Longtime Ago People
In a world where family connections shape us, stories bridge generations. Many of us carry cherished memories of those who touched our lives, which I think deserve to be shared.
Each episode I hope will feature guests recounting touching, funny, and inspiring memories, celebrating the impact these individuals had on their lives. I aim to beautifully remember loved ones, offering listeners nostalgia, warmth, and connection.
I am looking for people to reflect on the impact of these relationships.
Longtime Ago People
Manchester to Namibia: A Life Less Ordinary
Gary Booth - Karl 1963
brothers
What happens when a curious boy from Manchester decides the conventional path isn’t for him? In this episode, I speak with Karl about his brother, Gary—a man who, at 21, walked away from Thatcher’s Britain with just £150 and a self-taught smattering of French. That leap launched a 35-year adventure spanning continents, languages, and brushes with death, transforming him into a near-mythic figure among Namibia’s Himba people.
Karl gives his account and a glimpse of how Gary, growing up in a typical Lancashire working-class family, and stifled by a comprehensive school education system decided to break free from the “rat race” as a young 21yr old and embark on a lifetime adventurer that Hollywood could only dream about.
After leaving home in the early ’80s, he vanished for 15 years, working across Europe before making a perilous journey across the Sahara, through war-torn regions, and finally into Namibia’s vast wilderness.
Gary’s extraordinary letters home—often 50 pages long—document his life tracking endangered rhinos, surviving lion attacks, and earning the tribal name “N’garikatuki”, the man of the mountains. Perhaps most astonishing was his decision to buy a yacht despite minimal sailing experience and navigate solo across the Pacific, enduring hurricanes while relying on Karl for weather updates via satellite texts.
Today, Gary runs his own safari company, guiding small groups to Namibia’s hidden corners. His knowledge even caught the attention of filmmaker Eric Valli, who based a film on his experiences. This episode explores not just Gary’s remarkable life but the bigger questions about conventional paths, courage, and what happens when curiosity leads the way.
Have a story echoing through time? I’m listening—300 words or fewer.
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"In a world where you can be anything, be kind."
just before we get into my fourth episode. I really enjoy talking to carl. Carl has been a friend of mine for the past 20, 25 years. Uh, he's talked about his brother, gary, quite a lot over that time and I think for many, many years I've wanted to capture some of um carl's stories about gary and gary's incredible life. I mean, I like so much of this because Carl is just fantastic. He just just puts it all there. He's got so many stories, he's told these stories so many times and you can hear that in the way that he talked very proudly about his brother Gary.
Speaker 1:So in this episode we're going to look at Gary's extraordinary life as an experienced adventurer, safari guide and even, dare I say it, sailor. And we're going to hear about his early days in manchester, the time he spent traveling across europe, africa, well, in fact, the world. Um, I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed making it. Anyway, here we go. This is miles and you're listening to a long timego People. Today I'm doing a Zoom with Carl. So I'm in Arundel, carl, where are you? Manchester, today we're going to talk about your brother Gary. So first of all, let me first question for you Is Gary older or younger than you. He's two years older than me Now. We're going to get into Gary's story in a second. Did he always have a sense of adventure as a child?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think growing up in the place called a little town called Whitefield, somewhere in Manchester, and as kids I remember we used to go on adventures. Going back mate, you would be quite surprised by this. So I remember we lived in a certain house there's a house called Selby Avenue and we used to go on adventures. Gary was two years older than me. I had a couple of pals we got some great stories there where we did, where we used to go walking off on adventures, and we'd go from Whitefield to Bury. Bury Market was a famous market. We'd go to Bury. Bury was about probably as a crow flies, three miles walk and we'd go walking for the day and we'd find things along the way and we'd discover around Berry Market. I was five years old, he was seven, he was a ringleader.
Speaker 1:My other two pals, or three pals, and you were just out all day long.
Speaker 2:All day. We'd go out all day. My mum would be pulling her hair out wondering where we was, and we went on what we called adventures. So an adventure. We'd just go out. They wouldn't be open. We'd be out the door at 7 o'clock. I'd go round to my pal's house with Gary. He'd have oh, his mum, he used to have raspberry jam with seeds in it, so we used to like that. So he'd get some Mother's Pride bread, if you remember those days, and make some jambos. A bottle of water, a pop bottle filled with water from the tap and off we'd go, a lot of gang of us on adventures and we just go and find things and discover, get up to, not not get up to any trouble or anything like that.
Speaker 2:But it was just inquisitiveness was this in a city environment or a country environment? It was a town, a city more than not a city. As a city we was like a. It's a suburb of manchester, we're probably seven or eight miles outside the city center, but it's like just a normal town. Uh, you know, it wasn't saying it was countryside where it was, um, but it was plenty of fields and things to go around and parks and so on.
Speaker 2:That was that when we used to go on holiday we'd go to Newquay. I would save up spending money and Gary would spend up saving money. And as we got a little bit older maybe you know, 10, 11 years old I remember walking into shops and I'd be buying junk stuff and sweets and rock and he would save his pocket money hard and he would used to look at these Collins little Collins book of wildlife and there'd be one for butterflies, there'd be one for reptiles in the UK, there'd be one for birds they're only like a pocket size thing and he'd spend every penny on these books on wildlife. And he was about 10 years old. That's where I think he got his love for what he ended up doing, which was, you know, living in africa africa, big place. Where is he? He's now lives in namibia. For those that don't know namibia, it's north of northwest of south africa and just below angola borders zimbabwe and botswana to the east as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and he's been out there. How long, I mean? When did he go there?
Speaker 2:oh gosh, he left home. He left home when he was 21. So, as kids grow, when we got inside work, if you remember, just just before the maggie thatcher realized the maggie thatcher he came in and, all you know, a lot of jobs were got rid of. He was a frustrated 21 year old, 20 and didn't know what to do. Very gary was very, um, very bright at school, but he was a rebel. So he never studied, he never went into classes.
