Culture reporter
BBCLast year, Alfie Watts went global, becoming the youngest ever winner of Race Across the World – the BBC show that does exactly what it says on the tin.
Teams of two race to get from one part of the world to another with no air travel, no smartphones, no bank cards and a limited cash budget.
After 50 days spent travelling by land and sea from Japan to Indonesia alongside his St Albans schoolfriend Owen Wood, it all came down to a foot race by a beach off the island of Lombok.
The series four finale saw the pair pip mother and daughter duo Eugenie and Isabel by a mere eight minutes to take the title and £20,000 prize pot.
It also saw Alfie catch the travel bug, sending him on his way to a new career as a travel guru and online content creator.
As series five of the show gets underway on Wednesday, BBC News speaks to the 21-year-old about his new life on the road, advice for fellow travellers and tips for this year’s contestants on how to win the show.
“The whole experience [on the show] kind of opened my eyes to real travel,” Watts tells us over a video call from Portugal, while taking a break from refereeing a football match.
“I think there are definitely two different types of travel that we’re used to in the UK; shallow travel, as I’d call it, where you go on holiday and you see what you want to see and you stay within your comfort zone or hotel.
“And then I’d say there’s real authentic travel whereby you see the world as it actually is.
“And I’ve just learned that I actually much prefer the authenticity of places… rather than the weather.”
Watts’s main advice for readers with a similar wanderlust is to consider travelling further afield.
“Flights to Spain in the summer might be £300 return, but you are going to be paying extremely high prices for food, accommodation and things like that,” he notes.
“Whereas, actually, if you go a little bit further afield, if you try Malaysia, Thailand, even Brazil, for sure the flights might be £600-700 but when you’re actually there, you’re spending £20-25 a day maximum.”
He adds: “You’re helping local people and you’re trying something new.”
Since his big TV win, he’s been to around 30 countries, including five in one day for a Europe-based online challenge.
Another time he found and boarded the cheapest possible flights he could find online for seven days straight.
And he also returned to Japan to pay a bill he felt he owed for some Kobe beef steaks that were kindly donated to him and Owen for free when they were worried about their budget, as fans of the show will remember. “That was a really nice moment,” he says.
Watts likes to travel solo as he enjoys his “own company” and doing things on his “own terms”, while also meeting new people.
He acknowledges that it’s not for everyone, and that some people prefer to be away with friends and family, but he wants to encourage would-be travellers to “throw yourself in”.
“I don’t do things that would put me in danger because I think I have a responsibility to the people that follow me,” he says.
He does admit though that he once ended up in a taxi with an armed government official in Venezuela – a country he travelled to against UK goverment guidance.
“That was about as wacky as it got.”
Bucket list
His favourite place he has been on his travels so far is “without doubt” Angel Falls in Venezuela, while his favourite country would be a coin flip between Jordan and Malaysia.
One thing he’d still like to tick off his bucket list is visiting the remote island of Tuvalu in the South Pacific Ocean, which sounds like a pitch for a new TV show in itself.
“It’s the least visited country in the world,” he explains.
“Only 1,500 people go there every year. It’s very difficult to get to, very expensive to get to.”
As well as becoming far better travelled, the past year has also seen him expand his horizons in other ways, acting as an ambassador for Young Minds UK, a mental health charity for young people, and Winston’s Wish, a children and young people’s grief charity.
One of the most heart-rending moments of series four was when it was revealed that Watts’s mum had died of cancer when he was just a child.
Speaking of his ambassadorial work, he says: “I love it and I’m so glad that I get to have the opportunity [to help].
“But internalising it, it can be quite challenging, listening to people’s stories.”
Race Across the World resumes on Wednesday, with a new raft of contestants heading this time from north eastern China to the southernmost tip of India.
They include ex-spouses Gaz and Yin, and current couple Fin and Sioned, as well as sisters Elizabeth and Letitia, brothers Brian and Melvyn and mother and son duo Caroline and Tom.
The rules, as usual, are no smart phones, no bank cards (just a small cash budget) and no air travel.
Watts thinks it’s going to be a “really tough route” and “a topsy turvey” series.
“China is very easy to get around but very hard to communicate,” he stresses from personal experience. “And a lot of China doesn’t accept cash anymore.”
His “number one piece of advice” for anyone taking part is to learn from his mistakes and take a calculator and a whiteboard. “We had to borrow notebooks and God knows what else”.
He’d also suggest taking “little travel placards” with pictures of buses, trains and people on, for ease of communication.
“I think now there’s more and more series, people are watching it and starting to think, ‘actually, this is where they’re going wrong. This is how we can be creative around it’.
“And I think we’re probably going to see that this series, that people have been a lot more streetwise with how they’ve prepared.”
Is he worried about losing his title as the show’s youngest winner?
He replies, like a true international diplomat, that he just wants the pair who “nicely interact” with the others and “who genuinely appreciate the opportunity to travel” to win.
“I think those are always the people that you want to do best, and if that happens to be the two 18-year-olds this time, then I’ll be happy to hand my crown over.”