Kayaking the Mangoky (Madagascar’s Longest River) + Balancing Career and Travel with Oscar Scafidi

Welcome to the Show

Jason: Hey, Jason here with ZeroToTravel.com. Thanks for letting me bring a little travel into your ears today, and for being a part of this listening community. If you’ve never been in touch before, feel free to reach out. It’s Jason at ZeroToTravel.com, my email. Get in touch anytime. I love to hear stories and share stories from the listening community. I want to give a quick shout-out, by the way, to Ann, who came through Oslo. She sent me some pictures. We weren’t able to meet up, unfortunately, but it sounds like she had a great time here, and it’s always a joy to hear from people who listen to this show. I want to make this a two-way conversation. As we come out of the summer and enter into the fall and winter, I want to share more community stories here, so please get in touch and share yours, because it inspires other listeners in this community, and it inspires me as well. I just love sharing stories like that.

Jason: Speaking of incredible stories, we have Oscar Scafidi here today. We’ll link up to his YouTube channel, and Kayak the Mangoky is the website for the adventure you’re going to hear about today: the kayaking trip, the first-ever source-to-sea kayaking expedition along Madagascar’s longest river, the Mangoky. It’s a wonderful story. Enjoy it. Stick around at the back end, I’ll leave you with a quote to wrap this one up. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you on the other side, my friend.

Meet Oscar Scafidi and the Meaning Behind “Ozymandias”

Jason: Oscar Scafidi, welcome to the Zero to Travel podcast, my friend. Good to see you.

Oscar: Thank you very much for inviting me, Jason. Congrats on all of the things.

Jason: I couldn’t help but notice, we were trading emails, and then you had a moniker in the email. I’m not even sure how that works with Google: Ozymandias.

Oscar: Yes, that’s correct.

Jason: What does that mean for you? Because that’s a couple of things. That’s a character in Watchmen, which is an incredible graphic novel if you haven’t read it. It’s also a poem. Do you have a connection with Ozymandias? I’m just curious.

Oscar: Yeah, I think the original connection is the poem. Growing up, my mother always used to read that to us. I’m not sure what her interest was in it originally, but I’ve just kind of been interested in that ever since. That’s been my online moniker for the past 30 years or so.

Jason: I read the poem, because I was thinking that’s what it was, and I can link up to the Wikipedia page so people can read about it. But what is it, outside of having the connection with your mother reading it to you, what is the deeper connection you have there? Or am I overthinking it?

Oscar: Yeah, I haven’t really thought about that much recently, to be honest. It is a poem about travel, which is something that’s very dear to me. I suppose it’s also a poem about staying grounded and avoiding arrogance, which I guess is always a useful reminder to have in your life. And also, the guy who wrote it, Percy Bysshe Shelley, is also a very interesting historical character, and I am a historian by training. So it’s got three different angles that interest me.

Staying Grounded in Expedition Writing and Filmmaking

Jason: Interesting. Well, I do want to talk about your transition, not a full transition, because you’re still educating in many ways, but your move from educator to travel writer and expeditionist. But you hit on this grounding aspect of the poem, that idea of staying grounded, and how that can and cannot match up with the expedition adventure travel world. There’s a certain level of hubris you have to have to say, “All right, I’m going to go do this.” Like a guy recently who swam and cycled and ran to Mount Everest and climbed it. There’s a certain level of confidence, and maybe necessary ego, that you have to have in order to pull off some of these bigger expeditions. We could talk about some of the ones you’ve done, and we’re going to talk about your source-to-sea kayak along Madagascar’s longest river today. How does that grounding, and that philosophy, fit into your framework for the world, your mindset, whether you’re writing a guidebook or approaching these bigger adventures, which do require you to put yourself out there in a certain way?

Oscar: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I think it’s a bit of a balancing act, to be honest, and in my writing I have sometimes struggled to get the balance right. I think there’s a whole sub-genre of travel writing, especially when it comes to expedition travel writing, that’s very much on the hyping-it-up side, talking up the danger, either directly or indirectly bigging yourself up and saying how amazing you must be to have been able to do this extremely dangerous thing. That’s something I work quite hard to avoid in my writing and my filmmaking. But at the same time, I do get pushback from my editor sometimes, who says, “Look, could you please be a little bit more explicit about how difficult this was, or how dangerous this was?” Because at the moment it’s not particularly obvious. That’s something I found I had to make quite a lot of edits to the Kayak the Mangoky book for, just to clarify the level of difficulty of what we were doing, because in the first draft I’d kind of touched upon it but hadn’t been too explicit. So yeah, I think it’s a balancing act, definitely.

Oscar: But the whole staying-grounded thing, when it comes to writing, is that I always have to be aware, when I’m writing guidebooks to countries, that I’m an outsider. I’m coming into a place that is a home for many people, but it’s not my home, and I’m trying to talk about it authoritatively, having been there a lot less time than many of the people who are going to end up reading the finished product. So I always think of my guidebooks as quite a collaborative process, because I try to get as many other voices in as possible, especially when I’m talking about stuff I don’t really know about. I’m particularly interested in certain aspects of the tourism offerings of countries, like the archaeological sites, the outdoor activities, those kinds of things. I’m less of an expert when it comes to the food scene or the art scene, so I always try to get local voices in, because I recognize they’re probably going to say something much more useful and insightful than me.

Jason: Yeah, that’s a great approach. You’re essentially, as a writer, filmmaker, or adventurer, you’re curating, right? On a high level, your job is to curate. If you’re able to identify your quote-unquote weaknesses, like, “I’m not going to be as good in the food and art scene, okay, let me pull some people in whose opinions I trust,” that’s a great approach.

The Hippo Attack and Balancing Danger in Storytelling

Jason: It’s interesting to hear. So in the book, for example, because I know you had the encounter with the hippopotamus.

Oscar: Yes, that’s true.

Jason: That would be an example of you underplaying it, like, “Yeah, this hippo attacked us, but we got around it.” When actually you have to lead into the fact that this is a very dangerous animal that can kill you, something like that.