Speaker 2:When he was doing his old levels he used people used to come to me and say teachers used to come to me and say where's your brother, where is? He's not, he's not in his classes, where is he? Don't know, I didn't know, you know. And then he'd come out with grade a's without just turn up for the exam, sit down, you know, flick a pen, come out with perfect grade a's and just bugger off again. And people, people used to say, even today, people say to me your brother, he was so gifted but he couldn't be bothered, he just didn't. You know, he ended up learning French. He got disheartened with the UK. He looked around all his pals and they were all sort of saying I've got, you know, and everybody around him and he just saw it as a rat race at the time, saying is this was a rap it's like early 80s, yeah, early, yeah, early 80s.
Speaker 2:And um, he went and hired for five pence it was, I remember telling his five pence the french linguaphone course on a cassette player. Okay, he's got a bunch of cassettes, headphones with the cane with it and he sat down with a cassette recorder, press the button on it and listen to french and talk yourself french to a cassette player. And that's how he learned a few lines of French, because his idea was I'm going to go to France and try and get a job. And so at 21, after learning very pigeon French a little bit from a cassette player and nothing else, he went off with a I don't know have you had 150 pounds in his pocket Big suitcase. My mum and dad gave him a travel iron travel kettle, travel air dryer and all that, put them all in there and all the boats and hairdryer in the 80s and he hit shite. He went over to um in the early 80s so this would have been 82 and 25th of may he left home and went to france and it was 15 years before I ever saw him again. Wow, he just went on a voyage of discovery, really miles. He just did things, his life, love for adventure and so on, and while just took him places that nobody else I think has ever been, I actually think that I think he'll some of the stories he now tells have been made in you know, like going, I'll go further down the line. There's been films made about you know. They've made films about things he's done.
Speaker 2:So he left home and this was before mobile phones so there was no contact uh's. He wrote letters every now and again, after every three months. You can imagine my mom, you know, I think now if you think of your children, you can't speak to them on a mobile phone ever. Yeah, and they leave home, they live in a foreign country and all they've got and the foreign country where you end up living is there's no more. There's no landline phones. So most countries in africa in the 80s very difficult to find a landline. You they're not phone boxes on the edge of the streets and so on. You had to borrow somebody. Go into somebody's house and borrow their phone to make a phone call home.
Speaker 1:Did he travel from France?
Speaker 2:to Africa. No, he probably spent about 10 years in just less than 10 years, I would think in and around Europe. So he ended up in Spain, lived in Berlin for a while when the war was up. He got a job. Basically what happened? He went over to Paris, got to Paris with his suitcase, ran out of money, got offered a job on the New York Times as a runner for the New York Times. He had a grasp of English, very, very talented with English. English was his language, he said. To be came later on but probably didn't realize it at the time, but he was very gifted at sort of writing. He got a job as a New York Times in Paris but the job was coming up in two or three weeks' time and it was all dependent on this guy being sacked, apparently. And he looked at his money and he thought by the time I'm away I might have run out of cash, and if I've run out of cash I've got to come home. I'm not doing that.
Speaker 2:And he met he said he met a guy on a drunken night, another English guy. He was hitchhiking and I think Gary had actually got the train down to Paris. He paid for a train fare or something like that. This guy says forget that, I haven't got the money for that, we'll hitchhike down to the south of France. We'll get a job selling ice creams on the beaches or picking grapes or whatever. So at 21 he sends on the door and there's this big suitcase with his three-piece suit in there. His air dryer is that everything that we would give him just delivered back home and off he went and he went down to the south of france selling ice creams on the beaches and and then from there he met people and he moved to um. After the grapes picking season he went to berlin and he got a job in a bar in berlin serving in a bar some friends that had been on holiday in south of Berlin. And he got a job in a bar in Berlin serving in a bar. Some friends that had been on holiday in the south of France had come and worked up in our bar. You know, we give you a job.
Speaker 2:He lived in Berlin for quite a few years and he used to hitchhike across to the Basque country, to Bilbao and Victoria, and he met a girl one night over there. When he got there he got over to spain and his first thing he said was. He went in the bar. I said I remember going into a bar, I was in spain. I went un bien, si vous plaît. Then, oh, that's france, I'm in spain, I'll do it. And he went, oh, and he said un bien. And the guy turned around and said una terabeta. He went all right, he says that was his first word.
Speaker 2:He learned in spanish and caught a long story short. Over a period of time he met, they fell for each other and he used to hitchhike back from Berlin. Every month He'd go back to Berlin, sign on the dole in Berlin and then come back to Spain and live in the Basque Country. Eventually he moved to the Basque Country, learned Spanish very quickly and got a job. Teaching in night school, ib, with SD, with SH, was his job and he learned spanish very quickly, became fluent in spanish and on continent he's got about four or five languages fluency now. So quite long story from there.
Speaker 2:He then hits out from there through africa a few years, a couple years later, on his own, and he always wanted to go to africa. That's what it's my life thing kicked in, he decided from memory um, and I've got letters, I've got, I've got, I've got in front of me here, my house. I'll read you a couple of letters extracts that he wrote in the 90s to his mum. These letters private letters to his mum, but people said he needs to put these into a book and write a book because it would be fascinating. He wrote he went up to the Sahara and he hitchhiked across the Sahara Desert. He wanted to hitchhike across the Sahara, so he hitchhiked across across the Sahara through Mali and Timbuktu this is in the 80s on his own, ended up in Equatorial Guinea, in Cameroon, and he lived for a while in the Cameroons.
