An exhilarating ride diving deep into the extraordinary life of Chris Donaldson, a man who chose the path less traveled and never looked back! From embarking on a life-changing motorcycle journey to sharing profound wisdom about embracing challenges, Chris's story will inspire you to live life to the fullest, no matter your age!

CLICK HERE to Get on The OFFICIAL Email List for the Podcast!

"Get off your ass and go out and do it. You can do what you did when you were 21, just a bit slower or with more rest. There's more to life than retiring and playing golf."

In this captivating episode, we sit down with Chris Donaldson, a seasoned adventurer who has traversed continents on his trusty old motorcycle. His remarkable journey, which began with a wrong turn, led him to experience the world in ways most only dream of. Chris shares anecdotes from his travels, life lessons, and the enduring love affair with his aging motorcycle. This conversation will ignite your wanderlust and remind you of the magic that happens when you go the wrong way!

EPISODE AT A GLANCE

• Embracing the Unexpected: Chris reflects on how one fateful wrong turn in his youth changed the course of his life forever, leading to a lifetime of adventure.
• The Beauty of Vintage Machines: Discover how Chris's 45-year-old motorcycle has become more than a mode of transport; it's a trusted companion and a testament to the value of old-school mechanics.
• Adventure vs. Comfort: Chris makes a compelling case for choosing adventure over the easy route, sharing the rewards of stepping out of your comfort zone.
• Life Beyond Retirement: Chris's inspiring message to embrace life's challenges and seize opportunities, no matter your age, will leave you motivated to follow your own dreams.

LINKS & RESOURCES

MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE

• VISIT CHRIS'S WEBSITE: ChrisDonaldson.world
• PURCHASE HIS BOOK ON AMAZON: Going the Wrong Way

BE IN THE KNOW!

CLICK HERE to Get on The OFFICIAL Email List for the Podcast!

TODAY'S AWESOME GUEST

CHRIS DONALDSON

Chris Donaldson is a modern-day adventurer who has spent a lifetime chasing horizons, both on his trusty motorcycle and in life itself. His passion for embracing challenges and taking the road less traveled has led to countless adventures, memories, and a unique perspective on what it means to truly live. Chris's book, "Going the Wrong Way," chronicles his awe-inspiring journeys and offers a roadmap for those seeking to add a dash of adventure to their lives.

ALL THE WAYS WE CAN CONNECT

GET IN TOUCH

PODCAST HOST: KEVIN LOWE

• Schedule a Call with Kevin
• Visit Our Website
• Become a Grit, Grace, & Inspiration Insider
• Follow Kevin's LinkedIn Newsletter
• SEND KEVIN A VOICE MESSAGE

Guided by Faith. Inspired by life itself.

© 2024 Grit, Grace, & Inspiration

0:00:35 - (Kevin Lowe): I'll see you inside. What's up, my friend? And welcome to grit, grace and inspiration. I am your host, Kevin Lowe. 20 years ago, I awoke from a life saving surgery only to find that I was left completely blind. And since that day, I've learned a lot about life, a lot about living, and a lot about myself. And here on this podcast, I want to share those insights with you. Because, friend, if you are still searching for your purpose, still trying to understand why, or still left searching for that next right path to take, we'll consider this to be your stepping stone to get you from where you are to where you want to be.

0:02:03 - (Kevin Lowe): If you would like to sign up, please be sure to visit the link inside of today's show notes. So, friend, let's talk about it. Adventure. A sense of adventure. Do you have it or not? I feel like that's kind of two different camps. We got the people with a sense of adventure, the people who like to set off, who have no set destination in mind, who don't even have directions. They just have maybe an idea of we're going to head north and see where we go.

0:03:15 - (Kevin Lowe): That book is called Going the Wrong Way. Chris Donaldson is our guest today, coming to us from the beautiful country of Ireland. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have an amazing Irishman on the podcast today and he is here to talk to us about his story that involves a motorcycle in the entire world.

0:04:41 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, absolutely. Now talk to me. So where did you grow up at?

0:05:31 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah.

0:05:47 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. And how old were you then?

0:06:18 - (Chris Donaldson): But basically after planning this trip for the last four or five years and guidebooks had got my routes planned and so on my maps, my visas, everything for going to the east, I ended up going down Africa without a notion where I was.

