Tarran Kent-Hume is one of those people. You know the type — always off on the next adventure, always first to spot something incredible on the horizon, always dreaming big. The sort of guy who will never have to worry about a midlife crisis because he is fully, undoubtedly LIVING right now.
A few years ago, Kent-Hume drew up a list of things he wanted to do — crazy, half-cocked ideas — and proceeded to chase each item with ferocious tenacity, like a bucket list hunter. He trained as a muay thai fighter until he was able to fight professionally, he became a fitness model, he raced in an Ironman, he broke a world record…
Then came the adventurer’s biggest quest: Kayaking down the Amazon River. Along the way, he was shot at, fell ill, and abandoned by his guide. But he survived, and his story is a better one for those speed bumps.
This week, as part of our new series The Mad Ones, we spoke to Kent-Hume about adventure, the life uncommon, and the nature of fear. If you’re interested in such things, you’ll want to hear his thoughts.
Where did you come about this kind of mentality and thirst for adventure that you have?
I left Tasmania about a week or two weeks after I turned eighteen years old. I bought a one-way ticket to London, England, to try and become a professional football player. Ended up playing semi-professionally for about three or four years until I got to a point where I realized — maybe twenty one, twenty two — I wasn’t going to be a professional football player.
I moved to Vancouver from Tasmania and became a personal trainer for a year, and then moved back to London. I took up this job, which was basically working the financial markets in London moving higher-powered investment bankers from the likes of Goldman Sachs, HSBC, a bunch of hedge funds, and niche investment banks as well. I did that for about five and a half years.
At about four years into it, I became a little bored and a little disillusioned with what I was doing. I was spending sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week working weekends as well because I was very motivated to be successful in this field. After doing that for a while, it kind of just sort of struck me that I was spending all this time doing something that I was good at, but I wasn’t necessarily passionate about. I kind of thought to myself, what would I be able to achieve if I really focused and tested myself in other arenas, as well.
I came up with this idea that at the end of 2012, for the whole 2013, I would backpack. In 2012, that period of my life was essentially working a lot, going out, drinking, partying, and for me a lot of the ego-filled things that you get working in the bravado-filled financial market. I wrote down one day all the things that frankly scared me that I wanted to do. I wrote down things like run a marathon, do an Ironman, break a Guinness World Record, raise ten grand for charity, write a book, all these things.
I wrote this list down, and then I looked at it one night and thought, actually, if I really focused and committed, I could probably achieve maybe eighty percent of that list in the next year. I basically set about starting all these different things. That year, 2013, I woke up on New Year’s Day and started training for a half-marathon, then did a marathon a month after that, and then did a sprint triathlon, and then did a half-Ironman, and then I climbed to the highest mountain in Europe, Mount Blanc, and then I organized a Guinness World Record football game which was forty six and a half hours we played, broke the world record, and then we managed to raise something like twenty thousand U.S. dollars for this charity, actually Volunteer Uganda.
Then did a full iron-man, and then a few other things like giving a public talk, or going to schools, and writing a book, and various other things. I got to the end of that year and I kind of realized that I really enjoyed this aspect of it, and I loved that I felt motivated, and I was inspiring other people, and wanted to pursue this. I ended up quitting my job at the end of the year.
I asked myself the question, what’s the next thing that really scares you, and one of that was martial arts, or muay thai, kickboxing. I typed into Google, “What’s the most brutal form of martial art?” and muay thai kickboxing came up over and over again. I did some research, and then flew out to Thailand to train full time as a muay thai kick boxer. Something like three and a half months later, I was having my first professional fight in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand.
You fought there for a while?
I actually only had one fight. Having never trained or practiced any martial art or fighting really before, I was a complete beginner, I think it was three months and four days from being an absolute beginner, training six, seven hours a day, six days a week with professional fighters, and during that I got my ribs broken, one rib separated, one rib broken, and various other things. I was eating dinner through a straw one night because my jaw got busted up. Lots of injuries and lots of dings.
Bizarrely, the day before I started training, I was sitting in a stadium with my friend Gary watching the Thai fights. Bizarrely that ended up being the stadium that I would go back and fight in three and a half months later, and be the main event of the evening, which was again, quite a mission to just get the fight in the first place, let alone actually have the fight.
