Show Transcript

0:00:00 - (Kevin Lowe): It because this is a story about one man, one motorcycle, and one heck of a sense of adventure with a whole world awaiting it. If you've ever wanted to set out and explore the world, if you ever just feel like throwing caution to the wind and setting out in search of it all, well, this is the episode for you. If you've got a sense of adventure and you're ready, then I encourage you to hang on because we're about to take off with today's episode.

0:00:35 - (Kevin Lowe): I'll see you inside. What's up, my friend? And welcome to grit, grace and inspiration. I am your host, Kevin Lowe. 20 years ago, I awoke from a life saving surgery only to find that I was left completely blind. And since that day, I've learned a lot about life, a lot about living, and a lot about myself. And here on this podcast, I want to share those insights with you. Because, friend, if you are still searching for your purpose, still trying to understand why, or still left searching for that next right path to take, we'll consider this to be your stepping stone to get you from where you are to where you want to be.

0:01:19 - (Kevin Lowe): What's up, my friend and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Kevin Lowe, your host, and hey, welcome to episode number 219. Did you know that you're able to take this podcast to another level? Yes, you can do that by signing up for our exclusive mailing list, where you get a little personal email from me once a week to brighten your day to give you a boost. It's a midweek pick me up, delivered via email on Wednesday mornings. It has the latest and the greatest in the world of grace and inspiration, along with a little just insight from yours truly.

0:02:03 - (Kevin Lowe): If you would like to sign up, please be sure to visit the link inside of today's show notes. So, friend, let's talk about it. Adventure. A sense of adventure. Do you have it or not? I feel like that's kind of two different camps. We got the people with a sense of adventure, the people who like to set off, who have no set destination in mind, who don't even have directions. They just have maybe an idea of we're going to head north and see where we go.

0:02:39 - (Kevin Lowe): Other people, well, other people, they need a plane, they need a strategy. They need GPS directions. I feel like that's kind of the two different camps we come to. Adventure. When it comes to setting off on a trip, well, today's guest, he's going to kind of blow your mind, because he is going to make you understand that sometimes getting lost is the best thing that could happen to you. Matter of fact, he's taken this so far as to have written a book about it.

0:03:15 - (Kevin Lowe): That book is called Going the Wrong Way. Chris Donaldson is our guest today, coming to us from the beautiful country of Ireland. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have an amazing Irishman on the podcast today and he is here to talk to us about his story that involves a motorcycle in the entire world.

0:03:43 - (Chris Donaldson): Probably. Would you believe when we joined the Boy Scouts, some of the older guys had these old British motorbikes like Norton's and BSAs, and the dudes used to trundle up at the end of our Boy Scout evenings with these bikes and they'd go off down to the pub or whatever they were doing. And I think it always struck me the noise and the excitement of the machines at that stage really impressed me. And then we got to 16, it was like yourself, poly dirt bike and used to run around the fields and I just couldn't wait to when you're a teenager on your bicycle, the thought of actually going up a hill without actually pedaling is just like magic. So I couldn't wait to get an engine underneath me so I could actually do that. So from a very early age, I was just enthralled by bikes and in those days it was cheaper to ride a bike than it was to drive a car, so it was also a cost factor as well. When you were 17 or 18, you couldn't afford a car, so you rode a motorbike, whereas nowadays it's the other way around.

0:04:41 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, absolutely. Now talk to me. So where did you grow up at?

0:04:45 - (Chris Donaldson): I grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the 70s, which wasn't the most suspicious place to grow up, middle of the Troubles. I never got too much involved in it myself, but my father's furniture shop got blown up numerous times and there was lived through school I went to was in the center of Belfast. You would have looked out the windows and seen bombs going off and the lockdowns and people getting shot around the city various times. So it was pretty nasty place to be at some stage. But of course, when you're growing up, you didn't really notice that because we didn't know anything else. It was only when I got a bit older, realized, well, there's places that this sort of stuff doesn't go on, so so it'll be nice to visit some of these places if people don't sort of shoot each other because they're the wrong religion.

0:05:31 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah.

0:05:31 - (Chris Donaldson): At an early age, I think it was about 16 or 17, decided I'd like to go to Australia. And being a biker, I thought, well, the best way to do that be to ride there in a motorbike for a bit of an adventure. So the idea was to ride to India and then ship to Australia from the UK. From Ireland.

