I met him at the side of a road in Scotland, as he plodded along alone on one of those grey, drizzly days that makes up 90% of Scotlands weather when it’s not actually raining. By this point Eddie had already ran an absurd distance over the previous weeks and I thought hanging out with him for a few miles might help take his mind off the blisters, destroyed toenails and general agony he must be going through.

I was just so impressed by his determination to keep going through all the pain and inspired by his attitude of just doing something to make a change and complete his own dream, no matter what people said. Before he set off, Eddie got in touch with a few fitness consultants and trainers for advice because he’d not done much running before, nevermind a marathon. They quickly made a nine month training schedule to help Eddie evolve from an overweight stand-up comedian and movie star to a conditioned athlete capable of running daily marathons. Eddie said “Great, thanks Jeff. But I’m going in five weeks”.

Holed up infront of a computer, or pre-occupied with work and a million other distractions, it’s easy to forget exactly what’s out there waiting to be seen. Sometimes you have to slapped around the face with the sheer beauty and wonder of places waiting for you, simply so you’re reminded they exist. I present the first in a series of face-slaps; Earthporn.

Cliffs of Dover, England (credit: unknown)

Ben Bulben, Ireland. (credit: unknown)

Castle Varrich, Scotland. (credit: unknown)

Isle of Skye, Scotland. (credit: Chee Seong)

Stanage Edge, England (credit: Andrew Steele)
(I couldn’t make a post about special places in the UK without including Stanage Edge, it’s where I fell and became paralysed eight years ago. A short, rapid and life-changing journey of 50ft onto those rocks and boulders that’s somehow led me to begin a considerably longer journey of 30,000 miles around the world in a wheelchair.)

Pordenack Point, Cornwall, England. (credit: Andrew Turner)

Isle of Harris, Scotland. (credit: David Clapp)

Little Skellig, Ireland. (credit: Shai Hulud)

Giants Causeway, Northern Ireland. (credit: unknown)

Wastwater Lake, England. (credit: unknown)

Durdle Moor, England. (credit: Chris Button)

Antrim Coast, Northern Ireland. (credit: unknown)

Aaron Islands, Ireland. (credit: unknown)

The Cliffs of Moher, Ireland. (credit: Kerstin Enderlein.)

Al’s going to be away rowing the Atlantic, as you do, so host for the night will be Dave Cornthwaite and I’ll be in the company of an eclectic mix of adventurers including Polar Explorer Ann Daniels and all-round adventure superman Mark Kalch. I still haven’t decided what I’m going to talk about yet either!

Night of Adventure really is an exciting, sell-out event where the spectrum of explorers, daredevils and pioneers, come together to share their experiences with an enthusiastic and vocal audience. 20 x 20 seconds means once the talks begin there’s no stopping or going back, and each presenter has just 6 minutes, 40 seconds before they’re pushed off stage at the end of their allotted time.

Here’s a couple videos from previous presentations at Night of Adventure by Al Humphries and Ed Stafford to give you and idea of  what to expect and hopefully whet your appetite for adventure before the weekend.

Visit NightOfAdventure.co.uk to book tickets and learn more about plans for upcoming events in. Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol and Swansea.

Since semi-officially announcing my insane trip last week I’ve been bogged down with emails, proposals and ever increasing worries over the near terrifying logistics of preparing and funding a two year, 30,000 mile expedition through 30 countries. So with a fully healed shoulder and a gorgeous winter day in Scotland, it was impossible to resist heading out to forget everything for a while and simply enjoy the countryside. In the months to come I’ll be doing much more than gentle strolls as my training gets back on track, but in essence this is what my expedition and The Chutkara Initiative are all about, making it more readily possible for people with a disability to enjoy the outdoors any way they want to.

I shot all this with a GoPro and a telescopic pole, playing around with angles and positions to make things slightly more interesting. But it’s still just a rather uninteresting video of an idiot in a wheelchair, sorry about that!

Come along and say hello! More details (and cheap tickets) inside.

The Telegraph Adventure Travel Show is the UK’s biggest and only show totally dedicated to adventure travel and epic journeys. With a packed schedule of FREE inspiring talks from the experts, the event has an emphasis on reviving the true spirit of travel in its most adventurous form.

