EPISODE 66
Finding Adventure in the Everyday
Alexander Leonard reflects on a life shaped by bicycles, from his long student commutes across Montreal to his two-wheeled explorations through Berlin in search of forgotten corners like an abandoned swimming‑pool complex. In 2013, 18-year-old Alex traveled to Cambodia, where his volunteer work at an orphanage reshaped his sense of the world. He pedaled through Phnom Penh’s swirling scooter traffic, met curious locals, and taught students almost his age geography and astronomy. His journeys eventually led to Sri Lanka, where he studied human–elephant conflict and community‑driven solutions such as citrus buffer zones. Alex finds meaning in motion and wonder in short bicycle excursions close to home. Across these experiences, Alex champions journaling, mindful travel, and a minimalist approach to moving through the world. His stories simultaneously remind us that adventure isn’t confined to far-flung destinations and invite us to slow down, look closely, and rediscover the wonder of the everyday ride.
Episode Transcript
Alex: We covered a lot of ground. I just want to say thank you again, Gabriel, really. I truly appreciate you making time to talk about bicycling and talk about bicycling infrastructure and everything from journaling to elephants and everything in between.
Gabriel: That was Alexander Leonard, a Canadian listener, at the conclusion of our conversation, which indeed covered a lot of ground. Alex is an avid cyclist whose interests range from elephant conservation efforts to filmmaking to street art to environmental advocacy. Not surprisingly, perhaps, our lively discussion spanned three continents, taking us on the bike lanes of Montreal and Toronto, through the chaotic traffic of Phnom Penh and along the perimeter of an airport turned recreational space in Berlin. Although Alex has not yet undertaken any long bicycle tours, he shows us how a simple bicycle can turn ordinary moments into vivid experiences and reminds us of the value, often underrated, of getting out and discovering the adventures waiting right in our own backyards.
Sandra: You’re listening to The Accidental Bicycle Tourist. In this podcast, you’ll meet people from all walks of life and learn about their most memorable bike touring experiences. This is your host, Gabriel Aldaz.
Gabriel: Hello bicycle touring enthusiasts! Welcome to another episode of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. It’s hard to believe, but we have reached the time of year where you, the listeners, get to vote for your favorite episodes of the past 12 months. Today’s episode will be the last one considered for this year’s voting, and you’ll also have the final episodes from last year to choose from. We will again be using a very quick Google Form to capture your input. You’ll find the link in the show notes, on the website homepage, and on the Instagram bio. Remember, you need not have listened to every episode to vote. If you listened to just one episode and you loved it, vote for it. There will also be space on the Google Form to provide additional valuable feedback, like ways to improve the show, guest recommendations, and more. As in the past, we will be announcing this year’s selections during the epic Now, let’s jump into that conversation.
Gabriel: Alex Leonard, thank you for being a guest on the Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast.
Alex: Gabriel, thank you so much for having me here, and I’m super excited to speak about cycling.
Gabriel: So what is it that made you reach out to the show in the first place?
Alex: Yeah, there’s an importance there around bicycling, and why the show originally appealed for me is because to bike, whether it’s intentional or accidental, you’re going slow. You’re being able to witness more of the world, closer, the smells, the sights, the sounds that sometimes you don’t experience when you’re in a car or even sometimes when you’re walking and your head’s focused down on a phone. But it’s such a great title, around someone who discovers biking, if it just happens to be by chance. You have such a wide variety of guests, and as we spoke about, a wide range of people are listening to the show and they’re listening while they’re biking, and I think that’s incredible and speaks to the spirit of the show and how bicycles are just the way to connect people. So I love to bike. I bike many places in the world. I bike to work, and I bike, of course, for leisure. So I love to share more about my adventures and experiences across the world, where I’ve had the joy of cycling, and I’ll pass it back to you to take it from there.
Gabriel: Where are you based? That would be a good thing to know.