Speaker 2:Another story how he got a job as a site foreman, if you like, building a clinic in the middle of the jungle in the Cameroons where the pygmies were, and he lived near tribes of pygmies and they used to bring people to the clinic in the middle of this jungle. And because he spoke French and because he spoke Spanish, he got the job over an English person, because he could communicate and in the Cameroons I think it's French, if I'm not mistaken was their first language. So he got that job and then he went to Equatorial Guinea, lived in Equatorial Guinea, several places around there, and he spent quite a while and eventually, several years later, he hitchhiked through Angola, which is south of there, so he went south through there. He went south through Nigeria, went through Nigeria, stayed in Nigeria for a while and then into Angola, through Angola, which was in UNITA Remember UNITA Rebels with the army, the rebels who were fighting the government, so one side was backed by the Americans, I think, and the Unita rebels used to kill any Westerners really. And he hitchhiked across. Another story about him getting held up by Unita rebels.
Speaker 2:I remember telling the story. He said he was in Angola and he wanted to get into Namibia. Now Namibia was on the southern border. Everywhere you went in Africa there was roadblocks and borders that were very strict on trying to get you through. If you was Western. They wanted money all the time, every time there was always backhand money paying the security, the border guards to get in and there was trouble around certain borders.
Speaker 2:And he wanted to get through Angola, down through to the north border and crossing to Namibia, because Namibia was still one of the last areas in africa that was unspoiled. For that was his focus to get there, yeah, yeah. So kenya and the kruger and places like that, and tanzania, yeah, they had safari parks and they had lots of parts where they had you you know, some areas of vast wilderness but there was very much populated by tourism, so a lot of tourism there and you know these sort of safari parks, if you want to call them for that, or game reserves, um, with friends, staff and that. And people said you have to go to Namibia because Namibia is still truly wild. There is, you know, it's a vast country, it's the old part of South Africa, northern South Africa. It's just got its independence, I think in the 80s. It was unspoiled and uncrowded, so he wanted to go there.
Speaker 1:So did he have problems getting through the borders then?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, he had to sign. He went to the British Embassy to get papers to get across the border and go through Angola and the British Embassy said to him you're going to have to sign a disclaimer to say that we won't expatriate your body if you're killed by a UNITA. Your family will have to bring you back or whoever. The British Embassy are not responsible for bringing you back. And he had to sign that because he said the three Brits had been killed, journalists the week before in an ambush by UNITA rebels in Southern and this is where, if you remember Lady Diana going through, where all the landmines were in Angola. That was all to do with that battle. That civil war was going on. There was a civil war going on and it had just come to the end of the civil war and it sort of unofficially stopped. But there were still some pockets of bandits, if you like, that would still take Western hostage so they could get, extract money from the government or whatever. There was still that little bit going on. So he took the risk, so I thought I'll be okay, speak french, speak portuguese. He got in a car with two belgians, two belgian journalists, and they they hired a driver, they drove through the outback of angola maybe, like, and he remembered, said to me. He said we got stopped, also around this bend. He said and we're on a mud track and he, um, he said that he got they turned around and as he got turned around, there's an ambush, there's a jeep with a load of soldiers with ak-47s and they got him out the car and he said I honestly thought you know they would rabbit and honor a bit on in there. The belgians were out, you know there. He said that they were looking for papers and asking for and then they started asking for money. He said then, excited, really have any money to give them? He said I went and said I needed a p, I need to get a, what I need it and personally pain, I went to trying to get away from them in a way. He said it was there, it was. He said it was. It wasn't really aggressive but it was just boisterous. He said they were there for trying to. You know your westerners. He said I've stood at this. He says there's a wire mesh fence. He said I stood against the wire mesh fence and I looked through the fence. He said I can see. He said that's what he was. He said there were three brits had gone missing. The embassy said there were three bits gone missing. Uh, three journalists. We've not heard back from them, we don't know what's happened to them. And when he went to the fence there he saw through the fence full of riddled with bullet holes, with the jeep that the three brits had been in, and he was up on the other side of the fence where he was. He said he was completely riddled with bullets so he knew he was in trouble a little bit. He gets out of that situation and he gets through and he goes there and they let them go and that's another story they're able to call on story. So he gets into and he goes and spends the first few years with not a penny, no money. He wanted to go where wildlife wasn't.
Speaker 2:In the north of Namibia there's an area called Damaraland. It looks like Mars Miles If you go to Mars. It's red basalt rock. It just looks like a Martian landscape, beautiful, beautiful landscape. You've got a river, you know, you've got Savannah and stuff like that, and it's vast, probably the size of I would think, nearly the size of the uk damerlan. And there you've got the himba tribe, a nomadic tribe that live there the himba have been on tv most recently. So david attenborough, people like that we we've met and we slept with them kind of. When we've been out there. Gary's uh introduced us to people out there and we've slept in their not their huts if you like, but in their, on their ranches if you like.
Speaker 2:Wait down and met a guy. It was a belgian conservationist who worked for save the rhino and he set up save the rhino, so black rhino and white rhino, and it was one of the few places um that still had wild rhino that would roam in damerland was vast, a very rocky area, and he was responsible for lives in the middle of nowhere out in the middle of the wilds. You know, you look at places like. You know you talk. We talk about um how the wild west was. When we talked we talked about programs like um 1885, yeah, and that sort of thing. It was probably very much in light and civic like that where he was and he asked him. He said, got on with him. This guy never took any employees on but he got, took gary on.
Speaker 2:Gary wanted a job tracking rhino and working with, say, the rhino trust and he lived in a tent pretty much for two years on a little camp that he had in the middle there, miles from any any people, and he got to know the damara tribesmen who were trackers, who expert rhino trackers, and the damara lived there and lived with a damara for two or three years in the middle of damaraland um, going out every day, sometimes on a land rover, sometimes on foot, and they go out with the camp and they'd camp with wild lions coming around, you know, could come around the camp, or elephant, desert, elephant rhino and so on, and the idea was to track and to log all the rhino that were left, but very had to be very secretive because he couldn't let people know how many rhino were there, because you get poachers coming in from South Africa, you know, and they would shoot them.
