Q: Why did you want to experience life with the Mek specifically?

Olly: I am always confused when asked: ‘So Olly, why did you want to make that journey, why did you do that?”. With hindsight I can usually come up with a good reason, but when it actually comes down to the moment I decided to embark on a new journey, it’s always because of the people you meet along the way – but apart from that I never usually have a good reason. Hindsight is my mortal enemy because it’s never there when I actually need it.

I could give you a dozen reasons that you would believe – the opportunity to live with and learn from one of the last indigenous groups of farming-hunter gatherers on the planet; a chance to share a new world with people as alien to me as I am to them, and to be inspired by new knowledge; a chance to be humbled by the elemental forces of nature that can break you as quickly as they can make you; a chance to document the wisdom of the ancestors that will soon be lost; a chance to challenge myself mentally, physically and spiritually; because I live for the unknown and we were heading into one the few places on earth which is marked on maps simply in white with the title ‘relief data incomplete’; because it seemed like a good idea at the time… all are true of course, but they mask the simplicity, honesty and transparency that I can only express in the words of man called Mallory, who when asked why he wanted to climb Everest (he died trying years before Tenzing & Hillary summitted) replied: ‘because it’s there’.