Oscar: Yeah, absolutely. I also find that this is where we get into an issue with storytelling between filming and writing, because I often find that some of the most exciting elements of these expeditions, by their very nature, end up not getting filmed. For example, the hippo attack: I was not waving a GoPro at the hippo while it was trying to get us. “Hold on hippo, you’ve got to get this shot, man.” I was kind of busy trying to get out of the way. That was our Angola expedition. In our more recent Madagascar expedition, I wasn’t waving a GoPro around during some of the most difficult times, when we were both getting super sick, because we really weren’t in the mood to be in front of a camera. So you end up with very different material for the film than you do for the book. It’s another balancing act, deciding whether you’re going to try to tell the same story in two different ways, or end up telling a slightly different story.

Balancing Teaching and Travel Writing

Jason: Right, that makes sense. Staying on that for another moment, from a meta perspective, there’s this blueprint of building a career as an adventurer. You go and do some crazy thing, then write a book about it, then do talks about it, and it becomes a career. That is a part of the deal, but you’re also trying to balance all these other things. Is this your full-time job, to go on adventures and do travel writing, or are you also doing risk consulting in Africa? Where are you at with the balance of Oscar’s career right now?

Oscar: I would say my two main jobs are, I’m an international school teacher, so I’m a historian, and I teach within the International Baccalaureate system, and I’m also a travel writer. Those are the two things I focus on. Which one of those is my full-time job is an interesting question, it kind of varies. Right now, I’d say my full-time job is teaching, and I spend some of my free time doing travel writing. But at times when I haven’t been on a full-time contract at a school, I’d say my full-time job, and most of my income, comes from travel writing and everything associated with that world, and I’m not doing so much of the teaching and education side of things. So it varies from year to year, basically.

Jason: Is the ultimate goal to go with one fully, or the other, or do you have an equal passion for both in different ways? I’m just thinking from a lifestyle design perspective, that’s a big topic on this show. A lot of people are crafting a lifestyle or a business around their love of travel, and it looks different for everybody. I’m wondering, in the coming years, how are you thinking about that, or are you thinking about it?

Oscar: Yeah, I think about it quite carefully. Luckily, I love both. I love travel, and both of the career paths I’ve chosen give me extensive opportunities to travel. I think I do both because I’m passionate about both. I think doing both certainly has its drawbacks, but I’ve had periods of three-plus years at a time doing just travel writing, and then I’ve missed the teaching. So I’ve tried to design things and find a way of having that balance, where I can do both, essentially.

Jason: Some of those guidebooks, it doesn’t look like a thing you can necessarily just whip out on the side of full-time teaching.

Oscar: Well, again, I’ve done both. I have whipped it out on the side while doing a full-time teaching job.

Jason: That must be intense.

Oscar: It is intense, and it’s not ideal, to be honest. My last guidebook, to Tunisia, was published, I think it was summer 2023, and that was the result of three years of full-time work while in Tunisia, exclusively doing that. I wasn’t teaching at that time, and I’m very glad I wasn’t, because prior to that, I did a guidebook to Angola while also teaching, and it’s two full-time jobs stacked on top of each other, essentially, which is not ideal.

Teaching in Ethiopia and a Passion for African History

Jason: What do you love about teaching, and what are you doing in Ethiopia, and how long have you been living there?

Oscar: I’m teaching at an international school here in Ethiopia. I moved over here in August with my partner, for the beginning of the academic year. I teach humanities, like I always do, in the secondary school. What do I love about it? I love interacting with children and young adults. I think they’re fascinating, they haven’t made their minds up yet, you can see them grow and develop as you’re working with them, and you get sort of immediate feedback on what it is that you’re doing. I also like that I get to teach humanities, because it links beautifully to my other passions, especially working in Africa. I get to talk a lot about the stuff I’m interested in, because it happens to be directly relevant to the curriculum we’re working on.

Jason: What are those things you talk about a lot that you’re passionate about?

Oscar: I’m passionate about Africa broadly. I’d say the history of Africa, all the way from pre-colonial times through colonialism, looking at decolonization. I talk a lot about the Cold War, these were focuses for my master’s studies, and they’re also focuses for a lot of the curriculum I teach. I’m also interested in development, the way Africa is changing, or is going to change, now and in the near future, and who’s going to play a role in that. I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding around what Africa is like, the diversity in Africa. I always laugh when we say “Africa,” people say Africa is a country. There’s actually a whole excellent website called Africa Is a Country, designed to break down that stereotype. So getting to work on this continent with people from all over the place is fascinating.

Jason: Can you think of where that interest in Africa and that passion came from? Was there anything growing up you remember that drew you to it, or did it just evolve over time? Because you’ve spent quite a lot of your career and travel time in Africa.

Oscar: I think at this stage it’s accurate to say I’ve spent the majority of my adult life in Africa. I moved to Africa in 2006, and since then I’ve spent most of that time in various countries on this continent.

From Job Rejections in London to Teaching in Sudan

Oscar: The original genesis of that was very random, a complete accident, in fact. I graduated from university in 2005 and struggled to find a job. Originally, I don’t know where I got this idea from, but I wanted to work in marketing and advertising, and I wanted to work in London, which looking back is a bit bizarre. I applied for lots of different jobs at fancy advertising agencies and just got rejection after rejection after rejection, which I found kind of surprising, because I’d gone to quite a prestigious university, and I was like, “Why won’t these people give me a job? I don’t understand.” But I think it ended up being one of the best things to happen to me, because very randomly, after a year of rejections, a teaching English job came up in Sudan on the university alumni notice board. I mentioned it in passing to my mom, who’s herself a teacher, almost as a joke, “Oh well, if things don’t work out, maybe I’ll just move to Sudan.” Obviously, at that time, back in 2006, Sudan was having a fair amount of instability, as it sadly still is today. But she encouraged me to go for it, said I wasn’t really achieving anything particularly useful in the UK, so why not take the leap and see how things went? That was actually the first time I’d set foot outside Europe. I was in my early twenties, and I’d only ever, and not just Europe, I’d narrow that down even more, I’d say Western Europe. So I went from having seen nothing but Western Europe to moving to Sudan.

