Tom Fremantle is an English writer, teacher, and adventurer in his late 50s who, according to one source, resembles “Bilbo Baggins crossed with a low-budget Gordon Ramsay.”
His journalism career kicked off on one of the UK’s oldest papers, the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard. After three years cutting his teeth on local news he took a one-way Aeroflot flight to Hong Kong and landed work on the trailblazing Eastern Express newspaper.
After the Express crashed in 1996 he was lucky enough to blaze his own trail on a 12,500-mile bicycle ride between England and Australia. Then he hiked with Browny, a loveable if kick-happy mule from Mexico to New York and finally paddled his way down the River Niger in West Africa.
These journeys, along with Tom’s other marathon walks and runs, raised over £100,000 for several charities, including St John Ambulance and Hope and Homes for Children. He has spoken about his travels at venues as diverse as the Royal Geographical Society (of which he is a fellow) in both London and Hong Kong, The Explorers Club in New York and a host of UK-based schools, universities, travel shows, book clubs and charity events.
More recently, Tom worked for an NGO (focused on keeping local youths out of drug gangs) in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. This culminated in a 1000-mile walk along the US-Mex border with a Green Cross (Cruz Azul) paramedics’ ambulance—for whom he was raising funds—and a street dog called Pancho, who stole the show. Tom’s book, Pancho’s Song, is a children’s novel very loosely based on their adventures, published in 2015. (Click on the Books page for more information on any of Tom’s writing).
Tom spent 2016 – 2017 teaching English at the People’s Public Security University of China (catchy name) in Beijing—great students, and a fine experience, despite President Xi’s increasingly dictatorial grip.
Tom wrote books about all three of his long early journeys, each one mixing travel, history and humour. The first—Johnny Ginger’s Last Ride (Macmillan, 2000)—sold very well, the second—The Moonshine Mule (Constable and Robinson, 2003)—sold pretty well, and the third—The Road to Timbuktu (Robinson, 2005)—sold about 87 copies, courtesy of the local Salvation Army shop.
Post-Timbuktu, Tom reined in and secured a degree in psychiatric nursing at St Bart’s Hospital, working on wards in London’s East End. The experience blew him away and he wrote another book, Nurse! Nurse! (Robinson, 2011) using the pseudonym: Jimmy Frazier (Frasier is one of Tom’s favourite TV shows). For a spell Nurse! Nurse! reached No 1 on the UK’s Kindle charts.
In 2018, Tom decided to fulfil a long-held dream. Always a keen hiker, it was time to up his game—walk around the world no less.
Between 2018 – 2024 (with a three year Covid hiatus teaching English in Taiwan), Tom walked 11,272 miles through America, Europe (including a tiny part of Ukraine), the Middle East, India, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand and Iceland. His book about the walk, Travels with KOKO (the first in a trilogy) will be published later this year. Thanks to everyone’s generosity the walk raised over £45,000 for charity including the Alzheimer’s Society, Autism Early Support and Hopefull (see Charities page for details).
Tom now teaches and writes in Taiwan, where the most walking he does is around local parks with his wife, Ivy, and their young son, Finlay—fatherhood in his 50s proving the biggest adventure of all.
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Hopefull