0:05:47 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. And how old were you then?

0:05:49 - (Chris Donaldson): Well, I was 21 when I set off from Belfast and I got as far as London and the Ayatollah. Maine decided to take over the American Embassy in Tehran and was in november 79. So I didn't got it very far. It only got about 400 miles, and basically the road east was blocked with the revolution. So I couldn't go back home because I told him my friends would be away for a year and a half for a year and couldn't go back after two weeks. So I decided to go to South Africa instead.

0:06:18 - (Chris Donaldson): But basically after planning this trip for the last four or five years and guidebooks had got my routes planned and so on my maps, my visas, everything for going to the east, I ended up going down Africa without a notion where I was.

0:06:36 - (Kevin Lowe): So so before I start asking more questions about this actual mean, what made you want to do this trip? And especially, I guess, your first destination push was Australia. Why Australia?

0:06:53 - (Chris Donaldson): I think it's a few relations there. I reckon I could get a job there for a while and see a bit of the it's obviously an English speaking country, see a bit of the world on the way there. And I think I wanted to challenge myself as well. I didn't want just why I'd wanted to sort of challenge myself. When you're growing up, you're always under the auspices of your parents and then your friends, your teachers, your lectures, society around you. You're always under sort of some sort of influence from outside. I wanted to just get away from travel on my own and find out about myself rather than what I was under the auspices of somebody else.

0:07:29 - (Chris Donaldson): So I was keen to be away on my own, didn't want to go away with somebody else. So I didn't really know that at the time. But looking back on it, I think that's what it was.

0:07:39 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, absolutely. Now, what kind of motorcycle were you riding?

0:07:44 - (Chris Donaldson): Well, I had a motor Guzzi le Mon, which was the coolest bike in the street in those days. Bit of Italian flash. It was what we call a cafe racer, which was good for scooting around motorways and fast corners, but wasn't really a touring bike. So it converted into a touring bike and just put higher bars on it, a screen and top boxes and panniers, and it was a sort of wolf and sheep's clothing that it was still a high performance bike with a touring kit on it. But I thought it'd be okay for going to India because results are pretty much tarmac roads the whole way there.

0:08:19 - (Chris Donaldson): But of course, when I got to Africa, I had to cross the Sahara Desert, so it's totally out of the picture off the wall for crossing a desert of sand, 500 miles worth of sand, basically, on a standard road bike.

0:08:33 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. Now, all of this venturing across the world by yourself, right?

0:08:39 - (Chris Donaldson): Yeah. Well, you meet up with people along the way going the same direction and travel with them for a bit. But the nice thing about that is you don't get on or you want to go somewhere else, you just say bye bye and while you go on your own.

0:08:51 - (Kevin Lowe): Wow. Wow. Okay, dude. So this is so cool. Now we're talking a massive trip, this undertaking, whether to South Africa or Australia, either one. I mean, a massive trip. How long did it end up taking you to get to South Africa?

0:09:11 - (Chris Donaldson): It took me about five months to get to South Africa. I think I got there by April, after leaving in October. So Africa was pretty tough. Going through the Middle East with three israel and Syria and Jordan and Syria was pretty dodgy at that stage. Israel was just in between wars, I suppose. In fact, most of Africa was between civil wars or revolutions or something going on at some stage. I went through Uganda just after Amin, if you remember him, particularly nasty character through all his politicians to the crocodiles, as I say. After that, he went a bit off the wall, but been through Rhodesia's just after, became Zimbabwe in South Africa in the middle of apartheid. So it was pretty rough going.

0:09:55 - (Chris Donaldson): And it was one of those situations that if I had known what I was going into, I probably wouldn't have done it because it wasn't really that stupid. It was pretty stupid. But it's hard to imagine as a pre Internet age that you had a guidebook, you had what you were taught, school, but it's much harder to get information about summer. Nowadays, you just Google whatever you want to know and you can book your hotels, you can see how far it is. You can communicate online, whatever you want. It's all online. But in those days, you really didn't know what was beyond the next country unless you've done your mean. At one stage, I drove off out of Sudan into Uganda. I actually drove off the edge of my map. I had to swap maps with somebody coming up north, what country was going to next. So looking back, if I known what it was going into ignorance is bliss sometimes.

