Six Expeditions, No Rest, And A Crocodile Infested River: Meet The Most Ambitious Explorer Alive

Ash Dykes is a 34-year-old Welsh adventurer who has walked the length of Madagascar, traversed Mongolia alone, and hiked the entirety of the Great Wall of China. He has been followed by wolves for two days in Tibet, paddled crocodile-infested rivers in Madagascar, and encountered bears in the mountains of China. He is not, by any reasonable measure, a man who makes reckless decisions.

He is also, in the first weekend of October, dropping an inflatable kayak into the Sangha River in the Central African Republic and paddling 700 kilometres through one of the last truly wild places left on earth, through territory shared by forest elephants, hippos, gorillas, and a parasite that causes permanent blindness. Project Six is Dykes’s most ambitious undertaking yet, six extreme expeditions completed back to back with barely two weeks between each.

The Sangha River descent is Mission One, and it has already divided opinion before he has even put the paddle in the water. Reddit has already said he is booking himself a one-way ticket. Others have called it the future of exploration. Dykes calls it the “most interactive expedition in modern exploration history.”

Bored Panda spoke exclusively to a search and rescue professional operating in remote environments, and to the founder of DRCTOURISM to ask the questions that the comment section has been asking rather less politely. What does survival actually look like when something goes wrong 400 kilometres from the nearest doctor in a rainforest the size of Western Europe? And is an expedition like this opening one of the world’s most misunderstood countries to the world, or using it as a backdrop?