Tales from the first tee
Stories about my life experiences and others as I work at one of the premier golf clubs in Charleston, SC. Interviews with golfers around the world that have one thing in common...the pursuit of excellence on a golf course and everything else that happens along the way.
Tales from the first tee
From Boarding School to Everest: Harry Farthing's Extraordinary Journey
Harry Farthing, author of two novels Summit and Ghost Moths, shares his extraordinary life journey from motorcycle enthusiast to high-altitude mountaineer to writer. His experiences—from boarding school at age eight to climbing Mount Everest and riding motorcycles across continents—have shaped his descriptive storytelling style that brings readers into vivid worlds informed by his adventures.
• Sent to boarding school at age eight where he developed independence and discovered National Geographic magazines
• Father's Brough Superior motorcycle (same brand owned by Lawrence of Arabia) inspired his love for motorcycles
• First major adventure at 18—a three-month solo motorcycle journey through Spain, Portugal, Morocco, and Italy
• Lived in Italy and developed passion for mountaineering through a language exchange with an Italian climbing instructor
• Climbed many peaks including Denali and Mount Everest, drawn by both the physical challenge and historical significance
• Rode his motorcycle from Charleston across North America to Alaska, exploring the furthest reaches of the continent
• Novels draw from his experiences but are fictionalized to create more compelling storytelling
• Currently researching a non-fiction book about Lawrence of Arabia's later years
• Connects his family history to mountaineering—a distant ancestor photographed early British Everest expeditions
• Balanced adventure pursuits with family life throughout his career
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You're listening to an episode of Tales from the First Tee. I'm your host, rich Easton, telling tales from beautiful Charleston, south Carolina. In this episode I veer off the path of golf. I've done a few interviews in the past where my co-hosts are not golfers. We might touch on golf, they might have some experience either with it or with me as I play and talk about golf. But this interview is a right-hand turn. It's a departure from golf. I think I make one reference to golf in it, but the person I'm speaking to, my co-host, harry Farthing, really didn't talk about golf. Matter of fact, he didn't.
Speaker 1:Harry Farthing is an author of two novels Summit and Ghost Moths. Harry is a smart descriptive writer. He colors the settings and action with such referential detail that you can't imagine not living in the characters' high-top Solomons, and they come at the tail end of some of his extraordinary life experiences. At eight years old, living in England, he's sent to a boarding school and from there, at eight, he starts to learn his independence. His father used to ride really cool motorcycles. One of his bikes, his prized possession, was a Brough Superior made in the Brough Superior Works in Nottingham, england. George Brough only manufactured 3,048 Brough Superior bikes over 21 years. This was like the Rolls Royce of motorcycles handmade, and you had to pick them up at the Brough Superior Works. Imagine the day in your life when you get to travel to Nottingham and then go to the Brough Superior Works warehouse and pick up your bike and ride away. That must have been awesome way. That must have been awesome. And, as you'll learn from Harry, the Lawrence of Arabia actually had eight Brough motorcycles, eight Brough superiors. He died on the seventh one. The eighth one was on order when he died.
Speaker 1:So Harry kept pushing his dad and pushing his dad to get a bike. And his dad got him a bike to kind of ride off-road and then he started riding. At first it was the hills of the western part of England, kind of like what I would think it's like riding up outside of Milwaukee, and so not a lot of traffic, and so you could really let it go and see what the bike can do. You also get to see and smell the countryside. So Harry gets this thirst for adventurism and it starts with motorcycles. But it doesn't end there. He ends up in places where he is fascinated with elevation and climbing mountains. So he meets some people, they help him, he helps them.
Speaker 1:Next thing you know he's a high elevation mountaineer Mount Everest and other peaks that are as daunting, maybe not as famous, but certainly high elevation that require a lot of fitness and stamina and know-how. He rode. He got to the United States when he moved here with his wife Farrah, and before they get settled he decides he wants to see the USA and the countryside. So he gets in his BMW motorcycle, rides across country, rides up to Canada, rides up into Alaska as far as he could possibly go in Alaska, occasionally dipping his boot in the Arctic Ocean. And so he's doing this because in his blood he's an adventurer and he's going to do all of these things.
Speaker 1:And then, a few years back, he decides to write his first novel. Now he says it's called Summit and climbing a mountain is arduous and hard and difficult. And just writing about your experience, he said, other than the expected fatigue, physical exhaustion or the effects of oxygen deprivation, most of Harry's climbs went without disaster or despair. It might be a boring read, so instead what he does is he uses his experience and the people he meets and he creates a fictional novel of people climbing Mount Everest, climbing to the peak, and the experiences they have. And you know some of those experiences are his experiences.
Speaker 1:And then you know, being up in Nepal and Tibet, he has this interest. He's a historian, he has this interest about the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, and who knew there were two lamas? There were two lamas and he does his research. And he also has a sensitivity to the interactions with the mainland of China and Tibet and Nepal and what's happening there politically. He's sensitive to it because he's experienced it, he's seen it. And for those history buffs or people that, like geopolitics man, you got to be sleeping with one eye open, china, they're just not going away.
Speaker 1:And despite what you read about China's biggest real estate company, evergrande, what you read about China's biggest real estate company Evergrande possibly collapsing because they're overextended and overbuilt, it's not time to dismiss China as a growing power. They'll figure it out. Yeah, so back to Harry, schooled in England, motorcycle enthusiast, high mountain climber, author of two books, father of two pre-teenage girls Guy's interesting. So I thought I'd talk to him and he was kind enough to sit down and talk to me for probably more time than I deserved. So, without further ado, here's my friend Harry. So, without further ado, here's my friend Harry. So you've had these life experiences and something propels you to put it down on paper.
Speaker 2:Did somebody suggest to you, you know you ought to write that down and write a novel. No, no it's. I put it down on paper. But I do it indirectly, in the sense that in all the trips I've ever done I've always journaled, I've always taken notes, I've always recorded where I've been, just for my own personal posterity. When I was doing the Alaska trip I was completely asked an aside to it. I've always been a voracious reader. I've always read, going back to that 8 year old kid. I've always had a book on the go. I love books. I'm always buying books, I'm always reading. I like history, I like geography, I like the history of exploration, adventure. I also just like a really good story. You know, a lot of my reading in the 70s was, you know, early Clive Cussler stories, frederick Forsyth, john le Carré, spy stories. You know long before.