Jason: Pretty incredible experience.

Oscar: Yeah.

The First Weeks in Khartoum

Jason: What was that first week like?

Oscar: It was a bit of a culture shock, as you can imagine. I was thrown in at the deep end, in more ways than one, in the sense of being in a completely new country and culture, and also in a relatively new role, in a new school. So it was pretty hard work. Luckily, I got dropped in at the deep end with two other guys who seemed to have very similar backstories to me, and are now very good friends of mine, called Nick and Frankie. So we kind of made it work together. Our salary was very low, so we weren’t really part of the very limited expat scene that existed in Khartoum at the time. I remember we used to joke that there was the tier-one international school, which was where the actual ambitious and well-qualified teachers ended up, and they got very well paid. Then there was the school below that, which was still a relatively good school, but it wasn’t where we worked. And then there was a whole series of other schools that paid more local salaries. So we weren’t able to afford to fly out of the country for holidays or do anything fancy. We had a much more, I suppose, Sudanese lifestyle: smoking shisha, drinking tea, going to local football matches, traveling domestically, that kind of thing. I think that was fantastic.

Jason: Was that the gateway to opening up your curiosity about Africa as a whole, and all of the countries and the diversity that come with that?

Oscar: Yeah, I think so. I think after a few months there, I realized this was the part of the world I wanted to be in. I realized I wanted to continue in this career path too, in terms of teaching, because firstly, I was very passionate about it, and secondly, it also gives you fantastic opportunities to travel around.

Finding Angola Through a Book

Oscar: I randomly selected my second African country to move to within a few weeks of getting to Sudan. My friend Nick, who’s a Pole, was reading a book by Ryszard Kapuściński called Another Day of Life. He’s a famous Polish conflict journalist who happened to be in Angola in 1974, just as Portuguese colonial rule was coming to an end. All the Portuguese were fleeing, there was a civil war going on at the time, and he was basically the only foreign journalist in the entire country. He wrote a very short book about his experiences there during those few weeks. I remember reading it and thinking, “That sounds amazing, I need to go to Angola.” That was the plan I came up with in 2006, and that’s exactly what I did in 2009. I moved out to Angola.

[Ad break: We’ll get back to the interview in just a moment. Now, back to the show.]

Jason: I wanted to get some of your travel recommendations in Africa, you’ve been around to many places. We can get some of those hidden gems for independent travelers, some of your favorite spots. We can earmark that, because we’re going to talk about your adventure a bit, but be warned, I’m going to come back to that, so start gathering your recommendations.

Oscar: I’ve got plenty of recommendations, don’t worry.

Africa’s Rapid Development

Jason: I wanted to ask you about the development and future of Africa, which you brought up, and something you’ve had a keen interest in, studying academically and teaching. What are your thoughts on that?

Oscar: I think your average person in the West would be extremely surprised at how developed large parts of Africa already are. I think a lot of the stereotypes we associate with certain parts of the continent don’t really apply anymore. I’m here in Addis, the capital of Ethiopia. I’ve actually traveled around Ethiopia quite a lot in the past, but my last time here was in 2014, and now, ten years later, even I’ve been amazed by the pace of development here. The cosmopolitan nature of the city, the roads, the streets, the cycle paths, the electric cars zipping all over the place, I’ve been very impressed, and that’s from someone who has a fair amount of experience around here.

Oscar: I think the level of technology on offer is also quite impressive. In a lot of African countries, they’ve completely embraced the fintech revolution, smartphones. In some ways they’ve bypassed some of the inefficiencies of traditional banking and gone straight for mobile banking. I lived in Mozambique, and it was much easier and simpler for me to pay for things digitally in Mozambique than it was back in the UK or Italy.

Jason: Really?

Oscar: Where I’m from. Across Mozambique, everyone just has M-Pesa. As long as you’ve got a phone number, you have a way of transferring money to each other. It doesn’t even need to be a smartphone, you just text each other, and the exchange has happened. That’s the same across a lot of this part of Africa, so I’m always very impressed by that.

Family Roots and an Adventurous Mother

Jason: Which part of the UK did you grow up in?

Oscar: I was born in Rome, in Italy, my mom’s British, my dad’s Italian, but we moved to the UK when I was quite young. I spent most of my time and studies down in the southeast of England, kind of in between Brighton and Gatwick, that’s probably the best reference point.

Jason: Kudos to your mom, by the way, encouraging you, sometimes it just takes that one person to say, “Oh yeah, you should go for that.”

Oscar: The older I’ve gotten, and the more curious and the more questions I’ve asked, the more I’ve realized that we’re actually quite similar, and she also had quite an adventurous spirit, but she never told me many of these things growing up as a child, so I didn’t realize this. When I think, after university or during university, she tried to hitchhike from Algiers all the way through the Sahara to Nigeria with her friends, which is kind of amazing, this was in the 1970s I think, and I think she managed to get most of the way there, which is very impressive, and certainly not something you could do these days.

Jason: Wow, I guess it’s in your blood, in some ways.

Choosing Madagascar and Learning to Kayak

Jason: The connection to Madagascar, we’re going to talk about your kayaking journey. You have a whole smorgasbord of potential adventures to choose from when you take on something like this, and you know it’s going to be a lot of work from the logistics to the preparation, the documentation, all the things involved. What drew you to the kayaking adventure? Maybe you could give us an outline of the trip, so people can get context, and you can tell us what drew you to that.

