Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1832 - Charlie Walker
Uploaded: 2022-06-15T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1832 - Charlie Walker' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-06-15. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1832 - Charlie Walker' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-06-15. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1832 - Charlie Walker

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
We're up.
All right, Charlie, first of all, thanks for being here.
My pleasure.
Very nice to meet you.
Why do you do the things that you do?
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.
Where did you grow up?
Just close to Salisbury in the southwest of England.
About 10 miles from Stonehenge down there.
Oh, wow.
And 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 4x4 or whatever,
there's instantly a distance, a sort of divide.
You know, 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.
What was your first trip that you did like this?
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 quiet 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 fishtails and
eventually graft onto the rest.
I don't know how scientific that that was.
And then on my first night in Beijing, I fell over and broke my wrist a bit
drunk.
Oh, Jesus.
Two weeks later when I sort of, you know, cut my cast off and sort of, you know,
strapped my knee up a bit and pedaled out.
I wasn't in the best shape.
And frankly, the following two.
So you just went with a torn calf, quadriceps muscle, fucked up wrist.
You just went anywhere.
Yeah.
I mean, I started slow.
I'm not a, like, I'm not a sportsman.
You know, I'm not an athlete.
I've always just liked to, I've never really particularly trained for anything.
I tend to try and keep fit, but that's, that's, that's kind of it.
Um, so I've, I've always sort of thought start slow and build up.
And the, the two, it only took two weeks to, to cross up to the, to Ulaanbaatar,
the, the capital of Mongolia.
And once I crossed the border into Mongolia, there was just no road.
It was, you know, it's just desert and there's kind of tire tracks all over the
place.
And you just got to, you know, take a Northeast bearing and sort of stick with
it.
Um, and frankly, those two weeks were kind of shitty.
Like I didn't particularly enjoy them.
Um, but yeah, I mean, you're probably aware of the concept of type two fun.
You know, you've done something and once you've, it's, it's crap.
But then once you've finished, you start to rose tint it.
Right.
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 know, you, you, you can travel a fair distance.
You know, if you want, you can go a hundred miles a day and go 60 miles very
comfortably.
I 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, you know, on a bus or a train or a car,
whatever it is.
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?
I knew, I mean, I had a, for that first ride, I had a map and I knew, uh, that
besides, uh, I guess a 250 mile gap in the Gobi, uh, that there'd be, you know,
enough towns to, to get, get resupplies.
So you just had to go 250 miles through the Gobi desert on a bike with a torn
quad and a fucked up wrist.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In short.
But you can carry quite a lot on a bike.
You know, you can carry if necessary and, you know, later, you know, in later
years, you can carry, you know, two, three, four weeks of food pretty easily.
It's not going to be very exciting.
It's going to be just a lot of rice and noodles and stuff like that.
But, uh, you can, you can sort of stack it up.
Did you plan ahead for that?
Did you, do you understand what your requirements were going to be?
Did you like, did you sit down and write it all out?
I'm going to be there for X amount of hours.
I'm going to need at Y amount of calories.
No, I've, I've never been good at planning.
Uh, well, no, that's, that's not true.
That's not fair.
I've never loved getting granular with planning.
Um, I, you know, when I'm planning food for, uh, you know, earlier this year, I
had to plan food for about a month and I kind of look, that's about a breakfast.
And just times that a bunch of times that's about a lunch and then just pack an
extra, you know, 10, 20% and you should be all right.
Um, which is, which is perhaps a slightly sort of scattergun irresponsible
approach, but I've, I've slowly got a bit better at knowing what's, what's
needed.
And I mean, I've never got into, um, calories and counting the numbers of it.
Um, I totally see the value in that.
And a lot of people who do similar sorts of things do.
Um, but I've, I've generally thought, you know, I don't need to work out that I've
got precisely enough protein for any given day or, or fat or carbohydrate,
whatever it is.
Because usually these aren't hugely long endeavors, you know, a few months you
can go with a slightly impalanced diet, maybe take some multivitamins.
I would imagine that you're burning a lot of calories though, riding that bike
through the desert for 250 miles.
Yeah.
Um, I mean, like I, I look back at that trip there and I think that was quite
straightforward really.
And I do think that I'm not one of these people who says, Hey, anybody can do
anything, but I don't think that particular ride across, you know, across to
Mongolia was especially difficult.
Um, but it was, it was, for me, it was, uh, revelatory cause I just got this
idea of what bike travel could be.
