Want more adventure in your life? Hear real adventure travel stories and practical insights from people who explore the world in bold and meaningful ways by bike, on foot, and close to home.
Seek Travel Ride is an adventure travel podcast for anyone curious about travel and looking to bring more adventure into their everyday.
Host Bella Molloy chats with adventurers and everyday people about bicycle touring, cycle touring, bikepacking, long-distance cycling, and other human-powered adventures. You’ll also hear slow travel, cultural discovery and micro-adventure stories that show adventure can happen anywhere.
Expect travel stories, helpful advice and practical tips you can use to shape your own adventures, whether you’re dreaming of world travel, planning your first bike travel journey, or starting small with something close to home.
Remember it doesn't need to be epic to be an Adventure!
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Get taken on a cycle tour through Malaysia with guest David McCourt who shares what it as like during one day of his journey. This day was part of a 2.5 year journey which David took from his home in Melbourne, Australia all the way back to the village he grew up at in Cushendall, N. Ireland.
Follow David on Instagram - @LongWayHome__2022 you can also support his fundraiser here.
Live in or near Melbourne? Get tickets to David’s live presentation and Q&A session on Weds 04 Dec 2024 here.
Want to be featured as a guest of the show? Send me an email and tell me all about your journey.
Okay, listeners, so we have another midweek episode here, which of course shares what it was like on one day of your trip. I can tell you this day is a fantastic story that's going to be coming to you from listener David McCord, and he's going to be sharing a day of his amazing journey. Before we hear David, I just wanted to have a quick shout out to all of you people out there who have recently discovered the podcast. In the last few weeks, the podcast has picked up a whole heap of new followers, and I'm really glad to see that you're tuning into the show. Definitely take a moment to trawl through the podcast back catalog because as we come closer to a hundred full-length feature episodes, there's bound to be an episode or maybe even ten that you are going to be wanting to tune into to get your own inspiration for the show. Something else that I've noticed is there's a lot of people who listen to the show who aren't actually following it in their podcast players, which means that you don't get notified when new episodes drop. But even more than that, following the show in your podcast player actually helps me at SeekTravel Ride out immensely. It helps push me into more and more podcast charts and expose the podcast to even more people. So if you're not following this yet, please take the time to do it. It costs you nothing, but it helps me out heaps. So today, as I mentioned, we are featuring adventurer David McCourt. His journey was an absolutely incredible one. It started in Melbourne, Australia, with the endpoint of Cushendal in Northern Ireland, which is the village where his family is actually from. And I'm sure there are many, many stories for David to tell us about. But he has chosen one day where he was in Malaysia. And no one tells this story better than David himself. Let's listen to him now share one day of his trip.
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Hello, my name is David McCourt. In June 2022, I left my doorstep in Melbourne on my fully loaded bicycle with a view to cycle all the way back to my original village of Cushendal in Northern Ireland. Over the next two and a half years, I would cycle over 38,000 kilometers through 27 countries, including the deserts of Central Australia, the jungles of North India, the high Himalaya of Nepal, and the mountainous deserts of Iran, just to name a few of the places I visited. It was an incredible adventure, and I cannot wait to tell you more about it. So one of the days that stands out in my mind about the bike ride was when I was in North Malaysia. I was actually cycling from the west coast to the east coast via this road. Another cyclist I'd met along the way had told me about the possibility of seeing elephants in the north. So I found myself cycling along this highway through tropical jungle. As I was pedaling up that road, I noticed heaps of signs of elephants. There was lots of dung all over the place. And as luck would have it, I came across a pair of elephants, a mother and a baby in the long grass just off the side of the road. It was an absolutely magical experience to see these majestic animals outside of the zoo, not behind any fences. This is just them and their natural habitat. So that was so cool. But as I was heading up this road after having had that experience and, you know, having actually seen some elephants, I was thinking, well, where am I going to sleep tonight? Because I was planning to camp, but as it got towards the end of the day, I wasn't sure whether or not I was any danger because of the elephants. Were they aggressive or would they notice me in my tent somewhere? So I happened to have met a Malaysian ecologist earlier in the day who was doing some other work in a different part of the jungle. So I sent him a message in WhatsApp to ask him, What's the story? Is there any risk to me from the elephants? And Holly replied was with the following if you see an elephant, run. So I didn't feel great about that