- Speaker #0
And then we'll eventually work our way down to Greece and then into the Mediterranean and then find, I don't know exactly how, away from Crete to Alexandria and then up the Nile. And then from there into Jordan and Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman. And then there's a ship that'll get us to Madagascar.
- Speaker #1
of storyteller, national geographic explorer, and science journalist takes an epic journey exploring all seven continents, never by jet. 600 days of adventure so far, I think 120,000 miles of traveling and five continents. You're talking here about huge, epic trip.
- Speaker #0
The whole idea behind the trip really was I wanted to travel in a way that was different than the way everybody else traveled. That's when the idea came to me. I thought, okay, let's travel the way people traveled 110 years ago. And that will encourage us. to be moving slowly through places, through countries, through geology and history, you know, everything more slowly. And therefore, we're going to absorb more of it, you know, and we're going to enjoy more of it. And sometimes we're going to have a hard time with it, but it'll make it a good story. The storytelling part of me, you know, the writer part of me, like that.
- Speaker #1
Welcome to the Wing and It Travel podcast with me, James Hammond. Every Monday I'll be joined by guests to talk about their travel stories, travel tips, backpacking advice and so much more. Are you a backpacker, gap year student or simply someone who loves to travel? Then this is the podcast for you, designed to inspire you to travel. There'll be stories to tell, tips to share and experiences to inspire. Welcome to the show. Hello and welcome to this week's episode. I'm joined by Chip Walter, an author, journalist, a National Geographic explorer, filmmaker and former CNN Bureau chief. Chip's current project is The Vagabond Adventure, a journey into the vast beauty, complexity and diversity of our planet and the remarkable people and cultures that live there. It's a personal pilgrimage with two intensely curious souls, travelling all seven continents, never by jet, one day, one culture, one experience at a time. Chip, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
- Speaker #0
Great, thanks. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, no worries. Tell the listeners, where are you right now?
- Speaker #0
We're home, oddly. We haven't been home very much lately, but when we made this agreement, when my wife and I made this agreement, I came to her and I said, let's travel the whole planet, but never travel by jet. And I thought she would tell me I was insane. But she said, OK, let's do it. But I have only one thing that I need to be able to do. I have to go back and see my mother. And of course, I love her, too. So that's all good. And so occasionally we do that. And then we also agreed that if we had some other work that we had to do, we both are working. Cindy has an art business. I'm a writer. So I have projects going. You know that we might have to come back for that. every so often. And my last book just came out. So that was another reason to come back for a bit. And then Annie, our youngest is getting married. So that's very important to come back for.
- Speaker #1
Will Barron Can you get away with missing your daughter's wedding? I mean, if you gave the excuse that you're traveling in the depths of Patagonia, is that an acceptable excuse?
- Speaker #0
Andy Kirk No, especially since they asked me to officiate.
- Speaker #1
Will Barron Ah, okay. Yeah. Andy Kirk
- Speaker #0
Yeah, no, Cindy and I probably would never. Will Barron
- Speaker #1
we'd be back no matter what for any but we have three daughters all of them we'd be back for yeah fair enough okay i'd like to go back to the back story of my travelers on the podcast so i'd love to know where you initially grew up and was travel part of your upbringing yeah um well
- Speaker #0
i grew up in pittsburgh i grew up in pittsburgh pennsylvania in the in the us um which is kind of a you know all-american city i guess and uh i was surrounded by woods uh and so my my mother and father were just kind of you know i'd have breakfast in the summertime and i'd just disappear into the woods i loved that uh i mean there's the story that my mother uh used to tell where when i was three years old whenever she was i guess she'd gone off downtown and i wanted to and i was they had a caregiver with me a woman that worked with us and uh and i said well where's my mom and she said well she's downtown and i said okay and i just got like two cookies and got on my trike and took off and uh and they found me like a couple of hours later on the street and i i don't know where i was going or where i thought my mother really was or what downtown was or anything but i didn't think about it i just thought well okay let's go and uh and that's kind i think people um who love to travel are really basically more than just travelers they're intensely curious people period and travel just becomes one way for them to satisfy their curiosity so i think that um for me that was a lot of it i mean all you had to do was say let's go somewhere and i was up i was in you know i loved going uh to the beach as a kid i loved car car rides i mean you know anything because it was different and you're going to learn something new and uh so i i just think you know some people are built that way and i guess i'm one of them yeah i remember being based in london right when i was studying and
- Speaker #1
i used to see like the kids that were you know in their teenage years and they just thought about around london on the tube and i think oh that they're traveling like an hour in terms of actual travel time to a completely different part of london whereas what i grew up is quite small small town it takes me 20 minutes to walk from my house where I used to live into the city center and that was a journey don't get me wrong but it's like the one you could do all the time and it's quite set in stone but with someone like London I think god they're going like northeast London southwest like all these places that you kind of hear about on tv but they're just going every day just found a bit mind-blowing really like that adventure of just
- Speaker #0
going to a completely new area yeah and then you know the older you are and the more you're able You know, you just begin to begin to expand your world. I mean, honestly, if we could go to the moon, I'd say, let's go there, too. You know, so this journey is, you know, proving to be really interesting because we're trying to get through all seven continents. And it takes time when you're not traveling by jet. It's it's a whole different experience.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, we'll come to much more of those details in a bit. I'm really keen to know how it's gone. and what's coming up and also when you're kind of growing up into adulthood was the interest in travel starting to take a bit more of a serious turn in terms of your thinking maybe i can go to new york city or other states in america or even international like where you're thinking along those lines going into adulthood oh
- Speaker #0
yeah yeah i mean as soon as i saw a map and you could see the world and you could see other states i mean the united states is a big country yeah australia So you just see those places and you go, well, I want to go there. And finally, I really got a chance to do it whenever I got to Cable News Network. The job just required that I start traveling around the country. So I spent a lot of time traveling around the United States. And then when I got into documentaries, that's when I really was able to start to travel the world. And I could go to the Australian Outback. I went to the Amazon, went to Africa. you know tanzania and and you know you begin to think when you're doing that oh wow i'm really getting around and then you look at a map and then you go oh really i've been no i've been nowhere this place this place this place but you know so that that sort of got it was what got on my mind and and you know traveled a lot of other individual places over you know over my life but whenever you know whenever i was finishing immortality inc which was the book before the one i just came out with i just i said to cindy i said let's just hit the road and and do it in a different way and try to cover you know a whole lot of ground and that's what we've been doing yeah
- Speaker #1
it's amazing i speak to my friend every day who's from china right from beijing and i said i said to him that people say yeah i've been to china but i'm like china's huge like there is
- Speaker #0
an unbelievable amount of places within china you can go to and have an amazing train network right so you've got around the train they're there for years yeah years like you can literally spend years there yeah yeah it's just crazy i've been to china and i think i've been to beijing and xi'an you know right yeah it's not the same as saying you've
- Speaker #1
really been to china yeah it's high on my list actually yeah to do three or four months i don't know what the tourist visa length is but whatever that length is i'd probably maximize it and try and see as much as i can because that country is massive yes as as usa and australia and places like this right yeah yeah yeah and there's so much history and everything there oh yeah yeah you can really deep dive right almost too many places right you can't never really see anywhere oh i do kind of wonder the podcast like would you rather be seeing all the different countries or being like an expert in one country like really deep dive in one area or like one continent i don't know what's the cooler idea, you know, going to more places, different places, or just sticking to one area and really knowing that really well.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. I, I think for me, part of my problem is I want both. help me out but it's very it's very hard to have both um so that was one of the and i you know get into this whenever you're ready but you know that was one of the reasons for slow traveling uh you know but i you know there are people i know who say well okay i checked off iceland i checked off morocco you know i checked off or i checked off africa because they were in you know one place in africa um But so I think we all want much more than that. Real true travelers want they want to dig in, but they also want to see lots of places, you know. So I guess we're trying to do a little bit of both with what we're trying to do.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. Just talk to us a little bit before we get to sort of the travel aspect in terms of your career. You mentioned that you're doing the media. Was that out of love of broadcasting or writing? How did you get into?
