In this episode of the podcast, we chat to the first Welshman to walk the entire length of the Yangtze River in China, a record attempt that took him 5 months to complete. We talk about his journey and how he managed to do it, and why he thinks he might have been the first person to ever do it. We also find out what he's been up to since he got back from China and what he needs to do to keep up with his training. And of course there's a quiz from Curtdizzle too! 5 Star Potential is a Football Manager podcast brought to you by ! Check out our partners at and if you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to our new podcast, Rate/subscribe and tell a friend about what you think of the latest episode and what you're looking forward to in the next episode. Timestamps: 4:00 - What's your favourite food? 5:30 - What do you like about this episode? 6:20 - What kind of food do you eat? 7:40 - What s your favourite foods? 8:15 - What is your favourite thing to eat in general? 9:00 11:00- What are you looking for in a good night out? 12:30- What santa? 15:00s 16:30s 17:40- What is the worst thing you veg you ve ever eaten? 18:00 | What szn? 19:50 - How do you feel about your favourite meal? 21: What s a good day? 26:00 szn 27:30 28:40 29:00 is your favorite thing? 30:30 is your biggest challenge? 31:30 do you think you ve got a bad day so far? 32:30 what s your favorite meal? ? 33:30 are you would you like to see me eat for dinner? 35:00 + 32:35 do you have a new piece of food that santa s? 36:00 do you need a good meal for a good time? 37:30 would you want me to eat it? 39:30 can I eat it again? 40:30 more? 41:00 Do you like it better?
00:02:01.000Speaking of training, Ash, tell everybody what you've done.
00:02:03.000So I've recently, only five months ago now, five and a half months, came back from achieving my third world first record in walking the entire length of the Yangtze River in China.
00:02:14.000So it's the third longest river in the world, the longest to run through a single nation.
00:02:19.000It's 4,000 miles, it took 352 days, and it's from the Tibetan Plateau in the west of China.
00:02:27.000So you're talking 5,100 meters above sea level, which is equivalent to Everest Base Camp.
00:02:34.000And yeah, 4,000 miles later, 352 days, you end up near Shanghai, where it pours out into the East China Sea.
00:02:42.000You know, when I heard that you did this, I thought two things.
00:02:47.000What kind of willpower does it take to walk and hike 4,000 plus miles?
00:02:52.000But the other thing I thought is this kind of validates a lot of the ideas that people have always had about human beings migrating from Africa and through Siberia and through the Bering Strait.
00:03:02.000If you can do that, what you did, what you did is not dissimilar.
00:03:42.000Yeah, that gives us, we had to do over two years of planning.
00:03:46.000So it was a case of working heavily in China.
00:03:49.000Finding out whether this had ever been done before.
00:03:52.000We had to get different teams involved globally.
00:03:57.000I was always preparing to go from the traditional source, which is most famous for the source of the Yangtze River being there, But then we only discovered about a year into the planning that actually there's a true and scientific source found by the same guy who mapped the traditional source,
00:04:14.000yet he partnered up with NASA, used all the satellite technology, was able to correct his wrong.
00:04:19.000It's slightly longer than the traditional source, and that was it.
00:04:23.000We're like, right, it's got to be the true and scientific source.
00:04:58.000Can you imagine if you skipped on 20 miles and everybody's like, well, you did a pretty good job, but actually Mike over here just did the whole thing.
00:07:04.000And actually, that brings me back to the traditional and the true scientific source.
00:07:08.000If we went from the traditional, we'd go maybe one week or one and a half weeks without coming across any locals.
00:07:14.000So we'd have to carry a week and a half worth of ration packs in our backpack.
00:07:18.000But the true and scientific source sent us back.
00:07:21.000I think it was two or three weeks we couldn't find any community along the way via satellite and via the people that we were, my logistics managers.
00:07:32.000That is the craziest way to try to visit people.
00:09:03.000Yeah, and I think you've got to be stripped of all of the protein and whatnot running for your body currently, haven't you?
00:09:13.000I think if you're full, You're craving ice cream.
00:09:16.000You know, if you feel you want a dessert, but I think if you're now at the point of not starvation, but if you're really hungry and you know what's good, what's not good, I think your body gives a good tail sign of what you can.
00:09:27.000At the last month of Mission Yangtze, I was really bad.
00:09:30.000I was coming across cities every day because you can imagine like towards Shanghai.
00:09:35.000You're coming across cities, you're coming across towns, communities.