0:10:53 - (Kevin Lowe): Yes, of course. Now, along this way, is there anything when you think back? Obviously there had to be countless just incredible experiences, but any kind of most notable that you could share that maybe moments that were kind of like, now, this is why I'm doing it. Maybe because it scared the crap out of you and you're like, Whoo, maybe I survived that. Or it was just something amazing. Anything stand out?

0:11:25 - (Chris Donaldson): Well, it's funny. The weird thing about people is sometimes it's the hardest things that are most memorable. And driving across the desert, I was supposed to take a train across and we missed a train. It wasn't going to be another train for another week. So we joined up with some other guys and we rode across. It was about four or 500 miles, and it took me the best part of took me over a week about eight, nine days.

0:11:47 - (Chris Donaldson): In fact, the next week's train actually beat us to it. But some days we would be traveling, digging and pushing and riding for all day and maybe cover 10 miles through the sand. It was so difficult. Other days you'd maybe do 100 miles in the hard packed sand. But looking back, it was one of the most memorable times because you were driving through the desert in the middle of nowhere, following the Nile, completely sort of back to basics, back to nature, looking at the stars every night and thinking back.

0:12:16 - (Chris Donaldson): It was a wonderful time, but I wouldn't want to do it again. Certainly getting to South Africa was quite a feat in those days because it was with sanctions, it was pretty much cut off from the world, so it was sort of breaking through the various political barriers and physical barriers as well. But South Africa enjoyed South Africa. The feeling of completing that challenge, I suppose. But, yeah, there was other times Tanzanian army had ousted him, but there wasn't a government set up yet, so there was a curfew every night.

0:12:52 - (Chris Donaldson): There was child soldiers running around with AK 47. So it was a pretty scary place to be. It was probably one of the most scary places. Got down to Cape Town, which, as I said, it was a feeling of relation getting there, but it was kind of short lived because one thing about a journey, you sort of realized that it wasn't really traveling to go there for any particular reason. So when I got there, that was the end of the journey.

0:13:15 - (Chris Donaldson): It's nearly a disappointment then, because when you're enjoying a journey as day to day life, it's nearly a disappointment when the journey is over, because that's the end of that trip gone.

0:13:25 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, absolutely. That makes total sense now. What happened when you did reach the end? I mean, what happened then? Did you go back home?

0:13:38 - (Chris Donaldson): Yeah, well, it's hard to get out of South Africa, but I managed to get a job in a yacht, sailing yacht, in a yacht race coming back to Europe, which is a sort of predecessor of the likes of the Volvo Ocean Race, which is like the Formula One of yacht racing. But in those days, I was able to talk my way onto the boat with a bit of dinghy sailing experience. After crossing Africa on a motorbike, I found myself in the middle of a yacht race coming up south and North Atlantic, so call that lucky or unlucky, but it was quite an adventure as well in its own right. Because the rudder broke off at one stage and we ended up having to stop in Little Island in the middle of the Atlantic and get that fixed.

0:14:18 - (Chris Donaldson): But at that stage, it was traveling for the sake of traveling, as I said, really enjoying it. And then I got the sponsors of the race, shipped the bike to the states. So I picked it up three months later and rode up to Seattle and then Vancouver across Canada and then down through Seaboard, stopped in North Carolina for a couple of months, got a job to replenish your wallet there and really enjoyed the.

0:14:45 - (Kevin Lowe): Whoa. Whoa. So going through all of Africa, it wasn't enough. Now you're like, we need a new continent to explore. You act like it's a new neighborhood. No, it's a whole nother continent.

0:15:03 - (Chris Donaldson): That's why I've called the book Going the Wrong Way, which is the story of my life. But, yeah, it made me realize that traveling is about the journey, not about the destination. So I just wanted to keep the journey going as long as I could. Parents by the stage were going up the walls, wondering what I was doing. But when you're young or you're 21, 22, you think you're invincible, that nothing can stop you and you can do anything.

0:15:31 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. So when you traveling through America and stuff like, what time frame was that?

0:15:37 - (Chris Donaldson): I think I spent about six months in the States, on and off to really enjoyed America.

0:15:41 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah.