Speaker 2:So he spent a few years in Damerland for free, no money, just enough for his food and that was it. But he learned all about places in Namibia that he said nobody else would go to because he did a lot of walking. So he's a walker, he would walk off for days and days and days on time on his own in the middle of this, this bush with a tent, with you know potentially. You know lions and stuff like that come around and that's how he started off and now he's lived there over 35 years and he runs his own safari company and he takes small groups of people out to the places that he learned of when he was a young man, that your average tour guide would never even know where it exists. So a tour guide, typically in Namibia, would take you out and tick the boxes you'll go to a tosher, you'll go and do this, you'll go and see the big five, or we'll try and see the lion, the leopard and so on, and they go around. They take that.
Speaker 2:Well, gary does, can do, gary does all that, but then he adds things in that you could never dream of. You know experiences there. That's where he is. He's ended up there for 35 years. Sousa joined him from Spain. Sousa's girlfriend came out a few years later when he established himself there. She then joined him for a while and then they became. They were together probably the last 30 years or so and she's also a guide in her own way. She's a very, very talented guide as well. She's very similar to him.
Speaker 1:How often do you see him now? Then you had a 15-year gap. He comes back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he turned up on my doorstep after 15 years. I had children. He'd not seen the kids. He'd not been seen. I got married. He never saw my wedding and I think he just got a little bit. I need to see my folks. You know, I don't know how long they'll ever. You know, my mum and dad are getting older. Maybe I should go and spend some time. He just knocked on my door one night, opened the door and there he was with his Safari. He didn't tell you he was coming back. He didn't tell us at all. No, 15 years it since. A couple of times.
Speaker 2:He's probably been over to the UK I think about five times in the last 30 years or so. Every few years he comes over when he couldn't afford to come over, surprising him. The last time I gave him the shock of his life. Yeah, yeah, tell us about that, tell us about that. Then He'd just come through lockdown. So he decided his dream was to set up. So I'm jumping all over the place here. Yeah, that's okay.
Speaker 2:He ends up buying a yacht. So he ends up he wants. He's got a. His girlfriend, susie, has got a house in Namibia and they shared a house in Windhoek in the capital small house that there was rent in there, for whatever reason. They decided that they were better off working together but not living together that sort of stuff. So they went their separate ways in a romantic way, but they stayed together as best friends from a work point of view, as sometimes it happens. So he goes, he decides he wants to do something. It was an opportunity. But you know what? I've always wanted to sail. I've always wanted to sail. I've always wanted to sail around the world.
Speaker 2:So he has this sort of midlife crisis. Probably I'm not sure how many years, maybe 10 years ago, maybe, maybe less than that, really he gets some money together and he does all his research. He particularly does research and everything to the point, to the end degree. He ends up researching a boat, a second hand, small 30 foot yacht, single mass yacht, able to be sailed single-handedly. So he's kitting out. He'd been and been in a yacht race from california to hawaii. So in california to hawaii every few years, a bit like an america's cup race. They do a yacht race from california to hawaii. So in california to hawaii every few years, a bit like an america's cup race. They do a yacht race, apparently from the america, from california to hawaii, for single sail, and it's sailing.
Speaker 2:This boat had done that sale. The owner decided that the boat was a bit old. Now there's no point in bringing it all the way back. I'll fly back. See, you can sell it for me in hawaii.
Speaker 2:Gary goes on the internet, sees his boat. It's a French boat, 20 years old. He decides he's going to Go and have a look at it. So he flies over to Hawaii. He oh, before he does that, by the way, he goes and does a quick course, a five day Day skipper course In South Africa, in Cape Town. So he goes off to Cape Town, does a five day Skipper course To become a Skipper course To get. So he ends up buying this boat and he meets a guy there who's a sailor in the marina and the guy talks about Namibia and he's telling him all about you've got to come over to Namibia. That could be a trip of a lifetime. You know, I'll show you places out there. He'll say you know, I'm doing safaris out there now for small groups of Italians and Spanish. They get chatting away.
Speaker 2:So I definitely said well, I'll tell you what. If I get the chance to come to, maybe I'll phone you up, go and do it, I'll teach you to sail. So he taught him to sail in the waters for three months around hawaii on his own, telling him how to read weather um which is important thing how to read the water, and so on. And eventually he phones me up and says right, I'm just letting you know, I'm gonna. I've got a new home, it's my house, it's 30 foot long and he's got a mast on it and I'm going to take it back to namibia.
Speaker 2:Where is it thinking? I was like in south africa, maybe in cape town is going to come up with the cape, so it's cold storm, you know something like that, or maybe forever. It says it's um, it's the other side of the world from namibia. The furthest point you could possibly be from namibia is hawaii. Yeah, I said you're kidding me. No, he says I'm going to give you this app to download on your phone. I said yeah, he said, and what it'll do is it'll tell you the weather for me and you'll be able to contact me on a sat phone. I'm not going to sat phone, he said, but I've paid 30 quid. He said, but this ability that you can text me 150 characters in a text no more than 150 characters. Through on my phone I could read it, but you'll be able to see the weather for me as I'm. I'm just telling me, so I said you're kidding me. Now you want me to do it I don't want the responsibility and this is what they think.
Speaker 2:So it ends up being. He set sail and he said it's the year of the el nino. Okay, and the el nino causes turbulent weather patterns that change, don't? They cross across the western, the northern hemisphere, if you like? In an El Nino year, I think in a La Nina year, causing it around the southern hemisphere, there was more hurricanes hit Hawaii and went across Hawaii than there'd been in the previous 30 years. In that year of El Nino that he was in, I think there was eight hurricanes. Consecutive hurricanes came across in that period, say July to September, or whatever they do, and he tried to get a window. He got a window but they were several miles, you know, 100 or so miles north of where he was.
