for the rest of the trip, but I do try and remind myself now, you know, there's obviously done other trips subsequently and back in my normal life here in South Africa, I do try and remind myself when I find myself slipping into, you know, I remind myself to sort of get but negative about things, you know, that lesson for me over assuming the best in people is just pays dividends over and over and over again.
• 45:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: run it's a beautiful story.
• 45:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: You being on the road in one of the most probably challenging places to do something like this, all of Africa.
• 45:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: uh... in the world that is like one of one of the most probably apprehensive places people would do adventure on on ground level like this and to hear that the biggest lesson you learned or one of the biggest lessons you've learned is to assume the good and people is just i mean it just blows my mind that if you can do it there and you can assume it there in your situation we can at any time of our lives anywhere we are and any any interaction exact you know and if and it's a silent
• 46:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, in the complete opposite, you know, if when you're in London or Hong Kong or New York or Chicago, well, you know, a big city is in busy places, like all the most, most corners of the world, I really do honestly.
• 46:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Without China's sound like Kumbaya, like honestly, honestly, honestly, it's, you know, I've subsequently, you know, I checked across Mongolia, I've circled across Europe and Asia, you know, I've done adventures in over 100 countries in the world, you know, from the most poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia,
• 46:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Western Europe, you know, and honestly, it's, it's a truism that, that are absolutely stand by.
• 47:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: That is, that is so fantastic, you know, this is kind of taking us out of the experience itself and out of some of the other trips you've done, which are 100% qualified to be their own podcast episodes.
• 47:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: We'll have to have you back on and talk about them.
• 47:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I'll have this plan some more time, because I want to hear some of this more in-depth for you.
• 47:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: You said the first 38 years of your life, you felt like you were making decisions on fear and weren't really, you know, doing things like this.
• 47:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Of course, how would you have done this if you had not had the ability to do this experience?
• 47:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: How would you have taken your life into your own hands and into your control?
• 47:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe if you didn't have the ability to take two years off, what could you foresee now to learn those same lessons?
• 47:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: What could you do?
• 47:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, nice and that's it.
• 47:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a
• 47:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I've never been honest with like it, it's quite a hypothetical because, you know, I think for me and I'm sort of thinking on the fly here, but I look back at the first video it was in my life and I realize how much I sold myself short like anything I did, you know, whether it was my rugby career like, you know, I was never going to play for South Africa, I was never going to be a full-time professional rugby player, but I, I think that I always, you know, as much as I think that I tried as hard as I could,
• 48:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: As much as I enjoyed this sport as much as I could, I do think that deep inside of me, I never truly had to believe that I was as good as the people around me, you know.
• 48:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I just sort of for some reason had this sort of self, you know, just the self doubt about how good I could be.
• 48:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then when I think of myself in my working life, in my careers, various different sort of jobs in careers I've had, I also look back now and I go like, you know, I look at people around me
• 48:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, they're just so much smoother than me.
• 48:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're much better selves people than me.
• 48:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: Our arc can never be like that.
• 48:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's such a, it's such a self-defeating attitude.
• 48:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: And you know, and I think for me, it was like, it was a combination of like frustration at not, and feeding it, you know, that it wasn't living the life true to myself.
• 49:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: It was a frustration that, you know,
• 49:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: what they did, more than me.
• 49:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: I looked at people that had, and then it was when it came to adventures, started looking at some of these people that had done these big adventures.
• 49:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think for me, it was, I dreamed, I dreamed of the hardest thing I could possibly do in a bicycle.
• 49:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think, although I wasn't conscious of thinking it, I think and deep down aside of me, I said, if I can make this happen, then truly anything is possible.
• 49:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, nobody's ever attempted a single journey through every country in Africa, anything.
• 49:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Nobody tried it in a motorbike, nobody done it in a four by four.
• 49:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: planning it on a bicycle.
• 49:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it is again, it is, it is, despite giving us sitting earlier, there is a lot of, you know, there are a lot of people, you know, plant seeds of data in your mind and, you know, mixing you, you planning a trip and you'll catch it and use bulletin about something going on.