00:13:41.000And we were carrying 30. How much weight did you lose?
00:13:43.000I probably, and I've still lost weight now at about 13, 12 to 13 kilograms, I would say, in weight, which over the year was, I lost the same amount in Mongolia.
00:13:54.000Is that like 32 pounds or something like that?
00:14:59.000They want to get that healthy paleo food while they're out there in the mountain.
00:15:03.000But what's undeniable has got to be, for you, is that once you've made those steps, the first steps for the first day, you have this monumental thing in front of you.
00:15:27.000So before we got to the source of the Yangtze River, we lost, I think, four members.
00:15:34.000When I say lost, they survived, but they got altitude sickness.
00:15:38.000They were fearing for their lives because of the bears, because of the wolves.
00:15:41.000So before we reached day number one, before we reached the start line, we've already got four members of the film crew, of guides, evacuated, taken off the mountains, which brought me off the mountains as well because I needed to regroup with a different team.
00:15:54.000So everyone was scared and people also got altitude sickness.
00:17:42.000I say it was me and my friend, also videographer Kyle.
00:17:46.000We cracked on but Kyle filmed all of that conversation and four months later we found out from a girl from my editor team in Beijing who could speak Tibetan that he was saying right ahead, right down that valley is a pack of wolves and only yesterday they had killed a local lady.
00:18:03.000They were trying to get us not to go down there, saying don't go.
00:18:06.000But we didn't know, so we were like, oh yeah, all the best, thanks, see ya.
00:18:10.000And we cracked on, and for the next two days, we were followed.
00:18:13.000We believe we were stalked by a pack of wolves.
00:18:49.000How many days were you doing this with the wolves?
00:18:52.000So it was two days that they were following us, but we were in sort of Wolf County, if you like, for the best part of two or three months, I would say.
00:22:28.000They're in the forest and they're surprised.
00:22:30.000They come up the top of the hill, there's a bear there, and obviously the bear's shocked, it's scared, and it just attacks.
00:22:35.000Yeah, that does happen with bears in America as well.
00:22:38.000So they were saying pretty much, take a whistle, take an hour horn, make yourself aware, well, make the bear aware that you're present, you're approaching.
00:23:49.000And imagine someone would ask someone like you, like, why in the world, if you know they're there, would you want to walk for that long in bear country?
00:24:31.000I've been giving them old, crazy, ridiculous granny names.
00:24:34.000And I was like, this horse is the last one standing whilst my crew, my guides are suffering with altitude sickness and being taken off the mountains.
00:24:42.000You've got this horse still suffering with altitude sickness.
00:24:45.000Never knew that, but apparently animals can suffer with altitude sickness.
00:24:48.000But he's there like a badass still going.
00:25:57.000We had to get him off the mountains too.
00:25:59.000So we left the horse with some local nomads, got him off the mountains, regrouped with a different team, and tried again.
00:26:05.000So our first attempt towards the source was a fail.
00:26:10.000We regrouped, it was myself, it was two guides, it was the horse, and we eventually, finally made it to the source.
00:26:16.000It was on that gap in a nearby city of regrouping with a new team, with new guides that my team in the UK and China were saying, I think it's best if you hold back and we try again next year, because you'll be in the Tibetan Plateau during the depths of winter,
00:26:35.000which drops to about minus 30, minus 40 degrees Celsius.
00:28:32.000No jet boil or anything like that, because you wouldn't be able to refill them probably.
00:28:35.000Yeah, what we had actually, we had a bottle that connects to the stove, and with that bottle you can either fill it up with gasoline, but you can also use vodka, whiskey, and you can run off the vapors.
00:28:47.000You get pumping up, pump the bottle, the vapors leak out, sparks a flame, and you're good to go.
00:34:09.000They just came over, they were visiting, I was chilling with them, eating my ration pack.
00:34:12.000They brought some food and some tea over.
00:34:15.000We all sat out in the sun and at one point they would have slid my solar panel under my tent and I didn't see it.
00:34:21.000So when it came for me to pack everything back into my tent, which I did, put my head down, fell asleep and then I all of a sudden felt like nudging on the tent and something was yanked from underneath it.
00:34:58.000Because at that point, I took a trailer, and the trailer weighed about 120 kilograms of everything that I had in it, which is about 260 pounds.
00:35:07.000And so yeah, with that journey, I made sure I had backups.
00:35:52.000And a Green Development Foundation, which is like an organisation to make me ambassador, to make me doctor for a year, to be able to get all of this access.