as I headed further up this road and was really hoping to come across some sort of human structure that I could either camp inside or near might make me feel a little bit safer. So earlier in the day, I'd sort of hiked up from the side of the road to try and get a better viewpoint of where I was and the surrounding area. And on the way back down, I slipped and I cracked the lens of my camera. So that was a bit of a boo-boo. But fortunately, it was just the polarizing cap. So my camera wasn't too damaged. Another detail that comes to mind was I also had some of the best laxa I've ever had in my entire life. This delicious creamy noodle soup that was recommended to me by the same ecologist guy that I met in the jungle. He'd give me the good oil on where to get some delicious food. As the day tore on and dusk came in, I actually had noticed this big thunderstorm. So it was gonna be a rough night. So maybe a hundred metres by a hundred metres with these tall fences, four metres or so, and then this tar, this three-story tar in the middle. The gate was locked and there was no one home by the looks of things, so I decided that might be the perfect place to sleep. Fortunately, there was a small gap underneath the fence where I could slide my tent and other bits and pieces, and then I was able to hop the fence. So I chained the bicycle to the outside of the fence and hopped over just in time because then the heavens opened and rain, tropical rain started pouring down, bucketing cats and dogs, thunder and lightning, so I was really happy to have the shelter of the tower. Set up my tent, made some dinner, did my usual routine. I also climbed the tower. Uh, there's a staircase that took me up to the top, and I was able to watch the storm, watch these crazy thunder and lightning bursting across the sky, and then heading back down to my tent to sleep for the night. I had the head torch on, of course, and I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. So I trained the light on it to get a closer look, and I noticed this huge tarantula, the biggest spider I'd ever see in my life. I took a photograph of this spider with my watch held out, which I'll send to you so you can see it for scale. But this massive hairy tarantula just slowly walking up the wall. It's one of the coolest things I've ever seen. After already had such a great day seeing those two wild elephants. So I settled into my tent for the night in the dry shelter of this tower, and then in the next morning had these incredible views with the dawn mist rising up out of the jungle, all that humidity and moisture from the night before. So I watched the sunrise from the top of the tower before uh packing everything up, sliding it back under the fence, getting back on my bike, and then continuing along the road across the east coast of Malaysia. So that was really lovely, standout day for me. One of many on the road on my trip back to Ireland.
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Thank you so much, David, for sharing that incredible day on your trip. It was a day which seemed to have everything, didn't it? It had epic weather, remote countryside, elephant spotting, a little bit of fear, then the adventure within to find your own shelter, and then to top it all off, a huge tarantula, which can I just say I really loved that your instinct was it was one of the coolest things that you'd ever seen. I know many people would not perhaps have that reaction at seeing a spider that was that monumentally big, but you seem to take it all in your stead there on what turned out, listeners, to be an absolutely incredible journey. And listeners, I have to say, David is an epic storyteller, and I had the absolute pleasure of interviewing him just a few days ago. And his stories were so amazing and wild that whilst it was possibly one of the longest podcast sessions I've actually conducted, David and I have actually since agreed that there are too many stories left unheard, and we are going to try and get another podcast session in, so you'll get to look forward to not one but two future episodes in the coming weeks which will tell us all about David's trip. Just a quick shout-out. If you live in Melbourne, Australia, you have the opportunity to see David live and sharing more of his story there as well. It's an event which is hosted by Off Course Bikes. I have a real soft spot for them because they're actually the store that I bought my very first gravel slash touring bike from. Off Course Bikes are running the event. It's going to be at Inner North Brewing in Brunswick, Melbourne, on Wednesday, the 4th of December at 6 30 pm. David's going to do a presentation, a bit of a slideshow, and a QA. So again, get yourself down there if you are free Wednesday, the 4th of December, and see David in person. Now I've had a few donations roll in again, this time from Anonymous People on Buy Me a Coffee. All I can say to you, lovely people, is thank you so much for your kind support of the show. I really, really appreciate it, and it's so great for me to see that there's people in this Seek Travel Right community who are so supportive of the work that I'm producing. Once again, I've posted a link in the show notes. So if you so feel inclined, you can also do me a favor buy me some virtual coffees online, which all go towards the running costs of the show. Thank you so much to all of you who have already done so. And until the next episode, I'm Bella Malloy. Thanks for listening!