Oscar: Yeah, sure. So Madagascar, the reason I chose Madagascar is because that’s a country I used to live and work in. I lived and worked there from 2017 to 2019, teaching in an international school, and I think that gives you a huge advantage when it comes to planning an expedition. I don’t think I’d be enthusiastic about planning a big kayaking expedition in a country I hadn’t spent significant time in, because you get a much more nuanced understanding of how a place works, how the bureaucracy works, if you’ve actually been there. Also, you just have a local network, you have people you know who to speak to, people who can help you find the right person, you know how to source supplies, you have an understanding of travel time, safety, these kinds of things. So the reason for Madagascar is because I already knew quite a lot about it, having lived there.

Oscar: The reason kind of why kayaking, again, is another random one. My first big kayaking expedition was in 2016, I kayaked the Kwanza River in Angola, that was a 33-day, 1,300-kilometer expedition. I went on it with my friend Alfie Weston, and the reason we did that is purely down to Alfie, nothing to do with me. He just suggested it, he was already quite an enthusiastic kayaker, and he just suggested it to me, we both lived and worked there at the same time, and he knew I was probably the only person stupid enough to say yes. At that stage, when I did say yes, I had essentially never kayaked as an adult before. I’d gone on a couple of kayaking day trips as a child, but that was it, so I knew nothing about kayaking. Over the next nine months, I had to come up with a very rapid progression in terms of my kayak skills and understanding, in order to be ready for that expedition. After that 2016 expedition, it just turned into my thing. It’s an excellent way of exploring a country independently, you can travel a lot faster than if you’re just hiking, it’s much more independent than if you’re trying to go on a motorbike, where you have all sorts of other issues when it comes to sourcing fuel and breaking down and those sorts of things. So I think if you want to see the most remote parts of a country, there are a few better ways than kayaking through it.

Jason: Was it the challenge of the overall thing, or was there something inside where it was like, “Oh, kayaking sounds like a sport I could get into, that sounds fun,” or was it more that you learned to love it after diving in and trying to acquire it as a skill?

Oscar: I think I learned to love it, and I think it’s a very useful skill, especially when it comes to wanting to explore these remote places. I was just excited to go for another kayaking adventure, having had, what, a big gap between the first one and the second one, that’s a solid six and a bit years.

Advice for Aspiring Kayakers

Jason: What’s your best advice for somebody who’s coming out of this, maybe they’re not going to go down Madagascar’s longest river, which we’ll talk about that adventure next, but maybe they just want to try like a three-day trip, they’re interested in kayaking as a way of exploring and traveling. What’s your best advice for that person?

Oscar: I’d say start off with a safety course. It doesn’t necessarily matter if you’re going to do whitewater or not, but it does make sense to understand the basics of kayaking safety, because you’re near water, and there’s always that risk of something going wrong. You can find centers that offer those courses, whether on lakes, reservoirs, or even artificial rivers. For example, I went and did my kayak safety course at Lee Valley, in London, it was the London Olympic whitewater course they built specifically, and I found that really fun. They threw us into rapids and taught us how to use ropes, how to flip the kayak back over, how to navigate without smashing your head on rocks if you’re in the water, these kinds of things. I think I’d start there, and then after that, there’s plenty of relatively safe bodies of water, especially, I imagine, for a lot of the people listening, they’re going to have access to those. Just find a kayaking club or a rowing club, go and speak to them. I was really surprised when I took on the Angola mission, I had nine months to get ready, I was living in London at the time, and obviously London has the River Thames, so I found a kayaking club on the River Thames, but they were generally doing sightseeing tours for tourists, very simple, because the Thames is very tidal, they just float down the river with the tourists, past Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament and things. But when I spoke to them about what I was doing, they were super supportive, very excited about it, like, “Yeah, we can absolutely get you ready, do a kayaking fitness course,” and those kinds of things. I think most clubs are going to be very welcoming of new members.

Jason: Okay, that’s cool to hear, I’m sure it lit them up, like, “You’re not just going to be another one of the people floating down the scene. Wait, what are you doing? Hold on a minute, all right, this is a challenge we can take on.”

Oscar: Absolutely, and to a larger extent too, I think that whatever thing you choose, there’s always going to be that community there you can connect with.

Jason: I’m sure, with you experiencing that with the kayaking community, it really helps. I’m sure you had some anxiety around, “What am I actually getting into?” But to have this group of people preparing you, but also kind of cheering you on, I’m sure that was very helpful.

Oscar: Yeah, I think that really helped, and in some ways I got lucky, because I know the owner of the company who helped me out in London, I only found this out afterward, after I’d approached them and started training with them, I think he holds a world record for being the first person to sea kayak around the entire island of Ireland, which is pretty incredible. When you look at some of the surf and the cliffs around Ireland, that’s a pretty incredible achievement, so I kind of understand why he was particularly excited about that trip.

Jason: Well, that’s another small world, the world of expeditionists, you have a whole other community there to tap into. What other parts of expeditions do you need a little mindset to fall in love with? Some people maybe just hate logistics, but it’s a necessary part of the thing, and you just have to learn to power through. What parts of the whole expedition experience do you really enjoy, and what parts are you just like, “All right, whatever, I just need to get through this,” and how do you get through it?

Oscar: I think I’m okay when it comes to logistics and planning and dealing with bureaucracy, I think just from years of experience I understand it as a sort of necessary evil. I used to have an issue with training, especially in the buildup to the Angola trip, I really wasn’t very enthusiastic about going to the gym, actually going kayaking, these kinds of things. In fact, I think I was quite lazy, and we found out very quickly what a poor decision that was on the actual expedition, because it was extremely difficult. I only had to learn that lesson once, I think, now I take things a lot more seriously. Before the Madagascar expedition, we were much more scientific when it came to our actual physical training, and tried to be a bit more robust in our approach, because I’d rather train hard and have the expedition be slightly easier than the other way around.

Jason: Right, right, no, that makes sense.

Oscar: Yeah, I think probably the thing I struggle with most is the whole monetizing side of things, I would love to just be a millionaire and not have to worry about the financial side of things at all, because I find it a bit frustrating, the marketing, the contacting potential sponsors, persuading people to part with their money in order for you to be able to do this thing, and all the associated work that comes with that. I don’t think that comes very naturally to me, so that’s probably the hardest part. But again, I understand why it has to happen, because the trip needs to be paid for.