Speaker 2:But the weather pattern caused a huge turban water in the south. So he set sail from the south in hawaii, from the wine islands. It set sail in two days. It'd be going two days. I noticed this. So he started telling me, said what you've got to look for, carl, is the weather patterns on these maps are there, come through. If it's yellow, that's 40, you know 40 knot winds, that's bad. If it's green, that's good. If it's blue, that's really light winds. If it's yellow, if it's orange, that's the threat to life. You know, in a boat I've got so right, okay, so straight away.
Speaker 2:I've been going two days and I see this huge storm, maybe north of Hawaii, wherever he was, but the whip and tail of it was creating winds that were yellow and orange exactly where he was headed into. And I'm going, I'm texting him saying I can see yellow and orange, 150 characters text. Then he comes back whereabouts, southwest. Then he goes no, no, you can't say southwest. What's the coordinate? I don't really know the coordinates, so I had to learn, as quick as he learned, the coordinates of weather patterns and how weather maps across and so on.
Speaker 2:He got hit by this weather storm and he was texting me and so I. The waves are coming in now and I'm getting messages off him. He had to get on the deck and he was telling me I'm going up on deck, I've tethered myself, but the mast I've got to pull the sail in. I've got to put a reef in the sail. When you put a reef in the sail, you reduce the size of the sail to stop the wind hitting. You might end up having the size of a sail of a handkerchief, but it's enough just to keep you moving in a direction, because you've got to try and keep the boat in a certain direction, so you're hitting the waves at a certain angle. They're not going to throw you over. And the lines had snagged and he had to get on top of the boat in a storm with 20-foot waves hitting him on his own. And he never came back to the telephone. I remember I'm trying to text him nothing here, nothing here, nothing.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking, oh jeez, then I get a text off him. I'm exhausted, I've not slept for two days. I'm being thrown around in a washing machine, I'm batting in the ashes. I'm going to go to sleep. If you don't air off me for the, don't worry, I'm having a sleep. And then a few hours later I'm again. Nothing. Again, nothing, again nothing. I'm looking at the weather and the weather's now going purple. So where he is, it's now not orange and red, it's now purple. That's 60-knot winds with gusts at 80. This is hurricane stuff. This is hurricane, yeah, and I'm panicking because I'm thinking I don't know what he's doing. It's his first trip, he's only Hawaii. A few days I think I had the phone number of the guy he had I think he'd given it the guy who trained him in Hawaii and I text him and I said look, you know, have you heard of him? He said I did hear of him. He said a couple of hours ago, I think he's, I think he'd be okay. I think he's just asleep. I'm tracking.
Speaker 1:I'm tracking the weather as well, where was he heading from?
Speaker 2:from Hawaii to where, so he's heading down to the, to the equator and then from the equator. So he's heading down towards a place called kiribati on the equator, which is in the middle of the pacific ocean. Okay, and this pacific ocean, it's probably about three or four weeks, five weeks, four weeks sailing if you've got good weather, uh, on your own then from there he would then take a bit of respite and his idea was then to go down to fees, south and southern hemisphere, down through Paso Banoato, and then Fiji, and then Fiji. He'd have to leave his boat because then the weather changes. So what he did? He ended up, I'm still sure I phoned the American Coast Guard, did you? And I said look, I'm panicking here and I've not heard anything off him from there. He said okay, we'll just see. We noticed the weather front in the Pacific there south of the White. Yeah, we're seeing that. Okay, just keep us informed. We'll keep an eye out if we hear anything there. But it's early days at the moment to be doing anything.
Speaker 2:And then, about an hour later, I get a text message off him. I'm just walking up.
Speaker 1:I slept through. The purple beer Went through off him.
Speaker 2:I've just woken up, slept through the purple beer, went through down to the south coast, tabawang, I think it's called. These are little tropical islands with nothing on them at all. The people on this Tabawang where he was, I think he said he was telling me that it's like something Captain Cook would have discovered. They're still sleeping in the beach. They've got straw huts. They live on coconuts and fish and water. That's all they've got. They don't have anything to grow. It's literally on fish, coconuts, and that was the diet. He just sat around loud and round a few of these sort of tribal people there and he loved that. He loved getting away. He didn't want the touristy thing in there and as he was coming in he he was sailing without a boom most of the way and he was texting me and said can you text and work out a jerry rig? I think they call it when you jerry rig, when you make something out of tins and cans and pots is it still on the 150 characters per text?
Speaker 2:yeah. So he's saying go on the internet, Carl, and see if you can jerry rig, Jerry Rigger boom. I said what does that mean, Jerry Rigger boom? He said it means how do I make a boom with the stuff that I've got on the boat out the junk and woods and stuff like that. Anyway, I couldn't find out how to do it and he managed to sail without a boom, just string it up without a boom, and he managed to limp in over the South Pacific. It was an aluminium boom, small boom, about three inches out, I mean. It snapped it off and he said I'm gonna try and find, see if we can get a bit of a tree trunk or something like that. And then this is how lucky he is on some of the things he looks. He gets told that once a month the boat comes across all the islands and it gives and it puts in supplies into kiribati, so like fresh fruit, um, maybe whatever it needs to do a bit of that, takes some rubbish away from the island. And it's once a month month. He said it was due in three days' time. They think they've got a welding kit on it. Are you kidding me? No, he said a pilot had got a welding kit on. The guy had got a weld because he used it for the boat so they might be able to weld the mast.
Speaker 2:This captain of the boat that came in was a welder as well, but he was an alcoholic, oh dear. And he said so I asked him to give me a couple of quid to do my welding up. He said, but it was like it was all like snot and bubble all around the weld. He said it was a complete alcoholic's welding. So anyway, he managed to weld it, he said, and that got him so far. He snapped again. He ended up buying a new one eventually, in Fiji, I think. But he got so far and eventually went out to Fiji, left the boat in Fiji.
