Intuit Sponsor (0:00)

This is a message from sponsor Intuit. TurboTax Taxes was waiting and wondering and worrying if you were going to get any money back and then waiting, wondering and worrying some more. Now Taxes is matching with a TurboTax expert who can do your taxes as soon as today. An expert who gives your taxes their undivided attention as they work on your return while you get real time updates on their progress so you can focus on your day. An expert who will find you every deduction possible and file every form, every investment, Every everything with 100% accuracy all so you can get the most money back guaranteed. No waiting, no wondering, no worries. Now this is Taxes. Get an Expert now on TurboTax.com only available with TurboTax Live full service real time updates only in iOS mobile app. See guarantee details@turbotax.com guarantees the Apple Watch.

Apple Representative (1:01)

Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist whether you're running, swimming or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum compared to previous generations. IPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

Dan Kennedy (1:32)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. We have two stories for you this week and both of them are on the theme of travel because, well, it is summer after all and everybody's traveling. Our first story is by Tony Wheeler and it was told live in Melbourne in 2013. The theme of the night was Guts. Here's Tony.

Tony Wheeler (1:59)

Hello. Travel has always been part of my life. I grew up in first of all Pakistan, then in the Bahamas and then the USA. I'd never finished more than two years in the same school. And then 42 years ago, my wife Maureen and I arrived in Australia and we were British passport holders at the time. We're both Australians now, but we didn't turn up here as 10 pound poms, which was something you could still do back in those days. And nor did we arrive on one of the last ocean liners that were still sailing out from the UK to Australia. We didn't fly into Telemarine Airport. Telemarine, I think had been open for about a year and a half at that time. No. We turned up on a sailing boat out of Indonesia. We landed on the beach in Exmouth on the Northwest Cape of Western Australia. We had a few times in the previous two weeks. We wondered if we were going to really make it down here. I guess, in a way, we were boat people a long time before the term had been invented. Well, we'd actually set out from London in an old car that we thought would just drive it as far east as it went, and if it broke down, we'd just walk away from it and leave it. But it got us all the way from London to Afghanistan, and we sold it in Kabul for a small profit. I was telling people for years it was probably Osama bin Laden's getaway vehicle. And if they could have tracked that car down, they would have saved a lot of trouble, wouldn't have had to make that movie. But then we carried on by every means of transport you could find. And eventually we went down through Southeast Asia, and we got down to Bali at a time when there weren't a lot of tourists. I'd been to Bali, too. T shirt hadn't been invented yet either. But we were hanging around on a little cafe one day, and we heard these New Zealanders say, we only need two more crew and we'll sail down to Australia. And we thought, well, that sounds like fun. Let's go. So we joined them and we did sail down to Australia and landed on that beach. And if you needed the perfect introduction to Australia, our first 24 hours was absolutely that. We stood at the side of town with our thumbs out hitching a ride, and we watched kangaroos bound off into the bush, and we got picked up by a Yugoslav truck driver, and we ended up at a pub. And then there were Aboriginals there. And then we hitched another ride, and we ended up our first night in Australia. We traveled 400 kilometers south to Carnarvon, and our first night we spent sleeping on a mattress in the back of a station wagon in a garage with an orphaned baby joey tumbling around in a burlap sack that was pinned up to the wall. I mean, what a perfect way to arrive in this country. And then a year later, we published the first Lonely Planet guide. And it was really the story of our travels getting out here. It was subtitled Complete Guide to the Overland Trip. And we'd gone through some weird places. We'd come down through. We'd come through Iran, we traveled around Afghanistan, we'd gone through Pakistan. And I really. I got a taste for those sort of weird places. And with those first books, we realized there were a lot of other people who also had a taste for traveling to weird places. They're interesting, they're challenging. You may sell more copies of books to the nice Safe places. And I love Italy, I love France, but there's a bit more of a challenge to the weirder places in the world. And I still keep going to them. In fact, in the last couple of years I've taken shelter in an embassy in Kabul in Afghanistan because there was a riot going on outside and bullets flying around. I've been stopped for speeding in Zimbabwe in the last 12 months. I've been arrested once in the Congo for taking photographs in a place I shouldn't have been taking photographs even. I've sneaked into Iraq without a visa. So I've been to some places where I guess in a little way you could call them adventures. But I've never been searching for danger. In fact, I'm a sort of faint hearted sort of soul. I get very concerned when I'm flying on tatty aircraft from third rate airlines. And I don't like dark alleys and violence prone cities. And soldiers with big guns always make me feel very uneasy. Taxi drivers in lots of places in the world, I sit there gripping the side of the seat and I don't like swimming in deep water if there might be sharks down below. I've got to admit I don't like big spiders either. But you keep on doing these things. And we kept on doing this weird travel and then children came along and by then, you know, this was no longer just something we did because we enjoyed it. I did enjoy it, but it was also business, it was also life, it was also how I made my living. And I thought for a while either the kids came along or Maureen and I were living separately. She was with the kids and I was on the road and we wanted to keep traveling together. So for a number of years our kids came with us every school holiday when they started school, they were traveling somewhere. They'd been around South America before they were three years old. For a three month trip when our son was less than a year and our daughter was still two, we were in Kathmandu doing a little trek into the Himalayas. So they'd done some traveling and shortly after that we were in or where were we? Actually by the time Kieran was six years old, he'd been to every continent except Antarctica. But I really didn't want that travel to