0:15:41 - (Chris Donaldson): Got into lifestyle and it was actually hard to get back on the road after that because I wanted to go to South America at that stage and just complete that side of the continent. But it was hard work getting going after getting a bit soft with easy lifestyle, but headed down to South Merits, through Florida, down to Texas and down to Central America. I was running out of money, running out of motivation, I suppose, as well. It sort of covered, as you said, why are you doing this? I was starting to wonder why I was doing it to this.

0:16:17 - (Chris Donaldson): Yeah. We had gone as far as Bolivia and I caught hepatitis and had to shack up in a hotel for a while, ran out of money. And that was basically I was hoping to get to Del Fuego down the bottom, but I cut it short and went to Benazares in Argentina and shipped from there. So left for Australia and ended up in Argentina a year and a half later.

0:16:37 - (Kevin Lowe): Okay.

0:16:38 - (Chris Donaldson): But one of the hardest things probably was actually finances because the trip should have taken about four to six months and had about 1000 pounds then saved up probably equivalent of about $5,000 now, but had to make that last for a year and a half. So you can imagine it was pretty tight going at that stage of living like a living, sleeping at the side of the road and that sort of thing. So that was one of the main issues, I suppose, of money.

0:17:05 - (Chris Donaldson): But I suppose what I did then at Park, I started writing a book about the trip and then somebody else wrote a book about something similar and I just gave up, put my papers away for a long time and got on with normal life for 40 years.

0:17:21 - (Kevin Lowe): Okay. So what I'm kind of curious about though is once you finished this and you went back home, did you go back to your hometown?

0:17:35 - (Chris Donaldson): Yeah, I went back to Belfast and had a job in the family business and sort of motorbikes and traveling and overdosed in them at that stage. So I was happy enough staying at home at that stage for a while. So I got the family business and developed that into a property company and it diverted into several different directions over the years. It was reasonably successful. I think all the lessons I learned when I was traveling came in useful about motivating myself and persevering with difficult situations sort of made me the harder individual to go through life to meet with life's trials and tribulations.

0:18:14 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, absolutely. Well, what I was wondering was after such a long time being on the go, always experiencing new things, I had kind of wondered if it was hard for you to transition back into, quote, unquote, normal life again.

0:18:33 - (Chris Donaldson): Yeah, it was difficult at the time. I think it was sort of suffering from PSTD, whatever you call it, weebly because you're living on your own, traveling on your own. Every day is different, every day is another stress and you wake up every morning in a different place, the side of the road or some doll's house. You really don't know what's going to happen the next day, which is part of the excitement of it.

0:18:56 - (Chris Donaldson): But after a year and a half of it certainly was feeling pretty drained and then going back to normal life. The same thing happens every day in Groundhog Day, to an extent, in any job. It was difficult to motivate myself for a while, but I think I did it by bought a house and renovated. Dad just got stuck into work as a challenge and used my energies in that sort of direction rather than traveling. But I had to make a definite decision.

0:19:21 - (Chris Donaldson): It's going to be difficult. I'm going to have to get my knuckle down and keep my head down and concentrate on this. I'm going to succeed. Otherwise I have met up with other people since then who had find it practically impossible to settle down after a trip like that and have had negative implications from it never quite settled back into normal life as such.

0:19:41 - (Kevin Lowe): So you though you settled back down until 42 years later and then you got the itch again. How did this come about that 42 years later? Let's give it another go.

0:19:55 - (Chris Donaldson): Well, yeah, funny enough, there's a guy called Ian McGregor who's done a couple of motorbike trips around the world, maybe heard of him, as in Star Wars and a few other movies.

0:20:05 - (Kevin Lowe): Okay, so real quick, I'm going to let you continue, but I've been trying to think of his name because I watched a documentary with him and another guy on Apple where they did an electric motorcycle from the tip of South America.

0:20:18 - (Chris Donaldson): That's right, yeah. He's actually a bit of a motorguzzi freak as well. It's myself motorbikes. So I got winded. I thought, God, this guy's going to do it in a motorguzzi, going to go down to South American and thought, I'm going to write a book about it. So I thought, I'm going to write my book first.

0:20:35 - (Kevin Lowe): Yes.

