Ep 5 "BONUS EP" - How Visiting 52 Countries Changed Matt Shorrock’s Life

In this bonus episode from The Black Wolf Collective Podcast, Iron Tigers Founder Matt Shorrock shares stories from travelling through 52 countries and how those experiences helped shape his mindset, purpose and approach to coaching.

From burnout and uncertainty to finding direction through travel, Matt reflects on the life lessons, perspectives and moments that ultimately influenced the way he now leads and mentors young athletes through Iron Tigers Basketball.

🎙 Full episode available now on The Black Wolf Collective Podcast.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Do you think you ever want to get Iron Tigers overseas? Sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Why not?

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Speaking of overseas, you have traveled to 52 countries, right? Yep. How the bloody hell did you fit all that in? All of that was with your wife?

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Not all of them, but like that's the total amount I think in my life.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

I've packed.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Because when I was working for Pinot Containers on my desk, we had a world, everyone had this world map that was like a whiteboard type thing.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

And I had read a book called The Wrong Way Home by Peter Moore. Hey Pete, if you watch this, I've met I've met him and I interviewed him when I was a journalist. I was about to say. TNT magazine. And at the time.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Had you read the book before you interviewed him just because?

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Or did you read it because I can't remember how I fell into it, but I'd read all of his books. His bestsellers called No Shitting in the Toilet.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

It was just all travel related. I was just captured by his style of writing.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

And so I used to email him, like, you know, how did you become a writer? How did you get paid? Because while we were traveling, I was like, this is what I want to do. Again, another career tangent. Yeah. I'm going to be a I'm going to write books from from now on. I've still got a book in me, I think, somewhere.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Yeah, I reckon you could.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

And so, you know, I read this story from Peter Moore. He had travelled from Sydney to London, overland completely, without booking anything, just trying to, or it was the other way around London to Sydney. Either way. And so I used to just doodle on my um uh whiteboard desk because it was a world map, so I was just like, whiteboard, go this way, go this way. And then um I got made redundant because they the PO containers got taken over. Yeah. And um I said to Vic, let's go. Let's go traveling. So she quit her job. We went to Australia for my mate's wedding, and then their plan was to travel. Yeah. So we went um I can go through every country if you like. Go. So we we left Sydney, flew to uh Bangkok just overnight, and then we went to Hong Kong. Did you pre-plan it before you left completely, or did you just there was a framework there was kind of like flights booked to continents, and then we'll figure it out all. We'll figure out we know we've got to get to Singapore from China at some point. So we had kind of dates, but we moved a couple. Went to Hong Kong, uh, hung out with a lady who used to work for my dad that I'd known since I was a kid. Um, she showed us around Hong Kong. Again, met up with one of my rugby mates. He was living in the four seasons, five seasons, something like that, because he's a stockbroker. And then we went to Beijing, stayed in Beijing in a hotel first, and then we were in a backpackers lodge. That was just before the Olympics in Beijing. Was that 2004, something like that? I don't know. And they weren't very hospitable to Westerners back then. They were all the taxi drivers were being told to learn English, but they didn't want to. Yeah. So we would go to a train station and try and speak Chinese, they would laugh at us. We speak English, they would laugh at us. So getting anything done was really hard. Uh, we caught the train 25.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

Okay, yeah, sick.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Um, so we were kind of old enough to uh realize that we're having these rich world experiences that still hang out with the 19-year-old Jackie students.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

We still have a wild time, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:18

But we caught the train from Beijing to Hanoi, which was three days, and that was crazy because we just had um Ritz, crackers, and vegemite tubes to get us flying Hanoi. We traveled all the way down to Hui Chi Minh City in Saigon, um, and then up the Mekong River into um Cambodia, all through Cambodia, Anchorat, and then I'm just I'm tracing the map in my head down to we went to Thailand, Bangkok, up to a town up north there. Then we went down through Malaysia, a couple of cities in Malaysia down to Singapore, hung out in Singapore for a bit. At the time, there was an Australian basketball team called the Singapore Slingers playing in the NBL based out of Singapore, and I was connected on MySpace with some. That's how old I'm you remember my space with some of the players, and they had seen that I was in Singapore, they were like, hey, come to the game. So we ended up going to the game, and then we we hung out with them that night, and I remember drinking like Red Bull and Coke, like jugs. It's just crazy. Like we were hung over for three days. Yeah. From Singapore, we went to Nepal, Kathmandu. We got lost in Kathmandu because every street looked exactly the same.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 4:36

It was just like stalls everywhere. We flew over the Himalayas in a like a this is like a three-seater plane. I was like, if this is shaky, yes, super shaky.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:47

If this is our last experience in life, then so be it.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

