Four-time recipient of the Transglobe Expedition Trust's "Mad but Marvellous" grant, Guest on "The Joe Rogan Experience podcast"... Read more
Charlie Walker is a British explorer, author and inspirational speaker. A true believer in pushing boundaries and stretching limitations, he specialises in long distance expeditions reaching the most isolated communities on the planet. Both solo and as a team leader, Charlie has covered over 60,000 miles by human-powered travel including hiking, kayaking, ski-touring, and cycling.
Charlie is an elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a four-time recipient of the Transglobe Expedition Trust’s ‘Mad but Marvellous’ award. His writing has featured in a range of publications including The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, Wanderlust, Geographical and Sidetracked magazine as well as BBC Radio 4 and the World Service. Charlie has also appeared on numerous podcasts including The Joe Rogan Experience. He has written two books about his experiences.
Charlie’s numerous expeditions have provided him with countless experiences with which to communicate his key themes of resilience, ambition, perseverance and positivity. In 2022, Charlie spent two months trekking along the surface of frozen rivers and over Arctic sea ice in northeast Russia in order to visit remote-living groups of indigenous Siberians. The journey involved camping in temperatures as low as -50ºC and began just before the invasion of Ukraine. In an atmosphere of heightened political tension, the expedition culminated in a four-week stint in prison on spurious charges of photographing sensitive military sites.
Charlie’s longest expedition was a 4-year bicycle journey reaching the furthest cape in each of Europe, Asia and Africa. On this journey he traversed 60 countries, confronting extremes of weather, remoteness and physical exhaustion. Next Charlie completed a world-first 5,000-mile triathlon traversing the entire Europe-Asia border. This expedition was an investigation into the concept of man-made borders and spanned from the midwinter snowfields of the Arctic tundra to the Bosphorus in Istanbul via the scorched Kazakh steppe in high summer.
In 2014 Charlie descended a little-known tributary of the Congo River in a leaky dugout canoe. This journey into effectively uncharted territory of the DRC was beset by rapids, waterfalls, hippos, crocodiles and violent bouts of malaria and typhoid fever.
Charlie has also walked 1,000 miles solo across the Gobi desert, trekked 600 miles across Mongolia with a semi-feral pony and a stray dog he found in the forest, and twice traversed Papua New Guinea by foot and paddle reaching little-known communities living among some of the world’s least accessible jungle.
With hilarious and hair-raising tales from his adventures in the wilderness, Charlie examines how pushing ourselves to our limits is the best – and perhaps only – way to truly expand those limits. There aren’t necessarily shortcuts to strength and resilience, but it’s certainly possible to set oneself on a...
Charting his journey from ambitious, adventurous chancer to professional explorer, Charlie sheds light on how and why we should set our sights on the biggest possible targets. All too often we choose the easy option and don’t think big enough. But we forget that the bigger and more ambitious our...
Using examples from his various experiences selecting and leading teams for challenging expeditions in dangerous environments, Charlie imparts his tricks for spotting problems before they occur, using task cohesion to built team cohesion, and how to lead by example, exhibiting humility in leadership.
Exploring the complicated relationship between risk and reward, Charlie explains how to tread the fine line between boldness and recklessness. In his experience, accurately calculating risk has often been a life and death exercise, but the lessons he has learned are transferrable to both business and personal development.