![]() Taking charge of a group of people in any scenario is a big responsibility, but doing so amid militia groups, landmines, wild animals or extortionist officials heightens this responsibility even further. Along with organising my own expeditions, my prospective employers were as eager to hear about my life experiences in remote places, as my qualifications. My work as an expedition leader has taken me into some of the most obscure and hostile places in the world: think Iraq, Turkmenistan, Yemen and Somalia. Hooked beyond rescue on the drug of adventure, I wanted more, and I wanted to take people with me. Nevertheless, when I arrived in Istanbul at the end of my journey, bearded, sun-bleached and skinny, but with a mind bursting with memories and fulfilment, my path through life seemed clearer than ever. I emerged from my Uzbek predicament after five days of house-arrest, interrogations and intimidation, and opted for the hard road by ignoring my orders to leave the country and instead travelling into the mountains, where spying policemen courted my every move. My new mantra: life on the edge, or life over. Day by day on my long cold journey west, I encountered discomfort and uncertainty, and I had grown to relish it. Prior to crossing into Uzbekistan, I had narrowly evaded an avalanche in Kazakhstan, camped without a tent in a brutal winter storm on a 4000-metre high ridge in Kyrgyzstan, and had several run-ins with distrustful Chinese police officers. ![]() By the time of my Uzbek arrest, I was over eleven weeks in, and only halfway there, and now I worried that I might not make it back at all. I told my fiancée, who had miraculously supported my plan, that I would be home in around six weeks. I bought a one-way ticket to Hong Kong and vowed not to return home until I had completed an audacious solo winter journey along the mountainous spine of Asia, climbing mountains in each country visited, until I reached Istanbul. In my career, what I saw ahead was a nightmarish vision of normality and convention. My dreams of adventure, forged during a degree in Outdoor Leadership and a series of prior escapades – from Ugandan jungles, to Berber villages to bombed-out Lebanese suburbs – had all but vanished. The timing was terrible, but I had reached a crisis point. Seven months earlier I had quit my job as a kitchen salesman on little more than a whim, abandoning my company car and my only source of income, all while undertaking a major house renovation and finalising plans for my upcoming wedding day. Not only was I locked up, I had given up everything to be there. The tablets are a common painkiller in the UK, but an illegal narcotic in Uzbekistan, a fact unbeknown to me, until I was collared. And after rifling through the files on my laptop, the photographs on my camera, and the fluff in my pockets, the guards found their prize: a dozen small co-codamol tablets. Heroin trafficking, along with a totalitarian government, meant that Uzbek border guards eyed travellers like myself with a heavy dose of suspicion. Here, near the northern borders of Afghanistan, opium flows like water from the Taliban-controlled poppy fields then on a long journey towards the pulsating veins of heroin users across the world. My charge: trafficking drugs across the border and into one of the world’s severest dictatorships. It was late-March 2016 and I found myself detained in a cell in Uzbekistan. It was like no Easter weekend I had known before. ![]() This experience led him to continue his search for adventure by leading expedition groups through some of the most hostile and dangerous place on the planet. Oli France is a British speaker, adventurer and expedition leader, specialising in taking groups to remote and hostile places.Īfter quitting his job as a kitchen salesman in 2016 and leaving his old life behind on a whim, he decided to follow his dream of adventure by travelling from Hong Kong to Istanbul, by any means necessary, along the 8000-mile mountainous spine of Asia, crossing eleven countries and climbing fourteen mountains in mid-winter.
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