A recent interview with the Sunday Times in Singapore.<\/p>\n
By Wong Kim Hoh, Senior Writer<\/p>\n
kimhoh@sph.com.sg<\/p>\n
Growing up, Rob Lilwall was a pretty average fellow.<\/p>\n
He was mediocre in his studies, not particularly good in sports, listened to middle-of-the-road music and led quite a humdrum existence. But when he was in his first year at the University of Edinburgh, something happened which changed his life.<\/p>\n
Bored by a droning lecture on quantitative biology one day, he flipped open an atlas. His eyes fell on a page on South Asia and a little red line running through the mountains from Pakistan to China. The little red line \u2013 which had him fixated for months \u2013 was the Karakoram Highway, a 1,200km road which follows an ancient network of trade routes connecting South Asia with West and Central Asia.<\/p>\n
He tore a piece of paper from his note pad, wrote \u201cDo you want to come and cycle across the Karakoram Highway this summer?\u201d and passed it to an old school friend, Al Humphreys, seated in front of him. The latter did not know where it was, so Mr Lilwall scribbled a reply. A scratch of the head and a pause later, his friend scrawled something on the note and passed it back to him. \u201cOk,\u201d the note said. That trip was the first of several epic journeys Mr Lilwall was to undertake, turning him from a run-of-the-mill Englishman to an adventurer and explorer quite extraordinary.<\/p>\n
In 2004, he embarked on a 50,000km cycling trip from Siberia back home to England, a 3 1\/2 year expedition which took him through the jungles of Papua New Guinea, the war-torn passes of Afghanistan and the desolate sub-zero landscapes of Siberia. In 2011, he set out on an arduous six-month 5,000km trek through China, from the Gobi desert to the South China Sea. His adventures have spawned two books and two television series by National Geographic.<\/p>\n
Now based in Hong Kong, the 37-year-old is also a popular corporate and motivational speaker. He especially enjoys it when his audience is schoolchildren and teenagers. \u201cI always tell them: \u2018You may not be the cleverest or the sportiest or the most popular, but you shouldn\u2019t let that contain you in what you aim for in life.\u2019\u201d Fit and ruddy-cheeked, the congenial adventurer was born in London and is the younger of two children of a chartered surveyor and a part-time secretary. He was, he says with a laugh, an unexceptional kid.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was not particularly good at sports although I enjoyed it. I also enjoyed the outdoors although I was not a super proficient survival kind of guy,\u201d says Mr Lilwall who was in town recently to speak at the SIM Interest Group Convention. The event, organised by the Singapore Institute of Management, featured talks on industry trends, best practices and inspiring experiences by an array of speakers. His mediocrity was compounded by a crippling shyness.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was always not the kid to put up his hand in class. In fact, I was very conscious of my self-consciousness. I didn\u2019t like it and was always trying to overcome it.\u201d To become less socially awkward, he took a gap year and flew to Zimbabwe to become a volunteer teacher with a charity when he turned 19.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d never been outside Europe and it was a magical year. I taught classes of 50 or 60 students in villages. At that time, Zimbabwe was still beautiful and peaceful, just before it went downhill,\u201d he says, referring to the landlocked country in Southern Africa now grappling with a litany of troubles from political strife to an economy in deep crisis. The eight-month sojourn, he says, awakened an interest in adventure, one which he had been nursing after reading the books of adventurers such as Ranulph Fiennes and Benedict Allen.<\/p>\n
Fiennes was the first person to reach the North and South Poles and the first to cross the Antarctic and Arctic Ocean; Allen has gone on solo expeditions through the Amazon jungle, Namibia\u2019s Skeleton Coast and Mongolia\u2019s Gobi Desert. It culminated in his decision to traverse the Karakoram Highway in 1997. For that trip, Mr Lilwall and Mr Humphreys forked out \u00a3400 each for good bikes, and did a training trip cycling around Scotland. They then flew to Islamabad before getting on their bikes to cycle to Kashgar, in the westernmost corner of China. The trip, he says, was relatively event-free.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was 1997, and there were no strong anti-Western sentiments then like now. There were valleys with more fundamentalist sects but we would not stay the night at these places; we would just cycle through.\u201d Danger, if any, came in the form of massive landslides. \u201cYou just had to pick your bike up and run through rivers,\u201d he says. In fact, the duo completed their expedition a couple of weeks earlier than planned. Because they had time, they decided to fly to Istanbul and from there bike home to London. Mr Humphreys, however, developed problems with one of his legs in Rome so Mr Lilwall ended up biking his way through Europe home to London on his own. Big adventure over, Mr Lilwall thought he would buckle down to the business of finding himself and charting a direction for his future. He spent his next two university vacations as a volunteer worker for charitable projects; he worked on a rehabilitation project for street children in Mexico City and in a poor area in Glasgow.<\/p>\n
In his final year, he took off for Nashville to undergo training to become a door-to-door salesman with a company selling educational books. \u201cI thought my shyness still really needed getting rid off,\u201d he says. He returned to London after making US$10,000 in a couple of months. The same success eluded him when he went back to London, and he found a job selling exhibition space for a trade show. \u201cI was awful. I didn\u2019t make a single cent after eight weeks,\u201d he recalls with a grimace. \u201cI tried a few other jobs but I wasn\u2019t confident about launching a business career.\u201d So he applied for a grant to get trained as a teacher instead. He spent two years teaching in a secondary school in Oxfordshire.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a baptism by fire. In the first year, I couldn\u2019t control those kids at all.\u201d He found his rhythm by the second year. \u201cI learnt not to take myself too seriously. I learnt that even if you are totally failing at something, it\u2019s not the end of the world. So I learnt to enjoy myself more.\u201d<\/p>\n