0:20:38 - (Chris Donaldson): Greg, kudos to the guy, did what he did, but it's a very different trip than mine, being with a bunch of guys and a camera crew and all the rest of the sponsorship. Very different from doing it on your own. So I thought, Well, I want to get my story out. So I decided to finally get around to finishing my book 40 years later, which I thought was going to be more difficult than it was, because your memory fades after a while. But it was amazing how much reading my notes, reading my diaries, my journals, it all came back and what I was thinking and what I was doing when I was 21, 40 years later.

0:21:07 - (Chris Donaldson): And it actually gave me a much better insight into it. Being able to look back on my young self, as I say, doing those things and meeting those issues and problems and how I got random with the sort of knowledge I have now, looking back as a wise old aisle. If you like to write the book and give it a different overview on it, So it's very much a sort of coming of age story rather than just a motorbike trip.

0:21:33 - (Chris Donaldson): The book came out three years ago and it's been a bestseller on Amazon quite a bit, quite a few months. It's done remarkably well. Really pleased with it. I was never an intellectual at school, an academic, particularly. So I think if there's a story, there's a book in everybody. But if I can write a book, that's a success and a bestseller, just about anybody know. Yeah, and one of the great things about technology is the ebooks and audiobooks and the Amazon system, that you can actually sit in Belfast, write a book and get it, be selling it. The States is one of the biggest markets. Australia is one of selling as many books in Australia as I'm in the UK.

0:22:10 - (Chris Donaldson): So it's amazing how small the world's got from that point of view. But, yeah, so one of my mates said, well, you never actually got to Australia, so why not give another go? So I still had the same old motorbike sitting in my garage, I'm going to do it, might as well do it in the same bike. So I have a family and a job, self employed, but still have obligations. So we decided to do two weeks on and leave the bike where we were and fly back and back to work and fly out again two, three months time and do it over stages like that. So it took me a year and a half different, went to Athens, and then to Israel, back to Athens again because I couldn't get out of Israel into Jordan, and then traveled across Turkey, into Iran, down to Dubai, and then left the bikes in Dubai again, up to Iran, to Pakistan for another leg.

0:23:01 - (Chris Donaldson): Then the final leg was to Pakistan, across India, to Nepal, where I flew the bike to Australia last March. Just so. Finally making a triumphant journey down the east coast of Australia after took me 43 years to get there on a bike and myself with a combined age of 109. So it's got to be some sort of record break. There no doubt. Faster rider, but I get there in the end.

0:23:29 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. Wow. That is incredible. So now, though, I mean, we're talking a lot older when you make this ride. How was it compared to your younger self? Just the physical toll?

0:23:42 - (Chris Donaldson): Well, physically it was fairly when I was younger, I was able to ride all day and do 500 miles and then go out and party all night.

0:23:51 - (Kevin Lowe): Yes.

0:23:53 - (Chris Donaldson): Now, when I wrote all day, find a nice hotel, go to bed, have a nice dinner, a nice comfortable bed, whereas before it was in the side of the road or somewhere. It was nice, certainly nice to have a bit more money to be able to spoil myself, but physically it was much more difficult. Yeah, tiredness is the main thing, and your backs, your muscles ache and you're not pensioner officially. So certainly made it more difficult from a physical point of view.

0:24:22 - (Chris Donaldson): Mentally, probably better prepared, because I think back and I think reading my journalism, I realized that most days it was actually crap myself. It's just terrifying of what was going on, what was going to happen. Whereas now, wisdom, older age and knowing what was going to happen and having Googled and booking.com and all the sort of modern GPS to find out where you are, you never get lost. You sort of much more knowledgeable about what was going on. And the world's a slightly easier place to travel across nowadays, but certainly Iran was still difficult.

0:24:54 - (Chris Donaldson): Pakistan was mean.

0:24:56 - (Kevin Lowe): Did you ever have any moments traveling through some of those countries? Like any scary with with just the state of the world?

0:25:05 - (Chris Donaldson): Not really, to be honest. I mean, Iran was certainly we're all pressed and they were told what a terrible place it is, but actually it's one of the friendliest countries I've traveled through. People were lovely. They were very open and hospitable and wow. Totally the opposite of what I was expecting. A couple of times, credit cards don't work with sanctions, so you have to use cash, and they have their own credit card system and place the gas stations. So sometimes have to say to somebody, can you fill my tank up and I'll give you cash.