0:06:53 - (Chris Donaldson): I think it's a few relations there. I reckon I could get a job there for a while and see a bit of the it's obviously an English speaking country, see a bit of the world on the way there. And I think I wanted to challenge myself as well. I didn't want just why I'd wanted to sort of challenge myself. When you're growing up, you're always under the auspices of your parents and then your friends, your teachers, your lectures, society around you. You're always under sort of some sort of influence from outside. I wanted to just get away from travel on my own and find out about myself rather than what I was under the auspices of somebody else.

0:07:39 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, absolutely. Now, what kind of motorcycle were you riding?

0:08:19 - (Chris Donaldson): But of course, when I got to Africa, I had to cross the Sahara Desert, so it's totally out of the picture off the wall for crossing a desert of sand, 500 miles worth of sand, basically, on a standard road bike.

0:08:39 - (Chris Donaldson): Yeah. Well, you meet up with people along the way going the same direction and travel with them for a bit. But the nice thing about that is you don't get on or you want to go somewhere else, you just say bye bye and while you go on your own.

0:09:11 - (Chris Donaldson): It took me about five months to get to South Africa. I think I got there by April, after leaving in October. So Africa was pretty tough. Going through the Middle East with three israel and Syria and Jordan and Syria was pretty dodgy at that stage. Israel was just in between wars, I suppose. In fact, most of Africa was between civil wars or revolutions or something going on at some stage. I went through Uganda just after Amin, if you remember him, particularly nasty character through all his politicians to the crocodiles, as I say. After that, he went a bit off the wall, but been through Rhodesia's just after, became Zimbabwe in South Africa in the middle of apartheid. So it was pretty rough going.

0:10:53 - (Kevin Lowe): Yes, of course. Now, along this way, is there anything when you think back? Obviously there had to be countless just incredible experiences, but any kind of most notable that you could share that maybe moments that were kind of like, now, this is why I'm doing it. Maybe because it scared the crap out of you and you're like, Whoo, maybe I survived that. Or it was just something amazing. Anything stand out?

0:11:47 - (Chris Donaldson): In fact, the next week's train actually beat us to it. But some days we would be traveling, digging and pushing and riding for all day and maybe cover 10 miles through the sand. It was so difficult. Other days you'd maybe do 100 miles in the hard packed sand. But looking back, it was one of the most memorable times because you were driving through the desert in the middle of nowhere, following the Nile, completely sort of back to basics, back to nature, looking at the stars every night and thinking back.

0:12:52 - (Chris Donaldson): There was child soldiers running around with AK 47. So it was a pretty scary place to be. It was probably one of the most scary places. Got down to Cape Town, which, as I said, it was a feeling of relation getting there, but it was kind of short lived because one thing about a journey, you sort of realized that it wasn't really traveling to go there for any particular reason. So when I got there, that was the end of the journey.

0:13:25 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, absolutely. That makes total sense now. What happened when you did reach the end? I mean, what happened then? Did you go back home?

0:14:18 - (Chris Donaldson): But at that stage, it was traveling for the sake of traveling, as I said, really enjoying it. And then I got the sponsors of the race, shipped the bike to the states. So I picked it up three months later and rode up to Seattle and then Vancouver across Canada and then down through Seaboard, stopped in North Carolina for a couple of months, got a job to replenish your wallet there and really enjoyed the.

0:15:03 - (Chris Donaldson): That's why I've called the book Going the Wrong Way, which is the story of my life. But, yeah, it made me realize that traveling is about the journey, not about the destination. So I just wanted to keep the journey going as long as I could. Parents by the stage were going up the walls, wondering what I was doing. But when you're young or you're 21, 22, you think you're invincible, that nothing can stop you and you can do anything.

0:15:37 - (Chris Donaldson): I think I spent about six months in the States, on and off to really enjoyed America.

0:15:41 - (Chris Donaldson): Got into lifestyle and it was actually hard to get back on the road after that because I wanted to go to South America at that stage and just complete that side of the continent. But it was hard work getting going after getting a bit soft with easy lifestyle, but headed down to South Merits, through Florida, down to Texas and down to Central America. I was running out of money, running out of motivation, I suppose, as well. It sort of covered, as you said, why are you doing this? I was starting to wonder why I was doing it to this.

