Expeditions
Four expeditions.
Five records.
Unsupported means no vehicle, no resupply team and no one carrying anything for you. Everything needed to survive is dragged, carried or paddled. Four of these five records had never been set by anybody.
- Distance
- 1,500 miles
- Duration
- 78 days
- Hauled
- 120kg
- Status
- World first
Solo and unsupported, west to east
The first recorded person to cross Mongolia alone and unsupported - over the Altai Mountains, through the Gobi Desert and out across the Steppe, dragging everything needed to survive on a homemade trailer.
The second largest landlocked country on earth, crossed in 78 days - twenty-two days inside his own estimate. Grey wolves, blizzards, sandstorms, snakes, semi-wild dogs and heat exhaustion severe enough to stop a person walking. Mostly, though, nobody to talk to.
Herders who met him on the Steppe took to calling him the lonely snow leopard: the one predator out there that walks by itself, and the one the wolves give room to. He filmed and blogged the whole crossing, was picked up by BBC World News and ITV News, and was interviewed on seven Mongolian channels before he flew home.
He raised funds along the way for herding families facing winters that climate change is making harder, and kept telling that story afterwards on his first UK theatre tour.
- Distance
- 1,600 miles
- Duration
- 155 days
- Summits
- Eight
- Status
- World first
The length of the interior, and its eight highest peaks
The first to traverse Madagascar top to bottom through its interior rather than its coast, summiting the island's eight highest mountains on the way.
He contracted the deadliest strain of malaria. He was held up by the military and went around bandits. He took spider bites, built a raft to get across one river and was nearly taken at night by another with crocodiles in it. Long stretches of the interior had to be cut through a metre at a time.
The expedition ran with the Lemur Network Conservation and met conservationists working along the route, because more than eight in ten of the species living on Madagascar live nowhere else on earth and almost none of that is common knowledge.
He was later named UK Ambassador for Madagascar Tourism, and the promotion that followed reached an audience of 350 million.
- Distance
- 4,000 miles
- Duration
- 352 days
- Steps
- c. 8 million
- Status
- World first
Source to sea, on foot, 4,000 miles
The first person to walk the length of the Yangtze, from its source on the Tibetan Plateau to the sea. Certified by Guinness World Records from 26 August 2018 to 12 August 2019.
Bears, wolves, snakes and Asian hornets. Altitude at the source, landslides and blizzards through the gorges, and heat at the delta end that is a different expedition altogether. Sixteen people joined him for sections of the route; ten of them went home early.
He filmed it, blogged it and live-streamed it as he went, which is why a walk along a river reached an audience of 1.5 billion people. Conservation and development partners ran alongside the route, and the whole thing became a National Geographic documentary.
- Route
- Source to sea
- Method
- Foot & kayak
- Team
- Four
- Status
- Two records
Two records out of one expedition into the Amazon
The first team to travel the Coppename River from source to sea on foot and by kayak - and, on the same expedition, the fastest recorded ascent of the highest mountain in the Surinamese Amazon.
Suriname is the most forested country on earth by proportion, and the interior has almost no roads in it. Getting to the source of a river there is an expedition before the expedition starts.
It is also the one where the jungle gave something back: a jaguar, photographed at close range from the water, on a river where almost nobody goes.
Before the records
Nobody starts at a world first
Long before Mongolia there were years of getting it wrong cheaply: bikes bought for a tenner, jungle skills learned from people who live there, and a lot of time spent a long way from help.
1,130 miles
Cambodia and Vietnam by bicycle in fifteen days, on bikes that cost ten pounds each
985 miles
The length of Britain by bicycle in seven days, for charity
700 miles
Across part of Australia by bicycle in thirteen days
200 miles
Across Wales on foot in the dead of winter
The Alps
Crossed alone in winter, and missed by a landslide
The Himalayas
Trekked in northern India
Two years
Working as a scuba diving instructor in Thailand
Muay Thai
Trained and fought against local fighters
Jungle craft
Learned to survive in the jungle with a Burmese hill tribe
On screen
The expeditions became four series
Much of what reached the screen was filmed by the person walking. Alongside these three, BBC Earth's "The Great Wall with Ash Dykes" took him back to China.
Walking The Yangtze
Broadcast
Ash Dykes' Yellow River Adventure
In post production
Uncharted Amazon
Broadcast
What next
There is always another one being planned
Routes, permits and partners for the next expedition are worked out months and often years ahead. For media enquiries, filming rights or expedition partnerships, the fastest route is a direct message.