But just as he was settling into his job, his cycling companion sent him a fateful e-mail. The lives of the two friends had diverged after their big adventure on the Karakoram Highway. Like him, Mr Humphreys also did his teacher training after Edinburgh, but instead of teaching, he went on more bike trips. He set out on an ambitious trip around the world, cycling from London to Cape Town, to South America, Alaska and Asia. On his vacations, Mr Lilwall would fly out to places like Ethiopia and La Paz to join his friend. One day, he received an e-mail from Mr Humphreys asking him to cycle with him across Asia.<\/p>\n
The e-mail included a quote from an Eminem song: \u201cLook, if you had just one opportunity, just one shot, to seize everything you ever wanted, would you take the chance …?\u201d That struck a chord. \u201cI was a geography teacher. I told myself that teaching jobs were not hard to get and it would not be too bad for my CV if I took 11\/2 years off teaching to explore the world. And as Al said in his e-mail; \u2018If not now, then when?\u2019\u201d And that is how the duo ended up in Magadan, in north-east Russia in September 2004.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe looked at the map and it was really the end of the road. So we said: \u2018Let\u2019s start there, some place end of the world-ish.\u2019\u201d They had some crazy \u2013 many good, some bad \u2013 adventures along the way. The conditions were often punishing. In many places, the temperature was -40 degrees. Coal miners and indigenous tribes in Siberia would invite them into their homes, feed them, sometimes with exotic fare like pony liver, and offer them respite from the cold.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne night, while we were riding alongside the Trans-Siberian railway line, some guys in a car pulled up beside us and robbed us of all the money we had,\u201d he recalls. On another occasion, a kindly couple who ran a trucker\u2019s cafe in the middle of nowhere in Russia offered them a hut near the cafe to rest for the night. \u201cIn the middle of the night, we woke up and saw that the cafe was on fire. We ran out. The couple ran out in time but the man who was helping them run the cafe did not. The cafe exploded and killed him,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
When they reached Japan a few months later, he and Mr Humphreys parted ways. \u201cAl wanted to do northern China and then head back home. I had it in my head that I wanted to go to Australia. I also realised I needed to do this trip alone because I was relying a lot on Al and hiding behind him to fix things, to be the problem solver. \u201cI saw how much he had grown and I told myself I should try and do this too.\u201d<\/p>\n
He cycled and sailed through several places including Busan, Tianjin, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea \u2013 before ending up in Australia. After Australia, he cycled home to Britain, through South-east Asia to China and Tibet as well as India and Pakistan. Over the course of the trip \u2013 which lasted three years and two months \u2013 he kept a blog and shot videos of his adventures. Publisher Hodder & Stoughton offered him a deal to write Cycling Home From Siberia, and National Geographic used his footage for a six-part TV series of the same name.<\/p>\n
While the trip has given him memories and adventures to last a lifetime, Mr Lilwall says his biggest coup was meeting his wife Christine \u2013 a lawyer turned non-governmental organisation worker \u2013 in Hong Kong. The two had a long-distance relationship \u2013 with Christine occasionally flying out to meet him in different places \u2013 before they tied the knot in 2009. The couple now live in Lantau Island in Hong Kong; both of them work for a charity called Viva helping children at risk.<\/p>\n
In 2011, the intrepid adventurer embarked on another challenging expedition. \u201cInstead of cycling home from Siberia, I thought we\u2019d walk home from Mongolia,\u201d he says. With a cameraman, he flew from Hong Kong to the Gobi, trekked through the desert before going down the Yellow River. The result was another book and another documentary series. Each adventure, Mr Lilwall says, has helped him grow up a little. He has plans for a few more expeditions but is not ready to talk about them yet.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a lot of can-do in me now. I\u2019ve learnt so many things through my experiences. We are all strong enough to make it through life. And people will help you along the way,\u201d says the explorer who now gives at least two talks a month to establishments ranging from multinationals to schools. \u201cI use my trip as a metaphor to explain things like goal setting, resilience and problem solving. The power of the message is in the story. Stories are far more powerful than just bullet points.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A recent interview with the Sunday Times in Singapore. By Wong Kim Hoh, Senior Writer kimhoh@sph.com.sg Growing up, Rob Lilwall was a pretty average fellow. He was mediocre in his studies, not particularly good in sports, listened to middle-of-the-road music and led quite a humdrum existence. But when he was in his first year at the University […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45752,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[16,20,24,5,17,25],"class_list":["post-403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-updates","tag-adventures","tag-asia","tag-cycling","tag-inspiration","tag-media","tag-singapore"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n