- Speaker #0
the media space i started out as a newspaper writer um really all i was a literature major so all i really wanted to do was just somehow find a way to make a living writing yeah and uh so i got into uh i i started out writing newspapers and then i wrote for magazines and then i got hired by a local television station a cbs station here in pittsburgh and I was working there for a few years. I was the assignment editor and I got asked one day out of nowhere, a phone call that said, hey, we're starting this new cable news thing that Ted Turner started. You know, would you like to we'd like to hire you? So I was like, well, I wonder what that's about. You know, it sounds crazy now. Everybody knows who CNN is. Yeah, but nobody knew what it was. And a lot of people thought it would tank. my boss at kdka where i was working certainly thought it would tank but i went down and i did the interview and i said yeah sure let's give it a shot you know again i think that people that are curious and like to travel they're also eternal optimists yes so you you just assume that everything's going to go well uh sometimes they don't but cable news network did and that that was how uh that was how i got into that and then as a result i got into producing and then i would was uh the assignment editor on the national desk and then uh i was a son or a bureau chief in los angeles and then san francisco before i finally just burned out and and moved on to documentaries yeah
- Speaker #1
that's my next question how hardcore was the work in terms of hours and how did it affect your life either like in terms of time but also travel leisurely right because i guess
- Speaker #0
you're working a lot you're traveling up for work but did you ever get time to do anything for yourself no no no i mean it was really crazy because it was actually when cable news network was starting i was there the day we went on the air um and so we were just making it up as we went along and when you have 24 hours of news yeah it's monstrous you know black hole that has to be filled with news Nobody had ever done anything like that before. You know, everybody had their half-hour newscasts or their one-hour newscasts, sometimes 15-minute newscasts. And so we were just running all the time. And it was exciting. It was an interesting time to be there. Anything was possible. But on the other hand, after, you know, a few years at it, day in and day out working, you know, 12, 15 hours a day, and there's high adrenaline, I just finally said, you know, I need to do something where I can really sink my teeth into something. And documentaries were the opposite, you know, really of cable news network where you were just cranking out news, different news every day where and with documentaries, you'd spend a year just researching and figuring out how you were going to make the film.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, true. And do you think anyone in the CNN type of industry can survive that long or was it always burnout for everyone who's involved like do you know people who are still there now from when you uh yeah there were a few people that that you know lasted oh you know like
- Speaker #0
35 40 years and there were a couple that are even nice but i do remember being in cable news network and thinking you know i think only the insane survive here because it was so uh I mean, you had to be a particular kind of person to, you know, love that and dig into it day in and day out, especially there and especially at that time. I'm sure it's more calm now. you know at that time i thought i'm not sure i want to be here for 10 or 20 or 30 years you know um so you know it was good it was great it was a it was a terrific experience i learned a ton i met a lot of great people uh i got to travel around the states and i got you know i learned a lot about myself uh but it was really time to to do something that I, you know, I'd always really wanted to write books, but, you know, I was too busy making a living. And, uh, and so documentary started to get me closer to that, you know, where I could really dig into something.
- Speaker #1
Okay. So that kind of leads me nice onto my next area of the conversation, which is basically post, uh, CNN and that's like books, making films, travels, national geographic. So I'm going to start with. probably not in the right chronological order but maybe just what i researched in order pretty much i'm gonna start with books because i love books and i picked a couple that you've released that kind of piqued my interest and then we'll talk about your latest book as well which i don't think is on the notes but um we'll talk about after these two so the first one i've got is immortality inc and the reason i picked this is because this is about aging where people are trying to in quotation marks cure aging or at least try and bypass it or at least make them live longer than the norm. It's just intriguing and scary at the same time. I'm like, how do you even begin to write this book? Like, where do you start? Like, how do you even come up with a concept?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, that's a great question. Well, with the science documentaries that I had worked on, and then the science books that I worked on, the thing about science for me was, and again, I was a literature major, so it was something that kind of came to me later. Possibly because of literature, you know, I mean, you could read libraries full of books explaining why we are the way we are or how we solve problems, you know, philosophy, theology, psychology. But the questions that started to come to me were, well, you know, what's the science behind why we do what we do or how we solve a problem? And so. immortality kind of fell out of the other books that I had written. And I started to look around and I would see articles about aging and how science was trying to solve the problem here and there. And I thought, are we at a time in human history when, I mean, we've solved a lot of problems. Was this like the big one that we could really solve? Would science be able to figure out a way to stop? the human clock and if it did then what would happen uh and and so that's kind of what was in my head i thought well is there anybody out there that can tackle this who really you know not just snake oil you know because there's a lot of you know but some really serious scientists who might be able to tackle this and and right around when i started thinking about it um news came out that uh larry page at Google, one of the founders of Google, had met with a guy named Art Levinson, who was the chairman of Apple, but also the chairman of Genentech, which was the first biotechnology company. And they had come to him and asked him if he felt he could create a company that could solve aging, because Google wanted to tackle these giant problems, what they call moonshots. and when i read about art levinson first of all you know google says okay we're we're going to give you tons of money to tackle this now when i learned about art levinson he was really fascinating because well you know being chairman of apple and and all that but he was a serious microbiologist and uh so i find i and then craig venter the uh scientist that first sequenced the human genome and ray kurzweil who's a very well-known futurist and inventor who really was the first scientist to say, we don't have to die. And Aubrey de Grey and another scientist named Robert Hariri, who is probably one of the world's leading stem cell experts. So these guys, when I was able to track them down and they agreed to talk to me and allowed me to get into their labs and really spend time with them, I thought, okay, these are real. serious scientists and if anyone's going to solve this problem it's going to be them so i i mean there are other scientists i could have seen but i kind of focused on these and i really got into their stories because i wanted to know well, why would you think you could solve this problem? You know, what, what makes you think you're capable of tackling that problem? And, uh, so it just got very interesting to me. I, I just started digging. I spent hours and hours and hours with all of these people and I, I'd spent time in their labs and I talked to all the other people and I, I learned everything about their lives. And one of the things I thought was interesting about it was that most of them had lost someone. important in their lives early in their lives so the idea of death had a big effect emotional effect on them in the case of craig venter he actually tried to commit suicide and uh and then realized that he he had swum out miles out and when he was in vietnam uh out into the ocean to get away from he was working with as a medic and he just couldn't take the the slaughter anymore and then he got out there and a shark bump up against them and he and it's like a light bulb went off and he said oh my god i've got i want to live you know so he almost died swimming back but that had a huge effect on his life so anyhow i thought those stories were fascinating and then getting into the science of how they were tackling it and could they tackle it and uh and i think they they will they'll solve it i don't know if these particular scientists will solve it but i think science will solve it and what i've to people is I mean, a lot of people will say, well, do I really want to live that long? You know, and I think, well, people think that they're going to be decrepit and just get increasingly old.
- Speaker #1
Yeah.
- Speaker #0
And that's not the idea here. The idea is to stop aging and to reverse it. And so then I ask people, I go, well, if you're 35 years old, how would that be? And then they go, oh, well, that's different. You know. And the truth is, I mean, I wrote about this after the book came out. The truth is, if someone walks up to you, unless you're in horrible pain or something, you know, they walk up to you and they say, here, I have a pill. And with this pill, you'll be able to live, you know, hundreds more years, perfectly healthy. I mean, who's going to, I don't think there are very many people are going to say, nah, I think I'll pass.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
So I think that whether or not we like it, as this happens with a lot of technologies, once they're here, they're here. And we better just figure out how we're going to deal with it. Because I get that question a lot. Well, aren't there going to be too many people or how are you going to pay for living for hundreds of years, whatever? And I don't know what the answers to that are. I think that we can probably solve them, but we better start thinking about it now because I think it's going to happen and it's probably going to happen within the next 10 to 15 years.
- Speaker #1
That's crazy.
- Speaker #0
And I think we're already making progress now. So yeah, it is. It's going to be a crazy century.
- Speaker #1
And the fact we have a population decline, right? Worldwide.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, yeah. I mean, truthfully, the... the rate of growth has been dropping since the 1980s but there's so many people the number of people continue to increase but it is slowing down and as uh as countries become uh more financially stable and as people become better educated fewer and fewer people you know are born so that seems to be a massive trend globally you can't imagine it can you that you can just like live over 200 years
- Speaker #1
yeah that's yeah i put a question here what's the future of human race it's a really generic question but in line with the book i guess if they figure this out and people have access to this i guess my actual question would be the access to let's say a pill just for basic sake right there's a pill in your current state healthy whatever for 200 years like who has access to that and how easily accessible would be for normal people in the street or was it only for rich people
- Speaker #0
Right. I think that what we see, what you see over time and history is that initially new technologies are first come to the rich. Yeah. And they actually become, in a way, excellent guinea pigs or whatever the technology is. But once it starts to go mainstream, prices drop. And, you know, the stuff becomes much more universally, maybe not as universally available as it should be or we would like it to be. And hopefully we'll get better at that. But generally, that's what kind of happens. I mean, just take a simple example. The car used to be that people had a couple of people had Stanley steamers and, you know, a couple of rich people had, you know, high end cars. And then. you know ford figured out how to you know create the assembly line and make them cheaper and and then they became available to everyone whether we and again whether we liked it or not that's what happened uh same thing with cell phones with cable you know television um all sorts of drugs penicillin those kinds of things so i think generally that's the way it goes um again i'm not sure it goes perfectly well but yeah hopefully um the this will become available universally certainly should be that way yeah but it's not right now it's not right now people benefiting from this are very very wealthy people yeah
- Speaker #1
okay uh next book of yours which kind of is loosely related to this right in a way in a sort of if you swap it around is the last ape standing this people because this is about the journey of human beings you yeah i've got a thing here that like do you find incredible that we are like us two as an example we're alive today because the dna inside us has kind of reached this point and like millions of years of struggle right or that hundreds of thousands of years of struggle and we get to this point and i kind of think it's
- Speaker #0
quite it's quite incredible what it's gone through right let's get to this point now yes yes i mean that was one of the fascinating things i mean i actually wrote the book because Partly because of the research I had been doing and writing I had been doing about high technology, I began to realize there's this collision between human behavior and the technologies that we create. Sometimes it doesn't go well. And so I thought, you know, for us to really be able to properly use technology as powerfully as we do, we should probably get a better handle on what makes us tick. Where did we come from? You know, why are we this? I mean, let's face it. We are a strange creature. I mean, there's nothing else on the planet like us. There are no other animals on the planet that are building huge cities or going to the moon. So, you know, I just that really got into my head. I thought, well, and it goes back to that idea of, you know, not philosophy, not theology, but like, what are the real answers? And so I just spent years doing research for that book, had a lot of fun writing it. But what it really comes down to is what makes us tick? Why are we the way we are? And what I found was that, you know, about seven million years ago, the first, you know, what are known as hominins, you know, or upright apes appear, begin to appear. and so that's sort of made that the beginning of the story and tried to tell that story and i found that there were 27 at the time when i was writing book i think it's closer to 29 there's probably many more than that uh you know of the of hominins existed over over time and and so then we wondered well why did we make it they're all gone now all of them they're you know but why are we the last ape standing why are we still here and uh And so that just turned out to be a kind of nice story. And then it also became a really nice way to explain how we emerged out of this and what made us different. And why some other creatures, I mean, Neanderthals are extremely bright, you know, but they didn't survive. Same thing with Denisovans, you know, the genetic evidence indicates that they were. Very, very smart. We don't know as much as we would like to know about them. The only reason we really know about us is because we're here. Yeah. You know, but otherwise, you know, it's just fascinating to see. And you're right. I mean, we are married, especially over the last 400,000 years, 500,000 years. We are married in some ways with these other creatures, you know, and we benefit from. their abilities uh and it just got you know i don't know if luck is the right word it's well evolution is is simply about things yeah it is about luck in a way it's like you get certain genes and they work and and so we figured out a way to be born early uh because our brains were getting so large uh you know we had to get through yeah to get through the birth canal we had to be born really helpless. And that turns out It turns out to mean that unlike other apes, not necessarily Neanderthals, but like other apes, we are born very early and most of our brain development is outside the womb, not in the womb. Which means that your personal experience shapes you much more than it would if you were born with your DNA or you just arrive like a wildebeest and you're up and running and ready to go. um so it turns out that that made it much more difficult for us to survive but we figured out other ways to survive it became much more social much you know we had to be smart in order to survive we almost didn't make it i mean 75 000 years ago we're probably down to a couple thousand wow homo sapiens yeah but here we are there's eight billion of us now
- Speaker #1
There's so many questions in there with that whole subject. I think that's not a podcast,
- Speaker #0
but that's because you're curious.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. And also from the travel aspect, I think, I don't know if you touched on this in the book, but obviously some of those early human beings started to migrate and started to go explore, which is quite an interesting one because you kind of question why, why are you up and running and you don't know what's ahead of you. The fear of death is probably going to increase because you don't know your surroundings. Like, yeah, what's the thing inside those early...