Speaker 1:There's always a protagonist in every one of those.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know and just great writing and I just enjoyed those books and again in the back of my mind has always been I wanted to write a book like that. I wanted to be In the National Geographics. In the 1970s Rolex used to run advertisements and they used to run advertisements and they would show who is it Reynold Messner, who's probably the greatest, one of the greatest mountaineers of all time, from the Italian but from the Tyrol comes across more as a kind of Austrian. He would be there Rolex first person to summit Everest without using bottled oxygen. One of the other advertisements of that time was Frederick Forsyth. He would turn up with a gold Rolex and it was presented almost that as much as Messner was an adventurer on Everest like Forsyth's mind, he was an adventurer Everest like Forsyth's mind, he was an adventurer and had that kind of Rolex brand and to me he was a bit of a hero from those National Geographic. So there was always a little bit in me that kind of wanted to emulate that when I did the trip to Alaska. It's 8,500 miles, that's how big this country you know. It's basically to go from Charleston diagonally across North America to get to Fairbanks in the center is about seven and a half thousand miles. So you've got a lot of time to think.
Speaker 2:And I was, I'd had a real estate career, I'd moved to think. And I was, I'd had a real estate career, I'd moved to America. I was kind of semi retired but not. And I was like, well, what do I do? And I thought, well, you should sit down when you get back from this. Sit down, you should write, you should write. And I thought, well, I've had some interesting experiences. But in my climbing I was always quite a considered prudent climber. I never got into a kind of disaster scenario that there I was with a broken leg for 48 hours on a ledge, you know. And I and I thought I don't have that sort of story in my own experience, and you know I'm not all the great firsts of climbing were ticked boxes. Most of them were ticked a long time ago.
Speaker 1:Right. So you're thinking your particular experience isn't much to talk about, but there are other experiences.
Speaker 2:So I just thought well, actually, why don't you just take what you know and take what inspires you, like Le Carre and Forsyth, and just try and write a kind of adventure story and combine the things together? Because, you could color it.
Speaker 1:You could tell a story and color it with the colors of life and experience that you've had on the mountain with different characters. That was exactly it.
Speaker 2:Right and then tell that story.
Speaker 2:And when you'd be in a base camp too, it was quite funny. You know people would pass around books and you know a lot of the books were. You know people would be reading Harry Potter and things like that. Quite thick books, just because you can't take many. So you just take one or two and you just want kind of easy reading. Take one or two and you just want kind of easy reading. So with summit I just really just wanted to just create quite a thick, chunky novel that someone could sit in a base camp and say, hey, that was a good story and it kind of rings true and the guy knows his history and that was really. That was the design brief and and I wrote it and I went out to agents, publishers. No one wanted to know. I mean, no one wanted to know. And I thought, well, I'll be damned, I don't care, I can just self-publish it. So I'll self-publish it, I'll print 200 copies. I'll give one to my wife, one to my mother.
Speaker 1:They'll all say you know great, don't give up your day job. You know, because we've talked about commercialization of books before. You are not doing this to have the ultimate commercial success. That's nice, but that's not what drives you. What drives you is the fact that you have a combination of experience and you have imagination. It's that process where you get satisfaction. Totally Right.
Speaker 1:Man that was like taking a shot in the dark when I said that to Harry. I mean, what if he turned around and said, yeah, no, it's none of that, I'm trying to make money out of doing this man? The interview would have taken an entirely different turn.
Speaker 2:I mean totally, I mean it is. I mean writing books like Mountain Climbing is just beautiful when it's done. It's pretty painful, it goes on forever when you're doing it, but once it's done, yeah, it's pretty good. And, like Mountain Climbing, you forget the pain and immediately start thinking about the next one, which?
Speaker 1:is the next book. So then, what gives you the inspiration for Ghost Moths?
Speaker 2:Ghost Moths. I just wanted to take some of the characters I had in Summit and I just really wanted to explore the Tibet story In Summit. What I did was I took Mount Everest. I took my knowledge of the history, my knowledge of what it's like to climb it now and then wrote a kind of adventure mystery story, but really very much focused on Mount Everest. What I wanted to do with the Ghost Moths was slightly different, in that I wanted to focus less. There is, there are mountains, specific mountains in it that are key to the story, but I really wanted to focus on Tibet. The reason I wanted to do that was I felt that Tibet was, you know, high profile in the 90s. It was adopted by by Hollywood, the Richard Gere's, this World, but recently now, because of Chinese economic and political force, tibet and the Dalai Lama as a subject has been totally marginalized.
Speaker 1:Like I said, one eye open, you just can't ignore China.
Speaker 2:You know, most politicians won't even meet the Dalai Lama now because the knock-on of the disapproval they would get from Chinese interests etc.
Speaker 2:And for better or for worse with the Ghost Moths. I really just wanted to just take the situation and just create a story but also analyze the current reality. The current games in inverted commas that will be played related to the succession of the Dalai Lama, which I anticipate will happen again sooner or later, and hopefully when the story that like summit, as I said is it was very much a novel that I hope people would put down and say, hey, that was a great story and wow, I didn't know that about Everest and I kind of really learned something about high-altitude climbing With the Ghost Mods. I hope it's the same, which is that people say, hey, that was a good story, but I didn't really understand the Dalai Lama, the relationship between the dalai lama and the panchen lama. You know there's a power play there that that has always kind of managed tibet and is now being managed again by the interests that control tibet, and so I really wanted to explore that.
Speaker 2:I kind of that's kind of done now, and now for my next book I'm going up a completely different avenue, but again something that actually I've been thinking about a lot because I've just been back to england and was doing some research into it. But actually, as someone said to me, your next book it's just obvious. You know it know it's history, it is geopolitics and there's some really beautiful old motorcycles involved in it and it's the story of arms of Arabia. It's kind of inevitable really. I would end up.
Speaker 1:Wait, how do motorcycles end up in Lawrence of Arabia?
Speaker 2:Lawrence of Arabia.
Speaker 1:he died on a rough superior Because I think of horses, yeah, and when I say horses, I mean camels, when I think of Lawrence of Arabia, he in his latter years after the Arabian days.
Speaker 2:he had seven rough superiors and they were the Rolls Royce of motorcycles in the 1930s. He was probably one of the most famous gentleman motorcyclists of the 1930s and ultimately he died on one. He was killed on a motorcycle and one of the things I was reading about this is one of the surgeons that tried to save him a neurosurgeon surgeons that tried to save him. A neurosurgeon, a guy called Cairns, was so taken by the head wounds that he suffered that he then wrote a paper which went to the British Ministry of Defence that insisted that all dispatch riders from now on should wear motorcycle helmets, and then that actually passed into British law when everyone had to wear motorcycle helmets. And that progression the original paper written about the necessity for the motorcycle came out of the crash of Lawrence Arabia. And it's just everywhere I turn with Lawrence Arabia. There's little stories that I'm finding and details are just incredible, fascinating character.