• 50:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: And, but, yeah, so, I think it was like, for me, it was like, it was a subconscious decision to do the hardest thing I could possibly could knowing that if I did it, it would almost just kick start my life.
• 50:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's exactly what happened.
• 50:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: When I finished this journey, like I had no money.
• 50:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've borrowed, I've maxed out every credit card, I've borrowed money from friends and people to get to the end of the journey.
• 50:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I've done it.
• 50:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've jumped up the hardest thing and I've pulled it off.
• 50:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it just, the confidence boost that it's given me in every area of my life, since it's just been transformational.
• 50:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, it's hard to say what could I've done differently, or what could I've not done it in two years.
• 50:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I've a lot of people, as I'm talking to you, it actually reminds you,
• 50:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, I'm married with kids and I've got this business and I'd love to be something like this.
• 50:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, I'd love to be something what can you recommend, you know, and honestly, I think it's for some people.
• 50:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's jumping on your back and going for a three day weekend, you know, cycle somewhere you've never circled, going to sleep on a hill, you know, just take a sleeping bag, go sleep under a, you know, a portion of tree, go sleep on the beach, you know, you're living your comfortable house, so you're air conditioning and, you know, you've got your nice fancy car and you
• 51:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, drinking, you pack up, you get back in your car and you go home, and that's a fun weekend.
• 51:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: But do something that, but that's for a lot of people like that, the thought of sleeping on the beach, the thought of sleeping on a hill is like, oh my goodness, aren't you going to get mad?
• 51:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: What happens if it rains?
• 51:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, so all these reasons why you can't do those things.
• 51:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: So our will messages just going to do something crazy and going to do something, what, you know, you consider crazy.
• 51:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, if it's a three day weekend or even a two day weekend, you know, leave work on a Friday,
• 51:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: put a steepy bay in a backpack, a couple of sandwiches in the bottle of water and go cycle and find somewhere to steep for the night and then cycle back the next day.
• 51:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know, I'm probably not answering your question, but that's just some of the recollections and just what I did, I guess, to come over and come our own fears and self doubts.
• 52:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: What do you do now to continue that mindset?
• 52:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Do you take your own advice?
• 52:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Do you sleep in random places or on a hillside?
• 52:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: How do you keep that adventure movement going in you?
• 52:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I mean, for sure, I don't, I did that African trip and I was on the road for 27 months.
• 52:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it was now that, it all did, it was, it put fuel into the fire for me.
• 52:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, I, you know, I'm not someone who's going to go and spend 10 years on the road and you know, you know, I do like coming home.
• 52:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: I do like seeing my friends and family.
• 52:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: I do like the comforts of, you know, normal life and it really comes for a bit.
• 52:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: But, you know, I came back after the extra having, you know, as I said to you, no money, nothing, but it, it was all of a sudden like, well, you know, if I can, if I can find a way of getting through Africa, if I can find, you know, all these challenges that I've got through on this journey of cycling through Africa,
• 52:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, to find a job or to find, you know, somewhere to put food in the table, surely I can do that.
• 53:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: And as it turns out, you know, when I got back to my trip, everyone would hear about my story.
• 53:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: So you know, I'd find myself at friends' houses or at barbecues or,
• 53:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: in a bar and people at the spin hours and hours telling stories about my trip.
• 53:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And somebody said to me, I can't even imagine this.
• 53:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Trying to get home and tell people how, because they'd probably say, hey, how was your trip?
• 53:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: And leave it at that.
• 53:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: But then some people said, oh, Ron, actually, I said, one of my friends in this company were having a golf day for some of their clients.
• 53:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think they had a comedian booked to come in.
• 53:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: So they're playing golf, and they're going to have a big fancy dinner.
• 53:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think that brought in
• 53:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: they were going to have a comedian and the comedian, you know, cancelled on like sort of two days before.
• 53:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: So this guy ferns me into the panic and he says, Ron, basically, do you want to replace the comedian and just come and stand on stage and tell some stories about your bicycle trip?