Speaker 2:The hurricanes come through Fiji in the south in that time of the year so they had to bury it in a sand pit where you put the keel. You dig up a hole, you dig a big hole, they put the keel into the beach so it's anchored inside and they fill the sand around it. So if a hurricane comes through, if it's in the water it'll get smashed and lost. If it's on the beach he'll get hit by the weather but it'll stay there. Then you dig it out later. And that's what he did.
Speaker 2:And he went back to south, to namibia. He flew back to namibia from there so he could earn money again to make enough money to do the next leg. And he went back a year later, dug it out and the next it was still buried. In the event took him two years and he went over north of australia through the torres strait and ended up coming under Mauritius, north of Mauritius I think there's a couple of islands down there. They misstated that. He stayed there Then. From there he went on to Madagascar, down into South Africa.
Speaker 1:Richards Bay. Just rewind. How long was this boat buried in the beach? I'm worried about that. About a year, that's incredible.
Speaker 2:It's like they're sort of charging for it About a year. That's incredible. Well, it's like they sort of charge you for it. Yeah, they charge you for it, but it's called a sand anchor.
Speaker 1:I had this vision of the Lost Island and the boat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so that's okay, about a year he goes back, gets it out, gets it, you know, earn enough money to do his next leg and eventually he ends up going into South Africa. And then it took him probably six months to get around the Cape. And there was a guy in Richards Bay on the East Coast of South Africa who helped sailors on the internet and you could chat to him and he'd say, oh, I'm an expert, I'll tell you how to do this. He gave me some advice on how to get him across from Madagascar, sailing under Madagascar. He was sailing there about two or three weeks to go. So I'm always looking two or three weeks in advance of where his position is to see when he hits position. He's in position a. In three weeks he'll be in position b. What's the weather like in position b in three weeks time? Yeah, there was a storm coming up and I predicted that it would hit richards bay. Was also going to hit richards bay, let's say, on the tuesday. He was saying that with a set sail there I should be okay. I should be in for Monday if I can keep maintain six knots speed or something like that. And so he sets off. Does it to take the risk.
Speaker 2:The guy in front goes a different way, goes a longer route going. He goes further south and I'm watching and you can plot you can. There's a website, you can plot all the boats in the ocean. So I'm watching this other guy in front of him in a small yacht who's probably 100 miles in front of gary. He heads south and gary heads more straight across to richard's bay. So he's going. He's going to be like straight across to richard's dive south, which is a longer trip but takes him into the weather sooner. I don't know what happened to that guy because he got hit by that storm.
Speaker 2:Gary got into richard's bay within an hour or two of this storm coming through. He slowly thought he was very lucky. The storm came through and he said you can hear May Day calls going off on the radio, stuff like May Day, may Day stuff like that, people getting there and it had been three or four weeks. It was single handedly, without a stop, from Darwin across without stopping. And when you're sailing single handedly you sleep 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there. There's nobody. You know you've got a bit of normal sort of pilot that you can use, so he sails it into Richards Bay exhausted collapses in Richards Bay, basically, and this storm comes through and then he takes it out in Richards Bay. So he's got the weather, the season, the weather. It's storm after storm after storm after storm, storm after storm and it takes him six months to sail around to Namibia, comes into Namibia, the world goes into lockdown and he's two years and they have no injections, they have no vaccine. In Namibia. Everybody else gets the vaccine, namibia don't get it. Very, very strict curfews on the streets.
Speaker 2:Going back to your original question is how did you meet him? I thought I'll fly out. He's had the horrendous two years on his own. He's anchored up there on this small bay on his own and lovely little place, by the way, walvis Bay. I decide to fly out and surprise him. So I spoke to Susan.
Speaker 2:Things were getting some normality getting back to Namibia at this stage. So people were getting back out, tourists were starting to come back in, the world was out of lockdown, but it was very, very, very slow. So I just surprised him. I took a wig, blonde wig, blonde wig put my mask on so he was still wearing a good wig you still had to wear in certain restaurants when you were and he still had to wear a face mask. Yeah, so I put my face mask on, a pair of glasses and a wig and they had a safari shirt on, like a local and suza picked me up from the airport and we drove over to welbis bay and she said they'd planned to go.
Speaker 2:Gary and suza another girl had planned to go for a long weekend further up into the nabby desert, just for a weekend break, just to see the sand dunes and the desert and the wildlife and there's going to take some tents and just do some wild camping and then to get a break from it all. So the three of them had not been together for a while. So I jumped in her car and she met him at the bar. We planned it all and I just came up as a waiter, got the waiter's tray a couple of pints of beer and I just tapped him on the shoulder. I said is there a beer here for you, sir, or something like that? There's, or something like that. And he looked at them and he's like I don't know anybody, it's me. I don't know anybody, it's me. He looks like I didn't even know until I took my wig off who I was. That was.
Speaker 1:You were well and truly got him back then.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, but I tell you what this is the sort of thing. So I've just found a. So imagine this, michael. So this is Dameron, this is 1992. Okay, so I'll read this to you. So this is so. He's in Bushmanland in Namibia in 1992. So this is how he starts to write. This is to my mum. So again 1992, no more iPhones, no. And every few months my mum was waiting for a letter off him. This letter alone is 52 pages long. 52? 52 pages long. 52? 52 pages long. He wrote this over a period of months, so he would start writing a letter over months and send it on the dead thin airmail paper.
Speaker 2:I rose before the sun did, to the sound of hippos bellowing in the soft early morning twilight of the Okavango. They lay there floating idly, a dozen or so of them bobbing gently up and down in the water, twitching their ears and snorting loudly. I sat watching them from the riverbank and, as the last malingering shadows of night sunk silently away, I waited for the sun to rise. This was in Equatorial Guineainea. Stop your fornicating. A woman shouted at me as I entered a crowded taxi in the town of port harcourt in southern nigeria. I was about to answer. A chance to be a fine thing when I realized that you're just another one of those gospel preachers that you find trying to save the world from the backseat of a Combi van taxi as their fellow passengers are desperately praying that the bloody loony will get off at the next stop and leave them all in peace. The judge turned on a collective taxi. Then goes Nigeria. I've always enjoyed myself in Nigeria. This last time was no exception, so I'll tell you more about it before I go on to tell you about Equatorial Guinea and how I came to be where I am at the moment, sitting alone on a tiny deserted tropical island in the sun on para island.