Alex: Yeah, so I’m based in Etobicoke, Ontario. It’s just outside Toronto. I’m from London, Ontario, but I lived and studied in Montreal for many years, and I cycle to there a lot of the time, just going to classes. Concordia University has two campuses, and one is like the downtown core campus, but most of my classes were actually on a different neighborhood, which was in the far west of Montreal, in a neighborhood called Notre… NDG. I’m not going to try to say the French. I would bike there for an hour every day, essentially, an hour there, take my classes, bike home. There was a shuttle bus to take me there, but it’s just the freedom of biking, man. It’s just unreal. I don’t want to be on that stinky shuttle bus with a bunch of other students.
Gabriel: Stinky students.
Alex: Having to stand, go on the highway. I was like, no, I want to take my own bike. Thankfully, Canada does a pretty good job in terms of having a bike lane with actually like a protection rail. So a lot of that bike route that was on my way to school was in a guarded bike lane both ways. That was really nice. That’s the other thing. It was a really beautiful commute, and so I loved it. It was good exercise and everything. Studied in Montreal definitely continued to grow my love of cycling there, and now working here in Toronto.
Gabriel: Toronto is actually a mini hub for guests of the show. It is, you may be aware, the headquarters of TDA, the Tour d’Afrique. Have you heard about TDA Global Cycling out of Toronto?
Alex: I’ve heard of that tour group. I didn’t actually know that they’re based out of Toronto, though. That’s cool. I wouldn’t have imagined that.
Gabriel: Yeah, me neither, but actually the episode “Tour d’Afrique,” which was sometime last year, was with Henry Gold, who was the man who founded Tour d’Afrique.
Alex: That’s amazing. I see that, Episode 43.
Gabriel: Okay, if you say so.
Alex: I’ll have to give that a listen.
Gabriel: Very good. Episode is a cycling hub and a place I’d like to visit one day.
Alex: Without getting too political here, unfortunately our provincial premier has been pretty aggressive to crack down, pushing back on a lot of the protected bike lanes. There’s other groups that I’m part of, environmental groups, that have challenged him. They challenged him last year where they tried to remove, I think bike lanes, not just remove the protection, but actually to remove the bike lane entirely. There’s like three major streets that he’s going after. And why they’re doing this, Gabriel, is the argument is that no one’s using the bike lanes, especially in the wintertime. Of course, Canada, we get a lot of snow, less than less snow of course now, but it’s funny because, well, first of all, you’re the premier of Ontario. Why are you getting involved in the Toronto municipality? This is a municipal decision should be decided by the Toronto staff. City councillors or city planners, why is the premier making these choices? Well, our premier, Doug Ford, lives in Etobicoke and all the bike lanes are going right to like where he works, Bloor Street, which is where he lives and the main street that you drive up to to get to his work. And so I’m like, is this the most strategic decision or is this a matter of convenience for him on his daily commute? I would probably argue it is the latter, but I don’t want to turn this too political. It’s just unfortunate because I bike those bike lanes. My previous job, I was right beside parliament, so I was going up University Street every day in and out. I was like, you can’t take those bike lanes out, right? Like people are going to get injured. I would love for those bike lanes to still be here, but as of last week, he’s won the appeal. So they are planning to go ahead now and remove some of the bike lanes. In some ways, I can understand the argument of congestion, specifically more Bloor, but I also think of all the arguments of like adding extra lanes usually doesn’t improve traffic. It often can make it worse.
Gabriel: The money has already been spent to make the bike lanes and I’m sure people are using them at least in the warmer months. It just seems crazy to go backwards like that, spend money to remove them.
Alex: Yeah, but you know, we live in a car-centric society. It is an unfortunate matter that that is the status quo, but you know, I still own a vehicle. I still do drive, but I do choose to bike as much as I can. I think it’s super important. As a cyclist, the ethics of sharing the road. There was an event that I went to in Montreal years ago when I was studying there and it was all around like road safety, specifically biking in winter. And the speaker, who was from a Montreal bicycle organization, made the point of like, listen, when you’re a cyclist, share the road with vehicles. And if you’re a vehicle, share the road with cyclists. Like everyone’s trying to get somewhere and it’s super easy to be frustrated, especially if you’re in traffic and things like this. That always just stuck with me, because sometimes when I’m a cyclist, vehicles are super annoying. And you know, dare I say, sometimes in a motor vehicle, not every cyclist follows the rules sometimes, right? Sometimes they zip past red lights or they can put themselves or they can put pedestrians in danger. I think I became a bit more humbled and that expression of like, let’s just all share the road. You know, we’re all trying to get somewhere, we’re all trying to get home. Don’t be a dingleberry on the road, right? Like give people grace, let people move ahead.