- Speaker #0
guys that want to go you know what let's go and walk over there i don't know a thousand miles and what we know today is miles let's see what happens yeah yeah yeah absolutely i you know and i really thought about that and i thought about it even after the book came out because i thought okay what why we went all around the planet you know we started out in africa in a little place uh and we went all the way around the planet which is clearly not easy i mean it's not easy now i'm not yeah by jet i mean they didn't even have a you know uh a ship or anything it was just you and your feet and um you know i i think i think what it really comes down to is i think that any creature wants to have control of their environment because that enables you that gives you a better chance of surviving and and so i think that's that's where our curiosity comes from we we want to be in charge of what's around us And so that naturally leads to, well, what's around the bend? What's over the hill? You know, what's beyond that mountain? And so I think, you know, a lot of times people say, well, we're just migrating because we're following the food. And, you know, that certainly was probably true, too. But I do think that it's really like, OK, I need to know about that thing that I don't know about, because if I don't know about it, it might kill me. And so I think that's that's part of certainly a big part of why we're so curious and where it's really built into us. You know, we can't. We're what I call infobores. You know, we have to have information or we just can't. It really bugs us if we don't have it.
- Speaker #1
Which kind of leads me to the next question. Why do you think there's some people like me and you right today and others last, I don't know, 150 years of the great exploration? Why do we feel the need to travel as much? as opposed to some people you might know and definitely some people i know who have no interest and are happy staying in one place and that's it like why is there that difference you think yeah yeah that's a good question um i've talked with people like that and um well
- Speaker #0
first of all again i think that we're travelers are innately curious so it's almost like you just want to see a different place hear a different sound um It just makes you feel good because it's different, you know, and it satisfies your curiosity. You know, it's exciting. It broadens your your thinking. You know, it's it's ineffable. You know, it's hard to put your finger on it. But those are the kinds of things that I think of whenever I say, wow, you know, I can't wait to get up today and go see something new. But I think there are people who don't really want. things that are new. And that's why I differentiate between travelers versus tourists, because my definition of tourism is you leave the place you're at to go somewhere else so that it's like the place you're at, instead of a traveler who goes to find things that are different from where their home is. And so I think there are a lot of people that, you know, a lot of people would say to me and Cindy, they'd say, well, weren't you scared or weren't you afraid that something bad was going to happen? And, you know, there was not anything in particular they were worried about, but. And so I think fear is an issue. I think some people are just very comfortable because, again, it's a control thing. You go, I understand where I live. I understand what I do. I like that world. I don't know if they're comfortable with it or not, but for whatever reason, it's like, I'm good. I don't need to see anything else. I feel fine. And to those people, I would say, man, you're missing out on a lot. But.
- Speaker #1
if that's what you want to do that's up to you yeah it's very interesting your definition there tourist yeah i straddle both right i think i do both yeah but i think if i'm in the tourist mode i'm almost having a break i think i'd see that right it is seeing something new and it can be like you know physically you walk in 10 000 steps whatever a day but in terms of the experience it's not quite dissimilar to where i live now in vancouver for example right there's gonna be a coffee place there's gonna be water it's gonna be fairly new fairly the same same i think that's what i see tourists as and that could be different from just booking a normal inclusive stay there for a week and not actually moving or just like booking a city break if you live in a city already to somewhere new in us for example it's gonna be same same isn't it a tiny bit different so yeah
- Speaker #0
the travel aspect is very explain you're kind of exploring aren't you as i explore a mentality right yeah i completely agree with you and i've i've done it cindy and i've done it would just go we actually have have said before we even started this journey you know there are different kinds of vacations um yeah and so some vacations are go to you know a resort and get on the beach and pull out your books and that's it you know and and and that's you're there for a particular reason and you know that reason is to punch out uh which definitely people need to do um and then there are historical you know vacations or there are just hiking vacations or and and and they're different in in the case of what we're doing we're sort of getting all of it and sometimes you know we'll be somewhere we'll go well this is nice and we're tired so we're just going to stay here you know and we sort of do a little mini punch out in the middle of the you
- Speaker #1
know the trip love that okay awesome uh let's bring it back to travel uh slightly um no actually before that can you tell us about your latest book then we'll go to travel
- Speaker #0
Yeah, this book really, it's a novel. It's my first novel. And it really comes out of, it's in some ways a sequel to the other books that I've written, even though they're nonfiction. But I spent a lot of time, obviously, researching different kinds of science over the years. And I just had this story idea that came to my mind. and uh i kind of weave a lot of the knowledge that i gained into what i wanted to create was just a good page turning futuristic thriller nice uh and so that's what it is it's called doppelganger and i guess simplest way to the kernel of it is that uh it's a time in in the world where you could download a human mind into uh a cyborg body and uh And so this guy basically wakes up thinking he just woke up that morning, but it turns out that he's been murdered and he is the doppelganger. He's the backup. He's the downloaded version of himself. And he has to solve his own murder. And it gets way bigger and much more complicated than that. So it really kind of comes out of some of those issues in Immortality, Inc. And some of the years and years ago, I had met a scientist out of Carnegie Mellon University who was the first scientist to say someday we will be able to download a human mind into a machine. And I thought, well, what if you do that and and you do it on a Friday and then you're murdered over the weekend and you wake up, you go, how do you solve that? What do you do? you know and uh i would think you'd be pretty upset so it's i kind of ran with that premise and uh people have been really enjoying the book and uh and it it does kind of look at what's the next next stage of humanity it's like um you know neanderthals didn't make it maybe we won't either yeah yeah it's a new a new kind of creature that will emerge and evolve
- Speaker #1
There's so many possibilities. I was just thinking when you mentioned about someone getting murdered, like if you had that drug where you can live another 200, 300 years, is that exclusively only for people who aren't criminals? Because then would you run the risk of giving it to criminals as loosely as, you know, someone who doesn't do something as bad as murder, but I don't know, stealing something. Right. As opposed to murdering someone like are those guys banned from having it because they've been criminalized?
- Speaker #0
Right. Right. Yeah. That would be that would be the ultimate sentence, wouldn't it?
- Speaker #1
Yeah. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
You don't get to keep living, basically.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
Oh, well, I like that.
- Speaker #1
yeah yeah yeah and you could be innocent oh oh well yeah okay let's bring it back to travel um all right so after cnn you went to national geographic to work on a few things and that was as a filmmaker right and a documentary maker um
- Speaker #0
so what were some of the angles or stories that you worked for with those guys right um well so after i left cable news network oddly strangely i met uh the producer that had gone to Carl Sagan with the idea for Cosmos. This was a long time ago. I literally ran into him while I was at CNN on the street and we got talking. And when I found out that's what he was doing, you know, I was like, wow, I just would love to get into that. And so it took a, took a few years, but eventually he asked me to join a series called Planet Earth, which at the time in Los Angeles, wqed which was a big pbs television station in the united states had offices in los angeles and they did all the national geographic specials and they were doing this series too so i would i was just you know bumping into national geographic producers and uh photographers and everything all the time and but we did this series called planet earth with seven part series and uh and i co-wrote and produced two of those with a guy from Britain called from BBC named Robin Bates and we did those two and the series won an Emmy which was great and then I co-developed with people at WQED another series called Infinite Voyage which is all about science and I did a documentary called fires of the mind which is really what got me kind of led eventually to thumbs toes and tears and last day of standing uh but it was really an exploration of the evolution of intelligence which you know enabled me to go all over the world to to do and then i did a few other documentaries and i and i was asked to develop a series there and uh because i thought well i wanted to get into writing books And so I developed a series called Space Age, and it was a big PBS series. And then they asked me if I would executive produce the series. And I said, no, I'm going to write the book. And they said, well, there isn't a book. And I said, there will be a book. And I didn't know why, but then I got an email, or not an email. This was... I got a letter from an editor at Random House who had seen an article I wrote and said, I really liked your article. Would you like to write a book for us? And they said, oh, well, we have this series. And so that was my first book. And then that later led to a book with William Shatner, The Technologies of Star Trek. And then one thing led to another. And now we're into my sixth book.