• 53:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I just did it as a favor, you know, I still had some of my photographs and I've projected and I just told some stories about my trip and people were fascinated and then somebody in the audience said, everyone, we've got a sales conference next month.
• 54:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: Don't you want to come and into a motivational talk and you know, I just
• 54:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I guess that was, so that led you know, but you know, luck for a lot of people when you go and stand on stage for the first time, you know, to do a speech or talk, some people freeze up and it's people find it very, very difficult.
• 54:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that for me was I was I still remember like that, this is like real sick feeling with, you know, I was going to be on the stage.
• 54:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: I was going to be the center of attention.
• 54:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: despite, you know, and I always felt self-conscious and I was talking about my trip.
• 54:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but now, you know, so that was sort of, you know, a bit of, you know, that's sort of overcoming the sort of public speaking thing.
• 54:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: But then you do the couple of times you become comfortable and you realize people enjoy it.
• 54:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I really enjoy, I've told my story to, you know, to probably, you know, I don't exaggerate, but I'd say 100 schools in South Africa and companies, and so that kind of sort of helped give me back on my feet.
• 54:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I reconnected with another friend
• 54:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: It was time for another adventure and it's amazing how life works but I know we're running out of time but I reconnected with an old friend of mine from Hong Kong and he was a keen golfer and he added a talk to him and his rugby team and he said, Ron, I've got no sense of cycling through Africa but I'd like to do something with golf.
• 55:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: The next thing you know over two hours of drinking coffee together we came up from our dear of him and our playing golf across Mongolia.
• 55:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: So that confidence that I had had to look at a map and go, well, you know, this is what you need to, you know, if you can plan a trip to the cycling through Africa,
• 55:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, well perfect.
• 55:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: We'll get a set of golf clubs.
• 55:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'll have a cart.
• 55:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'll pull out staff.
• 55:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: You can walk and hit this thing.
• 55:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: And you just realize that you can just draw a black line of a map and make anything happen.
• 55:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's what means being the most liberating thing.
• 55:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I just basically live from pulling out a map, drawing a line of something that I'd love to do, and then just putting everything in place to make that happen.
• 55:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's a pretty cool way to be living my life.
• 55:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let's take a quick message break in here from the folks that help make this show possible.
• 55:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: that is plenty of that for now.
• 55:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let's get back into the episode.
• 55:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'd say what an incredible experience.
• 56:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: I definitely want to have you back on, but I think we have time for a few more questions about this trip specifically.
• 56:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I hate to jump all the way back, but I mean, tell me about was there a moment or an experience where you maybe had a self-reflection and thought, how did I end up in this situation?
• 56:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: like a very random situation or something where you thought, you know, playing this trip, do this thing.
• 56:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: I never thought in a million years I would be right here.
• 56:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: You ought to be straight away, Lake Assault.
• 56:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: So A, W, S, I, L. All right.
• 56:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Lake enough right now.
• 56:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: A, W, S. A, L. It's in Djibouti, which is a tiny little country on the Horn of Africa.
• 56:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Most people have no, and we'll go Djibouti is in a country and go, yep,
• 56:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's very, yeah, it's between Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea.
• 56:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's right in the Horn of Africa, the entrance to the Red Sea.
• 56:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, Lake Assoul is the third lowest place in the planet and the lowest point in Africa.
• 57:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's 150 meters below sea level.
• 57:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: So are you cycling in the middle of the desert?
• 57:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: And in the middle, well, not the middle of the Horn of Africa.
• 57:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: And you come across these series of lakes, which are below sea level.
• 57:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they're completely sailant.
• 57:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's like, I think it's the red sea and the sea of Galilee.
• 57:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: You see the famous photographs of people lying in the sea, reading their newspapers, because it's so salty.
• 57:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's exactly what this is.
• 57:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there you are in the middle of the desert, in the middle of Africa, you've got the third lowest points in the world.
• 57:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's this ancient ancient, you know, it's obviously from when the continents split up.