00:36:02.000When I went through the motions of getting these different organisations on board, that would give me access to the authorities and allow me to get to the source.
00:37:32.000We've not seen a westerner out here in I don't know how long.
00:37:35.000So that got tricky, and there was one stage where they said, you need to be on the other side of the river.
00:37:40.000So they drove us 40 miles back on ourself to a bridge, dropped us off on the other side, and we had to do those 40 miles all over again.
00:37:47.000That was day six into the journey, and we were desperately trying to get off the mountains, and now we just dropped back 40. We had to walk those 40 miles again.
00:38:02.000The source around that area, really sensitive.
00:38:05.000And then we found that the locals would call the police as well.
00:38:09.000They would radio to the next girl, to the next girl, to the next girl, until eventually there was a phone signal and they would call the police.
00:38:15.000And the police would often rock up at 2, 3 o'clock in the morning, just at our tent.
00:38:34.000So it came, it pretty much went from Mission Yangtze to almost Mission Escape and Evade.
00:38:38.000We had to escape the sensitive region that we were in, but we had to evade the locals because we realized that it was them calling the police.
00:38:50.000Because if you think of a fugitive from America or the UK is trying to get away, what better way to just jump into the middle of nowhere in China and walk?
00:42:23.000What a fucked up way to die from the most beautiful thing nature has ever created.
00:42:28.000If a tiger wasn't a murderous, horrific predator that definitely eats people, you would look at it and go, was it a movie like Avatar or something like that?
00:42:37.000A tiger doesn't even look like a real creature.
00:43:45.000And then it's like the back paw is almost like a human footprint, isn't it?
00:43:48.000Well, the big brown bears, there's a photograph, a famous photograph of a woman who is a wildlife biologist and they had tagged this grizzly to put a collar on it or find its location or something like that or maybe do a test on it.
00:46:10.000He had a co-branded range between himself and Adidas, so it was like a photoshoot GQ, Adidas, and Jackie Huang, who's like a big movie star.
00:46:25.000One minute in the wilderness, next minute, flying out to Shanghai, got all of these stylists, makeup artists, like, whoa, photo shoot, boof, straight back.
00:48:32.000You're dropping a hell of a distance and you're straight into the Yangtze River.
00:48:35.000So he was supposed to join me for two weeks, but he ended up going back on day number one after six hours just because of the danger of trying to cross it.
00:48:42.000And so that for my mindset, having company for two weeks, I have a good friend of mine as well from the UK. I can speak, I can converse and communicate with.
00:50:28.000I would send them like a voice memo or a message of text what to say.
00:50:32.000Was there ever an issue with the Chinese government that you were doing that through a third party, that you were somehow or another getting the information out into the real internet?
00:50:39.000Not so much, no, because even the satellite that we had to carry, I carried like a Navarino satellite beacon system, if you like, and that we had to register with the government and he had to sign off so they knew what I had with me.
00:50:51.000And it was with that satellite that I was able to send to the Beijing team.
00:50:55.000They would forward on to the UK team and from there we were able to make it one of the world's most interactive firsts.
00:51:00.000Did they have any concern at all about you using the regular internet?
00:51:04.000Like instead of just using the Chinese approved social media sites that you were also using the other ones that were international?
00:51:10.000That's it, using international and the in-China, in-house ones.
00:51:14.000Do they have an issue with that at all, the Chinese people?
00:53:07.000From the United States trying to stop them from taking over.
00:53:10.000And they're worried that it's a branch of the government and they're going to get their hands in all these different enterprises and businesses.
00:53:17.000And they'll be able to spy on everything and extract information because they can do that with their Huawei devices.
00:53:22.000But it's interesting that I wonder if...
00:53:25.000Leaving them out of the system will make them create a system that's better, and they don't even need our system anymore.
00:53:49.000I think they've got an app as well, like a delivery app, where if the guy is like one minute late, you can throw a complaint in and then it's free delivery.
00:54:25.000But it's, again, a pleasant place to be.
00:54:28.000I had my friend, Martin Barrington, who's here as well, say that, because he joined me on Mission Yangtze, and he had this idea that maybe it might be a little bit more suppressed, and when he joined me, he was like, wow, everyone's happy, everyone's doing their tai chi, dancing, everyone's active.
00:54:56.000Do you think it's because we don't communicate or because their language is so different, they seem so different because they're all the way over there?
