Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. As you can possibly

hear, I'm at a station, Manchester Victoria and I've just met a very, very special guest. Yes,

can you introduce yourself? Yeah, my name is Dylan, Dylan Harris. I'm from Wiggin. I run the company LeBind Travel.

Now, so Dylan is from Wigan.

He runs a travel company.

What intrigues me about this company is that it takes you to all the places

that sensible people really don't want to go to,

except for once it's doing the opposite. It's going where everyone wants to go. And this is the Lupine trans-European race. On the 5th of August at 10 o'clock in the morning, it's going to start from central London. And then you have, well, as little time as it takes to get from London to Istanbul.

Distance as the crow flies or the plane flies are about 1,500 miles, quite a lot longer by

public transport and walking, which is the only form of travel allowed.

What on earth is going on with this, Dylan?

Well, we wanted to do something different.

We've been running trips to really unusual offbeat destinations all around the world,

but we felt we wanted to make something more accessible and get back to a kind of

away from group travel and more about real challenges, getting people to have real experiences, travel, you know, not just fly

somewhere and not experience the journey, just get out there and have real experiences.

Trying to go by rail, by bus or meeting real people along the way. And yeah, all part of the old

tradition of travel, you know, people trying to be the first person to climb a mountain or reach the pole or, you know, anything like this.

Well, one has to reach Istanbul and you're making it slightly tricky.

First of all, there's a £99 entrance fee, which is refundable on any Lupine trip.

So if you want to go to Yemen or somewhere equally appealing,

then that's good news. But the other thing is, you're going to set challenges for people

...