Gabriel: Don’t be a dingleberry. Okay. All right, so now we know where you are. Yeah, tell us about a place where you’ve traveled, where you used a bike.
Alex: Yeah. So one of the ones that I think is really interesting place is Cambodia. When I was 18, many moons ago, I traveled and was volunteering in Cambodia. And so I was living in the capital, Phnom Penh. So I was there for a few months. I was in the outskirts, like I was in one of the outer neighborhoods, like on the edge, essentially, of the city’s perimeters. I was with a volunteer organization to a local orphanage. I had another volunteer, she was teaching the younger students, I was teaching the 12- to 18-year-olds. I was often teaching geography and astronomy. A lot of it was, like, extracurricular, like it wasn’t the core class, they still went to school. This was just extra education that the orphanage that I was attending would put on.
Gabriel: Geography and astronomy. I have to say those are rather unusual topics to teach at an orphanage.
Alex: Yeah, so, you know, it’s really funny, because I kind of started teaching English and the woman beside me, my peer volunteer, she was teaching the alphabet. And it was a much younger audience. I was like, they know the alphabet, we can we can up the ante a little bit. As soon as I started to teach them about, like, Earth, you know, I printed out maps, I gave them all maps. And then I bought books that were the flags. Because a lot of the time when you’re doing this, it’s like, if you want to get all this stuff, that’s on you. There’s pretty minimal stuff that this orphanage had. And as well, like the volunteer organization that I went with, so I paid around like two grand Canadian, 1,400 USD, 1,000 pounds, British listeners. Sorry, Europeans, I’m going to skip the euro, I don’t know. Anyway, I paid about 2,000 Canadian, you can do your own calculation.
Gabriel: Okay.
Alex: But the orphanage told me that they get $30 of that.
Gabriel: Oh wow.
Alex: Where’s the rest of the money going? So a lot of these things, I think in hindsight, you know, I was 18 at the time. But in hindsight, I am a bit skeptical sometimes of some of these like volunteerism trips. But I want to come back to the geography and astronomy element of this, because I showed them this map. And their eyes lit up, man. Like, the older kids in the class who like usually were nodding off and you know, like whatever, like they’re falling asleep. They come back from a busy day at school, they’re teens, they need to sleep, right? But they got so excited to learn about the world. And it’s almost like sad. I was like, there’s this passion, this craving to hear about it. And so what I did is, you know, I’m all about gamification in the classroom. And so I developed a way to be like, okay, I’m going to write a country on the whiteboard here. And you know, I had, there was about like 12 students and they were in tables of three, you know, four rows. I’m like, you’re all in teams, and mix up the teams and stuff. But I’m like, your goal as a team is to find that country on the map, and then find the flag in the flag book. And the first person to like hold both up and point on the map, you win. Your team gets a point. And I would do it where like, I would start off like, okay, this like Canada, oh, it’s the biggest country. Boom! Got it, right? Super easy. But then I’d hit them with like, we’re Sierra Leone. And they’d be like, “Oh, shit, we got to figure out where Sierra Leone is.” I don’t know, where’s that? Right? They loved this game so much. And they got so good so fast that I had to like, always be raising the difficulty. I have to be like, find some hard countries where like, where’s Kazakhstan or something? But it got to the point where I would scramble the letters of the countries. So I would like take Kazakhstan, but I would like, mix all the letters up, you know, and that really slowed them down a few minutes, right? But, and then they started to figure it out, man, like they figured out, it’s Kazakhstan, it’s Kazakhstan. Sometimes I would just draw the flag, or I’d like do an outline without colors. I’m not okay with what flag is this, you know, some flags are really recognizable, like Kenya has a pretty distinct flag, Greece has a distinct flag, you get the idea. I learned so much about flags, and I love flags now. I’m like a massive flag nerd. I learned a lot because I had to have a flag book too to help me. And they got so excited. And it was such an honor to teach them more about the world.
