--- title: "Where the hell is Matt? How a family PC in Birmingham led to Atlas51" url: "https://atlas51.co/dispatches/where-the-hell-is-matt" type: "dispatch" section: "Letter" published: "2026-10-16" updated: "2026-10-16T00:00:00.000Z" --- # Where the hell is Matt? How a family PC in Birmingham led to Atlas51 *Letter · 2026-10-16 · 10 min* By [Matt](https://atlas51.co/about#matt) Atlas51 — One video, a song I couldn’t get out of my head, and a sixteen-year-old who wanted to see the world. I was sat at home in Birmingham, on the family PC, doing what I imagine a lot of teenage boys were doing in the late 2000s: playing Age of Empires and generally avoiding anything that looked remotely like real life. Every so often, I’d take a break, open the internet and disappear down one rabbit hole or another. And then, one day, a video popped up. “Where the Hell is Matt?” [Watch Where the Hell is Matt? 2008 on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY) If you’ve never seen it, it’s a bloke called Matt Harding travelling around the world, filming himself doing this ridiculous little dance in front of some of the most extraordinary places on earth. He danced in deserts, in jungles, in cities, on mountains and alongside people from cultures I knew next to nothing about. There was something wonderfully simple about it. No grand expedition, no complicated explanation. Just a bloke, a camera and a world that suddenly seemed a lot bigger than the one I’d been living in. I watched it once. Then again. Then probably a few more times than was entirely healthy. The song got stuck in my head for years. But more than that, I couldn’t get one question out of mine. How the hell was this guy doing it? Here I was, sat in a house in Birmingham, moving little digital armies around a computer screen, while this bloke was out there actually experiencing the world. Meeting people. Seeing places I’d never heard of. Being part of things I couldn’t even imagine. I didn’t just want a holiday. I wanted to know what it felt like to be somewhere completely unfamiliar, where I didn’t understand everything going on around me and where life looked, sounded and worked differently from the one I knew. I wanted to get out there. ## The chewing gum company and the great escape Naturally, being sixteen, I approached this with the sort of business acumen you’d expect from a sixteen-year-old. I’d read about Matt and discovered that a chewing gum company had sponsored one of his trips. I remember thinking that this was it. This was how you got to see the world. You found a company, convinced them you were worth investing in, and off you went. So I started emailing companies. I had absolutely no track record, no audience, no particularly compelling reason why anyone should give me money, and not much more than an enthusiasm for a video I’d watched on the family computer. I was, in hindsight, probably not quite the sponsorship opportunity they were looking for. Nobody replied. Not one. Eventually, I accepted that the chewing gum industry wasn’t going to bankroll my grand escape. Instead, I started saving money from my weekend job and put the dream to one side. Not away, exactly. Just somewhere I could come back to when the opportunity presented itself. Life carried on. School finished, university came along, and the weekend job became a part-time job at Blockbuster Video. I spent my evenings working, my days studying, and gradually put enough money aside to give myself a genuine shot at doing something about it. There was only one problem. I had nobody to go with. I’d managed to save the money. I’d got to the point where I could actually go somewhere. But the prospect of heading off into the world on my own was a different proposition altogether. I wasn’t some seasoned traveller with a network of contacts around the globe. I was a university graduate trying to work out what came next, with a bit of money in the bank and a fairly vague idea that I wanted to go somewhere far away. Then, as these things sometimes do, the opportunity arrived in a rather unremarkable way. The girl behind the bar at my local was going travelling with her boyfriend. So I tagged along. I’m not entirely sure how enthusiastic he was about the arrangement. I imagine there were a few questions about why some bloke from the pub was suddenly joining their trip, but he tolerated me, and off we went. It wasn’t a particularly grand plan. There was no carefully constructed itinerary for a life-changing journey, no master strategy and certainly no Atlas51 waiting at the other end. There was just the decision to go. And that was enough. ## A sweaty room in Bangkok Somewhere along that first proper journey into the world, I found myself in Bangkok. I remember a room with yellow walls, the heat hanging in the air, and a hole in the wall looking straight into the room next door. It wasn’t luxurious. It wasn’t particularly clean. It certainly wasn’t the sort of place anyone would stick in a brochure. And yet, sitting there, I remember feeling something I hadn’t quite expected. I felt at home. Not because the room was comfortable, or because I knew where I was, or because everything made sense. Quite the opposite. It was because I was somewhere so far removed from the life I’d known that I could finally stop thinking about the life I’d left behind. I was there. Properly there. The sounds outside were different. The smells were different. The people, the food, the pace of life, the little things you wouldn’t think to notice until you were surrounded by them: everything was new. ![A young man grins over his shoulder in an open-sided ride, one arm up holding the rail overhead, with a car wheel and shopfronts blurring past behind him.](/dispatches/where-the-hell-is-matt/grinning-from-an-open-sided-ride-through-traffic.webp) | ![A shirtless young man slurps a long mouthful of noodles from a pair of chopsticks over a pink plastic bowl at a wooden table.](/dispatches/where-the-hell-is-matt/a-mouthful-of-noodles-over-a-pink-bowl.webp) I wasn’t watching someone else’s adventure on a computer screen anymore. I was in the middle of my own. That feeling has stayed with me ever since. I can’t tell you that this was the precise moment everything changed. Life rarely works quite so neatly, and I certainly didn’t emerge