Modern Wisdom - #524 - Charlie Walker - A Russian Adventure, During Wartime

Episode Date: September 10, 2022

Charlie Walker is an explorer, writer and public speaker. What happens when the Russian government catch you taking photos and writing articles shortly after a war breaks out? Very little that is good. Unfortunately Charlie stumbled into precisely this situation, but thankfully he got out too so he can tell us what happened. Expect to learn what it feels like to travel over 50,000 miles by bicycle, foot, horse, raft, ski and dugout canoe, how close Charlie came to spending his life in a Russian prison, how long a triathlon needs to be in order for it to takes 4 months to complete, why distinctions between European and Asian people makes no difference to anyone on the border and much more... Sponsors: Get 15% discount on the amazing 6 Minute Diary at https://bit.ly/diarywisdom (use code MW15) (USA - https://amzn.to/3b2fQbR and use 15MINUTES) Get 10% discount on all Optimal Carnivore’s products at www.amazon.com/optimalcarnivore (use code: WISDOMSAVE10) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out Charlie's website - https://www.cwexplore.com/ Follow Charlie on Twitter - https://twitter.com/cwexplore  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Charlie Walker, he's an explorer, writer and public speaker. What happens when the Russian government catch you taking photos and writing articles shortly after a war breaks out? Very little that is good. Unfortunately, Charlie stumbled into precisely this situation, but thankfully he got out too, so you can tell us what happened. Expect to learn what it feels like to travel over 50,000 miles by bicycle, foot, horse, raft, ski, and dug out canoe. How close Charlie came to spending his life in a Russian prison? How long a triathlon needs to be in order for it to take four months to complete? Why distinctions between European and Asian people makes no sense to anyone on the border, and much more.

But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome... Charlie Walker, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Good to be here. Talk to me about what drives somebody to do the things that you have chosen to do as pursuits? There's been a lot of different drivers at different points, I guess, over the course of my career. To start off with, I was, I mean, I don't think it's too, I'm doing, I'm too ashamed to say that at the beginning I was kind of quite keen to try and sort of I know stamp my mark on the world. A phrase I've used once before is a young man wanting to slay dragons, but I kind of grew up in the post-dragon era. And I, you know, I wanted to sort of get out there and see the world, but it was definitely quite a dose of, I guess, ego wound in wrapped up in that, and I quite liked the sort of self-image of the, I guess, the kind of thoughtful, grizzled

explorer plodding through the icy wastes, you know, with only his mind for company. But thankfully, as the last sort of, you know, 13 or so years have gone by, I've become a little bit more considered. And it's nowadays, I would say, roughly 50-50 between wanting to get out and challenge myself physically in wild places, to be in the wilderness, or less a known little seldom visited people and get some insight into their lives and their worlds. And I guess the thing that draws all that together is just a strong sense of curiosity, which has never waned. It's interesting to think about what can drive people to do the things that they want to do

when in the beginning some of it might have been recognition or status or a desire for a claim or respect from the people that you admire can take you a hell of a long way. Yeah, well, I don't think to be fair, my sort of my world or my sphere that how I imagined things going didn't quite stretch to a claim or recognition. It was, I mean, I wrote in my first book about going off during, I studied up in Newcastle, where I think you are far more of studied. Yeah. And in the summer holidays, I would scrape together the few pennies I had and, you know, I'd work in bars or putting up marquis or whatever rule summer. And then at the end, I would have a few weeks where I could go off to somewhere obscure.

And I quite liked when I came back that everyone had been parting all summer. And I'd been this just sort of absence. And coming back and suddenly having a story to tell and something interesting to say, I don't think I ever imagined that I would make a career out of any of this and a career is a sort of, you know, in inverted commas type term when you do something like this because it's scraping together all sorts of different things.

There's no kind of one single thing that I do. So I guess it was perhaps more vanity than a desire for recognition or anything else that sort of drove me to go out and sort of explore. Yes. Given the dancing around of what it is that you do, people might not be familiar, how do you define what it is that you do? Are you an adventurer?

Are you a global travels journalist? What are you? I would say I'm an adventure travel writer, but that's three words, which is a lot. So I guess, I mean, I used to allow myself to get into long drawn out, you know, protracted conversations or debates about the different meanings of the two words of venture and explorer. And I still believe, frankly, that the word explorer is something basically from a bygone age with the exception of scientists, astronauts, deep sea submersibles. Would that be breaking new ground for you going to places that haven't yet been seen? Exactly. I mean, there is a case to argue that we're all exploring in some sense, because if you haven't been somewhere before, you are exploring it, but then I think that's just the verb rather than the

adjective, the term, explorer, that said the other people who do similar things to me have, for quite a while, just use the word explorer. So I decided to stop fighting it. And I don't tend to self-identify as that, but I no longer quibble about it when people describe me as that. But in reality, what I do is go to places, check things out, come back, write about it, speak about it, and work out what's next. What was that triathlon thing that you did?

The triathlon was that the concept behind that was to travel the length of the Europe Asia border, well the perceived or supposed continental boundary between Europe and Asia, to try and explore what that is, what that means and if it has any relevance in the modern world brackets, it doesn't. We all at school learn that there are seven continents and we kind of just grew up, you know, having taken that for granted, we just didn't buy that information. Yeah, there's seven continents, but there's not.

Clearly, you look at a map and Antarctica's a continent, Australia's clearly a continent. Big, I think the dictionary definition of continent is a large contiguous land mass surrounded by a body of water. So Africa is arguably a continent all that's connected to Arabia, which is connected to Eurasia, as I call it.

So Eurasia is very clearly one big continent with this sort of complicated, wiggly line through the middle of it. And I started looking into what that line, where that line came from, how it was drawn. And the first person to bifurcate Europe from Asia was an Axiomander. I think a ancient Greek geographer and philosopher, 2,600 years ago. And even back then it was this complicated medley of geographical features.

