This book is about a life lived on the road and adventuring in some of the world’s most extreme places. Within these pages are stories which are in turn harrowing, comical and inspiring. There’s a story about my first climbing season in the New Zealand Alps where, as a young alpinist, I first confronted the brutality and unfairness of death, a scuba diving tragedy in the Red Sea of Sinai, a close call in the Amazon jungle and one decades later as veteran mountaineer high on Mount Everest during the 2015 Earthquake. There’s a sad story about paddling the Congo River in a country then known as Zaire and one about travelling through Eritrea where it is not so much wilderness but human beings who in their characteristic trademark fashion caused the madness and mayhem. But I feel that as humans we need to pay attention to life’s darker tones especially in these crazy times where we witness political and climatic upheaval on an unprecedented scale and when we need to be more realistic about who we are than ever before. Each person’s life is dominated by a central event which shapes everything that comes before and after it. For me the events in New Zealand derailed everything I expected from my future. I hadn’t quite finished growing yet within the space of a few minutes, I travelled from childhood to adulthood, between innocence and knowledge, between normality and chaos. All the stories in this book are shaped by this event and my consequent resolve to give up on the textbook future prescribed by others. They formed the man writing these words today.