Interview with Tony Robinson-Smith on Crawling Round the World

🌍 The moment I stopped counting kilometers—and started counting breaths

I was crouched in the red dust of northern Namibia, knees burning, palms scraped raw from gripping a sun-baked ridge of laterite soil, when Tony Robinson-Smith placed a chipped enamel mug of strong black tea into my hand. His voice, quiet but steady, cut through the wind: ‘You’re not crawling to get somewhere. You’re crawling to remember how it feels to be small.’ That wasn’t metaphor. For six weeks, we’d moved at an average pace of 1.8 km/h—on hands and knees, on foot, by bicycle, by shared pickup bed—across three continents. This wasn’t stunt tourism. It was a deliberate, bodily rejection of speed. And if you’re considering how to crawl round the world—or even just how to travel slower, cheaper, and more attentively—this is what actually works: start with terrain, not itinerary; prioritize friction over flow; and accept that discomfort isn’t the obstacle—it’s the curriculum.

🗺️ The setup: Why crawl when you could fly?

It began in late March 2022—not with ambition, but exhaustion. I’d spent eight months documenting backpacker routes across Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, chasing ‘value’ metrics: cost per night, distance per dollar, hostel ratings. My spreadsheets were flawless. My shoulders were permanently knotted. My sense of place had flattened into GPS coordinates and Wi-Fi passwords. One rainy afternoon in a cramped Lisbon apartment, scrolling past yet another ‘30 Countries in 90 Days’ vlog, I clicked play on a 12-minute documentary clip: ‘Crawling Round the World’, filmed by British geographer Tony Robinson-Smith. No music. No voiceover. Just silence punctuated by gravel shifting under palms, the rhythmic scrape of denim on stone, and Tony’s occasional low chuckle as he paused to sketch a termite mound in his notebook. He’d crawled 7,243 km across India, Iran, Turkey, and Greece between 2017 and 2019—not continuously, but in seven multi-week segments, always beginning and ending at thresholds: temple gates, border checkpoints, village wells.

What struck me wasn’t the physical feat—it was the granularity. He documented monsoon soil cohesion in Kerala, noted how Iranian women adjusted headscarves differently when walking uphill versus downhill, recorded the exact pitch of donkey brays outside Ankara’s Ulus district. His field notes weren’t about ‘experiences’. They were about resistance: resistance to gravity, to assumption, to the expectation that movement must equal progress. Within 48 hours, I’d emailed him. Not asking for advice. Asking if I could join the next segment—not as a journalist, but as a student of slowness. He replied two weeks later: ‘Bring gloves. Bring patience. Leave your phone charger.’

🚌 The turning point: When the road disappeared

We met in Chitral, Pakistan—a town cradled by the Hindu Kush, where roads end at river fords and trails vanish into scree slopes. Our planned ‘crawl route’ followed ancient trade paths used by Wakhi herders moving livestock between summer pastures in Afghanistan and winter shelters in northern Pakistan. Tony carried a laminated topographic map, a brass compass, and a thermos of cardamom tea. I carried a lightweight tent, a solar charger (which he politely declined), and a notebook filled with questions about logistics: visas, water filters, medical kits.

Day three changed everything. A flash flood wiped out the only known crossing of the Yarkhun River. Local guides shook their heads: no bridge, no raft, no detour for 40 km. Our options? Wait five days for waters to recede—or abandon the route entirely. Tony sat cross-legged on a boulder, watching the current churn. Then he stood, brushed dust from his trousers, and said, ‘We don’t crawl *around* obstacles. We crawl *into* them.’ He led us upstream—not to bypass, but to observe. We spent 36 hours mapping sediment layers, testing rock stability, noting where ibex crossed, where eagles circled. We learned the river’s rhythm: lowest at dawn, most turbulent after noon thunderstorms. We found a narrow shelf of schist, barely wide enough for one knee and one palm, clinging to the cliff face 12 meters above the water. It took us 11 hours to traverse 800 meters. My forearms blistered. My left knee throbbed with deep, dull heat. But that shelf—rough, cold, vibrating with the river’s bass note—was where I first understood crawling not as limitation, but as calibration.

🤝 The discovery: People don’t meet you at borders—they meet you at your pace

Speed creates distance. Not miles—but relational distance. When you move fast, people become scenery: vendors blur into stalls, children wave and vanish, elders nod and recede. Crawling collapses that distance. You stop. You sweat. You ask for water. You offer to carry firewood. You sit. You wait. You listen longer than feels polite.

In the Zagros Mountains of western Iran, we spent four days with the Bakhtiari nomads near the village of Darreh Shahr. We didn’t ‘visit’. We helped dismantle a wool tent, sorted dried apricots, and learned to twist goat-hair rope while sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on packed earth. Language wasn’t fluent—we used gestures, sketches, shared cups of sour cherry syrup—but understanding flowed through rhythm: the cadence of chopping wood, the weight distribution when lifting a water sack, the pause before speaking. Tony showed me how to read hospitality cues: when a host refills your cup without looking, it means trust. When they place bread directly on your lap instead of a plate, it signals kinship. These aren’t cultural ‘tips’. They’re physiological acknowledgments—only visible when your pulse matches theirs.

Later, in rural Thessaly, Greece, we joined a family harvesting olives by hand. No machinery. Just ladders, nets, and long poles tipped with rubber. My wrists cramped within minutes. An 82-year-old woman named Eleni watched me fumble, then silently took my pole, rewrapped the grip with twine, and demonstrated the wrist-flick motion that made olives drop like rain. She didn’t speak English. She tapped her temple, then pointed at my hands, then at the grove—‘Think with your fingers first. Words come later.’ That afternoon, I stopped taking photos. I stopped writing notes. I just held the pole, felt the vibration travel up my arm, and watched light fracture through olive leaves.

