From investment banking to biking

- [Interviewer] Climbing his first mountain wasn't love at first sight or anything like that. He enjoyed it but he didn't immediately become an adventurer full-time at 16. Instead Almer went your more typical routes. He studied Economics and Business at the American University of Cairo and upon graduating, he decided to move to London where he worked as an Investment Banker at HSPC. - [Almer] I wanted something different and I wanted to set up a kind of life where I didn't know what was coming around the corner and it seemed to me that staying in Egypt I would be fitting a certain template. Those were the days when Investment Banking was actually sexy like, you know and people actually earn money doing that. The first two, three months because everything's so new, it was really cool and then it started to get a bit like, what am I doing? What's this? I had a friend his name was Dennis, Dennis O'Connor. Every week we'd go for lunch together. One time at the end of lunch, he told me that he'd done this trip where he cycled from Nece to Naples. I was fascinated. This was like the most it was the coolest thing that I'd ever heard and so I went to the bookstore. I remember like standing in front of the map section closing my eyes and then just doing a sweep and I was picking a map out saying that whatever map I pick will be what I would cycle and it was a map of Andela SIA which is the South of Spain and then three, four months later, I was completely alone with a mountain bike arriving in Sivia in Spain about to cycle around the South of Spain. I cycled for about 11 days, I felt so alive doing it. I remember like one moment when I had done this big climb like big uphill climb, it was near Morro Bay or something like this. We started to hug the coast. Eventually we hit the coast and it's a long, long long downhill hugging the coast and you can feel the wind in your face and I was just going down this downhill not having to pedal and then just all of a sudden like this feeling of happiness, just overwhelming to the point that I was laughing out loud and I was and it hit me that like, I'm so happy and I don't remember ever being as happy as I am now but I'm completely on my own. No one else is responsible for this happiness. It's just me in the moment living this way and I was like, I need to do more of this. This has to be my life somehow. When I came back to the bank I still also remember very well the first time I entered into the office after this experience and I felt like a huge like weight, like the weight of the place and the pressure and the whole kind of grayness of this kind of existence of like I'm going to spend the rest of my life just sitting behind the desk, kind of plugging away and that same week I started putting together a plan of how I would exit the bank and this whole kind of world and it took me several years to be able to make it happen fully and then I realized like, you know 10 days or two weeks is not going to cut it and so I started thinking like, if I wanted to travel for six months or a year, how much money would I need? And I started to create a budget for this traveling obviously on a shoe-string budget and I had a figure and that almost made the work more bearable because I was like I'm working towards this target. The last time I walked out of the headquarter building knowing that I just quit my job, not knowing what lied in front of me was this feeling of lightness, you know, my parents obviously were not on board with this. - [Interviewer] What did you tell them exactly? What did you? You called up your mom and your dad and you said, mama Baba, I'm going to bike around the world? - [Almer] My parents took care of all my financial needs and school and everything like this up to the point of graduation. I'd started earning money at this point, my dad was really proud of me for my mother too, you know, like when they meet their friends, you know, Oh my son works in this big bank in London this and that and so he was coming to London I was like, you know, I'm going to invite you for dinner like, it was really big thing for me like, I'm going to invite my dad for dinner and this and that and he was like, no, no, no and I was like, no, no, I have to this is like for me and stuff and he was like, cool, man. So I invited him for like a nice Italian dinner cause I already made up my mind that I was going to quit and I figured doing it over dessert is probably the best thing. So I waited until that was happening and then I was like I've decided I'm going to leave the bank and he was like, Oh, interesting like, you know, what other bank are you joining? And I was like, well, not really a bank. Well, I'm going to travel and I'm going to travel for a while and stuff and he couldn't like... It was hard because he couldn't understand why can't you just take a holiday for two, three weeks? This was all very new to me and I couldn't still find the words to articulate what it is that I was feeling and so this is like one of the things I always tell people is like you don't have to be able to articulate what it is that you want to do as long as you feel it because the articulation of the thing comes after. I just had an insane feeling that this is what I need to do and we remember like we paid the check, I paid the check and we walked all the way to the train station and he was staying a little bit further out. The train was about to commence. We have to kind of put an, you know, like we have to cap this conversation and he was like, this is your life, you know, it's your decision and everything but I don't think he had any doubt in his mind that I was going to regret this like in a very big way.