- Speaker #1
Crazy. And for the travel aspect here. Where's the travel in this in terms of outside of these interests?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, well, I mean, once I started doing documentaries, you know, the beauty of doing something that's called planet Earth is, you know, you get to go everywhere. So, I mean, we went to Indonesia, went to the Amazon rainforest, the outback of Australia, all over Europe, Tanzania, you know, see. the oldest fossils in Australia, the history of human intelligence in Africa. So that really opened up my mind. I remember someone walking through the offices there saying, Hey, Chip, how's it going? And I said, I'm traveling all over the world meeting some of the most interesting people in the world. I go, really, what's better than that?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, absolutely. The dream, isn't it?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, it was, I mean, it was really great because not only did you get to travel, but you, you know, you were. exploring really interesting things and meeting really fascinating people. The only downside about it was that I was working. And so, you know, what I really wanted to do is just go visit these places and explore them on my own and not really have to do anything. But that doesn't really work anyhow, because I'm just, you know, I love writing. So everything that we're doing now, I'm writing about it all the time. So it's still in a sense work, but it's good work. I like it.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, because my question here is did you actually have time to travel for leisure in this sort of period of time where it's outside of the projects and you just have certain areas of the world you may have been to through work like you say you want to go to explore more or even new places you've not explored no
- Speaker #0
you know I didn't really yeah we were so busy uh doing the projects that I did not get to travel much for leisure occasionally you know you're you're there you So you might get a day, you know, able to explore something. But I think what it did more than anything for me was it just made me hungrier to at some point just do what I wanted to do, you know, kind of the way I wanted to do it. And and I wanted to dig into it. And so, you know, even when I started to get more time when I was writing books to just. you know take off with my kids on a vacation or or with my wife uh you know it still wasn't the same as what i really wanted to do and that's that's how this journey kind of happened you know because you still fly in and fly out you know um you know if you're going on a vacation so you know you you can you can expand it a bit but you know at some point you're you're You're saying, well, we're going to go away for two weeks or we're going to go away for a week or we're going to go maybe if you're lucky, three weeks, you know, but it's not the same as what we're doing now.
- Speaker #1
Which kind of brings me on to the Vagabond adventure. Is that maybe the reason why you've taken the decision to kind of start this new adventure? I've got like a little blurb that says a storyteller, a National Geographic explorer and science journalist takes an epic journey exploring all seven continents, never by jet. So. That is 600 days of adventure so far, I think, 120,000 miles of traveling and five continents to date. You're talking here about a huge, epic trip.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, it's a monster, but it's a really great one. And we started as soon as we could with COVID, as soon as we were allowed to travel, period. i mean we had all kinds of trips that were cancelled because of covid so cindy my wife said you know our initial plan was to head down through the caribbean and south america to antarctica you know it was going to be the first leg and uh and covid just killed all that because shipping stopped you know uh and and since you know the whole idea behind the trip really was I wanted to do some, I wanted to travel in a way that was different than the way everybody else traveled. And that's when the idea came to me. I thought, okay, let's travel the way people traveled 110 years ago, you know, and let's, and that will encourage us to be moving slowly through places, through countries, through geology and history and, you know, everything more slowly. And therefore, we're going to absorb more of it, you know, and we're going to enjoy more of it. And sometimes we're going to have a hard time with it, but it'll make it a good story. The storytelling part of me, you know, the writer part of me liked that idea. We just decided, Cindy said, well, look, if we can't head to Antarctica, then let's just start with the United States. And so we just started getting on trains and we went all the way up to Newfoundland and then came all the way in. across the united states and all the way down to baja and then up to vancouver where you are and uh victoria and and areas like that and then finally we were able to break out and get to uh get across the ocean so we went immediately over and and booked it to morocco uh because it was you know exotic at least or that would you know it was it was a wonderful trip um and then we said okay let's that would that took about a year so we said all right now let's reboot and head to antarctica and and that was an epic journey in itself you know just getting from the united states through the Caribbean and then all the way down through Peru and Chile and Patagonia and the Andes and the Atacama Desert and into Tierra del Fuego and then finally making our way to Antarctica. And then within that year, we got all the way back up to Svalbard, which is the northernmost human habitation. And that took six months of travel to do, but we went pole to pole last year.
- Speaker #1
yeah i've got some questions about those couple places actually in a bit but i've got some other questions about the trip uh there's so many questions i've got um do you have any hard rules i know no flying is one day to day is there certain things you're looking for or is there experiences that you're booking in like how do you get what you're after when you're going to new places day to day like in terms of like how long do you stay there because you're trying to do it slowly right so how are you figuring it out uh over like the shorter time period yeah
- Speaker #0
I mean, we have a very general, I said a very general kind of zigzaggy itinerary for the whole journey around the planet. You can't really avoid that if you're going to hit all seven continents. And then beyond that, one of the kind of interior rules was let's look at places that we haven't been. So we didn't go back to Paris. We didn't spend, I mean, we went through Paris, we went through London, but we didn't spend a lot of time in those places because we'd been there and a lot of other places in Western Europe and some places in Mexico. Yeah. And so we purposely tried to find places that we hadn't been and we would avoid places we were more familiar with. And then otherwise, basically we say, okay, well, this. Because we're not traveling by jet, we just kind of have to go through some places. Like we had to go through 2,000 miles in Argentina from Ushuaia, which is the very tip of South America, to get to Montevideo, Uruguay, so that we could take a ship from Uruguay across the Atlantic to get us to Europe. It was the only way that we could get on the other side of the Atlantic. We really wanted to go to Africa, but we couldn't find a ship that would do it. uh so we traveled to get to montevideo we traveled 2 000 miles on buses over five days frankly it was brutal you know but it was the only way that we could get um and we met we saw a lot of fascinating places and interesting stories to tell and everything as as we did it uh and it certainly would have been easier to do if we were flying but that's not what we were doing so we had a whole nother experience you um so something so in situations like that sometimes you just have to get from point a to point b and uh you run into whatever it is you run into to get there uh and then once we're there you know or as we're approaching usually i'll do research about what we're looking for yeah like we got to peru i really wanted i had long long ago had wanted to get everyone goes to machu picchu um I wanted to go to a place called Choquequiaro, which is another Incan palace, but almost nobody goes there because it takes four days to go in and get out on foot or mule. So we did that, and then we saw Machu Picchu. Or trying to get to the Atacama Desert instead of just hanging out by the beach.
- Speaker #1
I randomly went there. I had no plans, but I just... well i was in northern argentina right i had to get to chile and i was like oh what is this place i had no idea what that's kind of desert really was so i got a bus across uh i almost was almost sick on the bus because it outed you i think but um just about made it to san pedro that to come and i can't believe what this place was like we're going out into moon valley and other world yes never seen anything like it okay it's a it's a wild
- Speaker #0
wild place the driest place in on the planet yeah i didn't know that yeah i mean it's like less than an inch of rain a year uh but yeah but i loved it i loved i loved when we got there and uh i remember just a bunch of goats you know walking by as we were you know going to a you know a little restaurant somewhere um but that's you know so again that's that's the thing that makes it great so you know when you're When you're in the middle of Chile, there's not necessarily a ton of history, but there's an enormous amount of geology. Yes. Torres de Paine was amazing in Patagonia. But when you get to Europe, then there's tons of history. And I love history. So, you know, do research about all the little cities and towns and, you know, getting all the way up to Norway and all the stories about Norway and from Vikings to, you know, the way Norway has evolved now. And then getting into Estonia and the Balkan countries and all that history is all fascinating. We just kind of look at it and say, OK, we're going to go to. this is the next place we're going. Here's the train that's going to get us there or whatever it is that's going to get us there. And Cindy usually helps to find a place for us to stay. And then we do it and start all over again, you know, and just keep on moving around the planet. So we're about, I'd say 45% of the way there.
- Speaker #1
Ah, that's kind of next question. Is there a goal in mind in terms of maybe how many places or I know seven continents is on the list, but.
- Speaker #0
in terms of countries is that is that a goal yeah well one place that um i mean as we were since we'll be heading back to trieste and then we'll be going down through um croatia and albania and macedonia and montenegro into greece and then the mediterranean then cross into alexandria and up the nile after that our plan was to get a cargo ship that i knew that existed in antwerp uh and then go to namibia africa and unfortunately they're all booked kobe there are cargo ships that you can get on but and there used to be more of them uh now because of kobit they closed most of them down so there are only a few cargo shipping companies that do that right and the next one we could get wouldn't be until 2026 so i had to kind of completely reboot And now we'll be heading instead into Jordan and then across Saudi Arabia into Oman and Dakar. And then there's a ship we can get to that'll get us to Madagascar. And then from Madagascar, I'm not quite sure which way we're going to go. It's taking longer for us to get around the planet than I anticipated.
