Ep. 547: Guiding Adventures in Hostile Places - Oli France
Adventure Sports Podcast
Curt Linville
4.6 • 579 Ratings
🗓️ 19 July 2019
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Despite studying outdoor leadership at university and filling his summers with adventure travel, Oli found himself falling into an incredibly boring job as a kitchen salesman. After getting to the point where he couldn’t take it anymore, in the middle of a major house remodel, and months away from getting married, Olie decided to undertake a solo winter journey from Hong Kong to Istanbul along the mountainous spine of Asia. During that adventure, he climbed 14 mountains in the 11 countries he visited and the journey became the basis of his first book, ‘The Trail of the Mountain Folk’.
Since then, he has lead groups on overseas adventures to destinations including Iraq, Somalia, DRC, Sudan, and Turkmenistan. Overall, he’s taken clients to 13 countries in total and 60 countries he’s traveled to personally.
With a keen sense of balance, he has become a specialist in taking in doing personal trips and taking paying clients to hostile environments and situations, like being detained for five days in Uzbekistan, navigating through minefields in Iraq and Laos, avoiding car-bombings in Beirut, being caught in a 6.9 magnitude earthquake, dodging avalanches and frostbite, getting stuck in a militia-run town in the DRC, facing down the barrel of a gun, and being stranded alone without water in a remote desert valley.
There have been so many occasions where he has had to find the resilience to continue, and more latterly, to have good leadership to keep his groups safe.
Could you do this for a living?
Instagram: @oli_france
Website: www.oliverfrance.com
His book: The Trail of the Mountain Folk
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| 0:00.0 | But by the time we got back there, it was almost nightfall. And our guard said, there's no |
| 0:04.2 | way we can drive back to the city at this time of night. It's just far too dangerous on the |
| 0:08.9 | streets. We had people who were getting flights the following day, and they were saying, |
| 0:12.6 | can we get another guide? But we were really in the middle of nowhere here. |
| 0:19.3 | This is the Adventure Sports Podcast. |
| 0:21.9 | Trying to help you find adventure every day in any stage of life. |
| 0:25.5 | You're going to hear from explorers, adventures, business owners, |
| 0:29.8 | and anyone living their life a little more out of the box than usual. |
| 0:51.3 | So back in 2017, episode 3.30, we talked to Ali France about his 108-day journey along the spine of Asia. |
| 0:56.5 | And I should have used it as this week's throwback episode, but I'm going to use it for next week's most likely. And it includes, it's basically the story about his book, |
| 1:02.2 | which is called The Trail of the Mountain Folk, where he was a kitchen salesman, hated life, |
| 1:09.9 | was getting ready to get married and wanted to do something |
| 1:12.3 | in the middle of a big house renovation on top of all that and decided to take 108 days |
| 1:18.7 | to do something absolutely crazy. And it sounds like it totally changes life. So today we're |
| 1:24.6 | hearing from him what life has been like since. But briefly, he has |
| 1:28.7 | gone on to guiding trips, guiding adventures all over the world for people. He's a carpenter when he's |
| 1:34.6 | home on the side, just I'm sure there's a way to decompress and just not have to think about all |
| 1:39.1 | these logistics all the time, but also specializes in taking people and himself to really hostile environments, |
| 1:46.7 | which sounds crazy, but you can tell he's 100% professional, and I would one day love to go |
| 1:54.8 | on an adventure with him. |
| 1:56.4 | I hope you took our challenge yesterday and decided to share the show with at least one person. |
| 2:02.3 | With just one person, that's the challenge, not at least, just one person. |
... |
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