00:56:52.000So it all pretty much started living in Wales there.
00:56:56.000I went from high school, I went on to college to do an outdoor education course.
00:57:00.000I was working various different, so my first job, what was it, 14, 15, fish and chip shop, $4 an hour, you know, grinding away, and then I went into waiting on, then I went into lifeguarding, because I heard that the lifeguarding money for a young teenager, well, 16, 17, is pretty well paid.
00:57:16.000And then it was from there that I started to save up as much money as I can, got rid of my little jalopy of a car, bought myself a little bicycle, cycled to and from work, just saving the pennies, and eventually left at age 19. And the first place I went was China.
00:57:33.000When I looked back on the map, I thought, China's a big place.
00:57:36.000I barely even touched the surface, you know, I need to get myself back there.
00:57:39.000But after that, it was just various reckless, extremely low-budget adventures held around Southeast Asia.
00:57:46.000When I say low-budget, it's like buying a bicycle for $10, finding string on the side of the road that we would use to strap the rucksack onto the back with.
00:59:53.000We went there and this group living out there in the mountainous jungle region of the border of Tibet and Myanmar.
01:00:00.000They were teaching us berries, like there's a mosquito repellent, like you can pop them, rope them in your skin, it'll repel the mosquitoes.
01:00:07.000Teaching us how to hunt, how to gather, what berries or what leaves were edible, what plants weren't edible, how to build rafts and shelters using natural resources, you know, normally bamboo, banana leaves as a bed.
01:00:21.000It was a slanted shelter for the rainwater to run off.
01:00:44.000We walked up to this drive and there was this guy at the end of the drive doing all of these pull-ups.
01:00:48.000At that point, I'd become quite unhealthy, put a bit more weight on.
01:00:51.000It wasn't sticking to the trainer, it wasn't sticking to a good diet.
01:00:54.000And he jumped down, he wasn't interested in the Australian pound on gas, but he mentioned something like, yeah, I respect you guys out here, 40 plus degrees Celsius, 108 Fahrenheit, knocking on people's doors in their suits, trying to sell them a good deal.
01:01:07.000And my boss replied something cringeworthy.
01:01:10.000He said something like, yeah, but we get paid a lot of this.
01:02:03.000And I've had a lot of those little nudges along the way that if it wasn't for that nudge, I don't know, maybe I would have just continued and no idea.
01:02:27.000We'll come to Madagascar, but yeah, so just before, after that Australia cycle and before Mongolia, it's like this links us into the Mongolia.
01:02:37.000It's actually then working in Thailand.
01:02:38.000Because the money was so low, I had to find work as a master scuba diving instructor, but I was also doing the Muay Thai out in Thailand, which was awesome to see their discipline, you know, their ankle beating their shins.
01:03:30.000It was in Kotao, a little island in Kotao.
01:03:32.000So a guy sailed from mainland over to Kotao, and the winner, the loser, you can make money, of course, you know, so that was kind of my way of paying the rent.
01:05:06.000I was doing it for like two years, like living in Thailand for two years.
01:05:09.000But I was like, I missed trekking the Himalayas.
01:05:12.000I missed my time with the community, the hill tribe in Myanmar, cycling Vietnam.
01:05:17.000So I was like, I need to do something, you know, big, something That'll take me to a country that I'm very unfamiliar with, and that brings in Mongolia.
01:05:26.000So that was the first world, first record.
01:06:21.000So it's three weeks over the Altai Mountains, five weeks across the Gobi Desert, and a further three weeks up through the Mongolian steppe.
01:06:28.000So the Altai Mountains were excruciating, you know.
01:06:31.000It's no suspension, of course, on the trailer.
01:06:35.000Even one little pebble or stone gets in the way and you're struggling to...
01:06:40.000There's a sandstorm that I came across.
01:06:42.000It's actually one of the smaller ones.
01:10:29.000My logistics manager, my fixer in the capital city, needed to allow at least three to four days for him to get to me and at least another day or two for him to get me out to safety.
01:10:39.000Or I knew that there was a community which 100% had water.
01:10:43.000It was about three or four days trek away.
01:10:45.000And I continued and I pretty much passed the option of pickup at that stage.
01:10:50.000The only way to make it was pushing on those extra few days to the community.
01:10:54.000But again, four days, it was just too much for me.
01:11:12.000So I was just, if I can rest for five minutes, not an hour, and walk for 100 metres and then rest, because that's all I could manage before I was just in a mess, hide under my trailer again for another five minutes, if I can continue to do this.
