 Hello friends, I hope this finds you well. I'm Chris Thrall, as many of you know, former Royal Marine, turned author, adventurer, endurance athlete, podcaster, and live coach. And today, bushcraft instructor. So first off, thank you for everyone that's just joined me for the pre-warmup chat and helped me get the technology sorted out or sorted out as we're going to get it. If you could like and subscribe, folks, if you're watching this, chuck us a like and subscribe to the channel because I get an awful lot of messages when people go, Chris, I love your podcast. And then I say, yeah, but you're not subbed to the channel, right? If you could do that, it will help. So what I'm going to do tonight, a quick half an hour. I'm going to tell you about the time myself and my friend, Dan, we traveled to the Baltics. So that is up there in the north on the border of Russia. We're talking, we flew into Estonia. Then we bought bikes and we cycled around Estonia and then into Latvia. This is all former Soviet Union. So it was quite an eye-opener. And then while we were camping in the forest in Latvia, Dan turned to me and said, Chris, do you think we can make that raft now? Cause we'd been talking about this on and off for a couple of years. And I said, yes, why not? So we built a raft that was big enough to take us our bicycles and all our camping equipment. And then we sailed down, I'm going to call it the Valga River, but I'm sure it's probably not that name. We sailed down this river for three days, sleeping on the raft, cooking fish that we, I'm not sure if we caught any ourselves, but we certainly got, we got this huge pike off local fishermen. I'll show you some pictures about that. And do you know what? It's just one of those things that I'm always saying, dream, dream big, take action and get out there and smash your bucket list, you know? If you don't like the term bucket list, I don't blame you. I only use it because people know what you're talking about, right? But get out there, smash your goals, folks. Don't sit at home doing too much of that because before you know it, you'll be old, you'll nearly be dead, and you'll be boring. But you won't have done as much with your life maybe as you would have liked to. And these things are quite cheap. So we flew on EasyJet, I think it was, cost us about 30 quid back in the day. Maybe it's a hundred quid now. We bought bikes in a supermarket. We paid about $89.99 for them, brand new bikes. We had our panniers that we took from England and we had it packed with our camping gear. So Dan slept in a tarpaulin or a hammock between two trees. I just slept on the floor on a roll mat and in my sleeping bag. And yeah, so all in all, a really cheap trip, just the price of a bike and the price of an airline ticket and the food over there was fairly cheap. So yeah, let's look at some pictures, shall we? I'm trying to get some of the comments as we go along. So, here we go. Okay, I hope you can see that and still hear me. Just gonna see if I can, how am I gonna say? I'm just gonna see if I can take the live chat out and bring it over this side. Pop out chat, bring it over here. Yeah, there it is. Puffs, hello, John. So yeah, where were we? Let's go back to the desktop. Yes, easy jet. So flying from somewhere in London, probably one of the cheaper airports. I'm just gonna go through these photos quickly, get onto the raft bit. There we are, we traveled with this other chap, John left us after a few days because he wanted to go partying and to be honest, as you probably gathered, I'd done enough of that and this trip I wanted to spend it with my German friend Dan and just try to get away from all of that and spend some days in the forest, sleeping in the forest, cycling around these beautiful countries. That's why it was Dan and I that ended up on the raft together. Sorry if you can hear me drinking. Not. Yeah, look at that, what the hell are they? Some sort of slow berries and strawberries and stuff, but isn't that a beautiful picture? Sadly, this is back in the day before we knew 916, you know the ratio 916 or 1080p. So a lot of my photos are this kind of old-school style. Beautiful town centre, I'm just gonna whip through these, look, an old wooden building. There's the bikes that we bought. Yeah, they were wicked bikes, like I say, they're about 80 quid. Look at that handsome devil. Check out the bomb bag. I'm not joking, I don't think I've ever been traveling without one. Yeah, this place here, so, dun, dun, dun. So yeah, this place here, when you go to the former Soviet Union or old Russia, you just get this weird stuff, so much military forts and what are these called? Like enforcements, you know? We found underground ammunition tunnels, just huge things like bunkers, I suppose you'd call them, right? Can you still hear me okay? Can you let me know in the chat, just so I'm not, I don't go on talking to myself? I can see Mr. Loughbrook Ragnar says looking good. Thank you, Tony. Excellent, right. Yeah, look at these weird, look at that weird dock. Thanks, Puffs. Don't know why I took that photo. Yeah, typical old Soviet style council housing. You see the very similar thing in the north of Sweden. Yeah, look at that. That's one of the bunkers I was telling you about. I like that picture. Hang on. Who remembers Bodian Doyle? Action shot. Yeah, look at that, random, isn't it? We could have