Alastair Humphreys is an author and adventurer who has walked 600 miles across Southern India, ran an ultra marathon through the Sahara Desert, and hiked and rafted across Iceland. Alastair's newest wild idea is to embrace the concept of "microadventures," an adventure that is short, easily accessible, and affordable while still being fun, challenging, refreshing, and rewarding.
Alastair Humphreys is an author and adventurer who has walked 600 miles across Southern India, ran an ultra marathon through the Sahara Desert, and hiked and rafted across Iceland. Alastair's newest wild idea is to embrace the concept of "microadventures," an adventure that is short, easily accessible, and affordable while still being fun, challenging, refreshing, and rewarding.
Connect with Alastair:
Thank you to our sponsors:
Check out:
Shelby Stanger:
Wild ideas can be as big as skiing across the Arctic, biking from Alaska to Patagonia, or kayaking around every continent. But they can also be little adventures that fit into our day-to-day life.
Alastair Humphreys:
It's very easy to think, "Oh, I can't have adventures because of my nine to five." So what I started to do was to say, "Well, what about your five to nine?" When you finish work, what are you going to do until nine o'clock the next morning? Why not when you finish work, instead of going home for the evening and, I don't know, sitting on the sofa and watching Netflix or something, why not head out of town and go step away from the world just for one evening, turn off the phone, sleep under the stars, and then get back to your desk for nine o'clock the next morning?
Shelby Stanger:
Author and adventurer, Alastair Humphreys, calls these experiences micro adventures, and even though they're smaller, they can definitely be pretty wild. I think this concept is genius. It's easy to get stuck in our habits, fitting in a walk or a run between meetings or after logging off for the day. But going on micro adventures allows us to infuse our lives with spontaneity and discovery. I'm Shelby Stanger and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-Op Studios production, brought to you by Capital One.
Before Alastair embraced the concept of micro adventuring, he went after some of the wildest ideas I've ever heard of. He walked 600 miles across Southern India, ran an ultra marathon through the Sahara Desert, and hiked and rafted across Iceland. Alastair became fascinated by the way wild ideas fulfilled him and expanded his perspective. It all started when Alastair spent four years biking around the world. Alastair Humphreys, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Alastair Humphreys:
Thank you for having me.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm really curious. You've done more adventures than most people we'll even have on our adventure podcast have done. You are one of the most adventurous people in the world. Where did your love of adventure begin?
Alastair Humphreys:
My love of adventure comes from reading books really, so maybe I am a geek after all. Yeah, it was just really from a childhood growing up in the countryside, so I guess I enjoyed running around in the countryside as a kid, but really, it was reading books of travel and adventure that got me curious about wanting to go to other parts of the world. So I think before I was interested in adventure, I was interested in travel, and I think travel, adventure, expeditions, explorations, they're all sort of similar words that are different but overlap at their heart. But yeah, I definitely came first being interested in travel, just wanting to see different places, and then gradually, the adventures and the expeditions grew after that.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. So when did you start with your first adventure?
Alastair Humphreys:
When I was a student, when I should have been working hard at Edinburgh, I was mostly just reading books about explorers and travelers and adventurers. And in my spare time, I was getting interested in running around the hills and cycling for a long way and getting really tired, but finding that quite rewarding and enjoying I suppose the personal development side of challenging yourself and physically pushing yourself. And so these two parts of my life, the physical challenges plus the reading travel books started to come together and I decided I wanted to go on a long journey.
And being a young student, I had plenty of time but very little cash and very little skill or talent or expertise, and so the options that were left to me really came down to, well, why don't you go for a long bicycle ride? Put your tent on the back of a bike, cycle as far as you can until you run out of money and that's the end. And even 20 years later, I still haven't found a better formula or recipe for adventure than doing exactly that, just peddling away from your front door with a bike, a tent, whatever cash you've got and as much time as you can squeeze, and the magic happens after that.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, so you did that 20 years ago?
Alastair Humphreys:
Yeah, so I finished university and I decided to go have a big adventure before I settled down and got on with real life, so I decided to try to cycle around the world. So I pedaled away from England, rode through Europe, and actually, I set off in August 2001. So I was planning to go on a nice sunny bicycle ride through lovely places like Afghanistan on my way to Australia. And then two weeks into my ride, I was cycling through Germany and on September the 12th, I learned that yesterday, the terrible attacks in America, suddenly the whole world had changed and my carefully planned scenic route through Afghanistan didn't seem like such a fun idea anymore.