It was the as of see the the managed depression, the Caspian Sea, the Don River. It was this real, you know, dog leg of messy features to divide Europe from Asia. And that became important to people predominantly west of that line. And over the, you know, in 26 centuries, it meant different things to different people at different times, but often it was the divide between enlightenment and barbarism or democracy and despotism or Christianity and Islam, all these different things. But the line that is today, the sort of commonly accepted geographical board of the European Asia is, it was perceived by a conceiver, rather by a Swedish

cartographer in the 17th century, and it's the oral mountains, the oral river, the caspiancy, the Caucasus mountains, and then the Black Sea. So again, this weird combination of stuff. So I decided to travel the length of that border by human power. So skiing the length of the Ural Mountain ranged the Ural River rises in the southern foothills of the Ural mountains. So paddle down the length of the Ural River, which blows into the Caspian after 1500 and 9 miles and then cycle from the mouth of the Caspian around the edge of the Caspian across the Corksis Mountains along the Turkish Black Sea coast to Istanbul. And along the way, I wanted to ask people what they thought about this border, whether they were aware that they lived on a border, whether they, if they did, whether they identified as European or Asian or

Eurasian, or both or neither, or just Kazakh or Russian Kazakh or Russian or Turkish or Georgian or whatever. And it was 5,200 miles and took eight months. And by the end, unsurprisingly, I found that very little people cared about this continental divide. How many times did you cross backward and forward? Are you pretty close to being able to sit on that line and wiggle down it? Well, on the river it was very easy because you're just on the river. You are on the border. One night, I was doing this with a friend. One night we had camp. In Europe, the next night we camp in Asia, it was just wherever we saw the first kind of decent landing spot in this inflatable tandem kayak. We bought in a Siberian village. placeable tandem kayak we bought in a Siberian village.

In the mountains, the technical border is the watershed of the Ural Mountains. So there we would pass back and forth across it. You know, sometimes once a week, sometimes that we were three months in the mountains. So I guess we passed back and forth over it. Maybe it doesn't times during that three month period. And then once we were cycling, we were always on, let me think, we were on the Asian side of the border until we got down and crossed into Azerbaijan. And so everything north of the Corkesys is technically Europe and then south of that, you're into Asia. And that was kind of interesting. We passed within geographical Europe, we passed through this area in Russia called Kalmykia,

which is one of the many places that Russia calls an autonomous republic, not autonomous, of course. But this place predominantly Buddhist sort of enclave within Russia, the people living there, the Kalmiks migrated from Mongolia about 450 years ago. They speak in archaic form of Mongolian. They are ethnically Mongolian. They speak, sorry, they practice Buddhism. It's just not something you'd expect to find in what we term Europe. Next to that, you've got Dagestan, which is another part of Russia,

which is predominantly Muslim. And they've had a long, sort of long running low level islamist insurgency. There's been, you know, it's often touted as the most dangerous place in Europe. And whenever someone goes through there, you know, for TV, they say, God, isn't this place edgy. But of course, we found this would be the friendiest place we visited on the entire journey.

So yeah, that was a long answer to your Eurasia crossing the border question. But from Azerbaijan onwards, we were then in the Asian side of the border. And Georgia was the only place really where people seem to care about that concept of the border. What do you think that's due to? Quite a few different reasons.

I think historically, Georgians have seen themselves as, I mean, it's a very ancient place that converted in about 350 as a sort of independent kingdom. It converted to Christianity, so it's a very early convert to Christianity, and it lies within the kind of the wider realm of Islam for onto the better term. They are desperate to join the European Union. I should think that will never happen because they are too important to kind of meeting point between different powers. They've got Turkey to one side, Russia to the north, Iran, just across the border further south. They're in the Council of Europe, which has about 50 countries.

And so every government building has a EU flag outside it, because the Council of Europe and the EU flag are the same. And I think they just see themselves as kind of isolated. Even though much of a third or so of Russia is in Europe, they see Russia as being part of that kind of other block, maybe following the Asian tradition, and they want to be part of the European community. So yeah, for quite a few different reasons, it's not entirely clear, and it's something I'm hoping to get back there at some point to look into further. But I think they just say they also see themselves as inheriting the Phoenician and then the Greek traditions from the

ancient world. The Phoenician seafarers kind of settled the coast of Georgia and so they see that as part of their heritage. If Dagestan was one of the warmest places that you visited during that triathlon, which I mean, it's a triathlon where you skied and both paddled in a kayak, so I guess it's definitely an upgraded or amended triathlon. What was one of the more dicey places that you went to? We, while in Georgia, we accidentally crossed the border into South of Setia, which is a region of Georgia that Russia annexed in 2008 in a short five-day war.

It's one of the... South of Setia and up in Casio, these two sort of breakaway republics, Russia invaded Georgia in the course of about five days, theybed, I mean even the capital to Blysee and the strategic sites around the capital. And we were following Google Maps on a phone and it gave us this bit of advice to get to where we wanted to go. You've arrived at this road down some mountain valley path, go up the road for about a mile across the river and then head down the road on the other side and then you'll soon be in this town. But at the bridge there were police and they said the bridge is closed and they wouldn't explain why, they were Georgian police. And they gave no reason. And during this journey I've been arrested in