Gabriel: Yeah. I interviewed in Episodes 50 and 51, Heinz Stücke. Oh, yeah. There weren’t the flags, but there was this, like, here’s this country, and what’s the capital, and where did I go?
Alex: Absolutely. Yeah, just that kind of almost like pop quiz element, right? He’s just like, new country.
Gabriel: He quizzed me. He totally quizzed me.
Alex: Yeah, he’s like, hey, you brought the box, right? Or, you brought the tin, yeah.
Gabriel: Yeah, I had a tin, like a cookie tin, and I had 500 pieces of paper in it. I had every country and territory in the world.
Alex: That’s awesome.
Gabriel: At the end, I think I convinced him. Like, I knew what I was talking about. He became much friendlier.
Alex: He became a bit friendlier. I love that, though. I love that. It’s just that, like, everything, he can just go on on a limb, and like, what a rich memory to be able to just go in detail through some, you know, specifics.
Gabriel: He had the memory, but he also completely lived it, in the sense that he had all his notebooks. He had written things down. He would consistently review the notebooks, look at his photographs. So, I mean, it was totally impressive that you could say “1972,” and he would tell you what he did from January to December of that year.
Alex: Right.
Gabriel: But it was in part because he had these journals, and he reviewed them.
Alex: That’s really, really cool. He was able to visit his home. It kind of reminds me of something, though, which is the importance of journaling and documentation. Just you saying a big reason that those memories are still so rich was because he had this rich documentation. That first trip in 2013… You know, I’d been to the UK when I was very young. My parents are from there. I’ve been to America, of course, just being in Canada. But that was my first time, like, ever traveling on my own. It was a pretty significant trip. It’s such a young age. I just finished high school. And from doing that, I got into the practice and I got really into journaling. Every day, I would try and journal. What did I do this day? I think my mom bought me a journal. She said, you know, you’re going out for a few months, document it, write about it. And I love to journal now. I try and journal almost every day. You know, I journal in a variety of ways. I do a gratitude journal through Notion, which is kind of like a project management software tool. Note-taking tool for anyone who doesn’t know Notion. But I also keep a five-year journal. So I actually do in handwritten notes every day. Usually the five-year journals, it’s like you have one day of the calendar year, and then there’s like five lines or something. So I can always see like, where was I literally this day writing last year? What was I going through two years ago, three years ago? And I can use that as a way to track like my growth. And it’s so powerful to have that proof of your thoughts, your process, your emotion. And I highly recommend for people who have never journaled, you know, it can be intimidating. You start with a five-year journal, you’re asking yourself to journal every day. And I feel like it’s easy if you fall off to just get a case of, okay, why bother? But I challenge people to stick with it. And it’s okay if you fall off. There’s something in Atomic Habits, the book by James Clear, I think, where he talks about when you want to create a new habit, you don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to have a perfect score. You know, starting a new habit is kind of like a vote. You don’t need to get all the votes, you need to get the majority, right? And I think a lot of times when people fall off, it’s easy to just give up. I think it’s really important to get in that practice of coming back to what you started, getting back in the motion again.
Gabriel: I do think journaling during your bicycle travels is such a great idea.
Alex: Yeah.
Gabriel: Because when people are on bicycle tours, every day they’re experiencing so many things. If you don’t write it down or you don’t have some kind of a record of it, it’s incredible how much is lost. And that was the thing that Heinz did to just an absolute extreme. Any day, you could ask any day of his adult life, and he would show you where he stayed, how many miles he went by each mode of transport, his expenses. It was insane. I do think it’s a great way to preserve some of those memories and thoughts that people had. As a lot of guests have said, there are a lot of high highs and low lows when you’re on a bicycle tour. A journal is a great way to capture those thoughts in the moment.