Speaker 1:So is it going to be fiction with a lot of historical fact in it?
Speaker 2:Well, that's where I think I've kind of pivoted. Originally it was exactly that I wanted to write fiction. I wanted to write a fictional retelling of his last years to a lot of people, the kind of unknown years, the beyond Arabia years. But it's absolutely clear to me that his legacy is so strong that you just can't. So non-fiction, it's non-fiction and one of the interests that I basically I think I'm just going to write a non-fiction book and it's going to be called Looking for Lawrence and in it I've always been fascinated by this character.
Speaker 2:My father met him. My father again. This goes right back to really early childhood stuff. My father, I'm a product of a second marriage. My father was much older than my mother and, as I mentioned early on, you know great motorcyclist car man and he's the son of a very wealthy Dorset farmer from the West Country of England. And when he was in his I think even still in his teens he bought a Brough Superior motorcycle. And in those days in this must be late 20s, early 30s when you bought your motorcycle you bought it direct from the factory. It was effectively handmade for you. They didn't have dealers that you would go to and so you would go to the motorcycle to collect it from the factory and either george brush brough himself or a guy called ike webb and one other guy would kind of come out and shake your hand and give you the motorcycle. I mean, it was extremely really personalized.
Speaker 1:That's the experience is getting it is is. It's a big part of the experience.
Speaker 2:And then riding it and yeah, a a rough superior in those days was more than a year's salary, average salary in England. You know they were only the kind of well-heeled people that had that kind of, because these were the days really before disposable income. You were either rich or you didn't have disposable income or you were hand-to-mouth right.
Speaker 1:You know you were hand-to-mouth. You know you hand to mouth Right.
Speaker 2:And my father was lucky to be in the category where he came from a very wealthy background, so if he wanted it, he could have it.
Speaker 2:So he went to the factory, he went to the factory and as he went to get his brough, another one was leaving and when he went in, the workshop manager said oh, you just missed him. That was Lawrence Arabia collecting one of his bikes. And then, a few years later, and because at the end of his life, lawrence Rabin lived in Dorset, very near to where my father was a farmer, he did actually meet him when he was filling up one of his motorcycles with gas and my father but actually was in a car. But they actually did speak that time and talked about the motorcycle, my dad. I was always asking him to tell me this story because, I mean, he really was Lawrence of Arabia. In England, of the 20th century icons, he's up there with, you know, winston Churchill and Princess Diana. You know he's one of those characters.
Speaker 1:That was just massive and did your dad say he was approachable?
Speaker 2:Entirely on the subject of the motorcycle.
Speaker 1:He was an utter enthusiast and so so they had that in common and so that's just talked about it, and you know.
Speaker 2:Then he paid his gas and went on his way. Yeah, he said he was perfectly charming. And so I um, I've always had that and I've, I've read, you know, and I've always kind of been interested in Lawrence Rave again, for that kind of that seed that was sown. And I've, in and out, I've gone through periods where I've read, read a lot, and I put it all away and now I just think it's time to just pull it all out and just, you know, I've written two fictional books. I'm satisfied with with what I did, what I created.
Speaker 2:As I think you correctly identify, success in writing is a plus, but if you go into it, you're probably going to be disappointed. If that's what motivates you, right, because particularly today, it's the 1% the John Grishams, the pattersons that are, you know, are really doing well at this and really pretty much everyone else. They're doing it because they love it. You may get a breakthrough and good luck to you if you do, but if you're doing it because you think you're going to, you know it's just like the music industry or whatever it is, and it's also just like the music industry a is your chance of becoming having a hit. It's difficult, but then now factor in the world we live in with streaming and you know both of my books. You could download the pdf from a russian website for free within 48 hours of final publication.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the model's changed.
Speaker 2:The model has completely changed.
Speaker 1:But I can see you're enthralled with the experience, just talking and looking at you, and you express this book you're going to write. How long is it going to take to write this book?
Speaker 2:You know, I almost don't even care. It's funny. The first one Summit, I wrote because I had a lot of pent-up energy and I wrote it actually for a long book. I wrote it quite quickly, I self-published it and then a couple of people in the industry came across it and said you should never have self-published this. It should be re-edited and properly published, which is what happened. Self-published this, it should be re-edited and properly published, which is what happened. So that was a process that in the end kind of ran over three or four years. Then Ghost Moths I'm on it was on a deal and it's like, okay, you need to write this and you need to get it done in a couple of years. And then the pressure's on. Now with this one I would like to say I'd get it done in 18 months, two years, but I just don't know and I've got. I have a model in my head what the book is to look like, what I want to try and do with it and specific kind of chapters looking at specific facets of his life.
Speaker 2:And I finally got back to England a few weeks ago. And I finally got back to England a few weeks ago and I went to Clouds Hill, the cottage where he ended his days, lawrence of Arabia, and I had a look at that. I went to the place where he crashed to the marker on the road. I went to Morton where he's buried and saw his grave and travelled those kind of roads I also went to. He was very good friends with thomas hardy. Thomas hardy kind of tested the doverville's really famous books like that, far from the madding crowd and he used to ride from clouds hill on the brussels period to a house called max gate which was the house of th Thomas Hardy. And so I went to Max Gate and did a tour of that just to kind of complete that kind of loop.
Speaker 1:Now, when you're doing that, do you already know? You have a thought that you're going to write this book? Yeah, and then. So now, as part of research and what you do, you just want to see certain things that are going to even inspire you more to ask the question totally inspires, sure, when you go to these places.
Speaker 2:Um, clouds hill is a tiny little cottage which he, when he came out of um the first world war. It was an american journalist that created the kind of myth of lawrence Arabia. He created originally a slideshow which was called I think it was something like With Alan B and Lawrence in Arabia, and he presented this character in his robes, which we all know from the David Lean film, and it struck a chord the British population. To them, most people, the First World War was about mud trenches, massacre, horrible, horrible recollection. And then suddenly they were being offered this story of this dry environment with this man in wonderful, flowing robes being a hero, instead of what they knew was, you know, the trenches, 70, 80, 000 people being machine gunned at the Somme in a single day. So they just ate this story up. So very quickly.
