What It’s Like When GPS Fails in the Middle of Mongolia

Look at that fucking monster. We were just the bottom of the food chain, weren't we? Oh yeah. As soon as we invented the fire, wasn't it? As soon as we discovered the fire, boom. Change from there. Control of fire probably helped. Weapons, flints. Yeah, that's it. I wonder what came first. We were just after scraps, weren't we? Leftovers from lions. Do you feel when you're doing these treks and you're going on these journeys and you're walking through places like Mongolia that are incredibly wild, do you try to envision what it must have been like to be an early person without all these amazing resources that you have at your disposal to help you get to this area that you're going to? That's it, yeah. Oh, it would be a whole different kit and everything. So in Mongolia, didn't they actually even use that GPS because that failed me? Oh really? Yeah, all communities were in different places. It just didn't work. I went back to Bogstan, this map and compass. Can you imagine even before then as well? Map and compass? Yeah. So a fold up map? Yeah, fold up map. Yeah. Google Earth? No, no, no, no. Again, Bogstan did low budget journey that the Mongolia one was. So if you lost your map, you'd be fucked. Yeah, that, but also the track that I was on, as I said, you could be following goat track or camel track and that is your lifeline. That leads you to the next water source. So if you're in a desert storm, for example, it'd make more sense to try to... Keep going. Well, no, just try to camp down, hide under your shelter if you lose sight of the track but if you don't, you can keep going. Yeah. So if you did do that... That's why I didn't walk at night as well. A lot of people say, well, it's hot during the day and you're suffering with dehydration. Why didn't you walk at nighttime? And you've got the ammo pit vipers, snakes. You stand on the back end of them because you don't see it. You're pretty screwed, but you've also got the tracks. You need to be able to see in the distance the tracks splitting off because you'll come across almost like a junction of four to five different tracks that are splitting off. That's when you need your map and compass to be like, which one, which track should I go down? You know? Terrifying. Oh my God. I can't even imagine. And you can't communicate if you come across... If you're lucky to come across locals as well, they'll just point you in the wrong direction. They'll normally point you in their community, which stands south, up north, and you're trying to go east. They try and say, no, I want to go that way. No, no, no. Next community is this way. So I don't want the next community. I want to walk to the most eastern, you know? So it gets difficult. But yeah, that was always a threat. The dehydration in Mongolia really terrified me. Now what happens if a stand storm covers the track up? Yeah, back to your map and compass and just hoping that you can be aware of the people around you, hoping you've got enough water, hoping you make it to another community or settlement. Whereas the jungle, harsh environment, spiders-wise, snake-wise, et cetera. But same time, you've always got water. You can hack in the bamboo and it just leaks out water, you know? You've always got food. Does anybody know where you are? Yeah, I had a tracking device, especially for Mission Yanksie because it was Guinness World Record. We set off a tracker and every five minutes it'd come up with my speed. So even if I jumped in a car or on a bicycle, boom, every five minutes, it's my speed, it's my altitude, my longitude, latitude, coordinates, distance covered, whether I'm active and you'll zoom in and you can see my current location within five metres. And that was part of the interactivity. So I wanted to make this expedition as interactive as possible for the full year of like, sharing, blogs, videos, live streams, photos, getting people to join, again, presenting in schools, getting the kids out litter picking along the Yanksie River, doing the filming for the documentary, which was securing international documentary, the Mission Yanksie will go out as. So that's exciting. So all of this was very, very well planned. In terms of the interactivity, it's like six months of survival, six months of interacting with all the locals and just sharing it, getting out there as best as we possibly could. So I was heavily on the radar with GPS systems, the trackers, the lock.