How did it go?
I won by second round knockout. My visa ran out two days later. It’s my excuse for not fighting again. Ultimately I wanted to quit on a 1-0 record. Go out undefeated.
Did you say you have a book on the way?
Yes. Right now I do speaking engagements, but I’m writing two books at the moment. I’m in talks with a publisher actually about the first book is from that year of 2013 where I basically, as I term, I changed the direction of my life. I’m also writing another book about the last expedition adventure that I went on, the biggest one, which was to kayak the length of the Amazon, which took five months to do and something like a year and a half to plan.
Tell me a little bit about that trip, paddling the Amazon.
I came up with the idea when I was in Thailand, and then slowly began to formulate a plan. After Thailand I moved to Los Angeles and I did an aesthetic fitness model competition, which is basically body building, called natural body building. I did that for six months in Los Angeles, and then competed in that. I was putting together the plan for this Amazon expedition. Eighteen months later, I was at the start line. The expedition itself was crazy, it was incredible.
It started off in the high Andes at the source of the Amazon, or the newest source of the Amazon, which now made it the longest river in the world. There was me and a teammate — just two of us. We walked from the source of the Amazon in the Andes on the Mantaro River, which was six hundred and fifty kilometers. You guys do miles, so something like four hundred and thirty miles around that. We walked that first section, and that was incredible, being taken in by some peasants and being very humbled by a lot of the people that had absolutely nothing, but were inspired by the fact that I kind of explained what we were doing and took us in a lot of the time, and gave us food on the roads. We basically were camping on the side of the road, or along the river.
Then we got a town called Canayre, which is where we met our guide. I’d organized for us to have a guide for one month, thirty days, to take us through the two most dangerous sections of the Amazon River itself. The first bit is the Red Zone. This is where seventy percent of the world’s cocaine production comes from, so they grow the coca plant there, which they may export out and turn into cocaine. The Red Zone is, as I found out, they call it the most dangerous area in South America. This is where we got into our kayaks.
I’d never sea kayaked or tour kayaked before, so I had to learn how to really kayak properly with all the gear in it, in this incredibly dangerous section where pretty much every day or every second day, we would basically pull up to a river bank and be held at gunpoint, because they would hold guns up at me until I produced some paperwork and managed to talk to them and tell them that I wasn’t with the military, and especially wasn’t there to rob them, which is what they wanted to do. The reason why they had people with guns there is obviously because of the cocaine production. They had basically self-policing armed forces. There were lots of tribes along the Amazon River, and they would have their own guards or people with guns.
About halfway through this section, our guide that we had got shot at. I was about a hundred meters ahead of him and he got shot at, a few shotgun pellets went over his head. He was a little shaken up. As we got to the end of the Red Zone, after about ten days, he disappeared one day and I thought he was shot or he was kidnapped, because the previous three or four expeditions down the Amazon, the last group had been robbed of all their camera gear. The guy before that, a guy called Davey du Plessis, a South African adventurer, he was shot five times, managed to survive, and five years before that a Polish couple was murdered in the same section.
As it turned out, after a day and a half of speaking to some of the military in Peru, in Lima, who were about to scramble a helicopter to basically send out a search and rescue party, it turned out our guide has just disappeared. He’d just got off his kayak and gotten onto a boat, and gone downstream without telling us because, basically, I think he didn’t want to do it anymore, but rather than tell us, he just disappeared. That was a shitty day, and then it got a little bit worse, because we’d just come out of the Red Zone, and then the next twenty days were going through, as I termed it, the Pirate Zone where a lot of the pirates are notoriously known to rob people.
A couple hours after we set off that morning, we ended up getting shot at by some pirates. Which, at the time, you don’t really have time to think about how scary it is. It was quite a strange experience because they were coming towards us and cut off our path. I think there were eight or ten guys on a boat, and they quite drunk and boisterous. I remember sitting there hearing two shots they fired over the bow. I remember thinking, are they firing at us, or are they not? I remember just sitting in the river and thinking, shit, which way do we go?