01:11:25.000Maybe by breaking my goals down, after four days of 100 meters, I can make it to the community.
01:11:31.000And I did just about, it was off the radars.
01:13:45.000They allowed me back in with them, which was great.
01:13:47.000And I didn't even have money for a gym membership.
01:13:49.000So I had my uncle drop me off a tractor tyre, I wore a local sledgehammer, worked on like a barb, bit of calisthenics, and that's what I was doing out in the rain, hardcore conditions of Wales.
01:13:58.000Flipping the tractor tire, beating it with a sledgehammer, trying to prepare myself, not physically, but mentally.
01:14:05.000You know, when you're in your, as you know, your quilt cover, five o'clock in the morning, you can hear us howling with wind, rain outside.
01:14:10.000The last thing you want to do is go out and train, but I wouldn't have that option in Mongolia.
01:14:15.000So again, you know, that's saying, by putting yourself in more uncomfortable scenarios, the more comfortable you become.
01:14:51.000I was working on ticking off all components like flexibility, agility, balance, speed, reaction time, coordination.
01:14:58.000And I knew that my inner core was going to be crucial because pulling the trailer, if you come over a stone, literally your hips are being pulled left and right.
01:15:08.000So you need to be agile enough to be able to, you know, push on through that.
01:16:47.000I think I did when I got back I was slightly worried Just my organ the what I was feeling with my organs almost like they were drying up Just needed to check that everything was still functioning fine and everything was good The body recovers fast and I was only 24 I guess then 23 what what how much weight did you lose by the end of that?
01:17:06.000So that was 78 days and I lost 13 kilograms in 78 days That's what we were talking about earlier, so it's like 30-ish pounds.
01:17:15.000Yeah, so I lost 13 kilograms as well with Mission Yangtze, but that spread over a year.
01:17:19.000So that was like very concentrated, lost a lot.
01:17:21.000I was having a ration pack at 5.30 in the morning.
01:17:24.000This was two weeks of the Gobi Desert, or a week and a half, where I'd wake up at 5, and have a ration pack at 5.30, and I'd go a whole 14 hours before I had my next ration pack at about 7.30.
01:18:20.000You know, one funny story actually, in the Altai mountains, it was a Kazakh family, so I'd always try to eat and rest up with them where I could.
01:18:26.000It was a Kazakh family in their sort of hut in the middle of the Altai, rocked up 45 minutes inside, sipping on their chai, their tea.
01:18:46.000Eyes slightly squinted, slightly closed, like he's thinking of something.
01:18:51.000He looks over to his wife or his girlfriend, and he looks back to me, looks back at his wife, and then all of a sudden, right there and then, in hand gestures, offered me.
01:19:38.000And I was like, is it one of those things that this actually happened or will I leave and they're having a big joke right now and they're laughing away at the fact that, you know, you just never know, do you?
01:19:48.000I'm going to guess if they live in tents in the middle of nowhere and there's five tents and it takes forever to get there, those people are probably freaks.
01:19:57.000They're probably doing some weird freak shit.
01:19:59.000They probably have no attachment whatsoever to sexuality.
01:23:21.000Then I learned that it was offensive to offer them money.
01:23:26.000Because you're in their environment and they know for themselves.
01:23:29.000If they see, I had a guy once run me down on a horseback from the distance coming at me at speed and it was all just to give me a bottle to take away with tea inside.
01:26:44.000So I was just drinking, drinking, thinking I'm going to get better soon.
01:26:46.000Made it to the community, arrived at one of the nearest hospitals, and she said you potentially made it in time, potentially a few hours before you slipped into a coma.
01:26:55.000And that's when I realised, and then it was the deadliest strain of malaria.
01:26:58.000So you've got four different strains of malaria.
01:27:01.000You've got the deadliest and it usually kills you within 24 hours.
01:27:04.000But I believe I lasted five days because I was taking the anti-malarials.
01:27:07.000And then that one you can eradicate fully out of your system.
01:27:11.000Now, when you're on the anti-malaria medication and you're shitting yourself so it doesn't stay in your system, are you taking more of it when you think you have it?
01:27:31.000See, that's what Justin Wren was saying, that he experienced toxicity because he was taking five pills a day.
01:27:37.000Remember when Justin was talking about that?
01:27:41.000Yeah, we actually researched that there's been problems with some troops that get on that anti-malaria medication and they get really sick from it.