Russia probably three times I think. In remote areas in Russia, it's very hard not to get in trouble with the authorities, frankly, if you're a foreigner. Being in remote areas is automatically qualifying you for suspicion. Oh, I think that you're doing some sort of surveying, clandestine bullshit. Exactly. As if you'd sent a wanker on a pair of skis rather than a user assassinate. But yeah, we were kind of fed up with being stymied by the authorities, even though this time it was the Georgians. And so we just went half a mile back down the river, which was only ankle deep, pushed our bikes across. It was only 40 meters wide or something. Got out the bank on the other

side. It was the height of summer to the waters very low. Got up the bank on the other side, got onto the road we wanted to follow and started cycling. Happy that we'd got it, got away with it, we'll be in that town later that afternoon for a hostel and a shower and a good feed. And in less than a minute, a military jeep sped up behind us and this soldier jumped out and I noticed first the Russian flag on his arm. and this soldier jumped out and I noticed first the Russian flag on his arm and it confused me because the Russian border was I think probably 30 or 50 miles north and so I thought why what are you doing here and I asked him that and he didn't like that as a question and asked me what are you doing here for 30 and then he said this is South Osset And it turned out, long sort of a later review of maps that we had crossed. There's a tiny little in the very southeast corner of South Ossetia. There's this tiny little promontory of land that sticks

further south. And we're just, if it's a finger, we're just across the tip of the fingernail, just at this tiny little area and the river was the border. And the guy then pointed out that there were guard towers around us and bar wire and everything that we hadn't noticed. And so we were sort of taken in for the night, put in a cell, question, taken to court, everything like that. So that was a little bit sketchy. The journey, after about five hours of interrogation from Russian security officials, they then drove us to Schinballi, the capital of South Ossetia, which is this sort of supposedly standalone state, but of course it's entirely run by Russia. But the South Assetians were, if anything, more angsty

and they, the journey in the night, we got stopped at one point, some guy, more or less tried to rob us while we're in police custody, which is quite unusual. And then in the capital, we put in police custody, which is quite unusual. And then in the Catholic way, putting this sort of, you know, the cell was fine. It was nothing too bad. But then they held us interrogate us for hours, hours, hours, the next day. Never fed us or anything like that.

And then finally, when we were in court, I complained when they say, is there anything you'd like to say? I said, yeah, we haven't been fed and the judge got angry at the police and forced them to feed us. And we got a nice place of sort of Uzbek pl plough and then we're after paying our fine handed back across the border to the Georgian authorities and carried on on our way. So that was probably the hairiest

moment sort of politically. But the three months key through the urals, we were starting about 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the Arctic coast in February, which is really cold. So we had temperatures down to about minus 45. I think during that ski, intense blizzards and winds, which pushes the wind chill down even further. There was a lot of flat light. It was hard to sort of gauge avalanche risk at various points on our way through the Ural Mountains. The maps we were working off with these old Soviet military cartographic survey maps from the 1950s, so we were working off these slightly approximated contour lines and suddenly we'd

just find ourselves clawing our way up a 60 degree slope. So that was all quite sketchy as well, I guess. What was that place that you went to that you said is the most sparsely populated, cold place on the planet? Was that part of the triathlon or was that the walk-in thing? That was this year. Oh, that was this year. That scenario called Yakutia. So the most sparsely populated country on earth is Mongolia. And Mongolia has, let me get this right, three people, I believe, per square kilometer.

Ah! But Yakutia has three square kilometers per person. No way. And what's your Yakutia? Yakutia is a square kilometers per person. No way. And what's your Kutia? Yakutia is a country all of a time. Yeah, Yakutia, or as it's also known, Sakhra Republic, or Republic of Sakhra, is an administrative region of Russia.

It's basically the same size as India. I think I worked out it's 94% the size of India, but there's only one million people. India has 1.4 billion, I think 1 worked out it's 94% the size of India, but there's only one million people. India has 1.4 billion, I think 1.3 billion. So you've got an entire country nearly the size of India with the population of Newcastle city centre. Yes, yeah, on a Friday night. It's, and most of it is relatively uninhabitable. About half of it sits north of the Arctic Circle. Where would this be on a map? Let's say someone's looking at a map, is it just run across the top of Russia? If you go to Beijing and then go about 2000 miles north,

you're probably in the middle of Yakutia. And it goes up to the North Coast, but it's a huge area of Russia. It's sort of heads right down close to Lake Baikal, which is in the middle of Siberia. It's the size of India, but it's tucked away in the northeast of Russia. There's only one more district to the east of it, this place called Chakokka, and that's the peninsula part that reaches out towards Alaska.

So it's absolutely vast, and up there, the coldest and habitat place on Earth, this city called Verchoyansk, is in Yakutia, just close to where I started this trek earlier this year. And they had a temperature about 100 years ago recorded. It was minus, I can't remember off the top minute, I think it was minus 68.4 degrees centigrade Celsius, so really cold. You know, you don't want to be outdoors living in that much. But the average winter, daily low temperatures in much of it are below minus 40. It's really, really cold. And yeah, that was a very different experience

earlier this year in Russia because when I was there in 2017, it was peacetime. But three days after I arrived this year, peacetime ended. And well, to be fair, to the Ukrainians, they would say peacetime ended in 2014 when Crimea was annexed. But the rest of Ukraine was invaded, three days after I arrived, so the rest of the journey was a little bit dicey. What happened, though? Well, I spent the first two months hiking along this frozen river, starting from a little town in the middle of Yakutia, hiking north,

a couple of frozen rivers, in fact, up towards the Arctic coast. And it was really interesting. The reason I went was to go and sort of see the people living there, see what their lives are like. A lot of the people there are, in fact the majority of people there, are ethnically Indigenous Siberians, so they've lived in the area for hundreds of years, and have survived pre-the-Russian colonization of the area about 400 years ago. They survived by hunting, by herding, by living often semi-nomadic lifestyles in this incredibly harsh, inhospitable part of the world, but there are still people living to a greater or lesser extent,

somewhat traditional lifestyles or kind of a combination of the sort of Soviet communist enforced way of life with the previous ways of existing. So I wanted to go and see me these people and that's what I did for the first two months at a really interesting time. I would spend about a week out in the wilderness,