Good luck, babe. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

And then we caught a bus from Nepal to uh sorry, from Kathmandu to another town. I can't remember where it was on the border of India and Nepal. We crossed the border into India and got in the back of a Jeep. Like this is like I would never do this now.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

Hitchaki random jeep.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Yeah. Hectic that took us to a train station in Gorakhpur, which was like right on the w the eastern side of India. And the train that was supposed to take us to Delhi was due at 6 p.m. So this is about 4 p.m. 6 pm came and it never showed up. Nobody was telling us what was going on. It was just Vicky and I. At that stage, she was blonde.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

Same age. Yeah. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 5:32

Yeah, she's older than me by three months.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:35

She was blonde haired, you know, light skinned, stood out. Stood out in this, you know, small Indian town that had never seen anything like it. And the longer the night went on, we were like, this train's never coming. We ended up sleeping 18 hours on the platform.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

And then it was like one o'clock the next day the train came. And um, I remember it vividly. Like we got on the train and there was like a group of 20 kids. They were students, and they all just came into our cabin. Like it was a two-person cabin. All came into our cabin and they were just staring. And this uh guy was kind of pushed to the front as you're the spokesperson, find out where they're from and all of that. And I was like, we're gonna get robbed or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

And they just scared.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

She was, she was sort of sat behind me.

SPEAKER_00 6:24

Yeah, and then um 25, like Yeah, like life experience, but not Yeah, I definitely think 25 I would have been like super confident and ready and excited. But then when those moments happened, I realised I'm in another.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

And then nobody knows we're here, nobody would ever miss us.

SPEAKER_00 6:42

Completely different technology back then.

SPEAKER_01 6:45

And then um, you know, they started asking questions, and I was just like, Oh, I'm Australian, and they were just like Ricky Ponting! I was like, Oh, thank God. So we started talking about cricket and then they left. So um, but we went down to India, uh, sorry, in Delhi. We stayed with my good friend Rahul. I'll send him this video, hey Rahul. And then we sort of traveled to the south in Travandrum, went to Goa. Again, we were back in in Delhi, we stayed with a lot of friends. Um, one of the families that we stayed with took Vicky to get fitted for Asari, which we've still got, it was like completely custom-made for gorgeous, so gorgeous.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

I seriously see them all the time, and I'm like, I wish we had something cultural in that sense.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

Like, yeah. Well, I had um when we went when we left, I went to one of the stores in Pitt Street and bought all of these clip-on koalas. Okay, clip on koalas. So anytime we just sort of this. Uh I remember in in Hong Kong I left my bag in the front seat of a taxi and had my passport in it. Oh, freaking and then um but the taxi was um picked us up from the outside of my friend's house, so she called the taxi firm and said, What's the name of the driver? He dropped the bag off at the police station. So I went to the police station, I gave him a clip on koala. He was like, What is this? That um we're in India.

SPEAKER_00 8:10

We rarely see them in Australia, aren't we?

SPEAKER_01 8:11

Well, that's true, yeah. I can't tell you the last time I saw them.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

Yeah. Um we have to pay to go see one.

SPEAKER_01 8:17

That's like we were in Goa and we were on the beach. There's kind of more beach culture, a lot of retired English people living there. Yeah. And um, I was playing cricket with the kids. I just went and bought a a a bat and a ball, and they couldn't believe I was Australian because I had I hadn't shaved or anything. They were like, no, Islam, Islam. I was just like, nah, nah. Uh that was a good thing. Traveling sort of through Eastern Europe, India, I kind of fit in anywhere. So if like things stood out. Yeah, yeah. So I remember paying local price for chai somewhere in in India, and she had to pay the Western Up Right.

SPEAKER_00 8:55

He was like, I don't know, but yeah, not with me.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

Yeah. Uh India, then we went to we flew to Egypt from Mumbai into Cairo, traveled down to Luxor, rode bikes along the um the Nile. That was fantastic. We just had like cycles and we were just going from tomb to tomb. We then flew to Rome and then trained up through Austria, stayed with some friends around the traps in Germany, went up to Norway, Sweden, we went up to the Arctic Circle, stayed in the ice hotel in Sweden, down through Finland.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

All the seasons.