01:27:51.000Doesn't it do something to your brain?
01:27:53.000Yeah, I think that's the malarone that you're talking about.
01:29:37.000So, I have no military background at all doing this, which is usually strange.
01:29:41.000It's normally a military background to come in to do the survival, but everything that I've learned, I've tried to...
01:29:46.000I get as much knowledge as I possibly can from the locals.
01:29:50.000So like the Myanmar Hill community, Mongolia, how they survive, Madagascar, what's edible, what isn't edible, how to build rafts, etc.
01:30:00.000So I always try to take a small percent.
01:30:02.000And that's what you can ever take because they're so knowledgeable when it comes to what they can eat, what they can gather, what they can't.
01:36:13.000I didn't feel it, you know, when it happened, because as you're hacking through the jungle, you've got loads of bamboo shorts, and they all razor sharp, and they're stabbing you.
01:36:57.000You must take yourself a white cockerel, protect it, keep it alive, and it protects you from the bad spirits and witches of the rainforests, the locals say.
01:37:06.000So I'm all about respecting the local culture, of course.
01:37:33.000Two and a half weeks, chirping in my ear, praying for a little bit of rain, because when it started raining, he would tuck himself inside the bag.
01:39:40.000So Max, my guide, he said, so my take on it is we were in the middle of this community, deep in the jungle, high up in the mountains, in the middle of Madagascar, you know, the fourth largest island in the world.
01:39:52.000And we came across a community, and they allowed us to stay in their little wooden shack sort of hut.
01:39:58.000And I woke up about two o'clock in the morning, let's say, I don't know what time, two o'clock in the morning, and it's Max coming in.
01:40:04.000He should have been sleeping right next to us.
01:40:06.000It was Max, my photographer, me, and Lever, and the chicken next to Max, Gertrude.
01:40:13.000Anyway, his story is that me, Lever, and Suzanne were all convulsing in our sleep, all shaking.
01:40:20.000And then he looks up to the door and the silhouette of this lady was stood on the outside from the moon, stood on the outside of the door, peering in.
01:41:41.000And sometimes they would ask the local community whether it's safe to cross.
01:41:47.000And I would say, how do they know it's safe to cross?
01:41:50.000And he replied once, well, they've made a deal with the crocodile.
01:41:52.000I said, what do you mean they've made a deal with the crocodile?
01:41:55.000It's like, yeah, you know, the crocodiles have promised that they won't eat the locals if the locals let them be and leave them alone.
01:42:02.000So you're all going to cross that crocodile-infested river on the hope that some contract has been signed or some handshake, give me photo proof, you know?
01:44:48.000But they also believe in witches, too.
01:44:49.000But it's interesting, without the real outside world, right?
01:44:53.000We take away the internet, take away access to education, take away all the things that we think of in the Western world, and then in their world, even if witches aren't real, if they operate that witches are real, they're going to set these very specific patterns of things they're allowed to do and things they're not allowed to do,
01:45:12.000and it at least gives them this idea that carrying that chicken around is protecting them.
01:46:00.000So I'd just wind them up, you know, a second leaf dropped and they would scatter and I'd still be there like another tree.
01:46:04.000But I do love that, you know, that's why I travel to amazing stories, isn't it?
01:46:09.000People living in so many different ways.
01:46:10.000Big, beautiful world, lots to see, lots to do.
01:46:13.000And that's why, you know, so with Madagascar, I pointed up with the Lima Network Conservation.
01:46:17.000They've got 60 organisations on the ground helping to protect and preserve the unique biodiversity.
01:46:23.000So with these expeditions, the record is like the enticement, the motivation.
01:46:28.000But if I can do something worthwhile and highlight certain issues, so with Mongolia, I was actually raising awareness about climate change and the effects that it has on the nomadic way of life.
01:46:39.000It gets so cold out there now that the livestock struggle to survive, which means that the nomads are out of work, so they move to the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, to find work.
01:46:49.000But there's now like a Gur district or a Yurt district, you know, they're white felt tents surrounding the capital city and it gets free.
01:46:57.000It's one of the coldest capital cities in the world.
01:48:11.000It says, though they lack access to drinking water, proper sewage, or internal heating, many are reluctant to leave behind their unique millennia-old way of living.
01:48:19.000Yeah, just shitting a hole in the ground.
01:49:18.000Literally walking past stuff on a daily basis thinking you're not found anywhere else, only native to Madagascar.