slept in some of these places, but to be honest, they stunk inside and they were like full of beer cans and other stuff I won't mention. And it was far more beautiful to sleep in the forest. Bear with me a second. I'm just adjusting my screen. So yeah, where were we? Let's get the live chat back up. Yeah, random, huh? Next catalogue. I think that's mustard, isn't it? Or grape seed, one of the two. These stalks, they're really lucky. When we were passing these stalks' nests, suddenly this whole fleet of limousines and wedding cars would pull up and a bride and groom would jump out and they'd have their wedding ceremony or something like that underneath these nests. It was some Baltic tradition. Yeah, there we go. You thought I was joking, didn't you? Mad, isn't it? That's the beautiful thing about traveling is you see some crazy, crazy sights. Where's everybody traveled? Let me know. What's been your favorite place? Yeah, there we go. You tie a ribbon around the stalk's nest and I guess it's supposed to be good luck. Hang on a sec, I'm just gonna unshop my head. Oh, come on. There we go, I've just unshop my head. Right, that's a train. Goes on tracks, Richard Branson owns shitloads of them. You know what a train is, right? Yeah, meeting the locals, spot a drink in, surprise, surprise. You get some very, in these former socialist-type countries, I know Soviet Union was communist, but these kind of socialist environments, you get oddballs. Like, I would be the oddball there, right? The people that they don't like that kind of big brother system and you get a lot of people with drink problems and they just sort of take themselves out of society. There we go, there's my day sack on the back of my bike there. I've still got that one. Yeah, not exactly Lance Armstrong to be able to overtake a donkey. Yeah, that was Dan's sleeping arrangement. In fact, no, it wasn't. That was a hammock that I let my mate. And that's my sleeping bag. That's my tarp hauling, so I think he's borrowed everything from me. Beautiful. I haven't been through these photos before, so I take no responsibility for what turns up. Not our fish, that was somebody that we met. There's the boys, look. Yeah, I took photos of all the bus stops because they were really random. It's lovely eating local food, isn't it, when you're out traveling? Especially in the countries in the sort of Northern European where there's loads of pickled fish and that sort of thing. So I think there's quail's eggs there and olives, which is a family favorite. It's my boys' favorite food is olives. That was, I don't know if you know, Eric the Red, very famous Viking. Parked his ship there and got fire bombed. He's picking wild strawberries, so we stopped and picked a load and I tell you what, absolutely gorgeous wild strawberries compared to normal, the taste is amazing. Another random bus stop is a mole, is it Charlie Chaplin or is that one of the Lauren and Hardy? I'm not sure. Frog. Oh yeah, it was the football, wasn't it? This was back when, was it Portugal knocked us out at the World Cup and we got through to the semi-final or the quarter-final? Ah, I've made up my mind if we got through to the final, I was gonna fly back to England, I didn't wanna be the only person that wasn't in England when we won the World Cup. That's wishful thinking if there ever was any, right? That's a car, that's a plant pot. Yeah, we went on this swing, I think I got a video of it, hang on. Hey there, viewers. Yeah, boys in their toys, eh? Oh yeah, look at that forest shot. It's just amazing. We slept in the forest every night. Okay, just gonna whip through these, oh look, a well, getting some water from the well. Another Stork's Nest, museum, look at that. The bushcraft in these places is just unreal. It's the sort of stuff Ray Mears would go to a place like this, the Baltics to brush up on his carving skills. Thank you, Margot, very kind of you. Right, let's go forward a bit, shall we, too? What is that one? Pass, so what is that? Swimming with the locals. That was back when I had hair, some hair anyway. Right, let's get on to this raft trip, shall we? So yeah, it starts round about here. Okay, so there's Dan and I. There's Dan and I, we're in the forest. Our friend John's gone home by this stage. We've gone off partying. We met these guys, they were fishing for pike in this little boat, and so we bought a pike off them for dinner, and I'll tell you what, if you've never had pike, it's the most delicious fish ever. When you cook it, especially over an open fire, it's like steak. Yeah, that was our dinner. So yeah, you can see the fish there, one of the fish we bought on the stick. So yeah, so Dan said to me, can we build this raft? And I said, yeah, we can, but we've got to do it properly, so we need to cycle back to the nearest town and buy a load of tools. So we cycled back to the nearest town, had a farewell beer, and then we bought an axe, a kind of one of those U-saws, a lot of nails. Don't tell Ray Mears we bought the nails. We bought, gosh, just everything you'd need really to build a raft fairly quickly, and then I'll come on to why we had to go back into town in a minute. So yeah, don't do that. Okay, first thing we did was test out the wood to see if it floats, and what we learned, no surprises. If you took a fresh tree, or one that had just fallen down and you chucked it in a river, it sank, believe