We tried to work out which direction they’d went, and then go the opposite way. They fired two more shots over their bow, not towards us, and then they started to cut our path off, passing quite fast. Then they fired two shots at us, which were incredibly close, kind of zipped past my left ear. Again at the time, you don’t really think, you just keep paddling and keep moving, and then afterwards you kind of look back and think, shit, that was pretty close. I think when they got close to us we had massive beards, and looked incredibly poor, and had no sign of any wealth. I think they just left us alone when we got there, which I was very thankful for. That was quite an interesting moment of the trip.
We kayaked obviously without our guide this section, camping on the river bank. We were kayaking about ten hours a day, covering anywhere from seventy to eighty kilometers a day, so maybe fifty, sixty miles a day.
How do you encourage people to launch a life of adventure? How, and then why? Why do you think that that’s such an essential way to live?
I think it’s having an adventurous mindset. Like I’ve said, you don’t need to quit your job and go off and do what I’ve done in order to have a more fulfilling, adventurous life. I think the way I explain it best is I think the way everything’s structured these days is you end up getting stuck in the routine of your job, and your work, and your life. You end up thinking that in order to go and do something about this, like I did, you have to quit your job and spend all your money, and go and do this.
I try and put out there you don’t need to do that. You can take a week’s holiday, or two week’s holiday, and you can go and climb mountains, and get outside, and do very good. It doesn’t have to be the things to the extreme that I’ve done them. I do that because I like the idea of pushing myself physically and psychologically as far as I can go. I welcome the day I end up quitting one of these events because I would generally be happy then. It sounds quite but weird but I know that will be my limit, it’ll have to be extreme.
I also recognize that my approach is not for everybody, and it doesn’t have to be for everybody. There’s no reason why, if you really want to become a muay thai fighter, or go and pursue a martial art, you couldn’t do that after work a couple days a week, or you couldn’t take a sabbatical and go off to Thailand, and train for three months there and do it. There are different ways. I guess it’s having that, I call it, the growth mindset or the adventurous mindset. Which is something that I try to cultivate constantly within myself, and we all get stuck in routine, the routine of life, really.
It’s a interesting quest. I love the stuff you’ve done, I’m just amazed by it.
It’s been a roller coaster. I should just point out by the way, I know I went on initially about the Amazon about the dangerous stuff. There was some also incredibly humbling and beautiful moments where actually the best one I can tell you is where a family — while I was incredibly ill the first stage of Brazil — and was throwing up and had diarrhea for about thirteen hours. The whole night I couldn’t keep anything down. I was incredibly weak, and managed to kayak over to this little village where a family let me stay there, and eventually went off and got some medicine for me from another village and came back. The grandma made me a tea. They told me I’d be staying with them as long as I needed to to recover. I would term that as unconditional love, and I broke down and started crying, because I’d been three months with one other person. To have someone just give you everything that they had in order to help you, and take you into their family, I found just incredible.
Experiences like that are part of the reason I wanted to go and do this, because for me, my thought was I’d never been to South America, so I wanted to go and experience this culture, these countries for the first time from the riverbank, get to know people that way. My thinking was to evolve and become a more thoughtful and better human being, that was my initial thought.
Do you know what the next thing is going to be?
I don’t at the moment. I’m in talks with a number of production companies, and television networks for hopefully a show, something in Australia, because I’d love to go back to Australia where I’m from and reconnect with some of my Australian roots. There’s a couple of other things I’m looking at, doing something in India because I’m fascinated by the culture there and I’ve never been there.
I tend to like to go to new countries, or countries that I haven’t been for a very long time, and also a new discipline. A lot of the things I’ve done have been new to me, the muay thai, the Ironman, the mountain climbing, the body building, the kayaking. These are all things that I hadn’t done before, so I love the aspect of having to learn these skills. After a while I’ve worked out a style or a way to go about learning quicker than you would normally be. I don’t think it takes as long as necessarily you think it does initially to pick up the skill and learn if you’ve got the right engagement from the right approach.
Do you have any advice for someone planning an adventure?
