Travel and adventure go hand-in-hand, but the world’s modern adventure stories are living on not in print, but in the oral tradition.
-Joe Sills
Lightning tore across the South Dakota night sky and a wind streaking across the Great Plains slammed into my tent in the middle of Badlands National Park. As a tent pole bent down to slap me in the face, I scrambled outside to check the damage—stepping right onto a bed of tarantulas. I watched the plum-sized spiders scramble between my toes under the purple glow of a headlamp.
I was alone, farther from home than I’d ever been, on the second night of a cross country journey that would accidentally launch my career as a travel writer. Though I hadn’t boarded a commercial airline until age 27, the stories I wrote from that trip would carry me to five continents in the next three years.
The circumstances were more than lucky: a blog that began as a way to retain some semblance of sanity during a solo, 16,000-mile camping trip got noticed by the right people at the right time. Eventually, the project landed me on the team at Travel Channel and my door to the world was opened.
A decade that began as a college dropout delivering pizza would conclude as a globetrotting travel writer, all because I spent a few months living in the woods trying not to be eaten by bears.
It is amazing how quickly even the most mind-bending professions become routine. Though I will always be a backpacker at heart, I soon found myself circumnavigating the globe sampling its finest side, dining at the tables of its most storied chefs and sleeping in the soft throws of its most luxurious hotels and resorts. Campfire cans of Spaghetti-O’s became soirées with a Swedish countess. A cold package of Lunchables became a personal invitation to the table of a Chinese billionaire.
In the midst of this transformation, my outlets multiplied. But my stories…my stories changed as much as my cuisine. Their tides turned not by my experiences, but by the mandate of board rooms and advertising executives who demanded less substance and more page views. Across the travel publishing world, editors—the unsung heroes of all good stories—were pressured to comply. Though the sights in front of my lens and the notes on my pages were more inspiring than ever, the stories themselves were suffering: chopped, trimmed, converted into photo galleries with guidelines too rigid to tell real stories of adventure.
Real talk, that ate at my soul.
I have always counted my blessings as a travel writer. Because of my own stoke of luck, I truly feel that anyone can join this industry, too.
But my passion is not traveling to collect likes on my Instagram. My passion is traveling to tell the stores that inspire other people to pack up and go themselves. I want to talk to the farmers who drove from Amsterdam to Shanghai and crossed the Himalayas in a beat-up Land Rover to build schools in remote villages. I want to climb a volcano and tell you how to do it, too. I want to fly to Dublin, hit the first highway out of town and tell you why it’s a good idea to wind up trudging through a shepherd’s field in Ballyferriter, Ireland.
That’s why I created The Get Lost Podcast.
It’s a show dedicated to bringing real adventure back to travelers using the oldest storytelling tradition there is: the oral one. There are no ads, no gimmicks. In fact, the Get Lost Podcast doesn’t make a dime. But it does tell real stories. It does bring listeners back to the world of adventure. There are no top ten lists and nobody can buy a placement inside.
Instead, you get tales from people like Egyptologist Ramy Romany, who opened a sealed tunnel beneath the Giza Plateau in search of the tomb the god of the underworld (see link below). You hear from freelance photographer Matt Payne, who searches for a human connection to the wild mountain gorillas of Uganda. You hop a ride on a sailboat with writer Zach Johnston, who works for passage from Thailand to Djibouti. And you to Guatemala with explorer Josh Gates, who helps discover part of a real deal lost Mayan city in the rainforest.
None of those tales are stories that corporations seem interested in publishing lately. Why did I start a travel podcast? Because they shouldn’t be taken for granted, damnit. I started a travel podcast to publish those stories myself.
The Get Lost Podcast is available on Spotify and wherever podcasts are found. Follow the show on Instagram @GetLostPodcast.
Joe Sills is a freelance writer for Travel Channel, Lonely Planet and HGTV. He’s the founder of the Souled Outside Exploration Company and SouledOutBlog.com.
Listen to Tomb of Osiris episode here:
