Charlie Walker

Charlie’s many daring journeys have provided him with countless experiences with which to communicate his key themes of 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 Putin launched his war in Ukraine. After the invasion began – with 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 8,000km 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 the Lulua, 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 Charlie 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 traversed Papua New Guinea by foot and paddle reaching little-known communities living among some of the world’s least accessible jungle.