The Mangoky Expedition by the Numbers

Jason: I think this goes back to what you were saying at the beginning, about staying grounded, if you want to just do your thing, but you need to drum up enough interest to actually fund it. You guys had a charitable element to this trip too, let’s talk about the trip and the charity tie-in, and also, how many kilometers did you go, give us a number of days you were out there, just so people can understand. I got background on it because I’ve read about it, but for those listening, give people an idea of what this entailed, because saying something like, “Oh, we kayaked down the Mangoky,” okay, but when you actually look at the map and see the things you actually have to do to make that happen, it paints a whole different picture of the reality of that.

Oscar: Yes. So the trip ended up being about 750 kilometers, it took us about 28 days, and we started in the center-east of the country, just to the southeast of a big city called Fianarantsoa, and made our way westwards towards the Mozambique Channel, so the west coast of the island of Madagascar, facing Mozambique. But in doing so, we had to pass through a series of mountain ranges, which meant a lot of carrying the kayak, or portage, as we say to be fancy.

Jason: Yeah, pretty brutal.

Oscar: It was a lot more than we were expecting, actually, because it’s very difficult to get accurate satellite photography or on-the-ground information from such a remote part of Madagascar. I don’t know what we were expecting originally, the plan changed so many times. Perhaps we were expecting to carry the kayak for maybe 60 or 70 kilometers, which is bad enough, because the kayak itself, it breaks down, it’s a Klepper kayak, Klepper, our sponsors, gave us the kayak, it’s a fantastic piece of kit, but it does weigh about 40 kilos. It breaks down into wooden components and a skin you can pack up and put on your back, but that’s 40 kilos you’ve got to carry, in addition to all the other stuff you have to carry to stay alive, like your water, food, medical supplies, tent, cooking gear, that kind of thing. We ended up hiking over these very rugged bits of terrain, carrying very heavy equipment, for much further than we expected, I think we ended up doing over 200, maybe even 220, 250 kilometers of carrying that ridiculous kayak. Very hard work.

Running Out of Water in the Mountains

Jason: I can only imagine the conversations between you and Ben on the mountain range where you guys ran out of water, can you talk about that? That’s a very scary situation to be in, was that a situation where you felt, okay, this is exhausting, but I’m not going to die, versus, I could actually die? How many “I could actually die” situations have you had? You could say in general, but on this trip, did you ever have that feeling, this is actually getting pretty bad here?

Oscar: I think we certainly had the feeling of things getting pretty bad. When we started trekking over that mountain range, even our guides who were with us had never done that before, so essentially the mountain range is completely abandoned, there’s no reason to go up there, because there’s no water up there, and if there’s no water, there’s no good grazing for cattle, so no one takes the cattle up there, and obviously you can’t farm, so no one farms up there. We were heading into the unknown. But the local guys, we picked up some guides in a place called Ikalamavony, they agreed to take us, and looking at the map, we came up with some very unrealistic projections of how long it was going to take, we thought, “Oh, easy, just do 20 or 30k a day, and then four days later we’ll hit the river again and we’ll be fine.” But obviously you can’t walk in a straight line through a mountain range, because that’s impossible, because of the topography. We ended up getting, there are two kinds of lost, I suppose, there’s lost where you have no idea where you are, and there’s lost where you know exactly where you are, because you have the GPS coordinates, but you have no idea where you’re supposed to go next, or how you’re going to get to your actual destination. We were very frustrated, because we had a satellite communicator, we had our exact location, but we had no idea where to go. I think we had one day where we trekked, we followed the only trail we could follow, trying to head west, and by the end of the day, when we checked again, we were further east than when we’d started, we’d gone in a big dog-leg, but we had to do that in order to go past the mountain. What we thought was going to take three or four days ended up taking nine, which pushed us to the very limit of our food supplies, but also, we did not carry large amounts of water with us, we were reliant on, we have a fantastic water filtration system from a company called Water2Go in the UK, so we were just using that, you can drink anything, you can drink filthy groundwater, mud, whatever, but you have to find it, and we really struggled to find sources of water up there.

Oscar: I think if it had just been Ben and I, we would absolutely have run out of water on about day two, but luckily the guys we were with were absolute experts at looking at the landscape and the topography and understanding where the water sources were going to be, so we have to thank those guys for keeping us alive.

Jason: Wow, literally keeping you alive, that’s a scary situation.

[Ad break: We’ll get back to the interview in just a moment. Now, back to the show.]

The Biggest Lesson: Relying on Local People

Jason: For you personally, what were the biggest lessons you learned coming out of this one? Anything different from other expeditions you’ve taken, that really hit you in a different way?

Oscar: I think there were probably fewer surprises on the Madagascar trip than in previous expeditions, I guess that’s just from trial and error and experience. I think a lot of the takeaways I mentioned at the end of the book and the end of the film are almost exactly the same as the ones I mentioned in 2016, having kayaked the river in Angola. I guess the biggest takeaway is how reliant you are on the local people when you’re on a trip like this, and I don’t just mean the guides. We had a fantastic guide, we had Max, Rodia, Razozi, Ramam, they were our five main guys, and I’ve got to give them all a shout-out for keeping us alive, thank you very much. But not just them, everyone we bumped into in some way contributed to the success of the expedition, there were people giving us directions, people warning us about certain hazards, offering us shelter, these kinds of things. This comes back to the question we were talking about earlier, when it comes to staying humble. I think one of the things I don’t like in a lot of these expedition films is the idea that it’s sort of man against nature, that it’s one badass, or a pair of badasses, coming in from outside and conquering the unforgiving landscape they find, with nothing but their muscles and their guile. I don’t think that’s the case at all, I think it’s very much a team effort, and I’m at pains to emphasize that all the way through the book and the film, because there’s no way we would have got this done had it not been for the help of all the Malagasy people, right from the start to the finish line.