Speaker 2:Lowell pivoted the story and it became the Lawrence of Arabia story and he became this huge kind of figure in England, this kind of hero figure and under writing, which he he both loved and despised, they always describe Lawrence as he backed into the limelight. So the more he backed away, the way he did, it put him more in the limelight. So he said, oh, I hated it. But then he wrote seven pillars of wisdom, which is one of the great works of 20th century english literature, which then tells the complete kind of hero story progression to damascus. So he was kind of a very, very complex personality and I just, you know, that is the perception everyone has. And then his reaction to it was to basically he refused a knighthood from the king. He was the first British. Now it's quite fashionable thing to do.
Speaker 2:He was the first In the days of the British Empire you didn't look the king in the face and say actually, you and the French cut a side deal, carving up the Arabs. We completely betrayed them. You betrayed me because you sent me out there to motivate a revolt against the Turks, knowing all along they would never have their independence. By the way, I don't want your knighthood, which is what he said.
Speaker 2:He could have had any kind of job. I mean, he was a close personal friend of Winston Churchill. He worked with Winston Churchill in various issues related to the Middle East, but as soon as they were done he withdrew from that and the political arc that Winston Churchill was on that would see him be prime minister in the Second World War. He stepped away from that and he signed up under assumed name in the RAF as a ranker, as the lowest possible person in the RAF. He did that for a while until the media found out that that's what he was doing and blew his cover and he had to leave because it was an embarrassment to the RAF. So then he went into the tank corps in the army, again under an assumed name as a private Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, and that was based in Dorset and that's where he got the cottage, because he used to. He would effectively be with these rankers, you knowers, doing the most menial of tasks, and yet on his time off he rented this cottage and he would go and read works of literature and would spend time with George Bernard Shaw and Hans Hardy and people like that.
Speaker 1:The people serving with him had to know, not who he was, but he was different they knew. Because he is who he is, absolutely Right, and so they had to know this guy was a special guy. He's not like us.
Speaker 2:Absolutely they did. And I think they gave him a certain amount of slack for that. But there's kind of apocryphal stories of him and I don't know how this true, but it's. It's certainly perfectly possible. When he was in the raf he was late one one day back at the barracks because he'd been to dinner and they said well, you're late, you know your pass had expired, you were late, he goes. He goes. Where were you? And he goes? Well, I was having dinner with Winston Churchill, colonel Trenchard, who's the head of the RAF and the Archbishop of Canterbury and with Lawrence he could have been Sure.
Speaker 2:And so those latter years he was hiding from notoriety but then also kind of still hobnobbing with it and courting it. It's just completely fascinating to me. And it was all based around dorset and clouds hill, this cottage. So when I got there and you actually see these places, you see bovington army camp, when I was at his cottage, I still says I could hear the tanks because there's a big driving range for the arm tank base which is still there, so you could still hear the, the tanks in the background. You know, and it's just, and it's it's just like you know. Going back a little bit to what I was saying to you about the, you know, when I crossed the yellow band on Everest, I mean when you walk into Lawrence Arabia's little cottage in Dorset, you can just feel it. You know you just, it's just footsteps of history.
Speaker 1:After talking about the germ of an idea for Lawrence of Arabia, Harry goes back and talks a little bit about his childhood, being sent off to boarding school to grow up quickly and to learn all the things that somebody needs to learn to take his position in life. Well, it wasn't that easy, but it informs us about the influences and motivators that will later shape Harry's life.
Speaker 2:But my character. One of the things he borrowed from me is that he goes away to school from a really young age and you know they were pretty brutal, these establishments in the early 70s. I went away in 1972. And I sort of joked that it was kind of Hogwarts but with no laughter or magic, pretty austere buildings, and I used to I freely admit it now the first few years I used to hide in the school library because the one place in those was kind of ruled with a rod of iron was the school library.
Speaker 2:You know, you go in the school library and pick out a book. No one could harass you or mess around. If anyone went in there and started making a noise they were out in their ear. So I used to literally hide in the library and I used to read whatever it was at the time we were reading. But one of the kind of walls of this library was just faded yellow National Geographic magazines. And I started reading National Geographic magazines and just became just fascinated with archaeology, with travel, with and also with history and and those were my think that's how I saw the world, also growing up as a kid, so I think I was also interested, and it was.
Speaker 1:I was gonna see pictures and read stories about things that were not my backyard, yeah, which I found to be fascinating, and I didn't travel a lot when I was a kid, so that was my imagination of this is what the rest of the world is like. And what would one of my podcasts be without pointing out the fact that in the 1960s and 70s, national Geographic would have these stories about tribes in Africa and New Guinea, with scantily clad women with their breasts hanging out for every teenage boy to enjoy? Now those issues left the coffee tables and found their journey into bedrooms and bathrooms. I mean, it was just a better place to enjoy reading the articles.
Speaker 2:That was exactly the same for me and I didn't travel outside of you know I I went away to school but when I went home my parents were running a hotel. We never went on vacation, you know, we never went overseas or anywhere. So I kind of would be at home. You know, I'd have my motorcycle, I'd ride around the fields.
Speaker 2:When I was at school I was kind of reading about Egypt or I was reading about I don't know America, or I was reading about anything that kind of interests me, a lot of tribal stuff, geographical stuff, also the mountains. You know that came into it for a young Brit. Our story of, you know, of adventure was underwritten by people like Scott of the Antarctic, percy Fawcett who was lost in the Amazon looking for the lost city of Z, but above all it was the quest for Everest. You know that whole thing was in those national geographics kind of loomed large. So in that side we also did kind of outward bound stuff, so we would do rock climbing and things like that. So I became interested in the kind of outdoor, outward bound, and those elements Mix it all together. When I left school at 18, I was going to Bristol University. I had a year off. I'm 18 years old, I get a 250 Honda. I tell my mother I'm going to ride it to Marrakesh. She bless her, didn't even bat an eyelid.
Speaker 1:She goes. How many miles is that trip? I don't know how many days is that trip.
Speaker 2:Well, I disappeared for three months. I got on that motorcycle, I rode out the door, I went down to Plymouth. I got a boat to northern Spain. I rode all around Spain, Portugal. I took another boat to Morocco. I rode all around Morocco and originally my idea was that I was going to go Algeria, Tunis and then up into Italy. And still to this day I think it's the case. Morocco and Algeria, like all good neighbours, hate each other and are always having spats and the borders always closed. So the border was closed is closed. So the border was closed. So I took a boat back up across the Mediterranean to France, then went down to Italy where I had relatives outside Florence stayed with them and then, eventually, I rode the whole way back.