So I kept riding, got to Istanbul in Turkey, and instead of carrying straight onto Australia, I essentially turned right instead and headed for South Africa. So I rode through Africa, got a sailing boat over to South America, then cycled from Patagonia up to Alaska. I probably will have come right past your front door up to Alaska and then took another boat across the Pacific, and then cycle through Siberia in Russia in the wintertime, down Japan, all the way across China, Central Asia, back through Europe and back home to England four years later.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. So this was four years, 46,000 mile bike ride. No big deal.
Alastair Humphreys:
Yes.
Shelby Stanger:
That had have been the most incredible thing to do after graduating college. Do you have an adventure story that you absolutely love to share with people? Like something wild that happened, something magical that happened, something really wrong that happened?
Alastair Humphreys:
Oh, gosh. Gosh, it's hard to pluck from four years, but okay, I'll give you an example that I think is a nice story because it sums up lots of different things about the world and adventure. So I was cycling through Russia in the wintertime, which is a pretty hardcore time. I was in Siberia, it was minus 40 degrees. It was a pretty wild, hardcore part of the world, and the villages there, I loved the Russian people but it really felt like a state that was falling apart. A really kind of Wild West gangster land, people who were incredibly kind but also only a flick of a switch away from just getting absolutely drunk on vodka, so it was an interesting experience. But I was cycling along one evening and I was a bit lost and it was freezing cold, and a car stopped and that was kind of normal, but this time, the guy got out and he was really drunk and he had a gun.
So he held me up at gunpoint. It's the first time I'd ever had anything like that happen to me in my life, so of course, I gave the guy my wallet. I had a decoy wallet to give with just a little bit of money in there and my old university student union cards and things like that. Anyway, so he took my wallet. That's the bad part of the story. The good part of the story is that I was lost, so then once he'd stolen my wallet, I then said, "Excuse me, do you think you could help me a bit because lost?" So he's like, "Yeah, sure." So we got out my map and we spread it out on the front of his car and he started giving me directions and helping me out. And then I said, "Okay, thank you. Bye-bye," and off he went with my wallet, but at least I knew where I was going. So there is some good in everyone.
Shelby Stanger:
With all the news and social media we consume, we can easily become afraid of each other and of exploring our world. But the truth is many people actually experienced a renewed faith in humanity when they travel. For Alastair, this bike trip became the benchmark for his adventures. It opened up an entirely new relationship with himself, the world, and his future.
Looking back, it's been about 20 years, 16 years later, what are some of the biggest lessons you learned from that first giant adventure?
Alastair Humphreys:
I think they go into a couple of categories. There's lessons I learned about the world, and the chief number one lesson, which I think is always worth repeating because we seem to live in increasingly crazy times, was that I felt welcome essentially everywhere I went in the world. Of course, every city in the world, you have to be a bit careful. There's a few idiots everywhere, but by and large, regardless of the country, the world was a good, kind place to me out there on my bicycle. And then adventures are great because you learn a lot about yourself, so I learned that perhaps I wasn't nearly as tough and heroic as I'd like to imagine I was when I was reading all these books of great explorers, but at the same time, I also learned that I could persevere and keep plugging away and keep muddling on, and that maybe I wasn't as much as a loser as I sometimes thought I was in my darker moments.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah. I'm curious why you kept adventuring. I meet a lot of people who they're motivated by their mental health to see what else is out there and to get their head straight in some ways, to really answer these big questions. And adventure seems to do that for them.
Alastair Humphreys:
Yeah. There's all sorts of reasons why anyone goes on an adventure. Young people just generally like to go on adventures is one perfectly good reason, but certainly a reason why I was drawn to trying to do something really big and really difficult was a desire to try to prove myself. I had always felt that I was just not really very good at anything, not very remarkable, just a bit average, and I wanted to try and do something difficult. So it was interesting. As I was riding around the world, I very much noticed my motivations changing. So when I was going through Africa for example, my first continent, when I was really struggling and I needed some fuel for the fire, I'd think of people in my past life who I felt had been unfair to me and I'd be like, "Right, I'll show you. I'll prove to you." So I was very much trying to prove myself to the world.
And then I kind of got that out of my system by the end of Africa, so then riding through, say up through the Americas, I was then just trying to prove something to myself. Can I keep going? Can I persevere? Can I dare myself to always take the more difficult and challenging options? That sort of self-discovery and challenging phase. And then by the time I got to Alaska, I think I'd got enough of that out of my system, so then finally riding across Asia, I could just enjoy being on a bike in a cool part of the world having an adventure.