Speaker 2:So he's now going to talk about para island and where he is and how he got to para island. About this is 52, another one. This is no less than 52. It's quite gifted the way. It's not just like I am on. This is what I'm doing. That it really puts a lot, and when you put this, people talk about yes, gary, you should.
Speaker 2:These are private, these are letters that he's put for me. But when he came home one year, I said to him last year it was I said do you realise that mum's kept every single letter you've ever sent her from the day he left home when he was 21 years old. He said that's it. I said yeah. I said, gary, I've read some of them. She's got him in a suitcase upstairs. I've read some of them and I'm not, you know, but they're fantastic. They're just so descriptive of you. It's always, I bet.
Speaker 2:I can't remember half the stuff. So we sat there looking at these letters and we scanned them and we put them all, and scan them all into a folder for him to write a book, because he needs to write a book, because he's done so. This is just. This is one that he wrote and I'll find it here. So this is 1997, january the 7th, in windhoek in africa, in namibia.
Speaker 2:What he calls a lion's story. This is 24 pages long. This is part one. There's two pages to it. He was nearly killed.
Speaker 2:So remember when he talks about used to walk a lot in the desert yeah, on his own, and he'd go out for for weeks and weeks on his own and miles not see his soul. For you know, this is this is one of those trips that he went walking. So he got a name of the himba called ungari katuki. So ungari katuki is a name the himba gave him, as the man of the himba called ungari katuki. So ungari katuki is a name the himba gave him, as the man of the mountains. It means something like so they used to. They knew him as the guys have a backpack on and when he went, when I was with him, just could diversify it.
Speaker 2:When we went and took the kids out with us my kids were six and eight and jackie and me went out to see him and we took it. He took us to damaraland and we met tribal himba in mil of nowhere, you know. So we were driving, we did somewhere to camp and we saw the himba and probably like mudhooks and that sort of thing. Yeah, and he says we'll go and camp over here and I'm going. Well, why are we camping over here? Because we've just passed a small on another van. We drove for 11 hours and not seen a soul of a car or anything. Ostrich giraffe, we'd seen everything, not, not a single person. This is why Newbury is so beautiful. There was a Jeep Land Rover Jeep parked up on the side of a river a small river, and it had a little camp sign. It was like a little official camp sign and all that was a small toilet block. That was it. We'll camp here for the night.
Speaker 2:And he refused to camp to get us away from it. So I was a bit niffed because I thought we've not seen him in 11 years. He would now be just a chap to somebody. But he sees his himba about half an hour later in the middle of nowhere, goes to speak to them. We stand there and they come up to the door. This tribal guy comes at the door, nothing on, stark naked. He then starts rabbiting on in himba. He's a brother and he's going blah, blah, blah. And I go how is he speaking in Himba? I love the language, yeah. And then he goes and then he says, he points to his chest and says and this woman turns around, this guy turns around, oh, and he started and starts back slapping him and all that I said. Do they know? He said no, but they know of me. They know my stories. The he said no, but they know of me. They know my stories. The Himba share my stories of what I've found. For the Himba I thought Jesus, this is the lad from who used to go to Berry Market with me when we were five and seven years old, having adventures on the market stall, and this is a Himba that he'd never met before, knew of his background, called him Ngariketoki. This is 2797. It's got the lines wrong.
Speaker 2:On a dark desert night in northern Damaralan, I lay stone, still hardly daring even to breathe, before slowly inching my hand up to my head to feel my scalp. At least it wasn't bleeding. So they were still up. Yet the claws must have been retracted when the lion hit me Violently, woken from a deep and peaceful sleep just as I was nearing the end of a particularly nice dream, with my head still reeling from the blow, it took me a second or two to realise that I'd just been slapped by a lion and not Sharon Stone. So I lay there trying to recollect my senses. Lions weren't supposed to attack people in tents. I knew that much. And I also knew that I'd just met the exception that proved the rule, or should I say exceptions, because there were three of them.
Speaker 2:The next few moments were the worst, as the core reality of what was happening and what might be about to happen sank in. As I lay there, my heart thumping but for how much longer, listening to the sound of death as it prowled around and around the tent, dislodging pebbles that lay only inches from my head. If there was to be a serious attack, there was little I could do except for singing. Always, look on the bright side of the life. You do, you do. I groped for my torch, found it and shun it around inside my tent, which seemed extremely small and flimsy, and I yelled out at the same time. Suddenly all the prowling stopped and there was talking silence while the lions contemplated what best to do next. I was sure they could make my heart beating and I asked myself if I'd done the right thing by shining the torch and yelling. Now they definitely knew there was something living inside the tent.
Speaker 2:This isn't a big taken and it was now too late to change it. It was there to decide what to do. That goes on. That is another 24 page letter. That's part one. This is how.
Speaker 2:This is his story's right. This is a true story. This is him when he was there. So he's in his tent at night and he's always said and always, and the rule has always been his lions never attack tents, never attack anybody inside a tent as long as he zips up in a little two-man tent, and he's done it all his life. Lions, if they come through, and maybe as wild lions, desert lions, they will not attack somebody in a tent.
Speaker 2:And he taught you.
Speaker 2:He used to tell stories about what to do if you ever confront a lion.