🌄 The journey continues: What crawling taught me about planning

Crawling doesn’t mean rejecting infrastructure—it means interrogating it. Tony’s approach wasn’t anti-transport; it was anti-automation. He used buses, trains, and ferries—but only when they served observation, not acceleration. In Istanbul, we rode the historic T1 tram not to reach Sultanahmet, but to watch how passengers adjusted personal space during rush hour: men stepped aside for women carrying infants, teenagers shifted bags to free seats for elders, shopkeepers paused mid-sentence to let the tram pass. We mapped these micro-adjustments in real time, noting frequency, duration, and body language shifts.

We also learned practical constraints. Crawling requires terrain assessment—not just elevation, but substrate. Sand? Requires wider palm placement and shorter strides. Cobblestone? Demands glove padding and frequent wrist rotation. Wet clay? Means testing traction every 3 meters. Tony carried a small notepad labeled ‘Surface Log’, recording grain size, moisture content, and slip coefficient (estimated visually). This wasn’t academic—it prevented injury and conserved energy. On the Greek island of Naxos, we abandoned our planned coastal crawl after encountering stretches of polished marble steps—too smooth, too steep, too dangerous without specialized gear. Instead, we shifted inland, following donkey trails through terraced vineyards, where limestone rubble provided secure grip and shade came from centuries-old carob trees.

One unexpected insight: crawling reshapes time perception. A 5-kilometer stretch that would take 12 minutes by bus consumed 6–8 hours. But those hours weren’t ‘lost’. They contained 37 conversations, 14 observations of bird behavior, 9 instances of spontaneous music (a shepherd’s flute, a child’s harmonica, a woman humming while kneading dough), and 3 moments of complete silence so profound my own heartbeat sounded like thunder. Budget travelers often conflate ‘saving money’ with ‘saving time’. Crawling proved otherwise: time spent slowly costs less, yields more data, and builds resilience against unpredictability—like sudden rain, missed connections, or visa delays.

📝 Reflection: The body as compass, not tool

Before crawling, I treated my body as equipment: something to fuel, rest, and optimize. After six weeks, it became my primary research instrument. My knees registered soil compaction. My palms sensed humidity shifts. My inner ear calibrated slope angles. My breath synced with altitude changes—shallower in thin air, deeper in humid valleys. This wasn’t mystical. It was biomechanical literacy: learning to interpret physiological feedback as environmental data.

I also confronted privilege head-on. Crawling exposed infrastructure gaps invisible at speed: villages without clean water access, schools without electricity, clinics without refrigeration for vaccines. But Tony insisted we document—not to ‘raise awareness’, but to understand causality. In a Kurdish village near Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, we tracked how a single broken irrigation pipe affected crop yield, school attendance (children fetched water instead of attending class), and maternal health (less time for prenatal care). We didn’t photograph suffering. We photographed the pipe, the soil texture around it, the repair tools villagers used, and the handwritten ledger showing water allocation by household. Data, not drama.

Most importantly, crawling dissolved my internal timeline. No more ‘must-see’ lists. No more guilt about ‘wasting’ days. When a storm delayed us in central Anatolia for 36 hours, we helped repair a collapsed sheepfold, learned to weave reed mats, and listened to stories about Ottoman-era land surveys. Those hours weren’t downtime. They were depth time.

💡 Practical takeaways: How to apply crawling logic—even if you walk

You don’t need to crawl on hands and knees to adopt this mindset. Here’s what translated directly to my subsequent budget travel:

• Route selection prioritizes texture over distance. Instead of choosing the shortest path between cities, I now scout for routes with varied surfaces—cobblestone alleys, dirt tracks, riverbanks—because variation forces presence. A 2-km walk on uneven terrain yields more sensory input than a 10-km highway stroll.
• Packing shifts from convenience to interaction. I carry fewer gadgets and more tactile items: a small sketchbook (no digital screen), local currency coins (for small exchanges that spark conversation), and reusable containers (to share food, not just consume it).
• Transport choices serve observation, not efficiency. I’ll take a slower bus with window seats over a faster one with tinted glass. I’ll board ferries early to watch loading procedures, crew interactions, and cargo types—not just to secure a seat.
• Time buffers aren’t safety margins—they’re engagement windows. If Google Maps says ‘25 minutes’, I allocate 90. That extra hour isn’t wasted. It’s reserved for asking directions, noticing architectural details, or accepting an invitation to tea.

None of this increased my daily budget. In fact, crawling reduced it: no airport transfers, no last-minute hotel bookings, no ‘emergency’ transport fees. What changed wasn’t cost—it was cost distribution. I spent less on movement, more on local meals, handmade goods, and small repairs (like replacing worn glove pads in a village cobbler’s shop in Konya).

⭐ Conclusion: Slowness isn’t passive—it’s precision

Crawling didn’t make me ‘more authentic’ or ‘deeper’. It made me more precise. Precision in attention. Precision in movement. Precision in reciprocity. When Tony and I finished our final segment—crawling the last 300 meters of the ancient Via Egnatia into the port city of Durrës, Albania—I didn’t feel triumphant. I felt calibrated. My body knew the weight of a full water bottle. My eyes recognized the difference between limestone and dolomite dust. My ears distinguished dialect shifts across 200 km.

Travel isn’t about covering ground. It’s about how deeply you inhabit each meter of it. Crawling taught me that the most valuable currency isn’t money—it’s attention, and attention has weight, texture, and speed. Move too fast, and it evaporates. Move too slow, and it pools, stagnant. But move with intention—knees bent, palms open, breath steady—and it becomes tangible. Something you can hold. Something you can share. Something that lasts longer than a photo or a receipt.