01:49:25.000Giant comet moths this big, bright yellow, to lemurs over a hundred different species.
01:49:31.000So I'd do my best to try to meet up with as many organisations as I possibly could who were helping to protect and expand national parks, who were helping to educate the locals, supply different means of work, protect the species living within, and highlight the press.
01:49:46.000We're interested in the journey, but I would direct and highlight the real unsung heroes, I call them, the people volunteering, doing this day in, day out.
01:49:55.000And often there's just a lot of, you switch on the TV and it's just all negative, isn't it?
01:49:58.000But I believe positivity spreads more positivity.
01:50:01.000So highlight these issues, all of the amazing workers doing their utmost to protect the environment.
01:50:07.000And yeah, that makes you want to do more as well, doesn't it, you know?
01:50:11.000Well, it seems like it's got to change your frame of reference shifts.
01:50:18.000You've seen so many things that most people haven't seen.
01:50:20.000Just haven't been to that place and knowing that there's massive groups of people that are living like that that are burning plastic in the wintertime to try to stay alive.
01:51:19.000And then in the summer, so I didn't experience it in the winter, but in the summer, you still got the Gur district, but it's warm, so you can see the sky.
01:51:28.000A lot of it is livestock, so they raise their yak, dairy, you know, meats that they'll transport over to the capital city.
01:51:39.000But they're just out there living the purest way of life.
01:51:42.000I remember walking through a pot of Mongolia, actually, I went over eight days without seeing a single person, over eight days.
01:51:47.000I was like, wow, if you want to know what the world was like, I don't know, a million, two million years ago, Mongolia is the place that you'll get to experience a bit of that, you know?
01:52:35.000I remember my logistics manager, my Ulaanbaatar-based, my Mongolia-based logistics manager.
01:52:41.000I said to him, can you imagine how quiet, how silent it's going to be in the Gobi Desert?
01:52:45.000And he replied, he just said, there's no such thing as silence.
01:52:48.000I said, what do you mean there's no such thing as silence?
01:52:49.000They have like silence rooms, you know, torture, panic rooms, silence rooms with the headphones and whatnot.
01:52:54.000And he was like, I'm not going to tell you, you know, you'll get out there and if you've hit the right spot of the Gobi Desert, you'll know what I mean.
01:54:33.000I think the trailer on its own was 40 kilograms, I don't know what that was, a pound, 60, 70 pounds, maybe, on an empty load, because it was mild steel, just built in my family friends, backguarding, you know.
01:55:39.000At the same time, I realized, you know, just because no one's found a way to do something, it doesn't mean it can't be done.
01:55:45.000What made you feel like Mongolia was the wildest place?
01:55:48.000Probably because it was really close, like I'm living in Thailand, my initial idea was get a cheap bike, $10, cycle up to Mongolia, cycle across Mongolia and walk back the other way, or cycle to the start point in the east and then walk to the west.
01:56:01.000And I thought, if I did that I would have died, I wouldn't have made it, that was lack of preparation.
01:56:07.000So that's why I went back home, back to the UK for the right preparation, the right training.
01:56:11.000And again, as I say, now it's not like Vietnam, the cycle when it was all very reckless.
01:56:16.000It was all meticulous planning, detailed planning.
01:56:19.000And Mongolia for me just struck me as that.
01:56:22.000I was on the travel route for two years at this point, and I'd come across people, they say they plan to go here next, they plan to go there next, what they've come from, Cambodia, Vietnam, but no one had ever said Mongolia really, so I was just fascinated.
01:56:34.000Home to the Altai Mountains, the Gobi Desert, you've got your reindeer tribal community up north, you've got your eagle hunters in the west, your camels down south of the Gobi.
01:56:43.000It was just like, this country is fascinating.
01:56:46.000And from that point on, I was just like, I wonder...
02:00:59.000Like, not to say that anybody should have it, but I don't remember ever a time where someone was such a piece of shit that they ruined a hairstyle.
02:02:22.000He was trying to do exactly what Genghis Khan did.
02:02:26.000But it's interesting that there are these people in history that sort of shift of The civilization in a certain way where they just become incredibly dominant and conquer everything.
02:02:38.000There's a few of these people that throughout history, they pop up and then everything changes because of them.
02:09:20.000Oh yeah, he's well experienced in that.
02:09:22.000I think he's better physically without the drain.
02:09:26.000And I think size-wise, he's better as a 55er because those big giant guys like Darren Till at 170 are just a little bit too much, a little bit too powerful.