Shelby Stanger:
So when you were done with that four year journey, did you have any post adventure blues or were you like, "Okay, that was cool. I'm going to go get a job." What made you keep adventuring after that?
Alastair Humphreys:
Well, I think in some ways, I still have post adventure blues from that journey. Which sounds sort of jokey and it sort of is, but it sort of isn't as well. I often think that in some ways, my life was sort of cursed by peaking. I mean, I knew when I'd cycle around the world for four years, I was never going to do an adventure as good as that ever again, never. And I was 29, so geez, what's this next 60 years of my life look like? And I've certainly lived ever since slightly in that shadow.
Of course, I've lived also in all the positive wonderful stuff of that as well so there's a long term legacy of all these things, but short term, I was delighted to get home. I was relieved I didn't have to ride my stupid bike anymore and I could just relax, and it was so nice to be back just being part of an anonymous majority again, not having everyone staring at me every day, not having to answer the same 10 questions every single day, to not be a stranger every day, so there are all these nice things.
And then of course, I needed to get some money. I'd spent my entire life savings. The whole four years, by the way, cost me about $10,000, so it was a pretty cheap four years, but I had nothing when I got home so I was straight onto work. So I started giving talks, and then I decided to be a teacher so I got a job as a teacher for a year, and I really enjoyed that, teaching kids, and certainly, having an adventure makes you a better teacher. It's probably one of the best things you can possibly do, I think. But during that year of teaching, I just kept thinking, "Oh, I could be a good teacher when I'm 39 or 49 or 59 or 69 or 79. That's always there. The adventure stuff won't always be there."
So going all the way around the world, what that had really shown me was how little of the world I'd seen. And having done one adventure, this had given me some self-confidence and some momentum, and it's so much easier to get out the door on your second adventure than it is for your first adventure. So I decided to pause the teaching career and try to see if I could make a go out of doing adventures and earning a living from that through the usual sort of precarious means of writing and speaking and stuff like that, and I decided to give that a go and I've been doing that now ever since, so the teaching job is still on hold for now.
Shelby Stanger:
That bike trip was just the tip of the iceberg. Since then, Alastair has gone on countless other adventures, like rowing across the Atlantic Ocean, busking his way through Spain, and hauling a water cart across the Arabian desert. Alastair has written almost 20 books, produced four podcasts, and was named Adventurer of the Year by National Geographic. But after years of traveling the world, he's now focused on exploring a little closer to home. When we come back, Alastair talks about his concept of micro adventuring, his new book, and his advice to help you go after a wild idea, big or small.
Over the course of his life, Alastair Humphreys has gone on some wild adventures all around the globe, but eventually, he started to wonder if it was possible to find that same level of thrill and fulfillment in his own backyard. Alastair decided to take on a new challenge. For one year, he limited his travels to the seemingly boring area where he lives, on the outskirts of London. This search for local nature and wilderness proved to be one of the most fascinating journeys of Alastair's life. The experience encouraged him to come up with the term micro adventures.
I really love that you've come up with this concept of micro adventuring, because let's face it, we're not all going to climb Mount Everest or sail our sailboats across to Alaska. For many of us, that'll just never happen. But I think a micro adventure can be just as thrilling, so how did you come up with this concept? What is it to you?
Alastair Humphreys:
Well, it is exactly as you've just explained there. There's a big disconnect between the adventures that we perhaps dream of. You enjoy reading books of crazy adventurers or watching their movies and things. There's a lot of people who like adventure but not many of those people actually go on big adventures. Why not? Well, real life of course. Real life gets in the way of this. So I started trying to think, how could you still have expressed the adventurous side of your soul, the side that wants to go and howl at the moon when you're just going crazy in the office? How can you fit some adventure in around the busy constraints of real life?
And I realized that there were two ways to look at this. You can either get depressed and frustrated and maybe resentful that you don't have as much money as someone else to go on an adventure, you don't have as much time as them to go on an adventure. You don't have the expertise. There's lots of things you can complain about, or you can think, hang on. What opportunities are there? What small little things can I do in the small time I have available in the local area where I can live? What adventures can I fit in around my busy working life?