Alex: If someone’s on a significant bicycle tour, what do you think stops someone from taking that time to take a moment of writing, even something as simple as what they’re grateful for from the day? Just exhaustion?
Gabriel: Some people are not used to it. They’ve never done anything like that in their life and they just don’t do it.
Alex: No.
Gabriel: Other people in this modern age, incredibly, they are more focused on doing a daily Instagram reel or something like that. So instead of writing something down, they will finish a long day and they’ll have taken photos, sometimes elaborately set-up scenes where they set up a camera and they ride past it shot. They’ll edit, they’ll do all of this stuff for Instagram. But I always think that’s kind of a carefully curated version of your trip. You’re altering your trip fundamentally when you do that. So yeah, I think some people, they’re not in the habit, they don’t do it at all. Other people try the Instagram way, photos, reels.
Alex: Like in a way that’s become the new journal.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Alex: You know what I mean?
Gabriel: Totally.
Alex: They’re like, “Oh, I’m documenting it.” I’m just documenting it with this thing right here in my hand, like with my phone. Like I said, I use Notion, like it’s digital, some ways than a journal. But I think there is a power to still writing by hand. Good old paper and pen, man.
Gabriel: Yeah. The other question that raises is, who’s your audience? I think generally people who write journals, their audience is themselves. Some people convert those journals into books of their adventures. With social media, that’s why I use the word “curated,” because it feels like people are really trying to show a version of themselves that is in line with, oh, look, I camped where there’s a perfect sunset or I biked on this incredible road and they don’t show other parts that are just as real, like..
Alex: The flat tires.
Gabriel: Yeah, flat tires, a bunch of traffic. Some people do now because it’s, I guess now there’s this emphasis on authenticity. Some people really go out of their way to film themselves, crying or like, “I’m so tired.” And you know, you kind of wonder if that’s authentic or performance as well. It’s a complicated topic. Let’s put it that way.
Alex: Yeah, for sure.
Gabriel: Another thing that’s interesting is an app like Polar Steps. Do you know this app?
Alex: I do. Yeah, actually, let’s find my cousin from the UK. She visited him in Toronto. She was using that app. I was actually just going to ask you thoughts on the rise and the proliferation of Strava. Polar Steps is a bit more for bigger, like literally you’re traveling, can share that and more photos. Strava is a way of documentation that a lot of serious cyclists will use, right?
Gabriel: Yeah, I think Strava’s got a little bit more of a competitive side to it. Say you do the same ride 10 times, like your commute. If you were tracking it on Strava, you would see your personal record for some segment. So it’d be like, I don’t know, from parliament to whatever, the hamburger shop.
Alex: Yeah, it’s not very exciting, yeah.
Gabriel: Of course, they also keep track of who’s the King of the Mountain of every climb you can imagine.
Alex: Like, I don’t eat Strava. It’s not so much, maybe it’s part of the competition here, but I think for me, it’s also like, I don’t need people to see what I’ve done or like, oh, this guy hasn’t been running. It’s like, finally, got your ass out, right? I just want to run. If I’m going to go on a run or I’m going to go on a bike ride, I need to be like broadcast, right? Which is a bit like Strava does, but I guess if you’re like more serious and you have more of that competitive nature, there is some fun, I think, to it. And they’ve done really well with, like, tapping into the social media performative nature, right? And people post their best runs and you see it everywhere now. I feel like online.
Gabriel: Yeah, you do. I just remember with Strava, I did a century ride, but there was some kind of glitch. And part of my ride was blacked out. And so afterwards I said, oh, I got to check my stats. And, you know, it was 101 miles or something. And then I looked and Strava said, 22 miles.
Alex: That’s not a blackout. That’s like 80% of the ride.
Gabriel: I’d followed a road and then it lost most of the day and it put like a straight line like, Oh, you got here somehow.
Alex: They’re just like, Nope, didn’t happen.