Conversations About Colonialism

Jason: Yeah, I love that. Do you get into conversations on the ground, being from the UK, about colonialism and those types of issues, and things from the past?

Oscar: I have those conversations all the time. That’s a topic I’m very interested in from a historical perspective, but I’m also interested to hear people’s opinions now, and the way those past events are viewed, and the way they’re taught in different cultures and societies. Madagascar is a former French colony, they have a rather difficult relationship with the former colonial power, I would say. Those conversations were happening all the way along the trip, basically. Yeah, very similar to when I lived in Tunisia, I was having similar conversations about French colonialism when I was there, or in Angola, talking about the Portuguese, or that kind of thing. I’m now in a very interesting, different context, I’m in Ethiopia, the only country in Africa that didn’t suffer from European colonialism, barring a very short period of time when the Italians were here.

Jason: Times have certainly changed, and I appreciate that you take the time to point out the local involvement, and how essential that is, because in the old school, you think about the British explorers going, and like you said, it’s either man versus nature, or “I’m going to go conquer this and that,” and that’s just not the world right now anymore, you know what I mean?

Oscar: Yeah, I think that’s right, it never really was, people just didn’t talk about it. I kind of try to avoid that orientalist framing whenever I’m talking about a place. Having said that, when I look back at some of my earliest writing, when I was first getting into things in the early to mid 2000s, I do kind of cringe, because I can see how my own views on this have changed over the past 20 years, and how my approach to telling stories has changed.

Jason: Yeah, I guess that’s a wider change in the travel writing zeitgeist. The film, I guess, shares all of this. So everybody knows where to go, and they can, you’ve got the book, you’ve got the film, people can dive a little deeper and learn more about the expedition, and even some of the charities involved. Please share here.

The Film, the Book, and the Charity

Oscar: Yeah. So we have an official website, kayakthemangoky.com, and on there you’ll find links to the film and the book. The film we just released on YouTube, essentially, so it’s free for anyone to see, it came out a few weeks ago, we’ve also entered it into a bunch of film festivals, so we hope it does well. It’s quite short, only 41 minutes, that’s very deliberate, because I’m trying to get it into the short film category for a lot of these festivals. It tells the whole story from start to finish, Ben and I, it’s very much guerrilla filmmaking, we’re just carrying a bunch of GoPros, we had a drone, that was about it, and we put that story together. That takes you all the way through, from training in Tunisia, where we were living at the time, to flying to Madagascar, to driving to the source, to starting the trek, to getting all the way to the Mozambique Channel.

Oscar: If people want to know more, there’s also a book, the ebook is available on Amazon, also called Kayak the Mangoky, that requires paying for, I’m afraid, although we are donating 25% of profits to the charity, the same charity we raised money for with the expedition. This is a charity called Our Kids, Our Future Madagascar, which is essentially an educational charity. Sadly, because Madagascar has quite a lot of poverty, a lot of children drop out of school at the primary level because of the cost of materials, you have to bring your own materials to school, and it’s kind of shocking how difficult it is to get those materials and pay those fees to get the kids back in school. I really like it because it’s a grassroots charity, I know the people who run it, and it’s super effective, because all you have to do is come up with a certain amount of dollars, and that’s one more primary school student straight back in school immediately, which is fantastic.

Oscar: We’re still working on the paperback, I’m hoping it’ll be out by Christmas, just in time for everybody, and we’ll be donating profits from that to the charity as well, so I hope it does well. As I said before, the book is slightly different, in terms of the story, to the film, because the book is my memory and my notes, whereas the film is only the things we managed to capture. There’s a lot more information in the book, for example, Ben and I both got super sick on the expedition, none of that was captured in the film. Ben actually got bilharzia, which is a disgusting parasitic disease, from a snail that crawls into your legs and then reproduces in your internal organs, and makes you very sick, so there’s a whole breakdown of that if you’re interested. Then we had a couple of run-ins with the authorities that weren’t captured, because obviously I wasn’t about to point a GoPro at a corrupt official trying to shake us down for cash, so that stayed out of the film, but it’s in the book. Definitely plenty of adventures to read about in the book, if you want to go deeper.

Tips for Avoiding Bribes and Corruption

Jason: What’s your best advice, you mentioned earlier having a lot of experience with bureaucracy, which is something travelers can run up against all over the world, in various places, whether it’s visas or officials or things like that. What’s your top-line advice for dealing with those situations on the ground?

Oscar: I’d say, put very simply, getting angry doesn’t work.

Jason: Or how about, getting angry or impatient makes things worse. There you go.

Oscar: So I think being patient and having a good sense of humor about it is probably the best mindset to approach things with, because otherwise things can go south very quickly.

Jason: Yeah, everybody appreciates a sense of humor.

Oscar: Absolutely. In fact, I wrote, in my guidebook to Equatorial Guinea, which came out a long time ago, I think 2016, I remember before I went, I was told that Equatorial Guinea had a reputation for being one of the most corrupt countries in the world, when it came to the police forces and the way they’d interact with not just foreigners but also the locals. That kind of rang true when I was traveling around, I certainly had a lot of issues with police forces, but I made it my personal mission to not pay a single bribe for the entire time I was there gathering information, which wasted a lot of my time, but I did manage to achieve that without putting myself into too much danger. When I got back, I did a two-page spread in the guidebook called “Avoiding the Shakedown,” a guide to not paying bribes at checkpoints, some tips for people, and obviously they’re not just applicable to Equatorial Guinea, I’m sure they’d work in a lot of other contexts.

Jason: Sure, can you share one or two you think are the most impactful, outside of what you shared, staying patient, sense of humor?

Oscar: Making some sort of local connection immediately, so I’d have some sort of football team paraphernalia on the dashboard of my vehicle.

Jason: Oh really, okay.