- Speaker #1
But is there any time constraint though? Do you have to get this done by a certain year? Do you have any notes?
- Speaker #0
There's not a hard time constraint, but there's so many books that I want to write that while I'm traveling, it's very hard to write about anything except to travel because I'm just constantly taking notes. And, you know, so, you know, probably know what that's like.
- Speaker #1
And yeah,
- Speaker #0
so it just eats you, you know, all of your time is either traveling or writing about the travel and sleeping. And so. part of me really wants to do the trip i don't want to rush through it but i also don't want to take another five years to you know to get it done so so uh you know one of the things cindy said was well let's make sure that we do what we intended to do but let's not go to every place along the way you know which kind of tend to want to do yeah yeah but like you said i mean you could go to china and you could spend you know an unbelievable amount of time their years there uh so really everything that we're doing is kind of touching on them but it is touching on it more slowly and and and again as i said before that a big part of this is just the journey you know it that's why we call it a pilgrimage because it really is like something that changes you more than you change it uh you know it's going around the world you know is is a different different than uh you know any other travel I've done so you are managing to journal the whole journey right each day yes yeah yeah I mean I'm way behind on a lot of uh big chunks of of it that I just haven't had time to get written but uh So what I do is, I mean, I'll write a book about this and probably more than one book. But so I'm keeping all the notes for that. But, you know, I have what are called dispatches. I have two different ways of sort of telling people what we're doing. One is a journal, a kind of daily, more daily journal plots as we're traveling. And I'm behind on that. But the other one are more in-depth dispatches. you know, that are longer, have more history. They have more stories than than the journals. And then we're also on a thing called Polar Steps, which kind of track.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, we use that. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. Yeah. So it's a great way to track all the places you've been and can give people a quick picture of what we're doing.
- Speaker #1
Hey, just a quick one. I just want to say there are many ways to support this podcast. You can buy me a coffee and help support the podcast for $5. Or you can go to my merch store with the affiliate link with TeePublic, where there's plenty of merch available to buy, such as t-shirts, jumpers, hoodies, and also some children's clothing. Thirdly, which is free, you can also rate and review this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podchaser, or GoodPods. Also, you can find me on social media, on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. Simply just search for Winging It Travel Podcast. and you'll find me displaying all my social media content for traveling podcast and other stuff thank you amazing okay i picked out some places based on those so i'm really keen to hear what you think about them because they're quite unique maybe to me or just i have a serious interest the obvious one is antarctica i think people are aware it's going to be a huge journey in terms of cost but also the way you get there in terms of by ship right so what is that place like when you land like is it
- Speaker #0
as otherworldly as you think in terms of how vast it is what you see uh how desolate maybe it is as well like what were your feelings when you arrived yeah it um cindy my wife says instantly says it's the most amazing place that she's ever been uh and it is truly otherworldly um i mean first of all one of the things that's interesting about it is that We had to take a ship from Puerto Montt, and we took a ferry through parts of Patagonia, and then later a ship that took us through Tierra del Fuego to get to Ushuaia, which is the kind of place where everybody takes off to go to Antarctica. So when you cross into Antarctica, you've got to cross the Drake Passage. great passage yeah the drake passage is where three oceans come together so they are the wildest waters in the world whoa and we were you know we were at least told we were pretty lucky um that you know we were there in the summertime so it wasn't horrible but you're still seeing 24 foot you know swells and uh and so you're just spending two days excuse me you're spending two days you know kind of bobbing up and down uh on the ship to get there and then i remember so you know floors or doors are swinging all over the place people were you know moving left and right all all over the place and then we went to sleep and and we woke up and it was dead quiet and nothing was moving and i jumped up and i looked out the portal and all you saw was snow and huge mountains and glaciers. And it was perfectly clean and still and, you know, icebergs just kind of floating by. And that right out of the gate, you're like, wow. There was nothing like it I'd ever seen. The scale of things was just, you know, mind boggling. And then when you get out, I mean, you can't really, unless you're a scientist and you're working, you know, at... McMurdo Bay or someplace like that, you can't really stay there. I did try to get us to be able to camp at least a night or two there, but they're very rare. And that time of the year, you couldn't do it. So what you do is you get on a Zodiac and you go out and you can explore and you go and see the penguins and you can hike a bit and that sort of thing. And then we also got on kayaks. and went out. And that particular day was unbelievable. We saw three humpback whales go right by us, right under us.
- Speaker #1
Yeah.
- Speaker #0
You know, it just. Wow. Yeah. It's hard to process it, you know, and reasons why I like to write about it, because then I can really think about it and think about what it felt like and what it looked like. And, you know, the icebergs there are as big as mountains and they're just floating by. I mean. you're you know you're humbled you're you're tiny you're completely unnecessary uh and and and you're incredibly lucky to be able to see what you're seeing I think with those icebergs right because they're the size of mountains above water that means they're huge below water right I can't even imagine what that is you know something like 90 of the iceberg is below water and you're already looking at something that the size of a you know a small mountain range i mean it's it's you know i don't know how it's hard to even say how many feet they must be but yeah they're certainly several hundred feet high and uh and several hundred feet wide you know and you're just a little you know your little zodiac is minuscule next to it it's uh i mean if anyone wants to go to the website we have some great pictures of it
- Speaker #1
yeah i'll put the link in the show notes people have a look i've interviewed some people who've done antarctica before and they all say the same thing so it's just one of those places that you just have to maybe visit soon before arguably it goes away not sure yes yeah yeah unfortunately it is uh yeah the raw size shelf is probably going to go down i don't know when but within 10 years okay and on days 548 and 549 uni atlantic and this intrigues me because you're out to sea for so long right i can't really imagine what it's like to be out to sea for 20 odd days at a time yeah and you've got the one of the articles is there or the blogs is the doldrums of the south atlantic because it's known that area is just being wild right you are in the middle of nowhere the swells can be huge and i guess so many people have been lost over the last hundreds of years trying to navigate that right yeah it's um
- Speaker #0
So you're half, when you reach that, you're beginning to approach the equator, and you're also pretty much in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, which, you know, you look at it on a map and you go, well, it's not much, but it took us 21 days to get there. So it's big. And one of the reasons they call that the doldrums is because in that part of the world, when you were a sailing ship, but it would often get very quiet and there would be no wind and so they would just sit there sometimes it would sit there for weeks or i think you know in some cases months and just go anywhere uh and so that is not something that if you're a sailor or you're a you know you're you're a sailing ship you know that's not what you want you want to be able to move so it would get depressing uh upsetting it also was a place where a lot of slaves on slave ships would perish uh and that made it extra dark you know and you know the idea of doldrums uh comes up there too in that history so people would be dying and just tossed you know overboard uh just horrible um and uh and so when you're there you um i mean there were certainly times where we saw big swells but during the time that we were there uh in the doldrums it's just humid and quiet and if you didn't i you know i guarantee we wouldn't have been moving if it hadn't been for the fact that we had an engine that was i never thought of that wow yeah yeah um and so then and then we crossed the equator and there's uh on this particular ship i've been on other ships where they don't make as big a deal out of it but on this particular ship there's a kind of rite of passage if you haven't crossed the equator then you have to no one has to go through it but uh they used to do this with crews you know they throw fish off all at you and uh and you know there's a whole ritual where you have to kiss the foot of Neptune and his wife and uh you know there's a whole whole thing which I have some video of it um you know because some people had to go through it luckily i had already done it so i said sorry i've already been across the equation yeah um but some people just did it for fun and uh you know it's mostly it's just fun it was and it's it's an old old uh um rite of passage that i think started back with the doldrums and it was just a way to get people you know to have something to do uh and something to get excited about you
- Speaker #1
know in those days is that anything unusual that happens or is it just you just cross a bit of water and that's it like is anything i don't geographically or do you feel anything
- Speaker #0
No, no, don't feel anything. There's no big stripe in the ocean or anything that you pass. There's, when you begin to get a little further north or south, depending on the direction you're going, your toilets begin to switch their direction.
- Speaker #1
Right.
- Speaker #0
Because gravity just changes. The poles change. Yeah. But it is really, really interesting to, you know, whenever you're, when we got on the ship, we're. let's see, it was fall because it was March. So it's fall in the south and it was beginning to get cool. And then as we continued toward the equator, obviously it got hotter and hotter and then the sun changes and where you are in the world and what latitude, I mean, what longitude you're at changes. And then as we began to head north, it got cooler. And then it was springtime, you know, and trees are beginning to bud. And it was, you know, it was a fascinating experience.
