On the eve of his 30th birthday, Bobby Bolton found himself living in a mouldy caravan on a derelict farm in Hertfordshire. His relationship of 11 years had just ended, the construction business he had spent five years building was collapsing and he only had a few hundred pounds left in the bank. “I had moved out of the flat I shared with my ex, borrowed money from her to buy this caravan and had such low self-esteem about the direction my life and career was headed that I isolated myself,” he says. “I couldn’t socialise and I was stooping so much when I walked that I felt myself getting back issues. My mum thought I was suicidal.”
She pleaded with him to come home and live with her in Wigan, but Bolton refused. “It felt like the ultimate defeat.” He compromised on a weekend visit instead. Driving the 200 miles north, Bolton soon ended up in the pub with old school friends. Several pints in, he saw something that would change his life.
“This battered old Land Rover Defender filled with kit pulled up outside the pub and a couple got out. The man had a big shaggy beard and the woman had wild hair and they both had this look of adventure in their eyes,” he says. “The Land Rover had a bumper sticker on it that read ‘Family Expedition’, and I suddenly realised what I needed was to get out on the road like them. I wanted to rediscover my purpose, and that boiled down to three questions: working out where I wanted to live, who I wanted to live with and what I wanted to do.”
Three years later, Bolton has travelled through three continents, 53 countries and more than 42,000 miles in an adapted four-wheeler MAN truck. Along the way he has amassed more than 380,000 followers on his Instagram account – and fallen in love again. He and his fiancee, Marie Deleval, are now back in Wigan to plan their wedding and next adventure: a journey through Mongolia and Siberia in a converted eight-wheel-drive military truck. “I ended up answering all those questions: I want to live in the truck, I want to live with Marie and I want to be an overlander, exploring the world,” Bolton says. “Throughout this journey I came up with a kind of mantra that sums it all up: ‘Don’t let who you are today stop you from being who you could be tomorrow.’”
That platitude, crafted to be overlaid on a dramatic Instagram image of a sunset, is typical of Bolton’s attitude to life: no matter how tough things might be, you can always change. It was an impulse that set him on his journey and it is seat-of-the-pants impulsiveness that has seen him through to the other side. “We approach everything with a big smile and plucky British attitude,” he says. “Whether it’s policemen, border guards or even terrorists stopping you on the road, you give a big thumbs-up and that’s how you talk your way out.”
Speaking from his mum’s front room, Bolton has lost the layer of dirt that he often sports on Instagram. He has a dark tan, a trimmed beard and eyes that look more tired than full of adventure. Next to him on the sofa is Deleval, the 30-year-old French woman he met in the second week of his travels and who agreed to travel the world with him on their third date. Her bleached blond hair is tied into a messy bun and she sports the same tan and somewhat glazed look. The couple have been off the road for all of 72 hours and even over video call you can sense their eagerness to get moving again. “It’s amazing to be able to do laundry and have home-cooked food – we both smell good and look cleaner,” Bolton laughs. “But we will get itchy feet. We have a taste for it now and we’re looking forward to the next trip.”
Bolton describes himself as an “overlander” rather than “traveller” or “backpacker” – the distinction being the independent, uncurated nature of the experience. “Rather than a backpacker who is constrained by a hostel or a traveller who might be going to tourist spots, we go on dirt tracks and back roads, travelling through society,” he says. “We get an insight into people’s lives and might reach places where they’ve never seen a foreigner before. You have interactions.”
Those “interactions” form the basis of Bolton’s new book, Truck It! In a fast-paced conversational style, full of that “plucky British attitude”, Bolton recounts his journey from relationship and business breakdowns to selling all his possessions to buy his truck, meeting Deleval in France, then driving together with their dogs through eastern Europe, central Asia, Russia and south Asia to end up in Thailand.
Along the way, the couple encounter regular setbacks, from being shaken down by Russian police, to fighting with an Azerbaijani man at a border crossing and being held at gunpoint by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Each time, Bolton faces his problems with relentless optimism and a naivety that will be read as either charming or irritating. He has to research the history of Russian-occupied territories in Georgia on his phone while wondering why the locals seem suspicious at the sight of trucking tourists, for instance; in Afghanistan he fires off a pistol round with a group of young men who turn out to be Islamists, before being questioned by the Taliban.