I’ll be giving a talk on the motivation behind my adventures, why I keep going into what are rather unorthodox and often silly places for a guy in a wheelchair, and how I deal with the frustration of failure:

Adventurous Motivation: What’s holding you back?
In eight years Andy Campbell has unintentionally gone from soldier to adventurer, exchanging the unique thrill of military operations for the exhilaration and frustration of exploring the world from a wheelchair. Paralysed in a climbing accident, medically discharged from the British Army and forced to re-evaluate his life. Andy set off to test his new limitations and expectations for adventure, to see what was possible and find out where determination, stubbornness and a healthy dose of rebellion could take him. His resulting adventures, from making first sitski descents of Alaskan peaks, paragliding over Africa, handcycling the length of the UK or across the American Continental Divide, diving with sharks or traveling into the Himalayas in a wheelchair, provide the backbone to an inspiring and candid lecture about a personal quest for freedom and the differing success and failures it’s brought. Andy will challenge you to overcome the only thing truly capable of holding you back from adventure, yourself.

Get tickets to The Telegraph Adventure Travel Show for only £6 – saving £4 off the door price! Just quote ‘ANDYCAMPBELL’ when booking online at www.adventureshow.com or when calling 0871 230 7159

Which is extremely important to me as I suspect most border crossings in Kazakhstan or China haven’t much experience in seeing an idiot in a wheelchair turn up towing a kayak and paraglider, with a bag full of cameras and satellite phones!

They’ve already saved me from making some horrific mistakes on visa applications and underestimating the details required when applying. Thankfully they’ve taken over and armed with a list of the countries I’ll be visiting are sorting everything out for me. Thanks Guys!

It’s impossible to escape the feeling of being at the very home of geography and exploration when you pass statues of Livingstone and Shackleton as you enter, or pass by exhibits of Hilary’s maps and plans for Everest. I spent a while in the Foyle Reading Room, which houses thousands of past expeditions reports, maps and historical documents where you’ll find everything from a radar map of The Darien Gap to the carved section of bark from the tree under which Livingstone’s heart was buried.

The Royal Geographical Society is without doubt a special place, but it’s far from being a museum to the past. Today, just as it did with Darwin and Shackleton, it’s supporting vitally important  research, education, expeditions and fieldwork, and promoting public engagement and informed understanding of the world’s peoples, places and environments.

A large part of this is helping launch new expeditions, and Explore is the starting point for many. Over the course of the weekend I watched presentations from teams detailing their recent expeditions and trips all over the world, from pole to pole and everywhere in-between. Hundreds of people with the thirst for adventure and
exploration mingled together to attend workshops on every aspect of successfully mounting an expedition anywhere in the world. Michael Palin, president of the society, welcomed us all and talked about how satisfying his own thirst for travel and adventure began with Monty Python, when he convinced John Cleese and everyone else to film The Holy Grail as much as possible outdoors rather than in a studio.

In between workshops on route planning, risk assessment, satellite communications and planning expeditions for every environment on the planet we all excitedly talked about our own plans, where we wanted to go and why.

I mingled and talked to some amazing people; Dave Cornthwaite, who’s well on his way to completing 25 separate expeditions of 1000 miles, each using a different form of human-powered transport who was excited to find out about my wheelchair expedition as he’s planning on doing 1000 miles in a wheelchair! Tom Allen, who set off from the UK with two friends and a camera to circumnavigate the world on bicycles, only to end up by himself, then fall in love and get married! His self-shot film Janapar is amazing. The team from Atlantic Rising; three friends who set off in a Land Rover on 28,000 mile journey around the Atlantic Ocean along the 1metre contour line – the level scientists predict sea levels may reach by the year 2100 to document areas, communities and wildlife habitats that are in danger of being submerged. Ants Bolingbroke-Kent who’s delightfully insane and in the great tradition of English eccentrics has travelled thousands of miles around the world by three-wheeled tuk-tuk or moped!