0:25:39 - (Chris Donaldson): And a couple of times they've filled the tank up and said, no, we won't take your money. Enjoy our country and have a good yeah, friendly and they want you to come back, meet their family and have dinner and whatever. It's like all these things, what the governments do and what the people are like is very often completely different. In Pakistan as well, was fantastic experience. Had to travel through an armed convoy through countries that place parts like Bleuchistan where they have terrorist problem there.

0:26:08 - (Chris Donaldson): I don't know. Sitting at a back of a Land Rover with a bunch of guys with AK 47s isn't such a big deal when you've been brought up in Northern Ireland. I suppose during the going to school, a lot of.

0:26:28 - (Kevin Lowe): I mean, I have to say, I'm sure most of these people are like, this dude's traveling across the world on a motorcycle. He's got to be crazy. Don't mess with this dude.

0:26:42 - (Chris Donaldson): I suppose one of the interesting things was taking an old bike. Everybody said, Took the lemon because he crawled away in the first place when it was new. She was only two years old. People said, you're mad because it's not a touring bike. It's been no good for that trip. Yeah, but I proved them wrong then and I was actually able to do the trip again on it 43 years later on the same 45 year old bike.

0:27:03 - (Chris Donaldson): But it's interesting, just the technology, being able to work on something in an old machine, pre digital, pre computerized. Something happened, it went wrong or could fix it. Most of the things, a reasonable amount of mechanical knowledge, you could get it sorted out again yourself. Whereas the modern cars and modern machines, modern bikes, something goes wrong, you need to take it to an authorized dealer with the computer program, plug it in and see what tells you what's.

0:27:29 - (Chris Donaldson): So sometimes it's nearly an advantage to have an older machine like yeah.

0:27:34 - (Kevin Lowe): No, I agree completely. So we're all dying to know, was Australia worth it?

0:27:41 - (Chris Donaldson): It certainly was. I mean, I really enjoyed Australia. I got a great welcome from the guys out there. Been waiting for me for 43 years. Slagging, as we would say, Australians. And it does sort of make me realize some of the things that happened to in your life. I realized if it left two weeks earlier, probably would have got through around before the revolution. Could have got to Australia, got a job, got a girlfriend, got set up there. Would I ever have come back with that? Two week delay leaving Belfast in 79 changed my whole rest of the direction of my life after that.

0:28:22 - (Chris Donaldson): It's strange thinking back of things that happened to you along the way that are nothing to do with what you've done or sort of a tangent. Sets you off in a tangent, which completely changes how you ended up in your life. No, I'm not done yet. I'm hoping to take the bike across the States and meet up with a. Few friends there and bring it back that way and do a complete circumstance navigation on it.

0:28:45 - (Kevin Lowe): Eventually, yeah. That poor motorcycle, though. I mean, my goodness, that poor thing is like, dude, can you ever just get an upgrade and let me retire at some point?

0:28:57 - (Chris Donaldson): I must admit, I did think that when I was coming up to Kathmandu. It's Kathmandu's in the top of not in the top of MLA's, but it's in the MLA's. And there's a road going up which is quite steep, and it was bit of a dirt track and there's trucks, sand and dust everywhere. The bike wasn't going well. I was having to slip the clutch and rev the guts out of it to get up the hill and I thought, this per bike must be cursing me. What are the way?

0:29:21 - (Chris Donaldson): After 43 years, it's still treating me like a dog. And you're doing the sort of things you should never. Most of the guests, Le Mons, are sitting in their garage, polished with about 10,000 miles on them. The most mine gets 75 and it's been dragged across the world twice. A person that would never talk to me again.

0:29:40 - (Kevin Lowe): Listen, old man, I'm old too. What are we doing, man?

0:29:45 - (Chris Donaldson): Guilty. The old time.

0:29:50 - (Kevin Lowe): Oh, my gosh, that is so funny. So talk to me a little bit more about your book as far as for somebody who's listening to you. Enthralled enough with your story, wants to learn more, tell me a little bit about the book. What can they expect from it?