hiking along, camping in my tent, temperatures down to nearly minus 50. And then once a week I would stop into a village and meet interesting people and learn about their lives. But after about three weeks, I was taken into a police station in the only one town along my whole route. From the start to the finish, there was one town in the middle. How long was the route going to be in terms of time? Two months. Oh, and you'd already done two months, so you must have been nearly finished. No,

sorry. After about one month, halfway along, right, I was I was taken in by the police and questioned and accused of committing journalism while traveling on a tourist visa and asking people provocative questions about Ukraine. And there was this long sort of back and forth questioning interrogation process. And at the end of which, I realized, well, they're gonna find me 2000 rules, which is about 20 pounds. So not, actually in the course of the previous month that had gone from being worth about 20 pounds to being about four pounds. I was about to say that the hyperinflation would have given you a great

exchange rate. Well, it would have if all bank cards hadn't stopped working sometime earlier. So I was just on the cash that I'd taken with me by this point. But I realised that I could pay this fine and then just get out into the wilderness and carry on. They weren't going to have me after that. At least these two policemen, the only two in the scene. Were you on your own for this trip, by the way? Yes, yeah, just me. And so I'd left them, carried on walking, got up to the coast, spent the final two weeks walking along the frozen Arctic sea ice, which was absolutely beautiful. Just this huge expanse of whiteness stretching out to the northern horizon.

And there were Aurora Borealis playing over the sky at night, incredible starscapes. It was really sort of sublime, serene. But then I reached my final town, this port town called Tixie, which used to have about 15,000 people, I think, during the Soviet heyday. And as it turned out, more than half the people there are military personnel. Anyway, once I arrived in Tixie, it didn't take long for the police to arrest me once again, question me once again, and this time I was accused of the same things, but with the added accusation or allegation of photographing military sites. So I was taking to court once again, a bit of a sort of kangaroo court sham trial late at night, found guilty, and I thought they told me that I was going

to be banned from Russia for five years. I'd have to pay a 50 pound fine this time, and I would have to leave the country. And so I thought that I would fly back down to Yakutsk, the capital city of the region that I'd flown into, get a flight out the country and be done with it. But it turns out that I was escorted by a Marshall down Tiaqutsk, and then another one picked me up at the airport in Tiaqutsk. It took me to a detention centre and I was locked up for the next month until finally I was deported.

So it was all quite a... The thing that worried me most is I never knew, I was never told how long I would be locked up. They said, you're here until we deport you. And I said, when's that? And they said, oh, we don't know, there's paperwork. But then, so I launched a lodged an appeal. I managed to hire a local lawyer. And the appeal was immediately rejected just out of hand. They said that my charges were too serious and had a political nature to them. So they were accusing me of being a journalist asking provocative questions about Ukraine and photographing military sites. But you put all those together

and you've essentially got through the Russian States perspective, a foreign journalist getting ready to spread stories about the Russian military that run counter to the state's official narrative, and they introduced in early March about a week after the invasion of Ukraine a new law with a sentence a lot to 15 years for just that. So while I was in there, I was thinking, you know, any minute they might just take me back to court, try me again with this sort of criminal charge, and I could be here until I'm nearly 50. So it was a pretty hair raising time, mostly frankly, boring, frustrating, enraging.

I've never really been prone to a hot temper that while I was in there, I found myself having a rational fits of rage. At one point, they dragged me out of the cell in handcuffs, and suddenly I was just thrust in front of a TV camera and I was interviewed for state TV news. They just threw all the same accusations at me as the police had in court. So that felt like I was being kind of prepared or run through the court public opinion and things could get really quite bad after that. Brittany Griner, the American basketball player, she's still in Russia, she's been in prison

for I think about 120 days, four months, more baps, maybe closer to six months now actually. And there's British people who have been detained in sort of around Marriouple and they will be in the territories of Don Yepskin, Lugansk, the death sentence can apply, so they've been sentenced to death. Presumably, two or three of them now, and I think two more about to follow, along with a sweet and a Croatian.

Presumably, with a view, I think and hope that they won't be executed. They'll probably be sort of used or bargained for prisoner swaps. But there was just, while I was on the inside, while I was in the prison, there was just always hanging over me the possibility that they're going to use me, make an example of me, and I could spend months or even years in this place. So frankly, the fact that I'm out now is I do marvel at it every few days, how lucky I've been to actually be released. Yeah, it seems like a role of the dice.

I'm going to guess that some of the people that were detained were detained for probably no more, or maybe even less than what you were detained for. And they're still there and now potentially facing the death penalty, except they will happen to be in a different area with a different code and the wrong judge and the wrong inspector or whatever. Well, the folks who have been given the death penalty, they were charged with being mercenaries and sort of partaking in a foreign war as the Russian see it. A little bit worse. Yeah, so they were fighting with the Ukrainian army, but one of them had been in the Ukrainian special forces, I think, for several years already and is also a Ukrainian citizen, so they were fighting with Ukrainian army, but one of them had been in the Ukrainian special forces, I think for several years already, and is also a Ukrainian citizen, but they've just thrown the book out because he's also got UK citizenship. But Brittany Griner,

she just had allegedly, I mean, with the no evidence that we know of, allegedly, she just had a vape cartridge with trace amounts of hash or CBD oil or something like that. And she's been imprisoned for the best part of half a year. So that's more trivial. Sentenced to 15 years. Nine years, I think it was. Maybe it was nine, but I think they wanted nine and a half. That was it. She's done half.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that was just last week, I think. We learned about Dubai has a particularly strict drugs policy. And this guy flew from Las Vegas to Dubai and had had some THC in something while he was in Vegas, got pancreatitis in Dubai. And then when they did a urine test of him, he was found to have trace amounts of THC in his urine and that constitutes possession in Dubai. I don't even know what to say about that. That's wild. And that seems like that's largely just, yeah, it's just shitty luck. And that seems like that's largely just, yeah, it's just shitty luck. Yeah.