SPEAKER_01 9:37

Yeah, too. Yeah, you had we spent Christmas in India, but we were in East uh Southeast Asia for most of summer, and then by the time we got to Europe, we were back in summer again, which is crazy. Yeah. Yeah, then we went to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, um, Hungary. So in Budapest, we stayed in a place called the Aboriginal Hostel in Budapest. Random, there was nothing Australian or Aboriginal about it. It's just a name. Yeah. Czech. In Czech Republic, I had the worst coffee I've ever had. It sticks out to this day. Because even if I have a bad coffee, then Vicky will go, Was it better was it worse than your Czech Republic? It was on it. We were on the platform waiting for a morning train. It must have been 6 a.m. and there was a vending machine. So I pressed the buttons and it was just like black sludge. I don't know why. I just drank it.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

Still drank it. I was about to say that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

Because I need coffee.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

I'll never forget. Like, we got on the train, and then this tall black American guy burst onto the train going, Is this train going to such and such? And we're like, Yeah. So he's like, Oh, thank God. So he jumped in, he sat with us. His name is Keenan. Still talked to him.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

I was about to say, you know his name, you must have made friends with him. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:55

Yeah. He was in the army, still talk to him to this day. And he we kind of traveled with him for a little bit. Oh yeah. And so Slovakia, we went across Czech Slovakia, Albania, um, Montenegro.

SPEAKER_00 11:12

How long were you gone for?

SPEAKER_01 11:14

About 18 months.

SPEAKER_00 11:15

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 11:16

Yeah. And at various points, like we would ditch stuff. We met Vicky's parents in Germany. They took a luggage home for us. We kind of just shed things. Like I remember I think I only had three t-shirts. Like it just walked.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Would you travel with the money from the redundancy? Did you work or did you just use whatever you had?

SPEAKER_01 11:33

A bit of both. Like when we were um like did you have any savings first? Yeah. So there was the plan. Like I had done, you know, pre-internet, I had the lonely planets. Yeah. The books. So I would take notes and go, okay, generally you can get by on three US dollars a day in in Malaysia. Okay, well, let's budget first.

SPEAKER_00 11:52

You just lived on a budget. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

And like we kind of rushed through some countries, like Malaysia, we were like, let's just keep going. And we got through to Singapore. We're like, we should have stayed in Thailand for an extra week because Singapore was so expensive.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:06

Um, and in Thailand, you know, we were on um Kosamet and we were right on the beach. We had our own hut. Um there were geckos on the roof like this big, and yeah. But yeah, so we're Eastern Europe. We ended up in Corfu, where we worked on a farm for food and board. So it was a hostel and yeah, um Mada and Spiros. Spiros was as great as they come.

SPEAKER_00 12:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Um, I got really sick actually. I got taken to hospital and I was it was like a gastro thing, yeah, but I was sweating and I just couldn't keep any food down. Madalena looked after me, she was like rice, lemon. That's yeah, that's all you can eat. But I remember being in the hospital and then just like stabbing me with needles and I had bruises all over my arms and stuff.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

And scary being in a hospital.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

Yeah, nobody was really speaking English. Our our boss at the farm, Brian, Brian Toy. Hi Brian. Uh he uh he was in the US, he's from the US and he was there with me just trying to translate.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

Yeah, that would that's what like when I travel, that's one thing I get really scared of. The second I start to feel sick, I'm just like, I've got to get better. Like, I do not want to end up in a hospital.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

I think we were pretty well travelled by that stage, so we were just kind of let's just go with it.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Yeah, you know.

SPEAKER_01 13:26

Um, so we worked on the farm for about three months. How good, yeah, and then we were like, I think it's probably time to go.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

Time to keep going.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

Yeah, oh, so we traveled. Well, we traveled around Greece and then we ended up back at um at Corfu. And then it was like, okay, let's go home.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

And I think Vicky's friend had a um engagement party that we kind of targeted, let's be back for that. And it was so bizarre. Like we left Corfu and then five days later we were back in in London, and we just travelled the whole time. So we just booked overnight ferries and overnight trains. And I remember just walking down the road to Vicky's parents' house, like we were in Corfu five days ago, and we'd just been travelling, travelling, travelling. Just change, caught the um, you know, the ferry across to Dover, got on the train, changed at Red Hill, down to Caterum, and we're just like, this is just bizarre. Like the world just got so small, all it was up.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

Yeah. And then how long after you finished that travel did you decide how long was it after that that you came back to Australia? Or was it April?

SPEAKER_01 14:31

Uh it was probably what I've got. So we got back 2007. I think we got back, got jobs. I was already planning the next trip.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:40

Like I was like, we didn't get to do the eastern block. I wanted to go to Moscow and and you know, we couldn't get visas to go into Russia.

SPEAKER_00 14:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

And I really wanted to go to Transylvania. Crazy.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Yeah, no, that'd be sick.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

Yeah. Yeah. So we didn't get to do that. So I was planning that. And then uh we went to the US in 2008 and stayed with Brian, and then we, you know, sort of we went uh where was he? He was in um Pennsylvania, I think. We went to Washington and we traveled from there. And then we flew to Vegas to meet some friends, and then we got back home, and then Vicky says, I'm pregnant.

SPEAKER_00 15:17

Like, lock in.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

Yeah. Okay, scrap Russia. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:23

Oh, how good.