Ep. 695: Walking Across Australia With Five Wild Camels - Sophie Matterson
Adventure Sports Podcast
Curt Linville
4.6 • 579 Ratings
🗓️ 11 January 2021
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Trekking: Follow one woman's extraordinary journey crossing the vast Australian Outback on foot alongside five wild camels she caught and tamed herself.
After needing a break from her career in film and TV, Sophie took a very fortuitous turn in her life by finding the most random job she could, milking camels. If you didn’t realize camels could be milked, neither did I.
To make a long story short, Sophie fell in love with camels and never went back to her old career. Her ongoing 5-year passion for camels has taken her to places like The Flinders Ranges, Lake Eyre and The Tirari Desert, Uluru, Michigan USA, Texas, and Rajasthan India.
At some point in the pursuit to learn more about these amazing creatures, Sophie got the idea to cross Australia on foot while being accompanied by 5 wild (or “feral”) camels. This would not only entail catching and taming 5 out of upwards of a million wild camels that roam Australia but also walking thousands of kilometers across the vast and void Australian Outback. Keep in mind, Australia is the geographic size of the US with 1/10th of the population. A wild idea indeed!
Today Sophie joins us from just over the halfway point of the journey in the bizarre little town of Coober Pedy.
Jude, Delilah, Charlie, Clayton, and Mac will all continue the journey in March.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I've kind of developed a bit of a mentality of, um, when things go wrong, do nothing. |
| 0:08.3 | Or like, you know, kind of like, don't panic. |
| 0:12.2 | Um, like I said, like the camels pick up a lot of on your energy. I absolutely love a crazy idea. |
| 0:35.5 | Or when someone's doing something and they just disregard the norm. |
| 0:41.8 | If you don't know, I work in the brewing industry, but I actually work at a non-alcoholic craft |
| 0:48.4 | brewery called athletic brewing. And so when you're doing something so out of the box like |
| 0:53.7 | non-alcoholic beer all day long, |
| 0:55.9 | everything else sounds a little more doable, but also you're kind of attracted to these |
| 1:00.7 | just bizarre twists on reality and or just on just kind of the norm. And so with Sophie's story, |
| 1:13.3 | that that was totally the case. When her message came across, I was immediately excited because it involves something we've never talked about |
| 1:18.5 | on this show, which is camels. Sophie is in the middle of walking across Australia with five |
| 1:26.8 | feral camels that she has tamed and trained to walk with her and |
| 1:31.8 | carry her stuff. And so if you didn't know this, Australia is practically filled with wild camels. |
| 1:39.9 | I didn't realize this, but Sophie told us there's upwards of a million wild or as they call them feral camels just out in the Australian outback. |
| 1:49.9 | Just to put that in perspective, there are around a million elk in North America. |
| 1:55.3 | So if you've ever seen elk or gone anywhere where there's just tons and tons of elk. Replace all those with camels, |
| 2:01.3 | and you're getting an idea of what the Australian Outback looks like in certain places. |
| 2:06.6 | So Sophie has an incredible story, how she left her career, |
| 2:10.4 | fell in love with camels, and decided to do this adventure. |
| 2:13.4 | I'll let her tell her story. |
| 2:15.4 | But I just want to prime the pump and tell you it's an incredible episode. |
| 2:20.0 | So interesting, so cool. |
... |
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