About

Charlie Walker is an award-winning British explorer, author and keynote speaker. He specialises in long distance, human-powered expeditions and has travelled more than 60,000 miles (100,000 km) by foot, horse, bicycle, ski, kayak and dugout canoe. He has completed challenging expeditions both solo and as a team leader.

Charlie is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a four-time recipient of the Transglobe Expedition Trust's 'Mad but Marvellous' award. His writing has featured in a range of publications including The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun, Wanderlust, Geographical and Sidetracked magazine as well as BBC Radio 4 and the World Service. Charlie has also appeared on numerous podcasts including The Joe Rogan Experience. He has written two books about his experiences.

Charlie’s longest expedition was a 43,000-mile (70,000 km) bicycle journey reaching the furthest cape in each of Europe, Asia and Africa before returning home. He traversed 60 countries during the four years he was away, enduring extremes of weather, remoteness and physical exhaustion.

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 groups of indigenous Siberians. The journey involved camping and surviving in temperatures as low as -50ºC.

Charlie arrived in Russia just before Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine. In an atmosphere of heightened political tension, the 600-mile expedition was successful but became increasingly precarious, culminating in four weeks in prison on spurious charges of photographing sensitive military sites.

In 2017, Charlie completed a world-first 5,200-mile triathlon along the perceived Europe Asia border. This expedition spanned from the midwinter snowfields of the Russian Arctic to the Bosphorus in Istanbul and was an investigation into the concept of man-made borders. In 2021 he achieved a first ascent of a 4,500m peak in the Tien Shan mountains in Kyrgyzstan.

Charlie's 2019 traverse of Papua New Guinea by foot and paddle took him to some of the most remote communities he's encountered living among some of the world's least accessible jungle. In 2023, Charlie returned to re-trace this route, spending more time with the remote communities along the way.

In 2014 Charlie descended the Lulua, a little-known tributary of the Congo River, in a leaky dugout canoe. This journey into remote and effectively uncharted territory of DRC was beset by rapids, waterfalls, hippos, crocodiles and finally, shortly after leaving the river, violent bouts of malaria and typhoid fever.

In 2012 Charlie walked 1,000 miles solo across the Gobi desert from China to Mongolia. This feat involved walking over six marathons a week for six weeks whilst carrying enough food and water to survive. He then trekked 600 miles across Central and Northern Mongolia in the company of only a semi-feral pony and a stray dog he found in the forest.

In early 2024 and 2025, Charlie returned to West Africa to cycle 4,000 miles from Douala in Cameroon to Dakar in Senegal, thus completing a section of his earlier 4-year bicycle adventure that was impassible at the time due to the Ebola outbreak. The journey traversed twelve countries and provided a fascinating insight into a region on the front line of the battles against both climate change and Islamist insurgency.