- Speaker #1
A bit strange. Yeah. Yeah. Another place that you've mentioned before, actually, earlier in the interview is Svalbard in Norway. Yeah. This place seems completely wild. I think there's got polar bears running. around i think you need a gun right i don't think there's any visa laws it's quite a strange place but it sounds but also must be quite awesome to experience because you get the very closed window of the daylight right between late morning and early afternoon that was really interesting to go there's the it's
- Speaker #0
the northern most uh human habitation on earth uh and so there aren't very many people there are 2 000 people in this fall Longbyeren, which is where we were. Svalbard itself is part of, I think this is the way it works, is part of Spitsbergen, or it might be Spitsbergen is part of Svalbard, but there's a big archipelago up there, and then there's a large island, and I think that's Svalbard, and then there's this town called Longyearbyen, and mostly... it was even the only reason there's anybody there was for coal uh and metal uh and that was a place that was mined heavily uh but it's you know and so it was mostly just miners up up there in these towns and there's a couple of Russian towns there's still one Russian town called Pyramiden that is owned by Russia but you can go in from Norway because it is now uh controlled by Norway or owned by Norway or where you want to put it and yeah when you get there it's it's barren uh it's just ice uh and hills and we were there in in the very at the beginning of the winter well it was really the end of autumn and so the days were like four hours of daylight there's nobody really there um i uh i went to the little tourist office there so i went there cindy and i went there and i said well where could i you know hike back in here and explore a bit And the woman said, well, you can do that, she said, but you have to take a rifle. And I said, oh, that would be a bad idea. I'd probably shoot myself or somebody else if I had a rifle. And she goes, you have to have it because of the polar bears. And they have an unwritten rule there that any door or car door or house or apartment is left open, you know, in case you see a polar bear. Because as one hunter put it to me, he said. You can hunt other bears, he said, but polar bears hunt you. Two years earlier, they had disemboweled a guy that was sleeping out, you know, down near the airport. So you don't want to mess with them. They'll actually come around and like they'll walk along like they're, you know, outside the town, like they're just going by. But they're actually checking you out and they're super bright. and incredibly powerful and if you get in the way of one just take your head off with one swipe luckily we never actually ran into any but we also were careful not to be just you know lollygagging around out there
- Speaker #1
So do they sometimes go into town just trying their luck, you know, like trying to get into places? Is that what they do?
- Speaker #0
Apparently, that's what happened to this guy. He was camping outside, but he was by the airport. So he was pretty close to a populated area. Yeah. Yeah, he came in and, you know, they're in trouble. You know, polar bears are in trouble because of global climate change. And, you know, there's not as many ice flows and that sort of thing. So they're actually learning to, they like to kill seals. Yeah. But they're actually learning, one scientist up there told me, they're learning to kill reindeer. And what they do is they herd the reindeer into the sea and wait for them to freeze to death. And then they haul them out and they eat them. But until very recently, they never worried about. they never it was too much trouble to try to track them down you know because they're fast yeah yeah you can go 30 40 miles an hour but you know it's a lot of trouble so they didn't want to really chase them down but now they found this other way to kill them mental and spell bad in terms of the people what is the like mix of people there now because obviously mining is that still existing or is that completely finished now and who's actually left yeah it's pretty much finished i mean mostly Now there are people that are starting to go there as tourists or they're interested in exploring it. There is a place there that's interesting. One of the reasons I wanted to go was the World Seed Bank is located there. So there's a huge vault there that has where they're building a library of every seed in the world just in case there's an epidemic or whether there's war or, you know. some kind of pestilence but whatever it's it's there as a backup uh so we went up there and and you can't go inside of it they won't let you go inside of it because they worry about um you know germs and that sort of thing uh but we were able to it turned out that whenever i got there um they were a group from india and africa were bringing seeds in so it was open but it's just basically a doorway that goes into the mountain and and then there's a huge vault back in there and that's where they they keep all the seeds but otherwise It's their students there because they'll go there to study glaciology or you know meteorology And because there are more tourists there are you know a couple of hotels and so people work there and a couple of restaurants and they work there, but there's only 2,000 people there and and interestingly When you go there, you get provided a place to live, but you can't move there and say, okay, I'm moving here. You either have to have a job and then you're provided a place to live or you're a tourist. Otherwise, so long.
- Speaker #1
Polar bears, they don't hibernate. So I think they're awake all year round, unlike the bears here, which go to sleep during the winter. So that's a bit different.
- Speaker #0
They're always out there. And I can't imagine. I mean, we were there at the end of October, and it's so quiet. And there's just nothing much to do. I mean, we had a few days there that we could do things. There's a really nice museum there, actually. You know, and you could see the seed bank and just walk around and kind of gawk at, you know, where you were. But, I mean, it's huge, huge mountains. But... When it comes wintertime, and I think for over six weeks, there's nothing but dark. Because you're way up there, 75 degrees latitude. So it's much further before you get to the pole. And it's got to be difficult. I talked to some other people, and some of them said, yeah, I'm good for a year here. And then I'm gone. I can't stay here that long.
- Speaker #1
Well, I think we had the similar experience in the Yukon. We went to Whitehorse in Yukon in Canada, level with Alaska, right, for a week. And you're right, we've done the dog sledding. We drove around, saw the little towns in the snow because obviously it's wintertime and it's minus 30 degrees Celsius. But I'm thinking, what else do you do apart from work if you live here? Especially in the winter when it doesn't really get light until 11 a.m. and it goes back probably at 3 p.m., maybe 4 p.m. if you're lucky. But yes, it's a crazy... experience but also i guess that's why they offer incentives financially right they they give you like 20 more in terms of salary they give you an allowance per year to fly back to vancouver wherever you need to go right to see family so they try and incentivize but yeah in terms of day-to-day if you're an indoor person then great i suppose but if you're an outdoor person in the summer you are surrounded by other bears which is cool but got to be aware of them and in the winter it's minus 30 so yeah yeah there was a there was one woman i talked to and i said you know
- Speaker #0
How long have you been here? And she said, 30 years. And I said, so how do you handle the winters? And she said, I just kind of hibernate. She goes, I'm good with it. You know, then I talked to other people that said, I can't take it. You know, I'm done. So, again, different strokes for different folks, I guess. But it's definitely different. Like we found that it was easy to sleep in until 10 o'clock. And we sort of start to get sleepy around 4 or 4.30 because your body was basically saying it's time to go to sleep. But yeah, it's a very weird feeling because your timing is completely off. You're going, well, it must be 10 o'clock at night. No, it's 5 o'clock. But it was just, again, one... One really interesting part for you too, you know, in the Yukon, just one more interesting part of the experience. And it's all part of satisfying that curiosity where you say, wow, that was different. Glad I experienced it. And that's good enough. You know, it's just more interesting thing to learn.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, we had a crazy Airbnb host. I think I've told the story a few times in the podcast, but he had a shotgun and he woke us up in the middle of the night because the northern lights were out so he got up he gave us a beer at 1am i was like oh now just woken up it's fine jumped on a ski mobile which i've never driven before so i'm learning for the first time in minus 30 degrees in the middle of the night at 1am and we somehow make it out onto his lake and he said yeah look there there's there's northern lights in there and there they were pretty incredible so you got to see the northern lights yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean we were up
- Speaker #0
we were up in the arctic circle for a couple weeks and we never saw the northern where we went it was like well oh you just had them yesterday or it was cloudy or you know something but we we thought for sure we would see them for all the time we were spending up there so i'm you're
- Speaker #1
lucky i'm glad you got to see them well he said to us when we arrived he said that if i noticed they're out it's a bit strange i don't know if he's up all night or he he works on the land right so he knows it pretty well but he said if they're out and they're about I'll wake you up but we didn't really expect that to be a shotgun um yeah side of the cabin but uh I think he tried to text us as well but we're asleep right so my only advice would be to people listening if you're like halfway asleep and it's like 2am and you get the call to go just go you don't want to go at the time because you have to get dressed you're sleepy it's minus 30 degrees it's a bit of admin to get ready right but honestly you just need to get through that and get out there and then you you won't regret it because I was almost at a point and say no I was like nope I'm gonna stay in my cozy cabin and go to sleep so i'm glad i said yes yeah you gotta you gotta do it when you get the chance because you don't know when you might get the chance again yeah absolutely yeah and for those places i'd love to go i don't know what you think like flip it around and go in the summer and
- Speaker #0
experience the long days right i want to see how that feels right because we were in antarctica and we were in the summer that i mean the sun was setting like 10 o'clock 10 30 at night so that was good That was kind of cool. The days were very, very long. But we were in such an unworldly place that it kind of seemed to make sense in a weird way. Yeah. The sun is different when you're way down there. Right. Your perspective on the sun is different than whenever you're in the middle of the world. You're at the tip of it. So it's different.
- Speaker #1
I imagine it's all. I've got one more place that I picked out for your trip. and it's probably a bit more personal as one is monument valley because when we were road tripping through america last year that was on our list but we didn't get time to go and i kind of feel like i missed out a little bit um is it as grand as you see on the photos where you got those huge monuments in terms of rocks right and you're going through on that road that cuts through the middle right you get the classic image of the person standing on the road with miles to see is it as good as visiting and i had a question of who the navajo people are as well yeah you
- Speaker #0
Well, I hate to say it because you didn't make it there yet. But yeah, it's more spectacular than it looks.
- Speaker #1
Oh, wow.
