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I was looking at Google Earth one day
and I spun round to my home country of New Zealand.
And I was looking at New Zealand
and I was looking at the contours of the mountains.
And look, there's a mountain in the North Island of New Zealand
called Mt Ruapehu, the highest mountain in the North Island.
I looked to the South Island,
I saw a tallest mountain called Mt Cook.
And I came up with this idea
cause I've been thinking of climbing...
what I love to do, the kayaking, the cycling...
I thought, what about climbing this mountain,
then making a journey all the way?
That's 1300 kilometers between the two mountains
and climbing the next mountain.
But the journey, completely by human power.
100% by human power.
That means going down the roads using bicycles
Crossing over the straits using kayaks,
completely by human power, using no support whatsoever.
So I called this "Peak to Peak".
"Peak to Peak Journey", I made up the adventure myself.
The problem with this adventure is that I had a job at the time
which I had 22 days of leave only.
So this is basically,
a very short explanation of how the journey unfolded.
This is the highest mountain in the North... called Mt Ruapehu.
There was just two of us on this whole journey
but I invited on other guy for this mountain
He was my schoolmate from 20 years ago.
His name's Rob Knowles.
And 20 years ago, we'd done a walk in New Zealand for 3 days.
And he was a bit unfit.
And I said, "Rob you'd be fine on this walk, don't worry."
And I loaded up his pack with all the food.
So he can carry all the food.
Halfway through the second day, he had massive blisters on his feet.
And he was crying because he was in so much pain.
And he looked at me with a look of death.
And said, "This is the last time I'll ever do anything
in the outdoors with you."
[Audience laughter]
Luckily, 20 year later, he'd forgotten about that. And I...
[Audience laughter]
I invited him on this climb.
He is not a climber or mountaineer at all.
But here he is with bag bolts and two ice axes,
climbing up this very steep, hard ice to the summit.
And he was petrified.
This is, if you fall here.
You're going to die basically.
He was petrified, and when he got to the summit.
He gave me that same look again. [Audience laughter]
He said, "This is the last time I'll ever do anything with you...
But when he got down from the mountain that day.
I tell you, the look of pride and satisfaction on his face
was amazing and that's the great thing
about pushing yourself out of your comfort zone.
So there Alan and myself,
two of us, we stood on the summit of this mountain.
Then from this mountain
we got the divorce machine.
I rolled it up and took it out to New Zealand
and blew it up with air.
And we, went 260 kilometers down the river.
Alan and myself and the divorce machine, the Whanganui River.
There's no shops or towns, anything along yea?
You carried everything.
Food, tents and everything.
Along this river...
And it's a beautiful river.
You camp on this bank... the river there's no one else around.
Until it starts raining.
And on the second day it rained, and it rained
And it rained.
And that's what normal people look like
They have proper kayaks where they sit up nice
with their bottoms nice and dry all the way.
This is what it's like in the divorce machine.
[Audience laughter]
Basically, you're sitting in water
which is covering your leg
and this water comes from the glacier, you know?
It's very, very cold.
(Audience) Wow!
So for 5 days all the way down this river
We floated down, but our testicles floated down with us.
It was very, very cold water.
Then finally we got to the end
and there is the divorce machine. We packed it up.
And I shipped it back to Singapore just through the Post Office.
That's an example to show you
you can have a great little holiday
without having to spend lots of money.
[Audience laughter]
Here we are... on our bikes and it rained.
And we had to cycle 250 kilometers south
When it starts raining, you get lots of punctures.
In New Zealand, this is about 4 or 5 degrees.
It's really cold there.
And changing my bike tire on the side of the road.
When we got to the bottom of the North Island of New Zealand
and we get to the sea.
And here we have to
encounter 70 kilometers,
it was a very dangerous stretch of water
called the Cook Strait.
Lots of sharks, massive big swells,
huge... huge storms on the Cook Strait.
Lots of people die there on a regular basis
because it's a dangerous stretch of water