Oscar: There’d be a local football team, and sometimes they’d mention it, and I could say, “Oh, we’re both supporters of the same team, so maybe you shouldn’t try and rob me right now, because we have something in common.” Another one I had was having a ready supply of disgusting Chinese cigarettes, that seems to go down a storm no matter where you are. People don’t often outright ask you for bribes, sometimes they’ll ask you, it’s a euphemism, different in different countries, they’ll ask you for a drink, they’ll ask you for a cigarette, that kind of thing. If you interpret that literally, you can be like, “Oh, well, actually yes, I do have a cigarette, here you go, here, take the whole pack.” But I never actually gave away any of my cigarettes, because I bought the most disgusting Chinese brand I could find, and I remember their faces would always sink when they saw that I had this kind of $1.50-for-200 Chinese cigarettes, rather than Marlboros or something slightly better tasting. So we ended up in a sort of unusual situation, where the police felt a bit awkward refusing my gesture, and they’d just shoo me along, because they’d feel they’d been rude in some way, that I’d kind of acquiesced, and now they were refusing to take the thing I was offering to give them. So maybe a bit of reverse psychology, I suppose.

Jason: Yeah, I don’t smoke, so I would have been perfectly happy to hand over those cigarettes, but that’s great, and I’d love to see your football paraphernalia collection one day, that’s not something you thought about, a traveler carrying around, “Let me just get out my briefcase full of local football paraphernalia.”

Oscar: Well, it doesn’t always have to be local, because obviously the Premier League and various other European leagues are massive all across Africa. Even here in Ethiopia, I’m constantly sitting around listening to arguments between people over whether it’s Man U or Man City.

Jason: Yeah, you’re usually safe with a couple of top teams from La Liga or the Premier League or whatever. Okay, there you go.

Oscar: Yeah, you don’t want to have the wrong team that they hate.

Jason: Well, exactly, at least it’s a point for debate anyway. Spirited debate, no, that’s helpful, thanks.

Travel Recommendations Across Africa

Jason: Give us your travel recommendations for Africa right now, obviously it’s changing rapidly, so many places to go, so many things to do, so many experiences to be had. Just for the typical traveler, who may not be going to kayak down Madagascar’s longest river and end up in really remote mountains without water, what are some of the places you’d like to highlight for our listeners?

Oscar: So I think my list of favorite African countries is kind of directly linked to how long I’ve spent in each of those countries. I think my favorite country on the continent is by far Angola, I lived there for five years, I absolutely loved it, I’ve been back there many times since, obviously I did this kayaking trip there. Angola is following the pattern of a lot of other countries on the continent, which is, I think they’re realizing that diversifying their economy is a good thing, and that tourism is a potential stream of income that would be useful to have. Angola is now visa-free for a lot of nationalities, which is a massive change. When I lived there, I moved out in 2009, I don’t think there was even such a thing as a tourist visa, it was a very, very closed country, you were either working there or you were Angolan, those were your two options. Now you can just show up, get stamped in, and go explore. I really want to highlight Angola, people have got to go and visit, and that’s not just because I wrote a guidebook, it’s a fantastic country, it’s massive, it has a huge coastline, so all sorts of water sports, some of the best surf in Africa, but also, because it’s so large, and because of where it is, it has some of the biggest geographic diversity on the continent, you’ve got the edge of the Congo rainforest in the north, all the way down to the Namib Desert in the south, and everything in between. I love that place, and it’s also a lot cheaper than it used to be, I’m still battling people on social media who post old stories about how Luanda, the capital city of Angola, is the most expensive city in the world, it used to be, it isn’t anymore, they devalued the currency, and now it’s actually quite a reasonably priced African city, I don’t think it’s even in the top 20 most expensive cities, so I don’t think people should be put off by seeing old news about that.

Oscar: One other place I’d like to highlight, actually I’ll go with two more. I’ll go with Tunisia, I lived in Tunisia for three years, got to travel around the whole country, did about 30,000 kilometers in my four-by-four, writing the guidebook to that country, absolutely love Tunisia. I’d say for a lot of the English-speaking audience, they’ll associate Tunisia with package holidays on the Mediterranean, which isn’t that exciting to be honest, it’s just a cheaper version of the south of Spain or the south of France, but I think Tunisia has much more to offer than just the Mediterranean coastline. I think the government is really getting behind this push to expand their tourism offering, so there’s a lot more eco-tourism, independent tourism, they’ve got some incredible niche things, a lot of World War II sites unique to Tunisia you can go and explore, they have a bunch of Star Wars filming sites, completely unique to North Africa, it’s super safe, super cheap, obviously fantastic climate for where it is, and extremely easy to reach, especially from Europe, so that would stand out.

Oscar: Then another one, which I went to visit for the first time last year, again following the pattern of making their visa processes easier, is Algeria. I went and explored Algeria last summer, and I fell in love with it for a lot of the same reasons as Tunisia. Super cheap, super safe, everyone’s very welcoming, you’ve got incredible historic buildings, it’s not at all filled with tourists, so most of the archaeological sites you’re going to go to, you’re going to have to yourself, likewise with a lot of the historical sites in the cities. I was only there for a week, I did about 1,300 kilometers in my hire car, some of the cheapest fuel in the world, I think I was paying eleven euro cents per liter for diesel, so basically borderline free to drive around, which is incredible. I’d really encourage people to jump on the Algeria bandwagon before it fills up.

Jason: Wow, okay, love those recommendations. That’s a clue anytime you’re saying these countries, you spent time in them, like you said, Angola pretty closed off and now just starting to embrace tourism, this is a thing in a way, seeing things like, “Oh, you’re going to visit an archaeological site in Algeria and you’re going to be the only one there,” that’s music to all our ears in a way.

Jason: Yeah, absolutely, there’s so many places to see, but you need to get the recommendations from people like yourself who’ve actually spent quality time in these places.

Oscar: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I’m not a big fan of big crowds of tourists, so I go out of my way to avoid that wherever possible. To have a UNESCO World Heritage Site to yourself is quite something, certainly not something you’d get in a lot of other countries.