There is joy and beauty in naivety. I think sometimes we try, and I say this with anyone who’s planning an adventure, is don’t wait until you’ve got everything planned because you’ll never fucking do it. You’ve just got to be a little bit naïve, and embrace the naivety, and go do it.
It’s exactly what I’ve done and, as I’ve said, I’m waiting for the point where I’m going to fail. It’s like I don’t really know I’m going to get tired until I go and see. I think it’s one of the things that makes the experience of living worth it because you don’t know. If I knew for a dead certainty that I was going to be able to do the Amazon, or do this, then it kind of takes the fun out of it. It’s kind of the fun of not knowing, a little bit. Obviously you’ve got to plan various different things. The Amazon was a huge expedition, so it took a lot of planning. A lot of adventures or expeditions, you don’t have to have that much planned. If I wanted to cycle to Brussels tomorrow, I’ll literally get on my bike, and I would have my phone, and I’d have GPS there, and I could pretty much do it in the morning, I wouldn’t need to plan that much.
Exactly. I love that philosophy. I really like what you’re doing. I think you bring a lot of inspiration to people.
I appreciate it. It’s quite strange talking about the inspiration thing myself because I kind of look at it, and I’ve been massively inspired by lots of people in my life. I guess by doing what I’m doing, it might help inspire other people. I get messages coming through on Facebook, and social media, and Twitter. They are really quite fulfilling, and probably out of everything, it’s probably the thing that gives me the biggest buzz. Not so much in the ego sense that look at me, I’m great, but more in the sense it’s like this person just wants to go and do this adventure and they’re unsure about it. They want to talk to me about it, and if I can help them get on this and help them achieve what they’re dreaming, that’s fantastic. That’s being of service and paying back, and that’s, I think, a lot of what we’re supposed to be doing.
I love the idea of the case against fear. That’s something that I’m really, really intrigued by. Anything that’s anti-fear, I’m a hundred percent into.
I don’t know if I’d use the word anti-fear, just learning to embrace your fear. Actually I’d be interested on your thoughts on this, and I’ll definitely look on some of your writing in this space. I look at it as learning to understand your fear and how it works as opposed to trying to get through it. I guess one example is, maybe this isn’t the right example, but if you were in a battle and someone runs out without having the fear, jumps over the top of the fencing and runs towards the guns without having the fear, I would say that person is not necessarily that brave, but they’re still doing the action so you have to give them credit for it.
The person that’s absolutely shitting themselves and does it anyway, I don’t know if you’ve read the book by Susan Jeffers, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, but you don’t actually need to read the book. I’ve read the book, and basically the best bit you can take out of it is that one line.
It’s a fantastic metaphor for life. You’re going to have fear, but it’s always the thought of your fear, which is far greater than the actual fear itself. The one thing that I’ve gotten a lot of messages or approached from a lot of young men or young guys. The best way I can describe this relationship to fear is by talking about going to speak to women.
Most guys have gone through the stage where they’re in high school, or they’re in college, or they’re just out into their young adult life, is that when you guy and approach a girl on the other side of the bar, you have all these fears or what if she rejects me? There’s going to be shame, there’s going to be embarrassment, what are my friends going to say to me? All of this stuff that keep flooding in, and then what actually happens when you get there, provided you’re not an idiot, usually you have a small conversation and talk. The worst case scenario is that you listen for a few minutes and that’s it, and you come back to your friends, and that’s all. Nothing as bad as you think might happen will happen. You kind of look at the worst case scenario.
There is the extremes on this. Don’t get me wrong, for the Amazon, for example, I did deal with my fears of death and other things. For me, there wasn’t anything that was too great to stop me doing it. A lot of times it’s kind of looking and going, alright, seeing beyond your fear. What’s my biggest fear, and how will I overcome that. I don’t know whether you’ve done this yourself recently. I did this about a month ago, was to write down, for myself and no one else, write down all the things that scare me in life like death, and being alone and not being loved, all these things that as a guy you’re kind of taught not to talk about because you’re supposed to be masculine and manly about it. Writing all these things down is quite a cathartic process, because you realize actually if this happens and this happens, all these things come true, it’s really not that bad. That gives me confidence because you realize actually, all the things that I’m scared of really aren’t as bad as they are in my mind.