- Speaker #0
Okay. Actually, I wrote a pretty detailed dispatch about it. Because it was such an experience. And for me, it was a place that I had always wanted to see. So I was so happy that we did see it. And then while we were there, well, first of all, the way the clouds move. You have these huge mesas in the middle of a huge valley. And they're so spectacular looking. They're so battered. and they've been changed by god knows what they've been through you know and they're still standing there uh and they're immense uh so just seeing them you know and then there's the clouds and and the sun the way they would hit them uh was spectacular and we were there it was cold and kind of rainy some days and then some days it was sunny but uh chilly and anyhow we we went in by road to explore you know kind of in the valley and then we were coming back uh i saw a guy had a corral of horses all right i didn't see a guy i just saw the corral of horses and and so i i went up to them and i was kind of wandering around looking and uh a woman came out and she asked me you know what was up and she was native and and i said well i see you have horses here is there any chance that we can ride with you Um, she called her husband out. Uh, Jameson was his name. I think he has a Navajo name too. But, uh, so he came out and he said, yeah, sure. Just come, come on over tomorrow and, uh, and I'll take you out. And, uh, so it turns out he was, uh, a shaman, uh, you know, it was just kind of a local priest, uh, or minister, uh, and a really cool guy and almost had been killed by COVID. Uh, Oh, That was an interesting story. And he got us up on our horses, Cochise and Geronimo. And, uh, and, and we just went right into the Valley, you know, so we're like right next to some of these huge mesas. And, uh, you know, he had a lot of great stories. He told us about the Navajo, the Navajo people are the only native Americans that were never, uh, controlled by the federal government. They have the largest reservation. I mean, it's a huge reservation. It's bigger than most states. Huge reservation that they control, partly in Arizona, partly in, I guess, Colorado and New Mexico, maybe, or Utah. And, you know, just really cool people, very calm, smart, wise man. Uh, and he, so he took us through there and I asked him, you know, well, how did the Navajo, you know, work and they have, uh, pogons, which, you know, they, they don't use very much anymore, but there were almost a portable ways to, to live and, uh, spread out really, really far. He said, whenever we hunted, we would hunt in small groups. He said, we didn't hunt in large groups, uh, you know, and there were. extremely good with uh on horse best one of the the best horsemen in the world and uh in spears and arrows um bow and arrow and uh so anyhow uh he was just fascinating to talk with and uh again i think the dispatch kind of goes into his whole philosophy of how he takes care of people and how people sometimes can be difficult to take care of uh and his story of covid and And then very briefly, I'll tell you the weird thing was I had mentioned something online about this. And a woman got in touch from Norway and said, oh, my God, I'm so happy to hear that Jameson is OK because I haven't been able to get in touch with him. Oh, wow. And it turned out that she and he she had gone there 30 years ago and lived with the Navajo and wrote a book about it and fell in love with Jameson.
- Speaker #1
Right. And.
- Speaker #0
And so she had stayed in touch with Jameson over the years, but she had lost track of him because of COVID and only found out that he was OK through the story we wrote. And so then she went back and with her son and and visited him and sent pictures back. So we have that story.
- Speaker #1
Crazy. That's mental. Yeah,
- Speaker #0
it's crazy. Really cool guy. That was a great experience. I mean, just riding the horses through. through that place was one of the best experiences I ever had.
- Speaker #1
They're the experts of the land, right? So they know the lands inside out. Yeah. Yeah. Imagine they give you the best areas to go to or wherever you're looking for, they can direct you and help you out, I'd imagine.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. Yeah. No, it was, I mean, you just, just sitting on the horse and going by, you're kind of, you know, just goggling. You know, you can't believe where you're at. And you want to try to remember, you know, that experience and get it in your head and heart. So, yeah, that was a wonderful experience. And if you go back, look for him, you know, go in, give me a give me a ring, you know, and we'll find him. But his name is Jameson and Jameson. He'll have several. And he he, by the way, these are all Mustangs, wild Mustangs that he and some of his family members. broke they were wild horses at one point amazing people okay yeah on my list that place to go back to i think it's probably definitely top three maybe even top in america i think yeah utah you know didn't go make spend lots of time in utah it's yeah blue blew us away we spent three weeks there because we were so stunned
- Speaker #1
by the beauty of it i think we brisked past it maybe the north side i can't remember now on the route yeah um Yeah, I kind of wish we made that a priority, unfortunately. But anyway, next time. We've still got the camper van, so we'll drive down.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- Speaker #1
Your packing gear, is it light? Because you're going for such a long time. How do you travel in terms of that?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, we pack light. We carry one bag that's probably, I don't know, two and a half feet wide. We have two of those. One is a... A bag that can be carried as a regular suitcase. It's canvas or it can be put on a backpack or backpack as a backpack. And then another one that's a roller that can be carried, but it also can be rolled. And they come in handy when you're in cities. And we pack very light, mostly with a lot of layers. So. you know we just keep on if we're cold we just keep putting on more layers and we'll have a good rain slicker yeah uh to to you know help us with that and we carry one two pairs of shoes you know a pair of boots and a pair of you know mostly just tennis shoes or you know walking shoes and they seem to cover us we have yet to i mean we were in uh antarctica when you're on the ship they'll they provide you with really heavy gear uh that keeps you warm uh and keeps you dry so we didn't have to worry about that and we knew that uh but otherwise we never had a problem uh no matter where we where we've been we've been in places like morocco where it was well over 100 degrees or we walked the camino way in spain and oh yeah that was over 100 degrees uh And then we've been in places like Svalbard where it was, you know, seven degrees Fahrenheit. These are all Fahrenheit numbers, by the way. And, you know, so it was frigid, but we were we were all right.
- Speaker #1
Amazing. Related to your pack, a separate question is, do you pack much tech with you? And kind of second part of the question is, do you work whilst you travel? Apart from the blogging of the travels, do you do much else?
- Speaker #0
Well, what I did was I, you know, before we left, I got the best iPhone that I could. And I thought that's going to have to serve as my camera because it just didn't have room for a bulkier camera. And also, it's just something you have to lug around everywhere. So it was just easier to put something in pocket. So that takes care of a lot of stuff. One thing that I didn't have and that I wish I had, but I've now... bought is uh a good headset with a wind wind screen because half the time whenever i would go to uh talk about some place that we were it was you know like on a ship going across the the drake passage or something like that and it was just you couldn't hear a thing uh and then i think i'm going to invest in uh in a drone yes yeah and see if because like in morocco or places like that i wish that i'd had a drone to get an aerial view well there's a lot of places i wish that we had been able to get aerial views of some of the locations we were at
- Speaker #1
have you done that no do you know what that is probably my biggest regret in terms of tech by our trip last year was the drone especially traveling across canada in the camper van and going from west to east and and the states as well right going back across but uh i kind of feel like we missed out on the aerial stuff there unfortunately yeah
- Speaker #0
so i i think i mean there's some really small ones and that's the biggest problem for us is will we have the room But one of the good things is we'll be moving through, you know, pretty warm. We'll be heading toward the equator. So probably won't need to be carrying boots. I don't think. We'll see. So that might provide a little more room. But I think there's enough space. One of the things that's nice about the canvas bag is, I mean, it's amazing how much stuff you can stuff in there. And then we also carry a day pack so we can pull the day pack out.
- Speaker #1
wrote on for the day which you know provides some relief yeah the drone thing is interesting my friend who used to work in post-edit stuff um back in uk and london he would say drone footage as it's coming through this is like quite a few years ago now what's the number one thing that people would want to see and i don't think it's a be-all end-all but if you want filler content or at least a show different angle it's got to be some of the best you can do right get that drone footage up there and just
- Speaker #0
yeah yeah i mean i wish some of the places that utah or yeah yeah just or or patagonia you know oh wow would have been uh spectacular just a different point of view you know yeah uh so we'll see um i've got a friend who's pretty pretty good with that stuff so he's he's put me on to uh a good piece of tech it's a nice name i can't remember it's got a lot of numbers you
- Speaker #1
I think you have to learn as well, don't you? You can't really win that that much, drone footage. I think camera, you can wing videoing, but getting the drone up there and getting used to the controls, I think that's a bit of learning.
- Speaker #0
The last thing you want to do is spend a bunch of money on one and then have it go up and crash.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, devastating. Just quickly, can you remind people what is next for your trip? And then where can people find you on websites or social medias to keep track of your trip?
- Speaker #0
Yes. Well, okay, so we're going to head back and we're going to go to Trieste. We were very near Trieste whenever we departed and headed back home. And we will probably mostly by train head down through Croatia, then grab some ships that will bounce us along the Adriatic coast. We want to go to Montenegro because there's a friend that we met. That's one of the interesting things. We meet people all over. along the way and then we go home or go to their home and meet them in switzerland or france or you know wherever they're from uh and uh so this this fellow we met on the way to antarctica he actually worked on the ship and he lives in montenegro so we're going to go there and see him and then we'll eventually work our way down to greece and then into the mediterranean and then find i don't know exactly how uh away from um crete to alexandria and then up the nile and then from there uh into jordan and saudi arabia and qatar and oman and then a ship that'll get us to madagascar met a woman that was on the ship uh going across the atlantic who is malagasy and so she's already set us all up she's she's given us names people to see and places to you know get us around because there's not there's only one way to get around really and that's by car on yeah in madagascar but it has fascinating history so yeah that place it looks a bit wild and we actually have to get the ship will take us to a place called port louis yeah which is a tiny tiny island have you been there no i've done an episode of madagascar with someone um yeah um yeah we have to take a ferry and then a yacht and see if we can uh jump on a yacht and get to uh madagascar and then the big question there is then do we move into the interior of africa or do we begin to head east uh right yeah you know and that's kind of a time issue more than anything we're thinking maybe we'll come back for the silverback uh you know gorillas just on our own on a separate trip and i have been to tanzania not that it's not worth going again it's a spectacular place top five list i think tanzania yeah yeah absolutely do it and make sure you get to ungaro goro crater okay hot tip yeah and then as far as uh you know places to uh to see what we're up to there's really uh two websites one is vagabond dash adventure don't forget the dash adventure.com where you'll find recommendations, tons of information, you know, pretty much hundreds and hundreds of probably thousands of pictures as we've traveled, a good deal of video, and lots of articles, because I am a writer, and a lot of those articles are there to help people, you know, so that they can, there's two kinds, one are kind of self-help articles, and the others are stories. you know those yeah the dispenses that i talk about yeah um and then there's chip www.chipwalter.com and that's where you learn about my books uh and my writing and uh national geographic articles and stuff like that um and uh of course we're also on facebook as vagabond adventure and chip walter author chip walter and uh instagram and It was chipperoo.