• 57:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's actually a part of what would have been the ocean, the original ocean.
• 57:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: in the middle of the desert.
• 57:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's this, you have like this quite crust that, you know, of the shore basically, which runs for like 100 yards from the sand to the actual weather water starts, and you sort of, you walk through it and crunches.
• 57:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's just, yeah, you pick it up, you're tasting it, it's just, you know, it's obviously salty, and you get to this water and it's so salty, it's almost itchy.
• 57:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there you are, you can lie on this lake in the middle of the African desert.
• 58:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I just, I just say, I just went like, this is just ridiculous.
• 58:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, I had no idea this place even existed.
• 58:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: like planning this trip that I really identified your beauty and where it was and have any idea and here I am.
• 58:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: So for me that was one of those moments was just like, this is ridiculous.
• 58:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I've never even seen this on national geographic and here I am experiencing it for myself.
• 58:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm sure there were thousands of places like that, where they were off, they were on the list of top destinations, but you discover them by accident, maybe, and it became probably some of your favorite experiences of the whole thing.
• 58:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, 100% and there's another one jumps to mind.
• 58:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: And you look at always, you know, so one of the biggest challenges on a trip like this is your visas.
• 58:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: No, how do you organize visas like you on the road?
• 58:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, there's very few disadvantages of a bicycle, but one of them is that it's very, you know, if the nearest city, you know, it's 400 kilometers off route, where you can go, you know, you're going to get a visa application for the next country.
• 59:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's an 800 K. Detail, which is like a 10 day detail, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right,
• 59:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: which is on the west coast of Africa, just near the Congo, they pretty much on the equator.
• 59:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I was in Libraville, which is the capital, waiting for my visa for Equatorial Guinea, which is one of these very tiny postage stamp countries that is a result of history, basically.
• 59:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a very little bizarre little country, but it's a touristy difficult and bureaucratic process to get your visa for.
• 59:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I actually ended up being stuck in Libraville almost a month.
• 59:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: So as the biggest delay in my trip or the big year, the biggest hold-up of the trip of the whole thing.
• 59:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: A while I was there, you might notice, if you look at the map, just off the coast, to the west, there's a little, there's two little islands called It's actually the country of Saltome and Princey.
• 1:00:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I'm looking at.
• 1:00:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and if the most, it's, I mean, again, I'll be completely honest.
• 1:00:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: I had no idea this country existed before I did this trip.
• 1:00:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, in my research, so Africa is 54 countries, 48 on mainland and it's six island nations.
• 1:00:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: So there's four in the Indonesian, on the east, and there's two in the west, which is the Cape Verde islands, and then there's this little country of Sartama and Francine.
• 1:00:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: So when I was in Liverpool, I was updated my blog, and I was stuck there, and my one friend replied, he said, Ron, if you're in Liverpool, you should go to Sartama, because when it's a long story, but here at a friend, you're actually investing in a conservation project there.
• 1:00:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: So they very generously sponsored me a flight from Libraville to Sartoume.
• 1:00:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's only a little in an hour flight, but you have the country's made up of two islands which straddle the equator and it promised you, when you fly into, it looks like Jurassic Park.
• 1:00:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's this completely rainforest covered little island slash country, all that must, you know, kind of in the valleys and it's just like Jurassic Park without the
• 1:01:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's just, yeah, so I'm that I've spent in like 10 days in Sartama and for the sea sort of just kicking back.
• 1:01:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm obviously left my bicycle and loopravel.
• 1:01:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: I actually rented a motorbike for a couple of days to go and explore the bigger of the two islands, but it was just the most magical place.
• 1:01:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the smaller island of the two actually hack the whole island over a day with a local guide, you come across these old plantation homes that have been completely overgrown.
• 1:01:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's just to be a Portuguese colony and then they used to grow
• 1:01:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: I want to say, coffee, coffee, I think it was coffee.
• 1:01:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: The Portuguese handed the country back, the end of the colonial, the 1970s, the Portuguese basically fled and left the country to lift the new government or the people to look after themselves.