“People had repeatedly told us that we were taking unnecessary risk by going through Afghanistan. Our conversations had always concluded with ‘We’ll be all right,’” he writes. And miraculously they are. At times Truck It! reads like Top Gear without the introspection.
Was the reality more messy? “Nothing will top those lads coming up to us with a pistol when we were parked in Afghanistan, firing off a round into the distance and then adding me on Facebook, which made me realise they’re part of a terrorist group,” he says, shaking his head. “Then, when the Taliban arrived, we thought we might get our heads chopped off.”
Deleval adds that Afghanistan did have other challenges. “I couldn’t do anything; you don’t talk to people if you’re a woman there,” she says. “I was completely ignored. We had two separate experiences.”
Money is another issue that is more complex than it might seem on the surface of Bolton’s travelogue. He left the UK with “just £600”, he writes, and it was an impromptu decision to start filming his travels on Instagram that financed the rest of the trip. Once his first two videos explaining his plans to truck the world went viral, sponsors offered to pay for his Eurotunnel trip or provide him with free gear and cash to produce branded content. “I never really had any social media before and it’s actually been one of the hardest bits of the trip because it can invade our privacy,” Bolton says. “Me and Marie met as an organic couple but then it was a shock to realise that she had to be on camera and be part of capturing this journey. I never plan the content, so it’s on from the first thing in the morning to the last thing at night, and it can be hard to keep things just for us. Still, without it we wouldn’t be able to keep going. It’s a necessary evil.”
Bolton’s romance with Deleval is one of the more miraculous and charming episodes of the journey. While sitting with his dog, Red, on a hill just outside Saint-Tropez only weeks into his travels, Bolton saw Deleval running with her dog, Rubia, and was captivated. He plucked up the courage to say hello, and later Deleval found his Instagram and messaged asking to meet up. After two more dates, during which she revealed she had a boyfriend who needed dumping, she agreed to join him on his odyssey.
“Often you hear about couples going travelling and it breaks down because it’s so intense – but it just worked,” Bolton says. “Our 4 metre by 4 metre cab was our home and it really felt easy because we like the same adventures. It supercharged the relationship and the hardest thing is actually being back staying with the in-laws because home is in the truck.”
Aside from the couple he saw outside the pub, Bolton describes his parents as his biggest inspirations for the nomadic lifestyle he has now built. His dad was a truck driver and taught him from an early age how to tinker with engines and make repairs, while his maternal grandfather was in the merchant navy and used to regale the grandkids with his travels. “Both my parents are baby boomers and all they did was work,” he says. “They just want us to enjoy our lives and see the world. The hardest part was saying goodbye to them at the beginning but they’re really proud of what we’ve done.”
Deleval, meanwhile, says that it was her mother who convinced her to go off with Bolton despite barely knowing him. “I had backpacked in South America for a year and a half and my parents knew that I loved travelling,” she says. “I told my mum and she said: ‘You have to go.’ That was that.”
While Bolton’s parents have visited the couple on their journey, his dad even driving the truck for a while, there have been downsides to being away for so long. “The last time I went to see my nan, dementia had fully taken hold and she didn’t recognise me, which was tough,” he says. “But my grandparents on the other side of the family have gotten an iPad to follow us on Instagram and it’s given them a new lease of life. I think it’s brought a lot of the family together.”
That iPad will be in frequent use as Bolton and Deleval are planning another trip, this time to the US via Saudi Arabia and Siberia – with a stop in October to tie the knot on the Saint-Tropez hill where they first met. “I began thinking I would drive to Australia and that’s still the finish line, but we have a longer-term plan to reach there now,” Bolton says, smiling. “We’ve even talked about starting a family on the road. I just want to inspire people to go after life like we have, whether that means travelling or something else. You don’t have to go from stacking shelves to climbing Everest, but you can reinvent yourself.”
• Truck It!: The Drive Around the World That Saved My Life, by Bobby Bolton, is published by Macmillan (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