02:09:35.000But I think that at 170, with Conor at 170, they're both guys who are 55 pounders who are just not cutting weight.
02:09:42.000So I don't think there's an advantage for either one of them.
02:09:45.000I think it's great, and I think I would love to see that trend where guys just fight at their natural weight.
02:09:50.000Because I think it's terrible for your kidneys.
02:12:43.000It's like if you meet a girl and she's your favorite girl ever and you're like, oh my god, she's the one and you show up at her house with a dozen roses and then you don't have a dozen roses the next day.
02:12:52.000She's like, this motherfucker doesn't even appreciate me.
02:14:59.000He's on all sorts of anti-parasitic medication, but he was saying that after he worked out, he had to get into the shower because he was shivering.
02:16:34.000Becomes one of the top heavyweights for Bellator, catches malaria three times, three times, and keeps going back and forth to the Congo to spend these long trips out there.
02:16:45.000But in the process, he's gotten really sick, the last one.
02:16:48.000He looks great still, but it's still fucking with him.
02:21:03.000And he spent a considerable amount of time trying to find these things and take photos of them because of all the descriptions that the natives have of these enormous chimpanzees.
02:21:12.000They got video of one of them eating a jaguar.
02:21:15.000They don't know if it killed it or if it found it dead.
02:26:39.000So much more exciting but dangerous as well, you know?
02:26:42.000Well, when you're talking about people that believe in witches and people that believe in witchcraft, like back then, you almost had to have some belief system to keep you going because you...
02:26:50.000I had no idea what was around the next corner.
02:26:52.000So these terror birds were alive, I believe, when human beings were alive, right?
02:27:48.000And there's like stories of soldiers waking up half an ear missing because they've been injected in the middle of the night by this big ass camel spider size of a dinner plate, isn't it?
02:28:23.000The short-faced bear was the most terrifying bear in all of history.
02:28:26.000Short-faced bear was way bigger than a polar bear and super carnivorous, and they think it might have been the thing that kept human beings from successfully navigating the trek through the Bering landmass until they went extinct.
02:30:33.000Do you feel when you're doing these treks and you're going on these journeys and you're walking through places like Mongolia that are incredibly wild, do you try to envision what it must have been like to be an early person without all these amazing resources that you have at your disposal to help you get to this area that you're going to?
02:30:54.000Oh, it would be a whole different kit and everything.
02:30:56.000Like, so in Mongolia, I didn't actually even use that GPS because that failed me.
02:32:18.000And you can't communicate if you come across, if you're lucky to come across locals as well, they'll just point you in the wrong direction.
02:32:24.000They'll normally point you in their community, which is down south, up north, and you're trying to go east.
02:32:28.000They're trying to say, no, I want to go that way.
02:32:30.000They're like, no, no, no, next community is this way.
02:32:40.000The dehydration in Mongolia really terrified me.
02:32:43.000Now what happens if a standstorm covers the track up?
02:32:47.000Yeah, back to your map and compass and just hoping that you can be aware of the people around you, hoping you've got enough water, hoping you make it to another community or settlement.
02:33:09.000Yeah, I had a tracking device, especially for Mission Yangtze because it was Guinness World Record.
02:33:14.000We set off a tracker and every five minutes it'd come up with my speed.
02:33:18.000So even if I jumped in a car or on a bicycle, boom, every five minutes it's my speed, it's my altitude, my longitude, latitude, coordinates, distance covered.
02:33:26.000Whether I'm active and you'll zoom in and you can see my current location within five meters and that was part of the interactivity so I wanted to make this expedition as interactive as possible for the full year of like sharing blogs, videos, live streams, photos,
02:33:44.000Again, presenting in schools, getting the kids out litter-picking along the Yangtze River, filming for the documentary, which we're securing, international documentary, The Mission Yangtze Will Go Out.
02:34:02.000Very well planned, very well in terms of the interactivity.
02:34:07.000It's like six months of survival, six months of interacting with all the locals and just sharing it, getting out there as best as we possibly could.
02:34:15.000So I was heavily on the radar with the GPS systems, the trackers, the lot.
02:34:28.000But it does make me appreciate what you've done in a unique way, because I can see how it's affected you.
02:34:35.000And what we were saying earlier about things being, when you do something incredibly difficult like that, it sort of enhances you as a person, enhances your view of the world.
02:34:45.000You have just more things you've seen.