Okay, so go take me back. Like you get taken in. Who in their right mind when Russia has just invaded the Ukraine is helping a British journalist who was dicking about taking photos and writing stuff for a laugh, and because that's what he likes to do, who was prepared to give you any assistance? Why would they? Frankly, there's not really many diplomatic leaders remaining between Britain and Russia,

but they tried to help where they could. They were also six time zones away in Moscow, so that was that. I had a local friend who bought some books to the prison for me to read. That was that was very kind of a all him. And the the lawyer that I hired was just a local lawyer who was prepared to do that for the several hundred dollars that he was paid to do it. But his job was basically just to take my case presented to the court, have it rejected, and that was more or less the end of it. I believe he did help or certainly tried to expedite the movement of papers from the court system up in this

Port City on the north, or Port Town on the north, where I was arrested down to the capital where I was being held, which sped things up a little bit. Any one further day of delay for the papers not getting there apparently would have led to me not being deported at that time. They only deport people at certain times. So I was deported in late May. And the next window was going to be late July, so that would have been another two months

already. And had I been there for another two months, as the situation continued to deteriorate in Ukraine, as the British and Russian relationship continued to disintegrate too, there's I think a good chance had I been there another two months that my case would have been sort of picked up by the authority.

If I wanted to release you, you would have been more valuable to them. Exactly, I would have been retried with a criminal charge for either that fake news charge that they bought in or just simply espionage because they said I was creeping around in remote areas where you're not really meant to be and they said I was photographing military sites. So you're not going to go back to Russia anytime soon?

I can't, I can't for the next five years. But I mean, I would love to go back to Russia. I have a lot of affection for the place and for the vast majority of the people I've met in Russia, who, and there are, of course, plenty of exceptions to this people who are zealously in favor of everything own regime. And this doesn't mean that their lives are being torn up and separated, but it does mean that they aren't free to speak, to say what they think, to write, to publish, what they think, to protest or anything like that. So I do hope that Russia sees reform or revolution, frankly, in my lifetime. And I do get to go back. But until that day, I wouldn't be sensible or safe to do so.

How culpable do you think citizens are for being complicit, convinced, perhaps by malicious ideas and ideologies as a part of a regime that they don't know anything else but that. It's a really good question. I think that's one of the most interesting, difficult and important questions that there is at the moment. I've wrestled with this quite a lot and I don't have any definitive answer for it. I go through phases of feeling and thinking different things, but broadly speaking, plenty of people in Russia are just completely sold on the propaganda they've been fed. They genuinely

think that the Ukrainian leadership and governance is fascistic that they are neo-nazis. governance is fascistic that they are neo-Nazis. You only have to watch 10, 20 minutes of state TV news in Russia to just get just the level of bullshit that they're being fed. Now there is censorship, so it is hard to access external media or news. The basically all the independent media has been shut down. There are a few remaining, but they are only remaining because they are towing the government line. But it is still possible, or at least it was when I left, and I believe it is.

It is still possible to get to visit quite a lot of foreign news sites. But they might not be in Russians. They probably aren't understanding what the vast majority of people outside Russia. And I think the censorship on external websites has been a lot more rigorous on Russian language outlets. So there are plenty of people in Russia who know what they're being told is a lie, but can't do anything about it. And frankly, stand to gain nothing and really achieve nothing by speaking up. All they'll do is endanger themselves, their families, and they'll just bring the wrath

of the state down on them. There are people who are cynically exploiting the situation. You only have to see the little clips put on to Twitter from some of the main panel discussions on Russia 1, the main news channel, to see that some people are just, you know, tub thumping, who they're full of shit and are just happily repeating,

parroting anything that Putin or his propaganda machine says. So, it's tricky. This question I suppose is coming up most often with regard to international sports tournaments. So should Russian competitors be allowed to compete? They were banned from Russian's Am Belorosians. I think were banned from Wimbledon, but aren't from the Cincinnati Open in Ohio at the moment. There was a story today to Russian female tennis players were having a match and then a spectator who had a Ukrainian flag draped around her was ordered by the tournament

to remove it because one of the players complained. Now people who seem to show, and Russians abroad who seem to show an open prejudice against Ukraine, I think that's a problem. And I don't think that there's an excuse for that because they don't have to say anything. Especially if you're in the middle of a tennis match. Well, exactly. And so there's that, there's saying nothing is very different to saying something.

And I don't think we should condemn people for an absence of protest where it's so dangerous to protest. That said, the longer the war goes on and the more it starts to feel like the only way for the water end is through a vast popular uprising in Russia, for which there isn't the appetite. That's what you think. One of the solutions or one of the routes out of this current conflict is for the war to be won from within Russia itself. Yeah, well, I mean, there's only three, I suppose. One is some sort of treaty, essentially,

concessions from Ukraine, giving Russia what it's taken and calling it a day. Politically, I don't see that happening, or at least not for a long while. There is still the appetite in Ukraine to carry on fighting. Zelensky does still seem to have the support of the majority of the country to not concede to Russia. The other would be, well, the other two would be Ukraine winning or losing the war. I.e. Ukraine being entirely annexed by Russia or Russia being entirely repelled from Ukraine, but that would probably as things stand at the moment, have to include the Crimean Peninsula as well.

I don't see that happening. Or not, again, not anytime soon. The saddest thing about this war is it looks set to grind on for months and potentially even years. But the only other option I see, sort of things escalating to some sort of nuclear hellscape, is the people of Russia turning on their government rising up.