0:16:37 - (Kevin Lowe): Okay.

0:17:05 - (Chris Donaldson): But I suppose what I did then at Park, I started writing a book about the trip and then somebody else wrote a book about something similar and I just gave up, put my papers away for a long time and got on with normal life for 40 years.

0:17:35 - (Chris Donaldson): Yeah, I went back to Belfast and had a job in the family business and sort of motorbikes and traveling and overdosed in them at that stage. So I was happy enough staying at home at that stage for a while. So I got the family business and developed that into a property company and it diverted into several different directions over the years. It was reasonably successful. I think all the lessons I learned when I was traveling came in useful about motivating myself and persevering with difficult situations sort of made me the harder individual to go through life to meet with life's trials and tribulations.

0:18:33 - (Chris Donaldson): Yeah, it was difficult at the time. I think it was sort of suffering from PSTD, whatever you call it, weebly because you're living on your own, traveling on your own. Every day is different, every day is another stress and you wake up every morning in a different place, the side of the road or some doll's house. You really don't know what's going to happen the next day, which is part of the excitement of it.

0:19:21 - (Chris Donaldson): It's going to be difficult. I'm going to have to get my knuckle down and keep my head down and concentrate on this. I'm going to succeed. Otherwise I have met up with other people since then who had find it practically impossible to settle down after a trip like that and have had negative implications from it never quite settled back into normal life as such.

0:19:55 - (Chris Donaldson): Well, yeah, funny enough, there's a guy called Ian McGregor who's done a couple of motorbike trips around the world, maybe heard of him, as in Star Wars and a few other movies.

0:20:18 - (Chris Donaldson): That's right, yeah. He's actually a bit of a motorguzzi freak as well. It's myself motorbikes. So I got winded. I thought, God, this guy's going to do it in a motorguzzi, going to go down to South American and thought, I'm going to write a book about it. So I thought, I'm going to write my book first.

0:20:38 - (Chris Donaldson): Greg, kudos to the guy, did what he did, but it's a very different trip than mine, being with a bunch of guys and a camera crew and all the rest of the sponsorship. Very different from doing it on your own. So I thought, Well, I want to get my story out. So I decided to finally get around to finishing my book 40 years later, which I thought was going to be more difficult than it was, because your memory fades after a while. But it was amazing how much reading my notes, reading my diaries, my journals, it all came back and what I was thinking and what I was doing when I was 21, 40 years later.

0:21:33 - (Chris Donaldson): The book came out three years ago and it's been a bestseller on Amazon quite a bit, quite a few months. It's done remarkably well. Really pleased with it. I was never an intellectual at school, an academic, particularly. So I think if there's a story, there's a book in everybody. But if I can write a book, that's a success and a bestseller, just about anybody know. Yeah, and one of the great things about technology is the ebooks and audiobooks and the Amazon system, that you can actually sit in Belfast, write a book and get it, be selling it. The States is one of the biggest markets. Australia is one of selling as many books in Australia as I'm in the UK.

0:23:01 - (Chris Donaldson): Then the final leg was to Pakistan, across India, to Nepal, where I flew the bike to Australia last March. Just so. Finally making a triumphant journey down the east coast of Australia after took me 43 years to get there on a bike and myself with a combined age of 109. So it's got to be some sort of record break. There no doubt. Faster rider, but I get there in the end.

0:23:42 - (Chris Donaldson): Well, physically it was fairly when I was younger, I was able to ride all day and do 500 miles and then go out and party all night.

0:23:53 - (Chris Donaldson): Now, when I wrote all day, find a nice hotel, go to bed, have a nice dinner, a nice comfortable bed, whereas before it was in the side of the road or somewhere. It was nice, certainly nice to have a bit more money to be able to spoil myself, but physically it was much more difficult. Yeah, tiredness is the main thing, and your backs, your muscles ache and you're not pensioner officially. So certainly made it more difficult from a physical point of view.

0:24:54 - (Chris Donaldson): Pakistan was mean.

0:25:05 - (Chris Donaldson): Not really, to be honest. I mean, Iran was certainly we're all pressed and they were told what a terrible place it is, but actually it's one of the friendliest countries I've traveled through. People were lovely. They were very open and hospitable and wow. Totally the opposite of what I was expecting. A couple of times, credit cards don't work with sanctions, so you have to use cash, and they have their own credit card system and place the gas stations. So sometimes have to say to somebody, can you fill my tank up and I'll give you cash.

