#1832 - Charlie Walker

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience. All right, Charlie, first of all, thanks for being here.

Charlie Walker (0:16)

My pleasure.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

Very nice to meet you. Why do you do the things that you do?

Charlie Walker (0:21)

First question is the hardest one.

I guess over the years have formed a whole bunch of different answers to that, some of them flippant and sarcastic. Without rambling on for ages and ages, I suppose it comes down to, I'm just really curious. I want to get to these places, see people living lives differently to mine. I grew up in a tiny little village where it's nice, but nothing happened.

Joe Rogan (0:44)

Where did you grow up?

Charlie Walker (0:45)

Just close to Salisbury in the southwest of England, about 10 miles from Stonehenge down there.

Yeah, I suppose I started traveling when I was about 18 Took a year out between school and university, and just got more and more curious and slowly realized that I enjoyed traveling more if I was getting to places by, I suppose, physically difficult means. And that particularly helps, I suppose. If you turn up in some remote community in a, not that I've been doing this, but in a helicopter or a four by four or whatever, there's instantly a distance, a sort of divide, you know, you're, I spend most of my time traveling in the developing world where that's just building a barrier. Whereas if you turn up on foot or in a little kayak or on a horse or whatever, then I think people kind of take to that a little bit more.

Joe Rogan (1:34)

What was your first trip that you did like this?

Charlie Walker (1:40)

Besides backpacking around Africa, the first time I did anything sort of particularly physically challenging was I flew to Beijing and I had a flight out of Mongolia. And kind of quite last minute, I thought, oh, well, you know, there's a thousand miles between the two. I'll take a bike, a bicycle.

Didn't get off to the best start. I went to a friend's 21st birthday party about 10 days before leaving. And I don't really remember the party, but when I wake up in the morning, one of my quadriceps had snapped. Not torn, but snapped. The doctor said that the two ends would kind of flap around like fish tails and eventually graft onto the rest. I don't know how scientific that was. And then on my first night in Beijing, I fell over and broke my wrist a bit drunk.

So two weeks later, when I sort of cut my cast off and sort of strapped my knee up a bit and pedaled out, I wasn't in the best shape. And frankly, the following two-

Joe Rogan (2:32)

So you just went with a torn calf with the quadriceps muscle, fucked up wrist. You just went anywhere.

Charlie Walker (2:40)

Yeah, I mean, I started slow. I'm not a sportsman. I'm not an athlete. I've never really particularly trained for anything. I tend to try and keep fit, but that's kind of it.

So I've always sort of thought, start slow and build up. And it only took two weeks to cross up to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia.

And once I crossed the border into Mongolia, there was just no road. It was just desert, and there's kind of tire tracks all over the place. And you've just got to take a northeast bearing and sort of stick with it. And frankly, those two weeks were kind of shitty. I didn't particularly enjoy them.

But I mean, you're probably aware of the concept of type two fun. You've done something, and once you've, it's crap. But then once you've finished, you start to rose tint it.

And before I'd even left Mongolia, I was already thinking, yeah, there could be something in this. And I saw the potential of bicycle travel. You can travel a fair distance. You know, if you want, you can go 100 miles a day, you can go 60 miles very comfortably, and still have a lot of the day there. You can travel very cheaply. You can travel for ages. And you get to see all those places in between that you wouldn't really go near if you're on a bus or a train or a car, whatever it is.

Joe Rogan (3:50)

Did you have any idea of like where food would be, how you would get through these areas? Like, did you understand like what towns were available?

Charlie Walker (4:00)

I knew I mean, I had for that first ride, I had a map and I knew that besides, I guess, a 250 mile gap in the Gobi, that there would be enough towns to get resupplies.