it or not, or at least went underneath the surface, we found if you got the logs that had already fallen down in the forest and they'd been there for a few years, they floated really well. So we just went through the forest, dragged all the fallen logs out, sawed them down to size, came up with this design that was big enough for us and our bikes. Yeah, look how long that is. And then we built this runway. So that long tree was the runway. Because we realised if we built the raft in the forest, we'd never be able to get it to, we'd never be able to carry it to the river, it's too heavy. So we built that runway and we built half the raft first and then we flipped it over and we built the top of the raft second, if that makes sense. There's me crisping in the raft with the local beer. Beer Cuba pass. Yeah, and that was it. So this is where it got complicated. We got on the raft and immediately, even though we'd used this dry wood that floated really well, it sunk. It's just sunk beneath us or at least went underwater. So plan B, Dan and I cycled back into town and we collected every single two liter or three liter beer bottle or whatever we could get. We raided all the recycling banks and we cycled back with these two massive bin bags each of bottles over our shoulder and the wood there you see on top, that was a public toilet that we found in this kind of nature reserve in the forest and it had fallen, it had been pushed over so we used it as the deck in for our ship. Yeah, and that's it. We built, you can't really see it there, but we built, we had four poles on each corner raft so we could put our tarpaulin over at night. We had a rudder board, so a centreboard that you could lift up and down when we're in the rapids. As it happened, we didn't know you don't really need a centreboard on a raft unless you've got a sail because it's only when you've got direct pressure from the wind that the centreboard will come into effect but ah, there we go, off we went. And it was interesting, you know, for all we knew there might have been rapids around the next corner and that was it. It's game over, we just got to say goodbye raft after we've just spent two days building it, right? Little did we know this is quite a popular route for the locals and every so often or every weekend in the summer they all come canoeing down it. There's our dam at the rudder. I think the rudder came in handy, the steering rudder, that worked but only when you were pushing with the big poles that we had. Okay, there's a dark shape under the water. Who can tell me what that is? Yeah, um, no I'll say a snot on monster catfish, good try. Yeah, the women, the local women, it's the law in the Baltics, you can marry fish. This woman married a carp. It was very beautiful. No, it was a beaver. Should I go back for it? Oh, there we go. Dan and I, we couldn't work out every night when we're sleeping on the raft. In the middle of the night we could hear this. Like that. And we kept waking up and thinking what the hell is that? And then of course we thought it was a salmon jumping or something and then of course we, we won't. And then, yeah, then we worked out as a beaver. Hello, Mr. Angry, Bootneck, aka Matt. Matt, I used your little man at the beginning of this, so massive thank you for that. I used your little man in my, in my Bushcraft Commando montage. It's brilliant. Friends, if you haven't checked out, Mr. Angry Bootneck's channel, please do. He's a contemporary social commentator, and he's very funny. And Bootneck, for those of you that don't know, is a fellow marine. Okay. What was that? At least a carp won't fuck its secretary. Nice one, brother, thank you. Yeah, there we go. I think I took that picture off a bridge, either that or I was levitating. Another wedding ceremony, like I tell you, when they're not marrying fish and strapping themselves to Pelican's nests, Stork's nests, they're putting padlocks on bridges. If you go up on that bridge, there's thousands of padlocks padlocked to that bridge. Yes. It's reasons like that, wars have started. There we go. There's my trusty multi-fuel wicker cookahat, running that on petrol out of that pressure can. And we didn't have a lot of luck fishing. I'm not a bad fisherman, but there we go. Chopping a carrot. As you can see, we like to run a nice tidy ship. Not sure what I'm smiling at. Yeah, metal mug. What about that, Matt? Right, everyone has to have a metal mug, right? Perfect for brewing up half a liter of tea. I'm not sure if that's the same thing, Tony. And yeah, there's our flag. We had to improvise, so we got a super netto flag, which is one of the four runners of Lidl, I think. And there we go. We've got company coming up behind us. Look at that, Birchbark canoe. Don't see many of them around. You don't really expect to see a life raft either, do you, on a river and in the Baltics? Rapids, yeah, we didn't. If you want to see two grown men flat, that means panic, build a raft, jump on it with your mate, and then hit rapids. Yeah. There we go. I think that was a bird. Yeah, look, you can see our tarpaulin on our ship. I'm gonna refer to it as a ship, by the way. Anyone argues with me. I don't care. In fact, it's actually a longboat. There we go, yeah. I think we slept ashore that night just to chop and change it up a bit. You can see the nails in the end of the bench there. That was where we put