So I started trying to think of the sort of stuff I liked about adventure, which for me, is being out in nature, being disconnected, getting some exercise, having a really simplifying experience, just slowing down a bit. That's why I like big expeditions, but it turns out that you can squeeze those into really short things as well. So I started coming up with really small little ideas, calling them micro adventures, and trying to encourage other people to not just enjoy listening to stories about them but to actually go do them themselves. So that was the origin of micro adventures, and it seems to have just grown and grown and never really gone away, which I suppose shows that it is resonating with people, that accessible, achievable adventure is something a lot of people are dreaming of.
Shelby Stanger:
Can you share some examples of what that looks like?
Alastair Humphreys:
Yeah. Well, I think the best example I can think of for explaining a micro adventure is if you think about the nine to five, the working day, working nine to five, it's stressful perhaps. It's important, it's necessary. You've got to earn some money. Hopefully you enjoy it, but let's face it, the nine to five gets in the way of adventure. So it's very easy to think, "Oh, I can't have adventures because of my nine to five." So what I started to do was to say, "Well, what about your five to nine?" When you finish work at five o'clock, say, what are you going to do until o'clock the next morning? Now, of course there are commitments in life, but theoretically, and as good as a thought experiment if nothing else, we have 16 hours of freedom every day which you could fill with adventure, but we never talk about that. All we ever talk about is the nine to five part of lives. We don't think about the opportunities of the five to nine.
So what I started doing was occasionally, why not, when you finish work at five o'clock, turn off the computer and instead of going home for the evening and, I don't know, sitting on the sofa and watching Netflix or something, why not just once head out of town and go sleep on a hill for the night? Step away from the world just for one evening, turn off the phone, don't answer any emails. Sleep under the stars and then you wake up in the morning, sunrise, sun shining, run back down the hill. Ideal if you can then find a river to jump in. Rivers are very good for the soul. And then get back in your car or on the bike or whatever it is, back to work, back to your desk for nine o'clock the next morning. And then when your office colleagues say to you in the morning, "Oh, did you do anything interesting last night?" You can say, "Yeah, last night, I had a micro adventure."
Shelby Stanger:
I love that. What are some other things that you've done, micro?
Alastair Humphreys:
So I've really got into river swimming. That's something I've come to really enjoy, trying to just seek out opportunities to plunge into rivers, oceans, lakes whenever possible. I was going to a speaking event in the Netherlands a while ago and I was going to talk to some big corporate company about adventures and micro adventures. And as we were driving from Amsterdam towards the venue, we kept going over lots of little canals, and it was summertime and there were all these little kids jumping in the canal and I was going off to smart events and I was thinking, "Man, I'm jealous of these kids." So I said to the taxi driver, "Could you just stop the taxi please so that I can go jump in a canal?" And he thought I was crazy, but he stopped. And then I said to him, "Why don't you join me?" And he thought I was completely crazy at this point, but he's like, "Yeah, okay."
So the two of us just jumped into this canal and then we got out of the canal, got back in the taxi, drove off to the conference. I did the talk, and he sent me an email later saying, "That is one of the best things I've ever done in my life. I've been telling all my friends about it. They think I'm crazy, but it was so exciting. It was wonderful. I loved it." So I think this is an example of just small little bits where you just think, "I'm going to do this. I won't regret it." And I love how much joy something as tiny as that brought to this guy.
Shelby Stanger:
Micro adventures can be anything, like cooking dinner over a fire at a nearby campground, exploring trails and regional parks, or ice skating on a frozen lake in the neighborhood. Alastair's micro adventures often look like riding his bike on local trails or walking to the top of nearby hills. He has an event scheduled in his calendar to climb a tree once a month. In order to get serious about his micro adventuring, Alastair studied a map of the area around his home. From there, he decided to go out and explore every square inch of the map in real life. He documented this experience in his new book, Local.
You have this new book, Local: A Search for Nearby Nature and Wilderness. How did you come up with this book? What is it?
Alastair Humphreys:
So this book is an extension of lots that we've been talking about actually, which is I've spent a lot of my life doing big adventures and really enjoying being out in wild, natural places. I've also now spent quite a lot of years encouraging people to have micro adventures, trying to fit adventures in around busy daily life. But I realized that even, say, what I described about going camping for a night after work, that requires a bit of planning, a bit of equipment, and there are millions and millions of people for whom they don't even get that much nature in life. So I wanted to see if I could go even smaller and to try and find a way to fit a tiny bit of nature into everyone's life, every day, wherever you live, anyone.