- Speaker #1
Yes. I'll put the links of those in the show notes. And I checked out most of your Vagabond website. The amount of content on there is insane. So if people want to literally search any of those 600 days, I think there's going to be something on there. I think you divide it out into regions of the world. So much stuff on there to check out. And I've barely touched the surface. I've read a few articles and dispatches and stuff. So yeah, amazing website. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
Thank you.
- Speaker #1
put a lot of time into it and so is yours it's a really nice website so we'll be sure to to uh let people know about yours as well oh that'd be awesome thanks so much okay i have a sort of five ten minute feature at the end which is just quick fire travel questions uh these can be hard for travelers like yourself who've been to quite a lot of places so um don't get angry but there's gonna be like more of your favorite stuff worldwide i'm gonna kick off with It's travel question time. I usually say countries, but I'm going to say places. What's your top three favorite places that you visited of all time?
- Speaker #0
Oh, wow. Yeah, that is really hard. Unfair question.
- Speaker #1
Yes. I'll give you three, though, not one.
- Speaker #0
I know. Yeah, that's true. Your argument is three. Okay. I had given it some thought. Boy, it's still hard. Definitely Torres del Paine in Patagonia. Yeah. spectacular um just gotta go there um anybody uh antarctica and either morocco or uh monument valley oh wow yeah decide which which ones uh morocco is so much history the people are so fabulous the food is unbelievable uh and you know I mean, I've been writing dispatches. I thought I would write the dispatches, two or three dispatches. I think I'm on my fifth or sixth one. There's just so much stuff there. We had a terrific time.
- Speaker #1
Okay. My next question is tomorrow, if you're going on a trip to three different countries you've not traveled to before, and they could be anywhere in the world, which three countries are you going to travel to? tibet uh bhutan and either vietnam or cambodia okay and if you could pick one country in the world to live there for a year starting tomorrow where you're gonna live that's not usa yeah uh i think i would choose thailand thailand okay and what are your top three favorite cuisines worldwide
- Speaker #0
Well, if you're talking about something called a thunder cake, that's Newfoundland, which is a spectacular berry pie.
- Speaker #1
Okay.
- Speaker #0
The tangine of Morocco. Nice. I mean, the best food in the world, in my opinion. And any good French restaurant. Lyon, we were in Lyon and that's, you know, a real, really great food there. So, but I can't say like a specific meal because it's all good.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, yeah, that's fine.
- Speaker #0
Whatever they do, they just know how to do it.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, the French are good. Okay. if you could sit for an afternoon somewhere with a cup of coffee and watch the world go by where you're going to sit antarctica you know just being on the ship sitting there outside bundled up you
- Speaker #0
know cozy coffee hot hot chocolate yeah and and just watching going by as you're watching these huge icebergs and glaciers and mountains yeah that's insane but you've got to be fine
- Speaker #1
Wow. Okay. You kind of mentioned some of these, but I'm going to have to give you three favorite landmarks that can be man-made or nature.
- Speaker #0
Okay. Well, that Monument Valley is for nature. Hungary, there's this wild place where these huge rocks were sculpted by a sculptor back in the 1800s. And they're still there. They're really hard to find. And we found them in the middle of a, it was snowing. it was a really interesting time you know play norway uh or svalbard you know um it's just so wild there and we haven't gotten to uh into egypt or you know or thailand or cambodia yet so i'm sure that once we get there there would be and india you know uh or nepal you know i'm sure those would all be spectacular places but we just haven't gotten there yet oh oh i know what i mean for me personally uh cindy and i did go to the great wall of china and we got to out to an area that was not yet renovated and uh so we were just way out there and it was that blows your mind what what what that i mean you're looking at miles and miles and miles of these uh you know the wall
- Speaker #1
on the rest of these mountains and you just go how the hell did they do that yeah it's on my list yeah i would say if you get to nepal i think the himalayas are pretty special uh i think it's definitely my top three for sure just sitting there again with a cup of coffee once you're on your hike and
- Speaker #0
just looking around you it's pretty spectacular yeah i can imagine that's yeah i'm i'm looking forward to that i'm jealous that you've already done it twice yeah i've been twice uh good for you
- Speaker #1
I think it's one of those countries you can go back to all the time, right? You can just go and justify it anytime.
- Speaker #0
Yes, right, right. Yeah, and it's again, you just wish you could snap your fingers sometimes and be there.
- Speaker #1
Yes, absolutely.
- Speaker #0
Those are great questions because they're hard to answer.
- Speaker #1
Are you a sunrise or sunset person?
- Speaker #0
Sunset, sunsets.
- Speaker #1
Next one's quite difficult, but I'm going to go with your... favorite it's a bit of a harsh word for this but maybe three peoples so you mentioned navajo earlier but three people that you've met on your travels that are a group of people that you just have to meet if you can uh yeah um met
- Speaker #0
a great guide uh ismail uh in morocco just this terrific kid who's loaded with enthusiasm and you know just talk and showed us all around the atlas mountains and uh marrakesh and uh and and Merzouga which is uh the where the dunes you know the beginning of the Sahara is and uh there's uh Michelle and Silky uh who we met uh actually we originally met in Morocco but they're Swiss and they have traveled all over South America they have sailed uh the pacific on their own ship uh so they're just you know really fascinating people uh and wow there's a lot of uh a lot of different people that we've met i i gotta say i really enjoyed jameson you know the the of course yeah he he was uh just such a centered human being it seemed to me
- Speaker #1
Okay. And a couple more questions. As you're from the States, have you visited every state or is there a state you've not visited that you'd love to check out?
- Speaker #0
Well, I think I've been in every state. Got it. You know, some of them I might've been, you know, kind of going through because I was in a, you know, an airport or something like that. I might've missed North. No, I've been to North Dakota. So I think, I think I've hit them all.
- Speaker #1
Okay. And what does home mean to you?
- Speaker #0
Well, this is going to sound a little hokey, but actually home for me is wherever my wife is. I mean, there is home in the sense that you have a base, you know, sort of. But but to me, it's always a place that you're going to be living, leaving from. And also for me, home is a place where I write, where I can really dig in and and write. And that's probably the most comfortable thing for me. You know, our children of all, you know, they're they're all over the place. So. anywhere we're visiting them is also home in a way but uh i've moved so many times and you know changed you know my careers multiple times uh that uh i guess i'm not really tied to any one place i do love pittsburgh um but there's not a particular building or or house or apartment that that i'm married to you So I would say if I'm with my wife and I can write, I'm a happy man.
- Speaker #1
Okay. And that leads me to the last question is if someone's listening right now, who's nervous about traveling, whether that is going international travel or even just going to like a different state within us, what words of advice or wisdom can you pass on to say why they should go and take that leap?
- Speaker #0
Oh, well, I love that question because people should. you people should travel because it broadens your perspective i mean you begin to see instantly that the world is so much more interesting so much bigger than you are and and the whatever world you've been living in uh and there's you know there'll be so many experiences that you'll have a lot of people have fears we have never And all of these 120,000 miles that we've traveled run into anybody that was even a jerk, let alone dangerous. So I think a lot of people worry about that. Travel slows time and obliterates hatred. It humbles you. And at the same time, you're learning. you're also realizing how little you know. And that's humbling in a good way. And the people that we've met that have traveled, you know, all over the place, much more than we've traveled even, you know, they always are humbled. They're not arrogant. They're not like, oh, look what I know, because they realize how little they know. And that's okay. You know, it just means there's more out there to learn about. So that's what I would say to people. You'll love it if you do it.
- Speaker #1
Chip, that's an amazing way to finish the conversation. It's been a great chat. I think there's so much more stuff to learn from you in terms of your career experiences or your books or your travels and your future travels coming up. So you're welcome back at any time. And I think it's a truly fascinating story what you've given us today.
- Speaker #0
Well, thank you. Thanks for having me on. It was great to chat. It was...
- Speaker #1
great questions i really appreciate it and i would love to come back anytime you you want to have us back we'll try to put a few more miles under our belt yeah let's reconnect when you come back from your next stint that'd be quite an interesting story to hear right because that sounds like an amazing trip
- Speaker #0
we've got coming up from september yeah yeah the nile is going to be that's one of my places i'm really excited about sure yeah amazing yeah we'll get you back on and and see how that trip's gone Okay. Well, thanks again. And thanks for, uh, yeah, for, for including me and, uh, I'm looking forward to learning more from you too.
- Speaker #1
Thank you. Cheers. Appreciate it. Thanks for tuning into the podcast episode today. If you've been inspired by today's chat and want to book some travel, if you head to the show notes, you'll see some affiliate links below, which helps support this podcast. You'll find Skyscanner to book your flight. You'll find booking.com to book that accommodation. Want to stay in a super cool hostel? You'll see Hostelworld down there too. You'll find Revolut to get your travel card sorted. Click the GigSky link to get your eSIM ready for your trip. And more importantly, you'll find Safety Wing Insurance to get that travel insurance for your trip. There are many more to check out. So when you click that link and book your product, a small commission goes towards me and the Wiganet Travel Podcast. Thank you in advance and enjoy your travels.