our oars in, because we had oars as well. Told you, like the Vikings. No, but I had sun-uppers, John, sun-downers. Dan didn't really drink, but hello, other Tony. Yeah, there we go. There's our rudder. Yeah, true love. Look at the size of those oars. You can tell a lot about a man by the size of his oar. That's what I reckon. And there we go. I think we've come into the end of our trip. This signaled the point of no going past, really, because it was all rocks after this. In fact, I think I've got a bit more video for you. Welcome to the end of the journey, Daniel. There it is, the bridge of Segola. A couple of young ladies waiting for us on the bank. Why not? Can't blame them, can you? Yeah, I could, actually. Nothing like sounding like a knob when you watch your old videos, isn't it? Shit. There we go. Didn't even realize there's a cable car there until I've just seen that now. Or at least I didn't remember. Yeah, I'll talk with Duncan again, Mr. St. Any time. Folks, if you wanna have a think, who do you want to see on the channel? You know, maybe we should do some sort of poll and then we'll just try and contact them. Because if you think about it, someone's on their Instagram or Twitter and they're getting hashtagged or they're getting, you know, tagged into comments saying we want you on Chris's podcast, then they're obviously gonna do it, aren't they? Well, if they want to go on my podcast, that is. But there we go. That's our raft. You can see the plaque that we carved for it. This is Serena. It was short for serendipity. Serendipity obviously being go where the road takes you. And that was it. We unpacked our stuff. Sigourda, yeah. I think that was the name of the bridge. Janet, I think you heard me. I might have said it earlier. I'm not 100% sure. That's it. We say goodbye to Serena. We've got on our bikes. You can see my Puss's Bivvy bag there on the front of my bike. That green thing looks like a stuff sack. That's a military Bivvy bag. They're really good. The only problem is they're really heavy compared to the kit you buy now, right? The stuff you buy now, that thing there weighs almost a kilo, which is... You don't wanna be having that when you run the length of the country. You can get them now that they weigh 180 grams. It's amazing. And that's it. That's the end of our trip. We left the raft there. We tied it to that tree branch and we just left it for anybody that wanted it. I'm not sure where you could go on a raft when you can't go downstream because of the rocks. But hopefully somebody got some fun out of it, right? So yeah, any questions? Let's have a look at the chat. More on the Falklands. Yeah, they've been good, haven't we? We've been lucky with the Falklands stories and I also think I'm probably one of the few people that gets to chronicle them because if you think a lot of these chaps, yeah, they won't be around. Well, a lot of them have died already. The age limit on a marine, for example. It doesn't go much past 60. So it's good to get these stories down, isn't it? For future generations. Yeah, I'm just going back through the comments. Wow, the man's 24, Paul. That must be hell of a race. Were you in the actual race? Did you drive a car for 24 hours? Is it true? You just have to pee yourself. Not been funny, that's what I heard. Hi, Callum, Margot, Logan, Addy. Vegas, yeah, I've not been there funny enough. I think I'd get in too much trouble. Alaska, beautiful, Canada, beautiful, New Zealand, beautiful, and Kenya. I'm guessing Kenya's probably a bit similar to my Mozambique experience, except obviously it's a former English colony, yeah. Amazing, thank you everyone for all your comments. Tingting came for the raft building lessons. Well, you know, you wouldn't really want to build a raft out of using metal materials, would you, if your bushcraft skills were good enough, but it was a bit of a case of needs masked. Needs masked, yeah. No, I've never been to Nepal. I've met lots of Nepalese young men, obviously, during my time in the military. I'll be honest, as you know, I've driven to India, and that would have been maybe a prime time to travel up to Nepal, but I'm not one of these people that I could go to Everest Base Camp and be happy. I'd see that, I know it's gonna be beautiful and stunning and great trekking, but I'd be so disappointed that I got there and that I couldn't climb Everest. I'm not saying I wouldn't do it, but I wouldn't pay money to do it. I'd rather put the money towards climbing Everest or should I say, attempt into climb. So yeah, that's it. Brilliant, thanks for joining us, everyone. I'm gonna cut it short there, so it makes a nice short video for anyone else that wants to watch it. Much love to you all. Thank you to Matt the Angry Bootneck for my intro sequence on my cartoon man and really kind of you, mate. And if you'd like and subscribe, and I'll see you next time. Hello, friend. I hope this finds you well. My name's Chris Thrall. I'm a former Royal Marine's commando and I fought my way back from chronic trauma and addiction to live, work and travel in 80 countries across all seven continents, achieving all of my dreams and goals along the way. Now I pass my simple system onto other people, but I can only help you if you like and subscribe. So please do so because you get one life and if you live it right, one is enough. Hello, friend. I hope this finds you well.