Meeting so many vibrant and passionate people with the same need to always see what’s beyond the horizon or over that next peak meant any hesitations I had that attempting to travel 30,000 miles around the world in a wheelchair would seem ridiculous were firmly blown away with the amazingly positive reaction and support from everyone I talked to. Birds of a feather flock together and all that. I’d had some cards made to throw around with the hope that someone might take notice and by the end of the weekend had run out, the excitement amongst everyone at Explore is as infectious as it is enthusiastic. I left more determined than ever to complete this crazy challenge and with some amazing new friends to help make it possible.

I can’t recommend Explore enough, if you want to launch an expedition, plan one or just get some inspiration. The entire weekend is a melting pot of motivation and resources.

Traveling ‘light’ with just the trusty off-road wheelchair meant there was little chance for proper exploration without the handcycle, paraglider or anything else to help out with moving around what could be a textbook definition of non-wheelchair-friendly terrain (it’s the bloody Himalayas!). At first I was frustrated at not being able to really get into the mountains, until I reminded myself that I was 17,000ft above sea level in the Himalayas and was ‘in’ the mountains wherever I went. Taking photographs is an amazingly easy to way to meet people on travels and break the ice, especially in some of the more remote places like the small mountain villages I was traveling through. Take out a camera, snap someones portrait with a smile, show them their photo on the screen and they break out in smiles and laughter, often dragging friends over to have their photo taken too.

Words can’t do experiences like this justice, or at least my words can’t so here’e a selection from my favourite photographs of the people I met along the way:

Everywhere I visited, from tiny villages seemingly defying gravity perched on the side of mountains to towns like Shimla, it’s the people that left the biggest impression on me and have provided the strongest memories. There was more happiness and optimism in those places than anywhere I’ve ever been. People undoubtedly living hard lives and with very little compared to our pampered lifestyles but smiling through it all and focused on the important things in life rather than the frivolous luxuries that have a way of sneaking to the top of our priorities.

The one photograph that has the biggest impact on me isn’t one of anyone smiling or laughing though, it’s of a young girl taking a rest at the side of a road from carrying around a set of bathroom scales that she charges people to weigh themselves on. It’s powerful to me because on such a young face it’s obvious her life is extraordinarily hard and she’s tired.

Probably more tired than you or I have ever been. It’s heartbreaking to look into her eyes and try to imagine what she has to go through everyday. Yet it’s my favourite photograph from the entire trip, I have it printed out and hanging on my wall so I see it everyday. I look at it and see the sadness but more than that I see defiance and her refusal to give up. She isn’t sitting there with a look of pleading or helplessness you’d expect from someone so young in her position, she’s seems to be looking straight at me and saying “You think your life’s tough? You have no idea. But I’m still here, I’m fighting and I’m doing whatever I can, what are you doing?”.

It’s even more impressive because Dave has done this, averaging about 500 miles a day flying for 8hrs at a time, completely solo without a support team to meet him on the ground. I can only imagine the bureaucratic nightmare he found in some of those countries along the route when trying to arrange to fly across their borders, and then the amazement/disbelief when he lands and jumps out into a wheelchair. (I think he missed a great opportunity to do the entire trip in a tuxedo and Bond/Connery accent though).

Dave sounds like he’s got the skills to pay the bills when it comes to dissapearing off on solo microlight adventures though, he’s already the first person to fly one from the UK to Malta. Not the first paraplegic, the first person. Before he set off on the UK to Australia flight he’d already knocked up 29,500 miles since he started flying microlights in 2000.

The aircraft was built by UK firm P&M Aviation and specially modified to let Dave use handcontrols, he had a special lightweight wheelchair made at the same time that folds away behind the pilot seat.

Dave landed in Nortern Australia last week but still has a good distance to go until he makes Sydney and tries to cash in his airmiles. He reguarly updates the blog on his website, which is well worth the read to get an understanding of just how amazing a journey he’s been on.

DAVE SYKES – UK to AUSTRALIA SOLO – www.SoloFlightGlobal.com

Of course, it’s also nine minutes of distraction. Sorry about that, check out EightPrinciples for a clickable version that won’t take up as much of your time.