Speaker 1:So, when you're doing this trip, how much planning. And how did you plan back then? Cause you didn't have GPS, you didn't have a cell phone. You might have had maps in your pockets, your backpack.
Speaker 2:I have the paper map. I still have the paper map I used for Spain and Portugal, and the amazing thing about it is there's virtually not a what we would call a motorway on it. It's all regional two-lane roads. In those days, this was before the big investment the late 80s 90s that Spain and Portugal saw from, you know, from being part of the EU, and so, yeah, it was very seat of the pants.
Speaker 1:But I think that trip is a lot more exciting going on the two-lane roads, because isn't there a now a race in the United States where they just go the back roads?
Speaker 2:I think that's right to just sort of get off there. It's got to be way more fun to see any place like that but I think one of the things that I often think about that trip was and I was away for three months, I'm 18 years old I wrote my mother and father, I think, three postcards and I called them on the telephone one time, June 1st, which was my mother's birthday, just to tell her I was still alive and wish her a happy birthday, Whereas now I don't think you could go to the end of the road without someone texting you whether you're okay, right?
Speaker 1:So, yeah, it was a different time, but then you had also, you'd already lived away from your parents for a while, so you had your independence. So you defined how you were going to communicate and the fact that they got anything from you was probably nice that they were happy with. So you go off on your own Every day. You have no idea where you're going to sleep.
Speaker 2:No, exactly.
Speaker 1:You have no idea where you're going to eat.
Speaker 2:I have a tent, I have whatever equipment. If I need to cook for myself, I can. If I don't, then I may be eating in a little restaurant or something, and just off I went and just off I went. But I think that that trip for me was kind of formative really, in that you could clearly see the things of my childhood up to 18 that had fascinated me. So the geography I wanted to go to Spain, portugal. I looked to see some of the castles, it was things like that that attracted me. I wanted to go go to Morocco. So I wanted to go to the Sahara Desert the train.
Speaker 2:I'm on board the train.
Speaker 1:I've been saving all my money mystical city and did it meet your expectations Totally did the destination. What was more, when you look back, was it the destination or the rides to get to the destination that blew you away more that exceeded your expectations? Um, it's, or is that not a fair, is that not?
Speaker 2:no, it's always the overall journey, because in the sense of these trips, they're all journey. There's no finite destination. There's a. There's a view that I want to be in america. Sure, I want to go through the, the atlas mountains, but there's no. Joe blogs is living at street b and if you come down you can stay with him for a month. Destination Right, it's really just. If I ride across this country, I can go, and to this day, one of the most striking things was I was in the Anti-Atlas Mountains in a place called Meknes. I got up on this little motorcycle and it was a nice day and I rode up into the hills and then it the weather changed on me and it started to rain. The higher I got, it started to snow. I came down the other side and it stopped and it got hotter and hotter and then I ended up on the edge of the Sahara in that day in one day, and and so it's like you went through seasons in one day.
Speaker 2:And that was, in its way, everything I was looking for, much more than the destination of going to Ruin B or meeting, as I say, Joe Bloggs. It was really to go through places where all of the elements, all of the scenery, and just a foreign land. I mean, this is just strange, different land.
Speaker 1:Did you speak any languages at the time Other than English?
Speaker 2:obviously I had schoolboy Spanish and French and could get by actually pretty well in French Right.
Speaker 1:Sure That'll get you by, right right.
Speaker 2:And so for me that trip was really fairly formative. And then from there on in, a motorcycle trip was like okay, fine, you know, I'm going somewhere, where do I go? So I went other trips around Europe. I went. I think three years later I went to India. I didn't have the motorcycle. I flew there on Syrian Arab Airlines because there was only two ways to get there. The two cheapest tickets were Aeroflot and Syrian Arab Airlines. You either went through Damascus or you went through Moscow to get, if you were like a backpacker back in the day. So I went to India.
Speaker 2:But then I went up to Nepal and when I got to Nepal I wanted to go and see Mount Everest. And so I asked around and the guy someone said oh yeah, there's a place called Nagakot. If you go up to this hill station called Nagakot, you'll get a view of Everest. And so you know I'd gone. As a kid, I'd read about all this, I was kind of fascinated in it. So I hired a motorcycle, a Suzuki 185, and I rode it out to Nagakot. Didn't see anything. The monsoon, all I saw was just like a wall of cloud, and I've still got a picture of that kind of wall of cloud, but it kind of struck. There was always an interest in Everest and the Himalayas that I had again. That emerged from that kind of early reading.
Speaker 2:And then the wanderlust I started working, doing real estate work in London. But very quickly I kind of put my hand up and said, look, I want to work abroad, in London. But very quickly I kind of put my hand up and said, look, I want to work abroad. And it was a time when the English real estate firms were kind of expanding across Europe. So I got the chance to go to Lisbon, portugal, and I worked in Lisbon mid 90s and then I got a chance to go from there to go to Milan and I lived in Como and I was on the edge of the Alps and I I'd been skiing a few times.
Speaker 2:But when you start out in your career unless you're very fortunate and you've got lots of money and most of us didn't we didn't really have anything you have to make a decision. You have to cut your cloth with the scissors you've got, and for me I always had to have a motorcycle. That's where my money went. So I went skiing once or twice but I hadn't, I had never really kind of indulged myself in it because I didn't have the money. I saved the money for the motorcycle, for the trips I would make with it.
Speaker 2:Well, when I got the chance to go to Italy, I thought, you know, it'd be really good if I lived on the edge of the Alps, I can actually go skiing and can really develop that side of things. And I went to Como and I went skiing a few times and I got the skiing up. I thought I want to start doing off-piste skiing, ski mountaineering, stuff like that. And someone who I was working with said you know, you want to go and do one of these alpine courses. They're run by the Italian Alpine Club, they cost you virtually nothing and you will just be trained to be just excellent in the mountains. You'll be amazed. And so I signed on with the club alpine italiano in Como to do basically a basic ski mountaineering course.
Speaker 2:And I started doing this course and we started had to do climbing elements.
Speaker 2:As part of it was they took us rock climbing, they took us ice climbing and I just loved that part of it and I had done going back to childhood school, I had done ab sailing, rock climbing and all of those things, but then I'd really got kind of sidetracked from it for the reasons of express, into the motorcycling right and there I was with the chance to kind of do all this stuff, and so I didn't actually ski at all, I just started climbing and I particularly one of the instructors.