But there are plenty of people in Russia who want that to happen, but not enough, in my opinion. I think that lots of people in Russia predominantly older people and people away from the more cosmopolitan urban centres, where I think there's a little bit more awareness of and access to foreign media. People away from those places and older people support the war and support Putin and Putin is still seen as the essentially the savior who bought stability to Russia after the crazed kind of kleptocracy of the 1990s after the Soviet Union was dissolved. There was just that crazy period where all the oligarchs, everything was just robbed, people grabbed whatever they could, they sold off whatever they could. And it was around about the time Putin came into power that that sort of lessoned, that

snot to say that Putin and his currently he's haven't continued plundering the country as much as they can. And various estimates of Putin's private wealth stretched out to about the $200 billion mark, although he can't really take that away with him. The minute he's out of office, he's probably dead. So that's a really long rambling and self-contradictual answer to your question. And the simple answer is, I really, I just, I don't have a perfect answer to that question, but I do want people to think about it and discuss it more because I think it's really important. I do worry about the rise and spread of Rousseophobia, because a lot of people aren't culpable. They don't have a say over what happens,

and the incredible crackdown on the early protests that went right across the country in the first few days of the war. But within a week about 15,000 people have been arrested, many of whom are thrown in prison. So protest in a state that has quite such a huge police and military presence is nigh on impossible. It's kind of the difference between the art and the artist thing, right, that you have a population and then you have populists and then you have the politicians that are controlling them. And I think that it does suck. It's unfortunate that Russians are being tired with a brush that they perhaps didn't choose, that their government has put in place for them. And yeah, it's kind of like what you were talking about to do with sports. Athletes have come before in the Russian athletics federation and they've

been doping, which means that now in future you don't get to play anymore. Even if you're clean, I don't think that any of the Russian athletes are clean. I think that this is the sort of thing that's going to be continuing in any case. My point being there is something that feels unfair about that, but you have to draw a line at some point and you have to say, look, the difference between this being individual and this being systemic and even if it means that out of a hundred athletes, ten of them might be clean or out of a hundred population people, ten of them might be pro-putin or whatever. It is very, very difficult and I think that's where the new one sort of comes in.

Sport, I think, raises some really interesting different examples because tennis is a good example because you don't really play tennis outside of the Olympics, I think. You don't really play tennis for your country. There's also the Davis Cup, Europe versus America, but you don't play tennis for your country. You play as an individual, it's the same with golf predominantly, but a football team or a Olympic squad, that's a bit different. And I think it's right that, for example, the UEFA final was taken away from Russia pretty much as soon as the invasion happened. It also wasn't feasible from a security perspective to get all those many, probably tens of thousands of people into Russia for that game

Anyway, so it was a bit of a no-brainer but if you are in a team that is flying the Russian flag and sort of you know that I suppose if you're if you're Having the anthem played for you upon victory. I mean the national anthem's aren't played at the end of a tournament in Wilming, for example, when Nadal wins, they don't play at the Spanish National Anthem on the once-every 80 years that a Brit wins or an English or Scottish person wins, you don't get that anthem because it's individuals playing. But a football team is a very different idea, and the Olympics is the same because the Olympics is all about, well, supposedly, I guess,

international cohesion, but it's about countries competing with each other on the global stage. So sports does have those differing kind of examples. And again, it's sometimes difficult to draw the line, but I suppose if you are a team wearing the flag, having the anthem, then you stand for that country, and to compete in international sports should be a privilege. And I don't think countries, for example, China with its awful a privilege. And I don't think countries, for example, China with its awful human rights record, I don't think they should have been now to host the Winter Olympics,

let alone arguably compete at the Winter Olympics. Although if you start ticking off all the dictatorships and autocracies and people with bad human rights records, the Olympics is gonna start looking like, well, kind of the EU games or something. It's like that. It's like that, to say the least, I think. So given, let's say that you're doing these long trips,

I mean, you've done walking to the northernmost points of a bunch of different places, cycling around tons of places. How do you re-normalize coming back to everyday life after you've been away in these trips? You mentioned before that you, during your time at uni or whatever would come back and kind of have this new viewpoint that you would have been absent that you would have done something

that was different. But now, I mean, you've got family, you've got friends, you've got, I don't know, you're coming back to a very different sort of world. You have changed North a lot and yet the world has continued the same. How do you re-normalize? It's, there's no sort of one way, I suppose. It's different every time. And frankly, broadly speaking, gets easier every time I go back. And it depends a lot on how long you've been away. So my journeys are varied from two months to four and a half years. And coming back after four and a half years,

that's odd because your life has become whatever it is that you're doing for four and a half years, you're constantly moving on the road for four and a half years, that's odd because your life has become whatever it is that you're doing for four and a half years, you're constantly moving on the road for four and a half years. But going away for two or three months is a fair old amount of time. The thing that's most different when I come back is not the fact that I'm back home or back in the UK, it's the fact that I'm no longer waking up

in a tentage morning and hiking or cycling or kayaking or whatever it is. So I guess it's the, I guess, is that change from movement to just, well, no longer flux. You're just, you're in the same spot. It's that standing still. Do you feel that takes a little bit? At first, I get a bit sort of itchy. So when I got back from Russia, I arrived at about six in the morning at Heathrow. My girlfriend and an uncle came to pick me up. We had breakfast, she went to work, I came home and I just felt, I mean, I hadn't really slept, but I suddenly felt just kind of, you know,

stir crazy in the flat, so I went out for a run, but I'd been in a prison cell for the last month, so my head didn't have a shit for legs. So I run about three miles and then was limping and just had to sort of sadly limp back up and start unpacking. So there is that sort of first sense of almost claustrophobia, but I do find that starts to wear off quicker,

and there's always plenty to be getting back on with, normally coming back from a journey is so busy. I've got, I mean, sadly, lots of emails to answer, lots of, you know, friends to catch up with. You just kind of, you rush back into normal life. And the first day might be a bit claustrophobic and a bit disorientating. And then that dyscompobulation dies away. I've got another couple of weeks only, you might kind of go, oh wow, I'm just that quickly back into a much more sedentary lifestyle. And that's when you start to think, right, well, what's next? And then you start focusing your attention on whatever is next.

