We get up to speed with Gaven Sinclair’s action-packed life and adventurous spirit, all driven by raising awareness for causes, from missing children to chronic disease.
Gaven Sinclair is cycling down a dirt road between villages, somewhere in Africa. With pedestrians, cyclists and people on Pikipiki’s (small motorbikes) passing by in throngs, the little sand road bustles like a highway, even though it’s lit by cooking fires rather than street lights. There’s a full moon out, making it a beautiful night – when, suddenly, Gaven’s bicycle light snuffs out. From the rising darkness, he can just make out the white of a fellow road user’s eyes as he veers, panicked, to avoid a collision.
It’s not the first time Gaven has come close to death. Far from it. The adventure athlete has wended his way from Cape to Cairo on bike, swum solo from Ilha (an island off the Mozambique coast) to the mainland, run 388km up the Mozambique coast in six days, and run from Qherberha to Cape Town in 30 days – and at different times, he has faced danger in the form of flooding rivers, torrential rain, malaria, and even murderous bandits. He’s run out of food and money, and found himself all but crippled by blisters. He’s slept in backpackers, campsites, police stations and on the side of the road.
So, what drives him to take on challenges that would leave most people clinging to their couch? It’s simple, really. He uses each extreme adventure as a platform to raise awareness for causes, from missing children to chronic disease.
This is especially important for Gaven who, as a child, was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD. Later in life, a diagnosis of chronic fatigue was added to this list. “I was labelled a problem child because I couldn’t focus. My hands would sweat every time I met someone new, and I battled to communicate. This is something that many kids today struggling with the same issues can identify with. The problem is that when you’re treated differently, your self-confidence plummets, and you begin to take what people say very personally. These kids need to learn that they have been given a beautiful gift, and they must be shown how to tap into it.”
Gaven’s compassion for kids recently led him to pen a teen’s adventure book, The Golden Skull of Peru.
As a child, Gaven found that one of his own coping mechanisms was to immerse himself in sport – which was the first step towards his current action-packed life. He has a hunch that his adventurous spirit is the legacy of his grandfather, who used to build boats. “As a kid, I expressed this by hopping on my BMX and exploring the world around me.” As he grew up, tried his hand at corporate life and launched his own start-ups, that craving to see what lay beyond the bend didn’t leave him. And after watching The Long Way Around, a documentary about actor Ewan MacGregor’s attempts to motorbike from London to New York, Gaven realised that the key to his own lack of fulfilment may lie in pushing himself to his limits. “My body struggles to produce dopamine (a hormone which helps produce feelings of satisfaction), so I need to challenge constantly. That’s when I’m at my most alive.”
That can’t be easy for someone who lives with chronic fatigue – but Gaven approaches this condition pragmatically, carefully calculating how many calories he needs each day, working out rest and exercise requirements and, most importantly, crashing when his body tells him it’s time to do so.
And it’s all worth it. Gaven says the lessons he has learned, and the memories he has made, are beyond anything he could have imagined. “One of my favourite occasions to think back on is the time I arrived at Lake Turkana in Malawi, sunburnt, out of money and food, and with a broken bike. The nomadic tribe living in the area advised me to board a boat with one of the locals – along with a herd of goats. The motor stopped working after a few hours, so we were all given buckets made from cut off milk bottles and told to bail out water. A little later, we had to get out on an island so that the goats could eat. I wasn’t at all sure what was happening by this point – but, then, my skipper got out a fishing line, and soon we were all eating fish caught just minutes ago.”
That generosity is pretty typical of the spirit that pervades our continent, Gaven says. “Wherever I have gone, I have met the most amazing people, who have been all too eager to help me – especially when they find out I’m doing this for a cause. They’re a big part of what keeps me going when things get tough.”
Gaven’s next venture sees him taking other intrepid adventurers on slack packing tours through the Transkei, while he prepares for another challenge: climbing K2 or rowing across the Atlantic. “I’ve run, cycled and swum, so it makes sense that the next chapter involves climbing or rowing!”
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Text: LISA WITEPSKI • Photo: MEGAN BRETT