Speaker 2:I became very good friends with him and he was his Italian guy who wanted to become a professional mountain guide and we started. He was training me and at the beginning my italian was absolutely appalling. I had to study italian when I was there, I had to learn it, and his english was absolutely lousy. And he said well, to be a really good guide, I need to be fluent in english, because a lot of my clients will be international. He says so I'll cut you a, I'll train you beyond this course to be a really good climber if you'll teach me English. Wow, it's like a symbiotic relationship you both needed each other for different things.
Speaker 2:And we climbed and became really good friends. It was all conversationally. We did it all in English. The only irony is that he now speaks pretty good English but he cusses like a trooper because he used to take me out on these climbs in English.
Speaker 1:In English and I would be just saying somebody like me, then he had somebody who's like. Let me tell you how you express emotion, okay. So wait, when you're climbing, like what kind of equipment do you have? You're just not walking up hills. I mean, you've got all of the equipment that somebody would go like peak climbing, straight up climbing.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I mean, like all sports, like the motorcycling, the climbing, they're all so specialist, there's so many kind of subdivisions of the sport. Each one has its own specialist and dedicated equipment. I mean primarily with climbing, you set off with a rope and an ice axe. Fundamentally, you rope yourself to the other person and you're going to use the ice axe or crampons, which effectively spikes on your boots. Sure, right, and that's the bottom line. But as you, you know progression, you will use, you know, start fixing into the rock. You will use slings which are kind of like loops of material to clip into pitons. You nail in kind of nails with hooks, you know whatever it is necessary to secure you. As the going gets, you know, more and more difficult. Then you can go into the realms of pure ice climbing where you're using, effectively, screws that you screw into the ice and then you clip on that way.
Speaker 1:so what is the internal motivation that you have in seeing something that is higher than you metaphorically, yeah, things that are that you now need to get to the top of. And then I ask because I don't have that drive? I've climbed hills but I've never had the personal interest, probably because of fear of I'm not going to make it or I'm not sure what I do if this happens, and the fatigue and all of those things that comes with the challenge of getting from here to the top of wherever there is. What is it? What's the driving factor?
Speaker 2:There's historical interest for me when I well, take one step back. First, it's progression. When you first start climbing, and even start climbing seriously, you don't really think so much about peaks. You're thinking more about style, techniques and tiny elements of the mountains. So you'll go to a rock wall and you'll be perfectly happy climbing up and down a hundred foot rock wall, but at that point you must have a destination in mind, and maybe it's that rock wall at that point or is it more like I'm gonna do this today? Sport of it.
Speaker 1:Okay, right I can do this. I could pull myself out of it okay.
Speaker 2:Um, then as you get sucked into the sport, um, you then realize that there are kind of trophies within it.
Speaker 2:You know there are peaks that you want to and we'll come on to Everest in a bit, because then that's that peak when that situation becomes a problem but there are peaks within it that just become fascinating to you. And going back to my roots in the history of it, so in the Alps, the Matterhorn, mont Blanc, these kind of classic peaks, the North Face of the Eiger, these are peaks that have had reams and reams of ink written about them, fantastic stories of survival and tragedy. And so if you're interested in the history of the time, you're interested in the place, you're interested in sport, you then get kind of absorbed into wanting to climb these mountains. So the Matterhorn, for example. For me, when people say, well, you've been on Everest, you've been on what are your favorite summits, what are your favorite climbs? One of the best summits is the Matterhorn, because when you stand on the top of that, you know you're standing in the footsteps of every great climber in history. At some point they went over the Matterhorn and you think about that.
Speaker 1:So when you got to the peak of the Matterhorn, you thought about that. That's what overwhelmed you as much as what you're looking at to some climbers.
Speaker 2:That may may not mean anything, but always in my climbing what interested me and what the books came that I wrote that came out of it, I think, reflect, is that I was as much interested as the history and the personalities of the people that tried to climb it, what they went through to get the first ascent, the different routes they took, and so that really would kind of pull me to a particular mountain. And then there is a flip side of it, which is that it becomes an addiction. And it does become an addiction. You, you become obsessed with a mountain, you want to climb it, you focus all your energies on getting to that mountain, to getting the climb done, and once it's climbed, it almost evaporates, it's gone and before you've got down you're thinking about the next one. And it is a very dangerous sport and it is for that reason you're walking a fine line between a beautiful, beautiful experience and not collecting your pension. I get it. You know what I mean. No, I get it.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, you're putting a lot at risk. I was just actually talking about the history of it and because I've done 65 episodes and many of those have touched golf A lot of times, I will listen to golfers like Tiger Woods, jack Nicklaus and some of the ones who have when they've earned that trophy for that major to them. What I always hear them say the same thing is I see everybody else's name that have been here before and I can't believe I'm in their company and to them it's like it sounds like the same thing when you're climbing.
Speaker 2:It's like it is very much that to me, I I was just really fascinated, and particularly in the early days of climbing, those people that when, when I eventually did get to Everest, I I just remember key moments on the mountain, on being in places where I could see visually the images of the historic climbs have been before. So when you cross the, there's a place called the Yellow Band, between Camp 3 and Camp 4, which is a strata of yellow rock that runs diagonally across the lotse face. And this is by this stage you've got oxygen on, you're up, you know what are you at 23, 24, 000 feet, you're right, pushing through to get to camp four, pushing through to get into the. You know the death zone, if you want to use that expression. But as, as I went across the yellow band, I was climbing across, all I could see in my head was a cover of Life magazine with the 1963 American Expedition with Barry Bishop with his rucksack in his kit, with a picture of him going across the yellow band from 1963.
Speaker 1:And now you're where he was. So you've seen this and now you're here. Now, I was absolutely there.
Speaker 2:And that, for me, was that was one of the reasons I ended up going to that mountain, because I was drawn there again by the history. I mean, you can have a lot of debate about climbing Everest, because a lot of people want to do it, because it's the biggest.
Speaker 1:It's become posh, it is.
Speaker 2:And they feel that it'll lionize them because they went. I think that everyone is attracted a little bit to that. It is an ultimate challenge but frankly there are many very similar experiences you can achieve in the mountains without having to pay $50,000, $60,000 and be surrounded by 300 people. Many other Himalayan mountains you can go to. You'd be the only person on that mountain if you're so inclined. Yes, you won't be lionized because it's the highest mountain in the world, but actually experience will probably be better. But for me, I mean I was going to end up there at some point because of the history and the drawn-in, and I in my own family, my grandmother signed us the Knoll family.