0:26:08 - (Chris Donaldson): I don't know. Sitting at a back of a Land Rover with a bunch of guys with AK 47s isn't such a big deal when you've been brought up in Northern Ireland. I suppose during the going to school, a lot of.

0:26:42 - (Chris Donaldson): I suppose one of the interesting things was taking an old bike. Everybody said, Took the lemon because he crawled away in the first place when it was new. She was only two years old. People said, you're mad because it's not a touring bike. It's been no good for that trip. Yeah, but I proved them wrong then and I was actually able to do the trip again on it 43 years later on the same 45 year old bike.

0:27:29 - (Chris Donaldson): So sometimes it's nearly an advantage to have an older machine like yeah.

0:27:41 - (Chris Donaldson): It certainly was. I mean, I really enjoyed Australia. I got a great welcome from the guys out there. Been waiting for me for 43 years. Slagging, as we would say, Australians. And it does sort of make me realize some of the things that happened to in your life. I realized if it left two weeks earlier, probably would have got through around before the revolution. Could have got to Australia, got a job, got a girlfriend, got set up there. Would I ever have come back with that? Two week delay leaving Belfast in 79 changed my whole rest of the direction of my life after that.

0:28:45 - (Kevin Lowe): Eventually, yeah. That poor motorcycle, though. I mean, my goodness, that poor thing is like, dude, can you ever just get an upgrade and let me retire at some point?

0:29:21 - (Chris Donaldson): After 43 years, it's still treating me like a dog. And you're doing the sort of things you should never. Most of the guests, Le Mons, are sitting in their garage, polished with about 10,000 miles on them. The most mine gets 75 and it's been dragged across the world twice. A person that would never talk to me again.

0:29:45 - (Chris Donaldson): Guilty. The old time.

0:30:07 - (Chris Donaldson): Well, I suppose I started writing a book as a travel journey that had made 40 years ago. And I realized when I started writing it, I hadn't got a name at that stage. And going the wrong way was obviously fitting because, as I say, I went the wrong continent, did numerous things the wrong way along the journey and gone through it by looking, by hookup, by crook. But I realized it had gone the wrong way quite a few times in my life and got a lot of pleasure from doing that. So traveling the road as traveled, if you like, instead of going the easy way, gone the hard way in business and in my private life and different things I've done obviously been a trait of mine to go the wrong way at different occasions, different times in my life and different way. But it's what's given me a lot of pleasure and a lot of satisfaction from different challenges I've done.

0:31:22 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah.

0:31:45 - (Chris Donaldson): Sometimes by taking the risk and doing something off the beaten track, you can get much more from it. But don't be coming up back to me and gurning if you hurt yourself along the way, I'm taking no responsibility for you. Don't do what I say, but do what I do. But it made me realize that there's more to life than just following the rules and the regulations, and people should be a bit more individual in what they do. Sometimes I think.

0:32:42 - (Chris Donaldson): It'S Carolous, twice it's stupid.

0:32:54 - (Chris Donaldson): Well, my website is Chris Donaldson World, but probably the best way is on Amazon, the company that we love and we hate in the same measure because they're taking over the world, but we can't do without them. It's on Audiobook, it's on Kindle, it's on Hardback, it's on paperback. So it's amazing the technology that they have that they can do this. But that's probably Amazon's. Probably the best place to get it going the Wrong Way by Donaldson.

0:33:43 - (Chris Donaldson): Pretty selfishly, I suppose. You do something like that, you do it for yourself. Lucky to have a very understanding wife and very patient with me to let me do these things. If the original trip is a coming of age story, this trip has been a coming of old age story. And my main thing with people of my age in the 60s, late, middle, sixty s, seventy s, whatever, is get off your ass and go out and do it. Because generally you can do what you did when you were 21. You just have to do it a bit slower or have a bit more rest afterwards. But it's amazing what you can do if you put your mind to it. And there's got to be more for life than people retiring from 40 years of working life and ending up digging the garden and playing golf twice a week. Get a motorbike or get a car. Get whatever it is you want to do and go and do it. Don't just sit and talk about it.

0:34:57 - (Chris Donaldson): Pleasure.