Ep. 807: Update - Walking Across Australia With Five Wild Camels - Sophie Matterson
Adventure Sports Podcast
Curt Linville
4.6 • 579 Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2022
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We first caught up with Sophie early last year on episode 695 to hear about the first half of this epic adventure. Today we hear the second half.
How the adventure started:
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 1/12th of the population.
Today Sophie joins us having just completed the journey in December. Jude, Delilah, Charlie, Clayton, and Mac all made it to the finish line in Byron Bay, NSW.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I had lots of people before I set off were like, oh, are you nervous of, you know, strange people out there or, you know, oh, it's lucky you're carrying a gun or, you know, oh, I'd be terrified of just weirdos. |
| 0:14.0 | And there's this real sort of stigma, I guess, about the outback having, of there just being a lot of weirdos in the outback |
| 0:22.0 | that are just sort of waiting to come and murder some innocent backpacker. |
| 0:55.3 | So. So back at the very beginning of 2021, we talked to Sophie Maderson about literally walking across Australia, which by the way is the size of the U.S., walking across Australia with five wild, |
| 1:02.7 | or as they call them, feral camels. If you didn't know, there are over a million wild camels in the Australian outback. I didn't know that. That's just as many elk that are in the U.S. |
| 1:08.5 | and in North America. So it's an absolutely enormous population. |
| 1:13.8 | Sophie learned about this, working in TV, did a story about camels and just absolutely fell in love, |
| 1:21.0 | decided after working in, quote, the camel industry for a while that she wanted to walk |
| 1:26.6 | across Australia with five of |
| 1:28.3 | these camels so she literally caught five tamed them and they are walking together across |
| 1:33.9 | Australia we talked to her halfway through the experience back on episode 695 and it was one of the |
| 1:41.0 | coolest stories I've ever done we're probably going to play it as the Revisited this week, |
| 1:45.3 | maybe, or some point in the future very soon. |
| 1:48.1 | But today's episode is part two of that. |
| 1:51.4 | We talked to her when she was halfway through before she had to end for the Australian winter, |
| 1:56.2 | which keep in mind, the Southern Hemisphere, it's on the opposite end of the year. |
| 1:59.7 | So their winter is our summer |
| 2:02.1 | so she took a break during the winter and released her camels on this giant station which is |
| 2:08.1 | essentially the Australian version of a ranch and so she had to go gather them up a few months |
| 2:14.3 | ago or back in the fall their spring fall, gathered them up and finished the |
| 2:20.3 | journey, almost 3,000 miles, 4,600 kilometers across Australia, one of the largest land masses |
| 2:28.2 | with one of the fewest populations. So what an adventure, and she's going to tell us all about |
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