from that yellow-walled room with a ten-year business plan tucked under my arm. But something had shifted. The world had gone from being somewhere I wanted to see to somewhere I wanted to understand. I wanted to spend time in places that challenged my assumptions, meet people whose lives looked nothing like mine, and discover what happened when I stopped doing everything the familiar way. And I wanted more of it. ## I never quite caught up with Matt Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to have experiences I could barely have imagined when I was sixteen. I’ve travelled across countries, spent time in extraordinary landscapes, and found myself in situations that would have sounded completely implausible to the kid sat in Birmingham playing Age of Empires. ![A young man in a black vest smiles at the camera with a pale snake draped across the top of his head, beneath the thatched eaves of a wooden hut.](/dispatches/where-the-hell-is-matt/snake-across-the-head-under-a-thatched-roof.webp) I’ve paddled through the Okavango Delta, crossed the Himalayas and the Andes, ridden across the Mongolian steppe and made my way into plenty of other remote corners of the world, doing things that once would have seemed like somebody else’s life. And yet, I still don’t think I’ve quite caught up with Matt. That was never really the point, of course. His video wasn’t a checklist of places I needed to visit, and the goal was never to collect countries or recreate somebody else’s life. What stayed with me was the idea that there was so much out there waiting to be experienced, and that the biggest barrier between me and all of it was often the decision to take the first step. You don’t need to be a professional explorer. You don’t need to be fearless, endlessly confident or particularly good at knowing what you’re doing. Sometimes you just need to stop waiting for the perfect moment, find a way to make it happen and accept that things might not go entirely to plan. Especially that last bit. Because some of the experiences that have stayed with me most vividly weren’t the comfortable ones. They were the times I had to work things out, adapt to unfamiliar surroundings, laugh at myself and accept that I wasn’t entirely in control. That’s where travel becomes something more than a change of scenery. It’s where you start to see things differently. ## So, why Atlas51? For years, I’ve had one foot in adventure travel and the other in a fairly conventional corporate life. I’ve been fortunate enough to build a career, earn a living and travel to places that have changed the way I see the world. But I’ve also spent plenty of time sitting at a desk, looking at a screen, thinking about somewhere else. I suspect I’m not the only one. There’s something particularly strange about having access to more information about the world than any generation before us, while spending so much of our time looking at it through a screen. We scroll through extraordinary places, save videos for later and tell ourselves we’ll get around to doing something about it one day. Sometimes we do. Sometimes another year goes by. Atlas51 came from wanting to do something about that, and from wanting to share the experiences that have meant the most to me. Not another catalogue of holidays where the biggest decision is which restaurant to book. Not an exercise in ticking off destinations or collecting photographs. I wanted to find journeys that take you properly into a place. Trips where the landscape, the people and the challenges along the way are as important as the destination itself. That might mean kayaking through the Okavango Delta, hauling a pulk across a frozen Scandinavian wilderness, riding through the mountains of Pakistan in a tuk-tuk, or heading into the jungle in Guyana towards a summit that nobody can promise you’ll reach. Different places. Different challenges. The same underlying idea. Get out there. Be part of it. See what happens. We’ve built Atlas51 around specialist operators who know their corner of the world, small groups of like-minded adults, and journeys that offer something more meaningful than simply being somewhere else for a week or two. We take the practicalities seriously, because getting people into remote environments requires good judgement and careful preparation. But we also believe that some uncertainty, a little discomfort and the occasional unexpected turn are part of what makes an adventure worth having. We can’t promise you’ll come home a different person. We can’t promise every day will be brilliant, or that everything will go according to plan. But we can help you find a journey that gets you out of your usual surroundings and gives you the chance to experience the world rather than simply look at it. ## The world is still out there I sometimes think about that sixteen-year-old sat in Birmingham, watching the same video over and over again, wondering how on earth someone managed to build a life around seeing the world. I wish I could tell him that the journey would be straightforward. That the emails would get answered, the opportunities would arrive neatly packaged, and he’d somehow know exactly what to do next. None of that happened, of course. The companies never replied. The money had to be saved. The first trip required a bit of nerve, a slightly questionable travel arrangement and a willingness to go before I felt entirely ready. But I went. And somewhere along the way, that thing I’d watched on a computer screen became a life I could actually live. Atlas51 is, in a way, an attempt to pass a little of that feeling on. To help other people find their own version of that first trip, that unfamiliar place, that moment when they realise there’s a whole world beyond the routine they’ve become accustomed to. Because I know what it feels like to sit at home dreaming about being somewhere else. And I know what it feels like when you finally get there. So, if you’ve been sitting at home watching the world go by, waiting for the right moment to do something about it, perhaps this is your nudge. You don’t have to dance in every country on earth. You don’t need to become the next Matt Harding. And you certainly don’t need to email a chewing gum company. You just need to start somewhere. The world is still out there. Let’s go and see it.