And that's a good distraction. How do you commit to something which is going to take four and a half years to do? That was relatively straightforward, strangely straightforward. Largely because I was 22 at the time. I was 21 when I decided to do it, I think. And I had no ties, really. I just had my first job and so I was saving a little bit of money, but it wasn't something that I wanted to do forever.

And I was, I think, I mean, I was young and I was quite naive and I was able to just make that rash decision. And as I said earlier, it was that kind of, you know, almost wanting to essentially a Homeric boast, wanting to do something big and bold and, and brash and sort of, you know, slayer dragon in my metaphorical sense. So that was actually quite straightforward. I made the decision I was drunk at the time admittedly on some Mongolian vodka in a forest in Siberia, by a little campfire. It's a longer story that I don't think we've got time for now. But I made that decision, I drew some wiggly lines on a little, in the back of a lonely planet, they had those tiny little world maps, and I squiggled over it. I woke up in the morning, looked at it and thought, right, let's do that. And then just about a year later,

I sat off and got going. And the main thing about that journey is I didn't really prepare anything. I didn't train, I just saved a bit of money. I got a tent, an old bicycle, and some panier bags, saddle bags to carry everything. And when I was ready, I just sat off and it was kind of as simple as that. I suppose giving yourself a start date and telling people about what you're going to do is a bit of a hack because if you're someone like me who will be embarrassed to back down for something they said they'll do, you're then in some sense committed. And that seemed to work for me on that occasion and on several since then. Was that a specialist bike of some kind?

Did it have any important attributes that helped you to survive for several thousand miles? No, heavy steel frame, no suspension. It would have cost, I think, about three or four hundred pounds new. I got a second hand on eBay for about a hundred pounds. I put on that big seat. I wrote a letter, a handwritten letter, to a saddle maker called Brooks. They make very beautiful leather saddles. They've been around for 150 years. They're based in Oxford or Oxfordshire, I think. And they're really expensive. Well, I mean, they're not that expensive. They're about 150 pounds, but that's more than I had for even a bike. And they over time, they sort of contour and mold to your ass, and so they fit. So I didn't have padded shorts, I cycled without padded shorts, I just wore, you know, boxer shorts and shorts or trousers. But I wrote them a letter saying,

I'm going off to do this thing, I'm going to raise a bit of money for charity while I do it, I'm going to cycle 40,000 miles, it'll take about four years. At the end, I said, I honestly think I can say that I'm speaking from my arse when I say thank you very much. They said they get hundreds of requests every month, but Jews are that one little throwaway cheeky line. They said, yeah, here you go. Here's a saddle. That was perhaps the most sort of specialist part of the bike, it was just a saddle. 40,000 miles. Yeah. 43 or 44, I think. Yeah.

You must be in the top thousand people on the planet in terms of how far you've travelled on a bicycle. It's you and it's professional cyclists and that's it. Well, I mean, there are many thousands of professional cyclists. So, I mean, I'm okay. I might come in the top sort of, you know, 50,000 times. Yeah, but that's still an awful lot. And of non-professional cyclists,

probably easily within the top thousand. People that aren't doing it for the pursuit of the sport, even the amateurs and stuff like that. And who chooses to go and do that far? Just because adventure? Yeah, I mean the bicycle is a really good means to an end when it comes to adventure because you can travel for nothing, for free. All you need is food to fuel you. Because you're always in the places in between, you get to see, you get to really see a place in a really good depth, I suppose walking is one level further. But you can still cover comfortably 60 to 100 miles a

day and have time besides to see people, meet people rather, see things, learn things, whatever. You can sleep for free in, anywhere, in a tent. You just pull over, find a little bit of woodland or in the desert or in the mountains, wherever you are. You just find some little space, put up your tent. So you can travel for basically nothing, for a really long distance at a pace that is really conducive to seeing the places that you are and sort of scratching that bit deeper beneath the surface. And you're not just jetting through places as you would on a train or a plane or a car or a motorbike even because you are traveling slowly enough to force you to stop in lots of places, the villages between the towns that other people might visit if they were just on a shorter

tour. But not so slowly as if you were perhaps walking that you would never be able to get from one place to another quite so quickly and be able to see as much. Exactly. I mean, there's a Scottish guy called Mark Beaumont who cycled 18,000 miles around the world in 78 and a half days. I think a few years back, he has the record for the... But I mean, he was cycling 280 odd miles a day with, you know, support, because it's a very different type of experience

to what I was aiming at. And the bike was just the means, the end for me, the end was to experience things to see, to do, to learn. How did you find yourself changed after that? I was browner, mostly from sort of dirt and grime, rather than actually a suntan, I was hairier. I had a beard down to my nipples by the end of it. I was very, very comfortable in my own company, potentially a little bit too much at first, but I had spent just months and years by myself

and had learnt to be really comfortable by myself. But that was a struggle. It took ages to kind of get that balance right between feeling happily alone and feeling lonely. So that was probably the biggest difference, I guess. Also, I'd just seen a lot more of the world. I mean, everyone is very changed between 22 and 27, which is the age I left and came back at. So I was probably different in lots of ways. It's a slightly evasive answer, I guess. I always wonder about, I've been thinking about this a lot recently, how much of the wisdom that we like to attribute to our own efforts and our personal development and the bits of the world that we've seen and the conversations we've had and the introspection

we've done, how much of that just comes along for the ride as a byproduct to getting older? I often think a good chunk of it is maybe just you being having been around for another year or two years or five years. Absolutely. And I think the, you know, for most people, thankfully, the longer they're around, the more confident they become within themselves. I mean, this can lead problems. You do get people who get a little bit too confident perhaps and with age they're more likely to attain positions of power with which they can cause problems. But I think we get more confident as we get older and confidence just breeds a fuller understanding of your life's experience and the sum of your life's experiences. And that's going to happen regardless of if you're cycling around the world for four years