Speaker 2:The first British expeditions were photographed by a guy called JB Knoll Captain JB Knoll, who is a distant ancestor of mine and he fell foul of another guy called Eric Bailey one time who in the days of the British Empire was the political officer in Sikkim.
Speaker 2:And to get to Everest the British expeditions had to go in Sikkim and to get to Everest the British expeditions had to go through Sikkim.
Speaker 2:And on the expeditions although these are historic times, noel brought the film rights. So even in the 1920s he cut a deal that he could photograph it and when he came back to England he could do a slideshow at the Royal Albert Hall or whatever it was. And he did it as a commercial venture and he hoped that on the third expedition that George Mallory would summit and he would be the man that brought the story to the world. It didn't work out that way. Mallory was lost, but Noel still had to recoup his investment. So one of the things he did was he got a group of lamas from Tibet to come to England and they would do a chanting show before he displayed his pictures, and he got no approvals for them to leave the country. So Noel ended up being chased by Eric Bailey, my other ancestor, for breaking all of the kind of passport rules of the emperor at the time for getting these people out.
Speaker 1:So you've got some heritage in your family that precedes you, so you go in there. Do you also feel like you're there to you've? This has been passed on to you and your family. A little bit to keep a little bit.
Speaker 2:So again, that was something that the more I got into the mountains, the more that family so it and an interest in it.
Speaker 1:So did you have a healthy respect that was greater than your fear? Yeah Right, so you knew what you were getting into. You knew you had a preparation. Now, what about the physical preparation? So I've got to believe you just can't be in average shape, although now you say 300 people are up there, I can't imagine they're all training for it, although maybe they are.
Speaker 2:I think they'll.
Speaker 1:But I think it's something you should do right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I think they are training pretty hard. I think some of them you could question whether they have the technical ability or what their real motivation is, but they have the money. But they have the money and they have desire and good luck to them.
Speaker 1:So there's no restrictions, there's not a test that you have to go through physically. You just have to have enough money to get the support right, to have the Sherpas and all of the equipment and whatever the other costs are to do it. I think that's right.
Speaker 2:I mean a prudent to me I mean a prudent person would not want to go anywhere near that mountain unless they felt totally capable of climbing it.
Speaker 1:Do you think there are people that have climbed and I think you might have said this that have climbed Mount Everest, that haven't climbed other mountains, Like this is their first?
Speaker 2:There are people that have climbed Mount Everest with very little experience. Yeah, it may not not to the extent that it's their first, but with surprisingly little experience.
Speaker 1:So how many peaks did you climb before you got to Everest?
Speaker 2:It's quite a difficult one to answer, because I lived for 10 years in the Alps and I really climbed pretty hard. I went to Alaska to climb Denali because everyone sort of said and particularly in Italy, the guys and people I would climb with in Italy they really thought they, they said that's a really serious climb. If you can get up to Alaska and if you can do that, then that's will kind of take you to the other greater ranges. If you want to go to South America, into the Andes, you want to go to the Himalayas. I went to Alaska and I did that climb and it went pretty well.
Speaker 2:And that's also the reason I ended up riding the motorcycle, because in those days I was living in italy. So italy, you, I could get about three weeks out, three and a half weeks off, and so I got on the plane, I flew into anchorage, you get in a minibus. It drives you straight to talkeetna, talkeetna, you get into a little kind of beaver airplane with all your kit, the guy flies into the glacier, he drops you on the glacier and says right, I'm back in three weeks. You've either climbed the mountain or you haven't. You're right in the snow and ice for three weeks you just live in the freezer and you know the thing about Denali is the weather systems. You know most people who won't summit Denali are because the weather will come in and just keep them off the high parts of the mountain. I had a really good experience there. I really enjoyed it. We had the weather break. It was touch and go and I got it done and came back.
Speaker 1:Now it was like August, july, august, the time to climb it, that was June. Yeah, june okay.
Speaker 2:I think it was about, june is kind of the season there.
Speaker 1:And how long did it take you to summit?
Speaker 2:The whole climb is about three weeks. In terms of that one, it takes you about that because you don't, if I'm thinking rightly, you kind of make a progression up the mountain and you will there's, there's this concept in in mounting and climb high, sleep low, so you go up to a stage.
Speaker 1:Then you come down and sleep and go back up again.
Speaker 2:Then you work your way up and then you sleep a bit higher and that's the way you kind of progress and let your body adapt to it. Mckinley's a little bit. So in Himalayan climbing that all revolves around the base camp. You'll always hear these references to base camp. The reason that base camp is so important is because you're always going up and then coming back to base camp recuperating and because the Himalayan peaks are so high, the recovery times are longer. So people tend to spend more time in the base camp, whereas Denali you tend to, let's say, go to a camp, then go a little bit higher, come back to that camp, go on a little bit higher to the next camp. So it's a kind of a two-and-a and a half week progression to work your way up the mountain to get ready for the summit day, and then you bail out. You know you get out in a couple of days.
Speaker 2:You come down and get the plane out and we did the climb, we came down, plane picks us up. I have a hamburger in Talkeetna. Go to Anchorage, have a beer in Anchorage, get Hamburger in Talkeetna. Go to Anchorage, have a beer in Anchorage, get on the plane and went back to Italy. So when I moved to America, the one thing I thought I've got to go back to Alaska, because all I saw of it was just in these little plains and I just thought that's an amazing place, I want to explore it and that's why I went back later with the motorcycle.
Speaker 1:Where did you start with the motorcycle?
Speaker 2:Here in.
Speaker 1:Charleston, so you ride the motorcycle from Charleston to Alaska.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because I just moved here and I just have that mentality going back to when I was 18. If I want to see somewhere or have an objective, well, I get the motorcycle and then I just go there, so you're married.
Speaker 1:At the time Do you have the girls? Yeah, well, eden, I had the motorcycle and then I just go there, so you're married at the time.
Speaker 2:Do you have the girls? Yeah Well, Eden, I had, yeah you had one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, okay. So earlier I'm talking about free time. Yeah, so you have been able to carve out free time while during your work years. Yeah, during your child-rearing years. Yeah, you've been able to fall, you. You have a very understandable wife, didn't she?