And it was, it was only a couple of weeks less, probably 10 days after I
finished that I got a bit drunk and made a, on, on a Genghis Khan vodka and
made quite a rash decision to cycle for what ended up being about four years.
Um, Genghis Khan booker.
What are you saying?
Vodka.
Oh, Genghis Khan vodka.
Sorry.
Okay.
No worries.
I've got a plummy accent.
No worries.
Um, yeah.
And I made this decision to cycle, uh, from the UK back to the UK via the furthest
away point in each of Europe, Asia and Africa.
Uh, and that ended up taking about four years.
So you do this first trip and you decide after it's completed that, you know,
you get this interesting feeling, you know, it was fun.
It was exciting.
It was adventurous.
And that this is something you're going to do often.
Are you writing about these things?
Are you making videos?
Like, what do you, what are you doing once you're done?
Um, I, I write basically.
Um, I'm, I'm not a, you know, videographer.
I take photos.
Uh, I didn't for, for the four year trip that followed, I didn't have social
media at that time.
Um, so I, I very much focused on writing and every day at the end of the day,
it doesn't matter how sort of sweaty and uncomfortable.
I might be in a tent or cold or whatever, I will write down what happened that
day and just, just get it all down.
And later you can then kind of, you know, get yourself back into that frame of
mind and all these other details will suddenly start springing back in.
And it's, you know, it's quite a helpful sort of, uh, key to unlocking other
memories.
Um, yeah, but, uh, writing is my main focus.
How do you fund these trips?
Uh, initially I was saving, scrimping and saving.
And, um, that first long journey, I lived for four and a half years, as it
turned out, uh, on about 12,000 pounds, which back then would have been, I
guess, $16,000.
Um, and so.
For four years.
Yeah, yeah, so I lived in a tent, I ate very cheaply, occasionally I'll get a
night in a hostel or something.
Um, you can live for a really small amount of money if you're just out in the
wild.
Um, more recently I, I get sponsorship or grants that sort of, you know, help
and cover expenses, but I've always done things in quite a lo-fi way.
I've never done hugely complicated or expensive journeys.
I've always quite enjoyed the, uh, I guess the accessibility of doing stuff
that anyone logistically probably could do if they, if they put a bit of
thought to it.
The four-year one, like, how does one go about deciding that you're going to do
something that's going to take four years out of your life?
Like, did you recognize that it was going to take that long?
Like, what did it?
I reckoned it would take about that, and, and rashly is the answer.
I kind of, you know, I came up with the idea before I really gave it a lot of
thought.
And the first thing I did is told a bunch of people, you know, family included,
hey, I'm going to, in a year's time, I'm going to head off on a bike for about
four years.
And once I told a bunch of people, then it became almost a certainty to me,
because, you know, I think I would have been embarrassed to then back down.
And so I guess, I mean, I've always found that quite handy with any, with any
project, you know, just let people know, set yourself a start date, and then
the wheels are already in motion.
And out of sort of shame or embarrassment, you'll probably end up going through
with it.
That's, I can't think that anybody would fault you for quitting.
I mean, I don't think anybody would say, oh, Charlie, you only did three years.
I came close a bunch of times.
Did you?
By the time I got three years, you know, then it's like, well, I might as well,
might as well finish it off.
And when you get to the end of that, are you going to, did you write a book?
Did you, did you?
Oh, I have something for you.
Oh, there you go.
Before I forget, actually, I've got something else as well.
Bear with me.
What have we got here?
These are, I believe, for you, Joe.
Oh, thank you.
Those two books are about that four-year bike ride.
There you go.
And I've got a couple for Jamie.
And now, once you do this, so you get back, and I would imagine, like, writing
down everything at the end of the day, I'm sure, helps.
But it's got to be difficult to sort of capture the nuances of each experience.
I mean, if you're writing for four years, I would imagine there's a lot of very
notable experiences you're having during this time.
Like, how are you remembering all these and documenting them?
I mean, like, photos help as well.
You know, over the course of four years, I've probably had something like 15,000
photographs.
And that helps, you know, furnish a picture.
But, I mean, it's really just what I said.
About, what, 1,600 days, I kept a journal every single day.
Sometimes they're very brief, you know.
You mean just writing it down, hand to paper?
Yeah, in a bunch of, you know, tatty old notebooks that I've got, kind of, you
know, falling apart on a shelf somewhere.
And what was the path?
So, I started near Salisbury, where I grew up, headed across the channel up
Western Europe through Scandinavia to Nordkap, which is the northernmost point
of Europe.
It's up in the Norwegian Arctic.
That's quite a drama