And I think the fact that where I live is quite boring, it's sort of boring suburban edge land just outside a big city. It's really not that remarkable or wild. So I bought the map for the area that I live on, and the map covers about 20 kilometers by 20 kilometers, so about 12 miles by 12 miles, and the map is divided up into pale blue grid squares. Each grid square is just one kilometer across, one kilometer by one kilometer. And my idea was to spend a whole year only exploring the single map that I live on. And the way I would do that is each week, I'd go out to one of these grid squares, one kilometer only, and explore it in as much detail as I could to see everything and to really, really get to know close to home in a way that I'd never done before. And I found more nature near to where I live than I'd ever imagined.
I paid attention to the seasons and to nature. I learned more about nature and the natural world than I ever did in my four years studying zoology at university. I connected with my local neighborhood in a way that I'd never done before. And I thought at the start, it was going to be quite a boring project for someone who's so hyperactive and full of wanderlust and that it would feel really restrictive and claustrophobic, but I soon discovered actually that if you slow down and if you pay attention and if you allow yourself to be astonished by anything, then everything becomes astonishing. Everything becomes interesting.
Shelby Stanger:
That is fascinating. Any little micro adventures in your hometown that stuck out or things you saw?
Alastair Humphreys:
So I think what surprised me actually was I previously wrote a book called Micro Adventures, and it's quite a pretty looking book. It's got lots of nice pictures of pretty campsites and the usual sort of adventure-y type stuff, but on a small scale. And I think when I started this project, I was kind of looking for more of the same, but actually what I came to really enjoy on this experience was exploring the forgotten, derelict parts of my community, the industrial yard that's broken down and now the trees are starting to grow back up and the fences have fallen down, and you go in there and you feel like you're a real explorer there. No one's been here before, and I found solitude there, and strangely, I found wildness in these places. Not really wilderness because it's all been human impacted for eternity in England, but certainly, wildness, wildness and stillness. Stuff that I love going halfway around the world to find, I was finding in the broken down areas out at the back of town.
Shelby Stanger:
Any advice for someone who wants to go do a micro adventure right now? What's the first thing they should do?
Alastair Humphreys:
I think the first thing to do is to see what excites you. Think about what sort of idea excites you, and if you can think of an idea that excites you and go and do it, then perfect. Boom, job done. Get it scheduled in your calendar so that you actually commit to do it, and then go and do it. What I think is more likely to happen though is you think of an idea and you get excited, and then you think, "Ah, but... Oh, but, but..." And all these problems start to come in, the problems of life. And that's natural of course, but what I think then is important to do is not to shelve the idea completely.
Instead, try and think of a smaller version of that micro adventure, one that perhaps is compatible around those obstacles that just blocked up your dream, and then go do the tiny little adventure. Because once you've done the tiny one, you'll realize, "Oh wow, that was great, and it's worth making a bit more effort for the slightly bigger one next time. And it's not as scary as I thought, it's not as much of a hassle as I thought, and it's far more rewarding than I thought."
So just keep making your idea smaller and smaller and smaller until you've got no excuse not to go and do it. And importantly, do it before the end of this weekend, because if you think, "Oh, I'll wait till the summertime," you won't. You'll have forgotten. So do something by the end of this weekend.
Shelby Stanger:
So what does adventure mean to you now? What has it taught you?
Alastair Humphreys:
So I think what adventure has taught me is to be relentlessly enthusiastic and curious, and I think enthusiasm and curiosity are the one thing that runs all the way through For me in my early twenties setting off to bicycle around the world, to rowing across an ocean, sleeping on a hill for one night, and now spending hours wandering around my local little wood looking at mushrooms. I think the curiosity and enthusiasm is what runs through all of those things. And in terms of what adventure means to me now, is that I really want it to have purpose. All adventures are great for the personal development of the person doing it, but I feel now at this stage in my life that I want my adventures to have a bigger purpose, to actually not just not do any harm to the world, but try to actually do some good.
Shelby Stanger:
What micro adventures can you go on this month? We want to hear about them. Let us know by tagging REI, Alastair and me, Shelby Stanger, in your Instagram stories. You can also email us at podcasts at rei.com, or write a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We'd love to share some of your ideas on our future episodes. If you want to learn more about aicro adventures and Alastair, you can go to his Instagram at Al_Humphreys, that's A-L, underscore, H-U-M-P-H-R-E-Y-S. You can get a copy of his new book, Local, at your favorite bookstore. I highly recommend Alastair's books and essays. He's an absolutely wonderful writer.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hanna Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.