Speaker 2:You know, do not run from a lion. If you run from a lion you're prey. So you stand your ground, make a noise, maybe make yourself bigger, open your arms out, something like that, but do not run. He says you might make it, might look at you funny and think you know you're not really food because you don't look like food, because you're not running away. Food runs away from me. So I'm not sure about you and it might, might be. He's told my kids. It's fascinating when he tells you that story himself in real life, because it goes on for days. They track him and he's in the middle of nowhere and he has to carry on. He has to make a decision to get up in the morning and pack his tent up and he thinks he's lost them and they've gone the wrong way. And then a couple of days later he's at a waterhole looking at elephants at a water, tracked him to the water and how he escaped. Yeah, so this is the sort of character he is really no More interesting than I am.
Speaker 1:I've thoroughly enjoyed talking to you about Gary today. He's still guiding now, isn't he? He's still actively. Yeah, that's his job, it's his full-time job.
Speaker 2:yeah, so he still lives on his boat. He's still in the intensive dealing with small groups three, four people, five people tops.
Speaker 1:I mean you spoke to me before about doing this because he's yeah, he's an expertise in knowledge and the letters we get.
Speaker 2:My mum gets letters or he or safari cup, so he'll do some freelance work. So you might say I want a trip in to go to namibia and you'll contact a tour company and they'll say, yeah, we'll get you a guide, we'll do it. So they design the, the itinerary and then they get employee Gary to to guide the people. That's one way he works. He prefers to do it himself, where he does the itinerary himself, because, he said, he knows more than any tour company because he's lived it there, where these lot of people haven't. They're just travel agents and they just tick the boxes oh, you need to go here, here, here, here, that's it.
Speaker 2:He'll take you there, but he'll take you to do other things that you don't do, so he likes to do it himself. So he tends to be his market. His French, spanish and Italian are his three markets. He said the Brits haven't really discovered them yet, planet Earth have. So you know, attenborough and all that was same place that we took the kids and camped in the same riverbed where the giraffes were fighting on planet earth and they saw that scene. We camped at exactly the spot 10, 15 years before planet earth was even there. Took us those places you can book him online.
Speaker 1:I've seen him on youtube. He's on youtube talking about deserts and all sorts of stuff. I've seen those in the past and he definitely need to put those I don't know letters to home. I don't know. You need to get those letters you need. I don't know. You need to get those letters.
Speaker 2:You need to do a book. It's got to be his pension. You need to get those letters. It's got to be his pension, yeah definitely, the stories are all there.
Speaker 2:One of the quick stories for you. So he'd been out one of these walks where he'd gone out for weeks at a time Comes back to the Windhoek and and he goes there and the people in the bar say, oh Gary, there's a guy who's been looking for you French guy, he's a film director. So he says what do you mean looking for me? He said where have you been? He said we're trying to get hold of you. Nobody knows where you've been. He said, yeah, I've been out after Gary found this out Himalaya. What he does is he goes out to places that have unbelievable scenery in the world, makes a film using the scenery but using indigenous people as actors. So he doesn't use famous people or actors, he uses the indigenous population to make a story around them and use it there. So he'd done this one called Himalaya, been on the French Cannes Film Festival and he won an award for that, eric Vallée, very famous in France. Apparently he wanted to do a film in Namibia. So he wanted to do a film and he wanted to talk to you. He'd heard of people that you were the person in Namibia who can take him to places that nobody else can take him to to see some of the most fantastic scenery you've ever seen in your life miles and he's been trying to track you down so he can get your story. And we've been telling about your stories, about the lion story and the okavango and how you're navigating it and all that sort of so right, okay, the gary ends up having a meeting with him. They have a few beers together, at least a few meetings with him. I'd start telling him the stories about berry growing up in berkeley, talking about how he uh, you know the school life and what he was like at school and so on. And Eric Valli was fascinated. He said it's just what I need. And Eric Valli says I want you to be in the film. Would you be in the film? I'll make the film about you and your stories. It's perfect, it's what I'm looking for. He said I want to do a film about, I think, gary. Gary was, gary was always being very camera shy, don't like cameras, don't like. But I think he agreed to do it. He said, right, I'm gonna go away. Uh, I've got to, um, start to write the storyboard up. I've got to write the, the script up and the play and everything. How we're going to do it, we're going to do it, we're going to use the scenes, we're going to use them in stories. He's like, okay, fine, he came back several months later Gary was again not around. People were trying to track him down. Say, where have you been? He says oh, he says they've got, they've been filming. He said I thought they were filming with me. He said I thought they wanted me to be the money, some sort of actor who was well-known at the time, to be in it, and it was a sponsorship money depending on them getting an actor. So he had to recruit an actor and you know, you'll know a guy who just passed away recently. I'd say Julian Sands. Yes, I do. Yes, julian Sands was in the Onion Fields and Julian S his name is Gary in the film. Oh, cool.
Speaker 2:So Eric Vallée made a film called La Piste. La Piste means the trail in French. It was filmed in French, so it was done in French and it was dubbed in English and it was about this guy goes on a discovery in Damerlan walking, trekking, desert elephants, desert rhino Exactly what you told us A Humber girl, and this Humber girl says that her father's been taken by poachers. This Humber girl and Gary go on a trek across the desert and through the wild, through these scenes, to try and find where her father's been taken by. And that's the base of the called the trail Lepiste. And he's called Gary and he said I'm gutted because I never got to be in my film. I never got to be in my film about me, never got to be in my film about me. You're not going to be in the film, are you? But all anecdotes and all the stories I gave Eric Vallée are in the film. He said that's more pissed me off more than anything.
Speaker 1:Maybe the BBC or Channel 4 or somebody will, somebody one?
Speaker 2:day yeah, pay him a lot of money.
Speaker 1:I think what he used to do is if he writes his book, if from those letters that you've read, he can clearly write a book, so you've just got to put all those letters together and just put it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and make himself a wealthy man. But it just I don't know why he won't do it there.
Speaker 1:No, he needs to do it. Tell him. Tell him he needs to do it. Gary, if you're listening, you need to write that book, right Garth? Thank Cheers Wales, right Cheers, boy, cheers, pal Cheers. Thank you.