just be ticking numbers off on a list. Yeah, there's another continent gone. Because today there's so much misunderstanding in the world. And it's really by traveling that you meet people and you learn to understand them. And I wanted my kids to get some of that understanding that travel would be A way of connecting them to the outside world and understanding things about it. We were in Sri Lanka when Tashi had just had her third birthday in a garden in Kathmandu, and Kiran was still a baby almost. And we'd stopped at a little place on the beach and I was doing forays around the country from there and Maureen would stay with the kids. And then one day I took Tashi and we just drove along the coast a little way to Gaul, the beautiful old walled town on the coast. And we were looking around and I went to this one hotel, a beautiful old hotel. It's a building that dated from the late 1600s. And I'd been there before, so I knew what the hotel was like. And all I really had to do was look at the changes. They'd added a swimming pool since the last time I was there. But then as we were leaving, Tashi walking towards the car, Tashi took my hand and pulled at it and she said, daddy, we haven't checked the bathrooms. And I realized she knew what my job, part of what my job was all about. She knew that was part of what I had to do. And then when they were six and nine, by this time they'd learned to take perfectly good nouns and turned them into verbs. There were things like, we are templed out. We have seen all the temples we need to see, or we have done too much museuming today. We don't want to do any more of that. Well, we were in Luxor, down in the south of Egypt, and we'd been looking at the tombs. We'd just come out of Tutankhamun's tomb and they both announced they'd had quite enough tombing for today and they wanted to go back to the hotel. But heartless parents that we were, we were going on from the Valley of the Kings to the Valley of the Nobles. And we said, we're not only going to just go there, we're going to walk there over the hill that goes in between them. Nowadays, nowadays you're not going to Egypt at all, but nowadays you're not allowed to do that. You have to take the road by a taxi or a bus. But we were going to walk up the hill and down the other side. And our kids said, no, they were on strike, they were not going anywhere at all. And they sat down by the path. Well, Maureen and I walked up the hill expecting them to follow us very shortly. And we got about halfway up the hill and stopped to wait for them and looked down the hill and there were our two kids coming up the hill riding donkeys. And they came by us. And our son said, oh, we just saw this guy coming down the hill with his donkeys. And we said, how much to take your donkeys over to the Valley of the Nobles? Don't worry, dad, he said, I got him down from four Egyptian pounds to three. And I realized that they'd learned some things without even being taught it. I hadn't taught them how to bargain, they just learned it by themselves. And then when they were teenagers, Tashi was 17, we were in Guatemala, and we'd been up to the Mayan town of Tikal, up in the. Shrouded by the jungle, up in the mist shrouded areas. And then we'd come back by bus down to a town called Flores on a lake. And we were going on from there to Belize. And we were just getting towards the end of that bus trip, and Tashi said, oh, I'm not feeling very well. And then in the afternoon, she threw up. And when it was time for dinner, she said, look, I'm really not feeling well. I'll just stay home. You guys go out and have dinner. And we went out and had dinner, and when we came back, she'd thrown up some more, and then she threw up again and again and again and again. And she was just looking terrible. And she'd got. By now she'd got diarrhea and her hands were starting to cramp and her feet were cramping, which is a sign of dehydration. And I was getting really frightened. You know, you do things by yourself and, you know, that's looking after yourself. But you. You're not supposed to get other people into trouble. Particularly, you're not supposed to get your kids into trouble. Well, we did what you can do. And what you should do in this situation is you just pour liquid down them. The fact that they throw it up again doesn't make any difference. You just keep pouring liquid in flat. Coca Cola is a good thing to do. But it went on and on, and she just didn't get any worse. She was limp, she could barely respond to us. She could hardly answer questions. And it was getting dark by this time, and we were thinking, what on earth are we going to do? And I finally said, look, I've got to go out and get some medical attention. We can't do this. So I went downstairs and I went out in the street and it was completely dark and there was nobody around. But one of those miracles, a doctor, lived next door. And I went to him and I Explained what had happened, what was happening. And he, even though my Spanish is terrible, you know, I just dragged out the best, the best my Spanish could do. And he came back to the hotel and he diagnosed food poisoning and went back to his place and came back and gave her an injection of an antispasmodic to stop her throwing up, but it just didn't work. And then he said, I work in a hospital near the town. I'll get my car and I'll drive there. And he drove there and 45 minutes or an hour later he came back and he set up a drip. He turned hotel room into a little clinic and plugged the drip into Tashi and started putting medication in through the drip. And she gradually started to quieten down and finally she went peacefully to sleep and he left. And we took turns staying up all night keeping an eye on her. And he came back at dawn and she, a day or so she'd recovered. And I thought afterwards, you know, well, this is one of those things that you're very lucky that there's a doctor living next door and you talk about the kindness of strangers and when you're traveling you often do encounter that kindness of strangers. And definitely I'd encountered it at that time and what had I done? I just been brave enough to inflict my terrible Spanish on somebody, but that was just about all I'd done. But then I thought, you know, well, is there anything more to this? You know, have I just put her off travel forever? I've sort. We pulled her back from the edge because we were really frightened. But you know, is there any more to this? But you know, a decade and a half passes and kids grow up and we sell Lonely Planet. And a lot of the money we got from Lonely Planet we put into a foundation which we call Planet Wheeler. And we've got 70 odd projects around the world and somebody has to go out and check these projects. We checking a water project in Ethiopia or a school in Tanzania or a children's hospital that we helped to fund in Cambodia. And who goes to do it? My daughter. Thank you.