0:30:07 - (Chris Donaldson): Well, I suppose I started writing a book as a travel journey that had made 40 years ago. And I realized when I started writing it, I hadn't got a name at that stage. And going the wrong way was obviously fitting because, as I say, I went the wrong continent, did numerous things the wrong way along the journey and gone through it by looking, by hookup, by crook. But I realized it had gone the wrong way quite a few times in my life and got a lot of pleasure from doing that. So traveling the road as traveled, if you like, instead of going the easy way, gone the hard way in business and in my private life and different things I've done obviously been a trait of mine to go the wrong way at different occasions, different times in my life and different way. But it's what's given me a lot of pleasure and a lot of satisfaction from different challenges I've done.

0:30:55 - (Chris Donaldson): You stick the extreme. You can always take a jumper jet to Australia, she'll get there, but you won't get any satisfaction out of it. You've just been sitting there. It'll be quite getting fed and watered the whole way. So you might enjoy the trip, but you won't get any satisfaction of it, whereas doing it the more difficult way. I think I'm a bit demented somehow that actually make life difficult for myself along the way.

0:31:22 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah.

0:31:23 - (Chris Donaldson): But I think it made me realize that by doing things, making life a bit more difficult for yourself and doing it in a more difficult way, you will get much more out of life. The world these days is very health and safety conscious, so you have to do that. We're hammered into don't take any risks, don't go too fast, don't do anything you shouldn't be doing. In the last 30, 40 years, it's become more and more like that.

0:31:45 - (Chris Donaldson): Sometimes by taking the risk and doing something off the beaten track, you can get much more from it. But don't be coming up back to me and gurning if you hurt yourself along the way, I'm taking no responsibility for you. Don't do what I say, but do what I do. But it made me realize that there's more to life than just following the rules and the regulations, and people should be a bit more individual in what they do. Sometimes I think.

0:32:18 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, I love it. I love it, man. Dude, you are exactly what I thought you were going to be, this awesome guy who's done these incredible things, yet you're so humble, you're so chill. You act like it's no big deal to just travel across the world on a motorcycle twice, going wrong directions and loving every minute of it, but once.

0:32:42 - (Chris Donaldson): It'S Carolous, twice it's stupid.

0:32:49 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, but where is the best place for somebody to find your book at?

0:32:54 - (Chris Donaldson): Well, my website is Chris Donaldson World, but probably the best way is on Amazon, the company that we love and we hate in the same measure because they're taking over the world, but we can't do without them. It's on Audiobook, it's on Kindle, it's on Hardback, it's on paperback. So it's amazing the technology that they have that they can do this. But that's probably Amazon's. Probably the best place to get it going the Wrong Way by Donaldson.

0:33:20 - (Kevin Lowe): Amazing. Chris, last question for you. Through all of these experiences that you've had, whether it was traveling the world, whether it was just being at home when you share this story in your book or here on the podcast, what's the theme that you want somebody to come away with? What is your reason why for doing this?

0:33:43 - (Chris Donaldson): Pretty selfishly, I suppose. You do something like that, you do it for yourself. Lucky to have a very understanding wife and very patient with me to let me do these things. If the original trip is a coming of age story, this trip has been a coming of old age story. And my main thing with people of my age in the 60s, late, middle, sixty s, seventy s, whatever, is get off your ass and go out and do it. Because generally you can do what you did when you were 21. You just have to do it a bit slower or have a bit more rest afterwards. But it's amazing what you can do if you put your mind to it. And there's got to be more for life than people retiring from 40 years of working life and ending up digging the garden and playing golf twice a week. Get a motorbike or get a car. Get whatever it is you want to do and go and do it. Don't just sit and talk about it.

0:34:31 - (Kevin Lowe): Chris dude, listen to you. Just do it. You just need to pack some advil and ice pack and a heating pad because you're going to be a little bit sore. And get out there and ride the bike across the Sahara and do the thing your bike and go, yeah, I love it, dude. I love it. Chris man, you have made my day 110% over. Thank you for being here on the podcast.

0:34:57 - (Chris Donaldson): Pleasure.

0:34:58 - (Kevin Lowe): Kevin yeah. Awesome. Well, for you listening today, I can only hope that you are smiling as big as I am, still kind of chuckling at what a crazy awesome guy Chris Donaldson is. And do yourself a favor, please check out today's show notes. Grab a link to get a copy of his book today. You will not be disappointed. With that said, this is another episode of grit, grace and inspiration. Have an awesome day.