What’s Next and Closing Thoughts

Jason: Incredible. What’s next for you, Oscar? What do you have going on over the next year or two?

Oscar: So my expedition partner, Ben, who I did the Madagascar trip with, he and I have been talking, and our plan is, I do believe, to kayak the longest river in Indonesia, which is called the Kapuas River, that’s on Borneo. That’ll be our biggest challenge yet, because it’s a massive river, about 1,200 to 1,300 kilometers, and that’s just the river, so when you factor in sections where I imagine we’d have to portage, it’s going to end up being longer than that, which would make it even longer than the Angola trip back in 2016. Originally we were going to do that this past summer, June, July, but various work commitments, both from me and from Ben, meant that couldn’t happen, so that’s possibly going to happen next June, July, or the one after that, that’s kind of what we’re working towards.

Jason: Nice, he didn’t have enough with the snails inside his body, that wasn’t enough to put him off.

Oscar: We managed not to put him off, Ben still wants to hang out with me, and he still wants to do these things, so we must have done something right. Actually, we’ve got some other good news, I spoke to the CEO of Klepper recently, the German brand that makes these incredible folding, collapsible kayaks, and he said he’s quite keen to work with us on engineering something specific to us, which would be fantastic, because then we could bring the weight down, and when it comes to these portage sections, maybe we could be carrying 20 kilos worth of kayak rather than 40 kilos worth of kayak on our backs.

Jason: Amazing, the fact that you’re, after hearing just a touch of some of the experiences, which would be enough to probably make another kayak trip their last one, you’re after it again, planning another venture, which is super exciting. Thank you for your time, for sharing a bit about your expedition and your story here today, I really appreciate you coming on the show, and I will definitely link up to all of the things in the show notes. People can find the documentary, the book, some of the charity tie-ins, of course kayakthemangoky.com, which was the main site for this particular expedition. Is there anywhere else, if people want to follow you on social or anything like that, that we should link up to?

Oscar: Let’s have a think, I have a Twitter, or X, account, Scafidi Travels, that people can follow along on if they want to, and I have a YouTube channel, actually, maybe that’s what I should be pushing, I have a YouTube channel called Scafidi Travels, and that’s where you’ll find the Madagascar kayaking expedition, and the Angola kayaking expedition, and various other stuff. If you want to follow me, please follow me on YouTube, because that’s where you’re going to find the most.

Jason: We can link to that channel. I imagine these projects also scratch some kind of creative itch, right, is that more film or writing for you, or what, creativity-wise, what fills you up as part of your work?

Oscar: Probably I’d say writing more than filmmaking. The reason I started a YouTube channel is actually because I wanted to include some videos in my Tunisia guidebook, because I wanted to make it slightly more interactive, so now there are like 100 videos of tourism sites QR-coded into the book, and through that process, between 2019 and 2022, I kind of learned how to do the editing and the filming and those sorts of things. But I think that’s more me moving with the times than being particularly passionate about filmmaking, I still find the writing process a little bit more engaging, so I’m a bit more passionate about that side.

Jason: Do you keep a journal every day when you’re out traveling?

Oscar: Yeah, when we’re kayaking, or even when I’m traveling around for guidebook writing, I tend to keep notes in the evening, just for stuff I’m going to forget, that sort of thing, I take a lot of photos too.

Jason: Thank you, man. Do you want to leave us with, we mentioned the poem at the beginning, maybe to bookend this, do you have a quote or a little phrase you’re living by, or anything like that, what can we send everybody off with?

Oscar: I’ll end with a quote from Ben, on the finish line of the Madagascar expedition, he said, I’ll try to get this right, I think his exact words were, “Guinness had better give us that bloody world record, otherwise we’re just two idiots who carried 40 kilos of wood over a mountain range in Madagascar.”

Jason: Well, you did, in fact, get the Guinness World Record.

Oscar: Well, I got the Guinness World Record for the Angola expedition.

Jason: That was a different one?

Oscar: That was a different one, so we still don’t have it for the Madagascar trip, we’re still discussing with Guinness whether or not what we did constitutes a record, so fingers crossed it does.

Jason: Well, you know what, I think that even if it doesn’t, this is such a great quote that you guys should just put it on a plaque and give yourselves your own damn award, I mean, why not?

Oscar: Yeah, maybe we can just say it’s a record, no one else has done it, it’s a record.

Jason: It’s a record with that quote, that’s fantastic, that’s travel in a nutshell, right, you do it just to do it.

Oscar: Well, yeah, exactly, the external recognition is nice, but it’s not really the motivating factor.

Jason: Right, love it. Thanks, Oscar, appreciate your time.

Oscar: Thank you very much, Jason, take care, bye-bye.

Wrapping Up

Jason: There you have it, thank you to Oscar Scafidi. For me, this one was also a great reminder of the fact that quote-unquote regular people, with full-time jobs and careers and things like that, can still make some pretty incredible adventures happen. This brings me to the quote today from Walt Disney, who said, “All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.” It takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of persistence, I would say, it takes help, and all of those things. One of the big threads, and one of my biggest lessons learned in this podcast, recording all these episodes over the years, for you and for myself, it’s definitely been an education for me, is just a reminder that regular people can get out there and do things, you just take it one step at a time, you’ve got to figure it out, and there’s bumps in the road, and all those cliches, but it’s so true. When you hear the behind-the-scenes stories, I think it’s very easy to look at some of these incredible adventures people go on and see just the end result, “Okay, yeah, they did it, they must have had all this experience, or funding, or whatever.” Then you realize, when you dig into these stories, that these are just people out there planning these adventures one step at a time, dealing with the issues when they arise, and making things happen, and that’s something we’re all capable of, and I think that’s inspiring, at least for me, to remind myself of the fact that hey, we can do hard things, we can do hard things as humans.

Jason: I love that. So anyway, that was the quote I wanted to leave you with, from Walt Disney, I’ll say it one more time as we sign off: “All your dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.” Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time. Peace and love to you and yours. Cheers.