Jacqui Holth thinks we need more adventure in our lives — and she’s doing something about it
AFTER returning to Australia after a long spell living overseas, Jacqui Holth decided we’d become way too busy and serious and now she’s working to bring back our lost sense of adventure.
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JACQUI Holth spent two decades travelling and living overseas, and when she finally came home four years ago, she noticed a striking change in her motherland. “Everyone had got so serious and so busy,” she said. “It was like a badge of honour: ‘I’m so busy’. I couldn’t see the smiles I’d seen when I left — people seemed all-consumed by having a big house and a big car,” she said.
Holth had spent the latter years of her travels in Italy, first Sardinia and then Padua, and had returned home with her husband Torstein, to put their son Aymon, now 15, through high school. While Aymon settled in at SCECGS Redlands (he is currently in Year 10) Holth, who grew up in Cremorne, looked for work.
She had worked in a variety of interesting roles in various countries — including as a high- flying event organiser in Sardinia — and hadn’t made a CV since living in London in the 1990s.
“I found myself at 42 or 43 with a white sheet of paper in front of me, in a different country and it was like, ‘Who am I gonna call? Ghostbusters? I didn’t even know the number of a taxi here,” she said.
In 2016, she went to a Tony Robbins leadership event in San Diego, which proved the catalyst to starting her business, Adventurous Life Project, and initiating its speaker series Adventurous Spirit (which she describes as “TED X in the adventure space”).
“A woman called Robyn Benincasa, who is a firefighter and an adventure racer, came on stage. She started talking about adventure and the impact it has on your life. There were 1200 people and no one went to the bathroom or looked at their phones. I thought, ‘We need this energy in Australia’.
Loath to start the project alone, and with TED X as her inspiration, Holth reached out to the likes of Di Westaway from Wild Women on Top and adventure magazine Travel Play Live, who suggested she connect with Richard Old, an adventure racer with a background in marketing and tourism.
The pair launched Adventurous Life Project, and within that Adventurous Spirit, a series of six talks by adventurers in Sydney, Melbourne and the Gold Coast to be held in August.
Speakers include Samantha Gash, an endurance runner who completed a 3000km run across India, the ‘Jonesys’, who walked for 100 days through the Australian desert, unsupported, with their 18-month-old daughter; and Hollywood stuntwoman Ky Furneaux.
Also on the agenda is a youth adventure summit in Nepal in April of next year, where teens will participate in a school building project. Holth’s hope is that companies or individuals will step forward to offer sponsorship to allow more kids to attend.
The choice of location for the youth summit was an easy one — after all, the people of western Nepal’s Bardia National Park saved her husband’s life.
The couple, who met in 1995 on the Caribbean island of Antigua, were in the very early days of their romance when they found themselves in Nepal. Towards the end of the trip, Mr Holth, now 51, began to feel unwell. “We got off river in a village in Bardia National park, the place you’re most likely to see Bengal tigers in the wild. It was remote — no technology, no cars, nothing. I went off to see the tigers and my husband stayed behind. When I came back, he was really sick — we had to get him out.”
Holth and friends eventually found a car and made the three-hour drive to the nearest airport. In Kathmandu, a tropical medicine research clinic said his intestines were about to rupture and he could die.
“We had to find three guys we rafted with to donate blood, then he went in to surgery,” said Holth. “I thought, ‘Am I going to fly back to Australia with a body?’”
The surgery saved his life. “What is interesting is that we carried guilt, both of us, until a Tony Robbins event about three years ago. I was guilty I invited him to Nepal, he was guilty he put me through it. Tony did an intervention, and it freed us of all of that,” Holth said.
It was important to the couple that they thank those who had saved Mr Holth’s life, so they embarked on journeys to Demark, Columbia and Kathmandu. “It was vitally important to us. When our son was born we gave him the middle name Bardia, in honour of the people who helped us,” she said.
“Four years ago, on our way back to Australia, we did a trip round Asia with our son and took him to Bardia to thank the village. We walked in to the hotel, which is a little hut, and the father who ran the place in recognised us, even though 18 years had passed. It was so emotional for them both, because he never really knew if the foreigner made it. When he saw in my son’s passport we had given him the name of the village, he was so proud.
“One of his sons is now the principal of the little school there. We didn’t have any money because we were on our way to Australia, but I said, ‘I will come back with some money to expand your school’.”
Part of the ticket price from the Adventurous Life Series will go to the school, and another portion to the Humpty Dumpty Foundation. Through it all, Holth’s main aim is to ignite a passion for adventure in teens and adults — and to stop people being afraid of it (“We have insurance for insurance. What are we so scared of?”)
“Adventure for some people might be climbing a mountain, for others might be turning left on the beach instead of right, but they don’t call it adventure because they compare it to jumping out of planes. Everyone can do it — I’ve seen a guy with no legs do Kokoda. The speakers we have on-board in August are all ordinary people with a little bit of extra — we can all be like that.”
For tickets and information on the Adventurous Life Project, visit adveturouslifeproject.life