The Slim Line Between Success and Catastrophe

It was like no Easter weekend I had known before. No family meal. No walks through woodland. No chocolate eggs. It was late-march 2016 and I found myself detained in a cell in Uzbekistan. My charge: trafficking drugs across the border and into one of the world’s severest dictatorships. Here, near the northern borders of Afghanistan, opium flows like water from the Taliban-controlled poppy fields then on a long journey towards the pulsating veins of heroin users across the world. Heroin trafficking, along with a totalitarian government, meant that Uzbek border guards eyed travellers like myself with a heavy dose of suspicion. And after rifling through the files on laptop, the photographs on my camera and the fluff in my pockets, the guards found their prize: a dozen small co-codamol tablets. The tablets are a common painkiller in the UK, but an illegal narcotic in Uzbekistan, a fact unbeknown to me, until I was collared.

Not only was I was locked up, I had given up everything to be there. Seven-months earlier, I had quit my job as a kitchen salesman on little more than a whim, abandoning my company car and my only source of income, all while undertaking a major house renovation and finalising plans for my upcoming wedding day. The timing was terrible, but I had reached a crisis point. My dreams of adventure, forged during a degree in Outdoor Leadership and a series of prior escapades – from Ugandan jungles, to Berber villages to bombed-out Lebanese suburbs – had all but vanished. In my career, what I saw ahead was a nightmarish vision of normality and convention. I had to escape. I bought a one-way ticket to Hong Kong and vowed not to return home until I had completed an audacious solo winter journey along the mountainous spine of Asia, climbing mountains in each country visited, until I reached Istanbul.

Day by day on my long cold journey west, I encountered discomfort and uncertainty, and I had grown to relish i

Day by day on my long cold journey west, I encountered discomfort and uncertainty, and I had grown to relish i
I told my fiancée, who had miraculously supported my plan, that I would be home in around six weeks. By the time of my Uzbek arrest, I was over eleven weeks in, and only halfway, and now I worried that I might not make it back at all. Prior to crossing into Uzbekistan, I had narrowly evaded an avalanche in Kazakhstan, camped without a tent in a brutal winter storm on a 4000-metre high ridge in Kyrgyzstan, and had several run-ins with distrustful Chinese police officers. Day by day on my long cold journey west, I encountered discomfort and uncertainty, and I had grown to relish it. My new mantra: life on the edge, or life over.

My long journey across the length of Asia was transformational. I emerged from my Uzbek predicament after five days of house-arrest, interrogations and intimidation, and opted for the hard road by ignoring my orders to leave the country and instead travelling into the mountains, where spying policemen courted my every move. Nevertheless, when I arrived in Istanbul at the end of my journey, bearded, sun-bleached and skinny, but with a mind bursting with memories and fulfilment, my path through life seemed clearer than ever. Hooked beyond rescue on the drug of adventure, I wanted more, and I wanted to take people with me.

My work as an expedition leader has taken me into some of the most obscure and hostile places in the world: Iraq, Turkmenistan, Yemen and Somalia. Along with organising my own expeditions, my prospective employers were as eager to hear about my life experiences in remote places, as my qualifications. This is with good reason. Taking charge of a group of people in any scenario is a big responsibility, but doing so amid militia groups, landmines, wild animals or extortionist officials heightens this responsibility even further. One of the primary skills of a good expedition leader is to possess and display a calm confidence in the edgiest situations. As I found out on my very first job with an adult group.