Speaker 2:because she went out to meet you in Kathmandu, or something yeah, didn't she when you were, when you're doing that, so she gets what you're about yeah, one of the things that brought us together is the same interest in travel, geography, the world. So she totally gets it. And you know some trips. You know, say, kathmand, she's come out. We've traveled around Nepal, she's made her own. I mean, she's hiked part of the Sahara in Algeria and made her own trips as well. So she's always been supportive to it. And it's a bit of a juggling, obviously, you're always juggling family, you know. It's just so funny.
Speaker 1:I hear stories from people that would reason excuses on why they don't do things. Yeah, and they're like, oh well, I got the kids. Or like I'll meet people at the first tee and they said I haven't golfed in like 10 years. I'm like, why not? He goes. Well, I got've just haven't figured out a way to carve up your time, to balance everything or even bring the kids into golf. That's just a decision you've made, and now you've decided I have more free time, I'm going to do this. You, on the other hand, have figured out through your whole life how to do the things that bring you pleasure in hiking and biking and figure out how to balance that in a family life, I think it's exact word is balance and it is also you know, pick your moments, pick your objectives, you know.
Speaker 2:So the things I've done have just been incredibly important to me at that time. So when I was, when I was climbing, and in that kind of phase of my life, there were things that objectives, that I that I worked my life around them to make sure they happen. So and the same with the, the motorcycle trips. I, motorcycle trips, I mean I, I now I don't make them so much, but and so I, probably last week I'm talking to my brother.
Speaker 1:He's in his car. I'm like, what are you doing? And he goes I just bought a bmw 1200r yeah, to tour, to just try. Get you know. It's a fastest kind of a performance bike. But he had that. He had it COVID in all the being sequestered. He was just he needed to do get out and do something. And so as soon as things opened up, he went up to Wisconsin. He's been following the shop, owns this and he ends up getting it.
Speaker 1:What was when you have this desire to go to Alaska? So you'd been there before. You've seen it in a different way. You know you have to get back. What was the trigger? And then, what was the conversation you have with Farrah about? I got to go to Alaska. Now, was she traveling also at the time or was she here? So tell me what it looks like when, all of a sudden, you walk into a room, you're having a cup of coffee and it's like you know, farrah, I think what I want to do for the next few weeks is get on my BMW, travel across country and go to Alaska, and then she says great idea well, we just moved from Italy to to America and I I don't I just kind of it just seemed like a logical thing for me to do, because you're now in the States, I'm in the States, I've just moved here.
Speaker 2:The rest of life hasn't sort of started to consume us and take us in. I've kind of got that initial freedom when you move country where you can really for a little while, while you can just be whoever you want and do whatever you want. Within about the arc of six, twelve months, reality kicks in and you know there are mortgage payments and there are things that have to be done and you get sucked into the kind of suburbia right and so we, we moved here and I just said, look, I, you know I'm, you're american, I'm not, I'm coming here.
Speaker 2:I want to see the place, you know. I want to come to my own conclusion about it. Um, I want to make a trip. I've always wanted to make this trip, but you know, you remember me telling you that the denali climb was brilliant, but it was a real pity that I couldn't because Alaska looked incredible. I want to go there and I'd always in the back of my mind, always had this concept that I wanted to do in America, and kind of coast to coast, I mean to anyone who is not American. You know, one of the kind of trips you always want to do is go coast to coast in America. You know there's the variety and the scale of this country is so enormous that you know you can only really appreciate it by starting at one sea and heading across to the other, and I think doing it on a motorcycle is different than doing it in a car.
Speaker 2:It is different and it was funny. I don't say this to kind of sound either kind of obsequious to America or kind of patronizing, but when I look back on last year and the kind of political divisions and the kind of rankle that was in this country, one of the things I used to say to people was well, I came to this country and I got on a motorcycle in Charleston by myself, I didn't go with anyone else, and I rode from here the whole way across America, the whole way across Canada, the whole way across the Northwestern Territories. I went to a place called Tuktoyaktuk, which is on the Arctic Ocean. I put my boot in the Arctic Ocean, I got back on the bike, I rode back down through Dawson, the Yukon, to Alaska. In Alaska I rode the whole way up to Prudhoe Bay, put my boot back in the ocean and then I came back down through the whole way across Alaska. That's a thousand miles north to south. Just Alaska is a thousand miles to Homer and at Homerport I put my boot in the Pacific.
Speaker 1:And if any of you are wondering whether his boots were waterproof or not, I think you're missing the point.
Speaker 2:I did that trip. The whole way I met only the kindestest, nicest people. I never had a single moment and I went through some pretty sketchy areas, one or two areas. I remember getting certainly the wrong end of Milwaukee when I I was looking for a BMW dealership, and you know one or two areas where I thought, you know, I never, ever had any problems. People were so kind to me and so friendly to me and I used to say it last year and say, you know, a lot of this is manipulation, it's social media, it's political manipulation. Sure, because fundamentally people are actually very good-hearted and really I have no evidence of the kind of hostility that was being literally stirred up last year.
Speaker 1:Well, you're a citizen now, and now I'm a citizen. Yeah, I look forward to it. It's beautiful, I look forward. Well, I wish you the best of luck in the experience of doing more research and then writing it, because that's going to give you a lot of pleasure in doing that and then getting that done, because people have written things, but I don't know that they've taken the same approach and passion that you, or, if they have, this is just another passion project yeah for you and um, I'm sure it's going to be great no, I'm, I'm excited, I really am, I'm really enthused for it.
Speaker 1:So we've talked about your motorcycle riding, we've talked about your mountain climbing and we've talked about your novels, and I think this is a good first podcast with Harry Farthing, and I think the next time we talk there'll be another more subjects to talk about. So with that, I thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much for hearing me out. It's cool.
Speaker 1:Summit and Ghost Moths are two very well-written books. Harry has a talent in being able to translate his experiences, his imagination, on paper, and his vivid writing is really like no other. And in addition to Harry writing a non-fiction novel about Lawrence of Arabia. If you wonder what his next itch is, the next place he has to go well, he said it to me in one sentence.
Speaker 2:I have one BMW in my garage that I still, kind of, in the back of my mind, think I'm going to ride around South America.
Speaker 1:If you have any interest in high altitude climbing or the Dali or the penchant llama and some of the geopolitical strife between China and Tibet, I think you'll enjoy both of his books. You've been listening to an episode of Tales from the First Tee. I'm your host, Rich Easton, telling tales from Charleston, South Carolina. Talk to you soon.