• 1:01:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: So all these sort of big fancy plantations became overgrown because there was no expertise and you had to run them.
• 1:01:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: So the whole island, it's amazing what nature does when it recovers.
• 1:02:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: So basically have these big homes,
• 1:02:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, when I was able to collect them in ruin, but in the middle of the jungle, and this is the old railway line, which is completely covered in jungle.
• 1:02:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, just as bizarre little place, just a fantastic, bewildering, crazy, yeah, just magical little spots in the middle of the Atlantic.
• 1:02:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Wow, I've never even, I'm going to have seen it on a map, I don't know anything about it.
• 1:02:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Don't hear anything about it.
• 1:02:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it's just amazing what's out there that isn't talked about that much, that you are able to discover when you get out there and see it, that you'll never know otherwise.
• 1:02:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: 100% Where can people find you, where can people see what you're doing next, and do you have any plans for something coming up?
• 1:02:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, the answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, so all right, so this trip took me from Cape Town and a load was it was primarily about Africa are actually pushed on through in our cycle through Europe and got to the UK.
• 1:02:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm a big rugby fan and the rugby world couples taking place in the UK in 2015.
• 1:02:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: So fast forward four years later, I actually circled with a friend of mine with a very different type of journey.
• 1:03:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: We actually had a sponsor this time and we're doing some proper fundraising,
• 1:03:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: So in 2019, I made to James and I, I, I could from London to Tokyo, because in the, the regular cup in 2019 was taking place in Japan.
• 1:03:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I kind of had this theme of cycling to all cups.
• 1:03:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm now planning the next one, which will be cycling from Tokyo to Paris, starting in January as the goal, and it's actually gonna be 20 months and cycling, basically, it's a bit of a convoluted route, but
• 1:03:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Basically in Cycle from Japan, back through China, Vietnam, South through Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, across Australia, New Zealand, you know, I'm going to catch a flat with a swire in the bottom of Argentina, in Cycle up the whole of South America, the whole of Central America, and then I'm going to come and visit you Mason because from Mexico, I'm going to enter Texas and then head all the way up, I guess the South and then the East up to New York, Boston, into Southeast Canada, and then fly across to Iceland and then onto the UK and onto Paris.
• 1:04:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: So that's going to be a 40,000 kilometer journey through 41 countries starting in January.
• 1:04:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: So that's my next big adventure.
• 1:04:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: And if you go to runrattlein.com.
• 1:04:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm actually just in the process of redoing the site.
• 1:04:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: So runrattlein.com, my name is links to the stories of all my journeys.
• 1:04:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've actually done a documentary on our cycle trip from Tokyo to Finland to Tokyo.
• 1:04:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a documentary there on my Mongolian golfing adventure and a gallery with hundreds of photographs
• 1:04:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: but it's it's it's working progress for the next week or so the app and running properly.
• 1:04:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: And if you look for just search for Ron Rutland on Twitter and Instagram, and you'll see all the links there.
• 1:04:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: How exciting Ron.
• 1:04:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: That is a heck of an adventure.
• 1:04:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, please, I know it's going to be a while.
• 1:04:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Please stay in touch.
• 1:04:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'd love to host you.
• 1:04:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'd love to I'd love to interview you and you in person, too, and before before, before you leave, we got to get an interview to hear about that Tokyo to what we're always a Tokyo to.
• 1:05:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: London to Tokyo holy camp.
• 1:05:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: I want to hear about that because that seems even more distinct changes culturally and environmentally.
• 1:05:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: That is wild.
• 1:05:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: All right, Ron, I'll talk to you soon, man.
• 1:05:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: First of all, thank you so much for listening and means the world to us that you choose a listen to the show.
• 1:05:26
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• 1:05:33
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• 1:05:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: And also, if you have an idea of who could be a good guest for the show, we're always looking for people to tell their story about the outdoors or adventure.
• 1:05:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: So if you know someone, please reach out email us at infoedadventuresportspodcast.com And until then, get out there and have some fun.