or you're working in an office having day-to-day experiences and interactions with lots of different or the same people, we all grow and sort of broaden our horizons throughout time and there's lots of different ways of doing that. And that's why I've never been someone to preach the idea that everyone should travel and that travel is uniquely transformative for me. It has proved to be very transformative, but again, as you suggest, potentially that's just the passage of time. What places did you go to that was surprisingly enjoyable. I mentioned earlier on that Dagestan was a place that you went to that perhaps surprisingly enjoyable. Mentioned earlier on the Dagestan was a place that you went to that perhaps in advance you wouldn't have thought of

as a bastion of fun, warm welcomeness. Any other places or places if people are thinking that they're fancy going to do a trip that they should probably consider that wouldn't be on the typical list. Iran is probably the most surprising place I've ever been to. Now, I assume that the majority of your listeners will be British and American and British and Americans don't

exactly get an easy passage into Iran. You can't, this didn't used to be the case, the first two times I went, you could travel independently, but now you need to be on a tour with a guide in a sort of pre-arranged itinerary so you can no longer quite experience it in the same way. But even so, Iran is, and I've been, I've probably spent about six months there in total, it remains the friendliest place that I've ever been, the single friendliest place. I've been to about half the world's countries and Iran stands out, had them shoulders above the rest for just the incredibly warm welcome. And these are people who know that I'm, you know, just to sort of dispel the slightly lazy stereotypes perhaps. these are people who know that I'm, you know, just to sort of dispel the

slightly lazy stereotypes perhaps. These are people who know that I'm not a Muslim, potentially not even a practicing religious person. These are people who know that I come from a country that doesn't particularly want good things for theirs or at least is politically at log ahead with them. But Iran is a good example. I suppose this loops back a little bit to what we were talking about earlier with with Russia and Russians. Iran is a great example that many people aren't and don't feel represented by their governments and their country is not just what we see or hear in the news. A country is made up of, well, in Iran's case, about 80 million people. And there's a complete, you know, diversity within that. And the vast majority of people

I met, the overwhelming majority were incredibly warm, friendly, interesting, open-minded on most topics. But of course, people have been indoctrinated by a, you know, state censorship and a lack of access to the broader market of ideas. But, yeah, that's the one place I would say that surprised me most. Interesting. What about lessons that you've taken from this? I'm aware that it's always difficult to synthesize something that you've been doing

for a decade and a half. But if there was a bunch of insights that you think that you've gained or the ones that you find most valuable that you think other people should Really take to heart certainly seems like one of them is that most of the world is quite warm and welcoming and friendly and not hostile I'm gonna guess that that might be something. Yeah, that's definitely pretty much the default wherever I've been in the world is for people normal people authorities are often slightly different case, but normal people just want to help out really. It probably helps that I have often travelled in quite a vulnerable manner without, sort of, shows of visible wealth, for example. I've heard it had anything worth robbing, certainly not well-traveling, traveling. But I mean, I suppose the main thing, which is really hard to phrase without sounding trite or cliché, but it's cliché for a reason, is that you,

I mean, it makes you sound like some sort of motivational speaker. But most people are a lot more capable than they think. If you set your sights a bit higher than you expect, then you will probably rise up to meet them. And if you don't, you will at least rise up to higher than you'd expect. And failing well, giving something a go, not completing it, but having done better than you ever imagined you could, is really, really valuable. Now, none of that is a secret, and there are many, many people who charge many, many dollars or pounds out there to tell you that,

but it's quite a straightforward truth, and just making that first step, getting out your door, whether literally or metaphorically is the simple key to that just doing something starting something and most people will be surprised by what they manage to pull off. It's strange because there's that the Matthew principal to those who have more those who have everything more will be given to those who have nothing more will be taken and you start to see in the world people diverge into more of what it is that they're doing at the moment. And it's the inertia, it's the getting out of the door, it's the beginning of the first

step, it's committing to doing the thing where almost everybody gets stuck. Because once you start to do the thing, not doing the thing takes more energy than continuing to do the thing. It's the change. I remember I was learning about this guy, I think he may be swam somewhere to the Bahamas, some insane route that he'd done and he had to go there and back. And he said that he wasn't emotional, he'd nearly died and there was all his swells and all sorts of chaos that ensued. And the only time that he ever really felt emotion,

he said was when he got to land, and it was because of the deceleration from what he'd felt to what he was feeling now. And I think that that's kind of true just generally for when we're trying to make changes, changes, right? It's not continuing to do the thing. If you're getting up on time and going to the gym

and you've got healthy relationships and your food is okay and you're not an alcoholic. It that is what you tend to continue doing. Yeah, I mean one way putting it as opposed is that once you're pressurized for the better term. The only thing that sort of shocking or jarring is depressurization or decompression rather. You know once you've once you've got those wheels rolling stopping is harder than then just rolling with it. I agree. Charlie Walker ladies and gentlemen if people want to keep up to date, oh actually, what are you doing next? Tell us what's up next for you.

Well, I've just started work on a book about this experience in Russia, but don't hold your breath, watch this face, that'll be a while. I've got a few ideas bouncing around at the moment for what journey will be next, but I haven't decided on anything yet, so I'm not gonna make any loud boasts that I will then feel forced to stick to, regardless of the viability of them. So in the meantime, yeah, people can keep up with what I'm doing on Instagram. At CW Explore, it's the same on Twitter,

at CW Explore, my website, CWexplore.com. There's a couple of books I've written about my experiences, which can be found on Kindle and Audible and my website, Amazon, wherever. But yeah, that's me for the time being, and I'm sure there'll be another journey before long. Charlie, I appreciate you. Thanks for me. My pleasure. Cheers. Ciezę.