Gabriel: It surprised me how mad I got at Strava.
Alex: One star right away. Yeah, deleting this app.
Gabriel: I don’t think it was Strava’s fault, but it surprised myself, how you find yourself wanting credit. You want the credit for the ride. The world doesn’t really care. But at least when you scroll back, you go, oh, that’s the day.
Alex: Heartbroken for you, Gabriel. That loss. You’re just going to have to redo it, dude. Just go back out there.
Gabriel: Yeah, I got to get out there. This time, Make sure it’s tracking.
Alex: Totally. Just on the spirit of tracking and documentation and everything. I just recently got a new watch. I had an Apple Watch before just to help me track swimming, running and cycling. And my Apple Watch stopped working. And I took it into the Apple store and the touchscreen is all wacky. It’s not really receptive. And the Genius Bar, they were like, “Oh, it’s fine. All the systems are green light going.” And I said to the guy, I was like, “But you can see it’s not working.” “I don’t want to tell you, we can ship it in, but it’s going to cost you more to get this fixed and there’s no guarantee it’ll fix. You may as well just buy a new one.”
Gabriel: Genius advice!
Alex: Genius advice. Yeah. It’s just, you know, endless capitalism at all. This is just past warranty, so I wasn’t able to get it replaced, whatever. So I got a new watch. I was like, never again will I do Apple Watch after that stopped working. But I got a watch called Suunto. They’re a Finnish company. I don’t know if you know them.
Gabriel: Oh, yeah. Sure. They’ve done watches, heart-rate monitors for ages.
Alex: Oh, yeah. All that stuff, right? I love it so far. I’m like, this thing’s awesome, really nice interface, a sleek design. This is that when it comes to like tracking the stuff, it’s like, I just like to have a minimal setup and I want to do it for me. I don’t need to post it anywhere. It doesn’t need to go on social. It’s like, I just want to track my own runs. I’m very much minimalist when it comes to gear, when it comes to equipment. You don’t need to go and buy the latest tech or the latest software or the latest bike. There’s always this innate sense of this, you know, we call it “keeping up with the Joneses.” You always need to buy the next greatest and best thing. And I’m very much the opposite end of that. I’m like, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.
Gabriel: Right.
Alex: In 2013, I went to primarily Cambodia, spent months there, as I mentioned. There was something about that commute. It was about like a, you know, 20-, 25-minute commute every day. And we would bike there. Sometimes we’d have our lunch. Sometimes we’d come home like back to the orphanage. For anyone who’s been to Southeast Asia, motorcyclists on like scooters versus cars is a pretty crazy ratio and crazy in terms of like, even on like major roads, we weren’t on like backroads. We were like on the main highway getting into the city of Phnom Penh on a push bike, you know, and there’s all these motorists ripping by us, but mainly it was scooters.
Gabriel: We’ve talked about the traffic in Southeast Asia on a few episodes. It’s a miraculous thing in a way, because nobody seems to pay any attention to any kind of traffic lights, stop signs, anything. And there’s kind of this love, well, the larger vehicle has priority and people just don’t stop for anything. So it’s scooters, pedestrians, cars, trucks, they’re all weaving around. You were in the middle of that for that time.
Alex: I was in the midst of it, man. It was definitely a bit nerve-wracking when I first started. Where I used to work, I transitioned away from there just at the start of this year. I was working for a biotech company. We were often making insoles. We’re making biofoam, foam that’s made with up to 70% plants, to help bring down carbon emissions. A lot of foam, traditional foam, in the footwear, just quickly, is petrol origin. So we’re trying to find alternative ways around that. Our lab, our R&D, and of course our admin here in Toronto, but we had actually like a manufacturing facility where we tried to provide fair wages and opportunity. And that was in Vietnam, in the south of Vietnam near Ho Chi Minh. So a lot of our colleagues, we talked about this, and there’s a book that’s a really well-known popular book that’s called How to Cross the Road in Vietnam. It just sounds like such a… you just cross the road, right? Like what? This needs to be a whole book? No, there’s a method to the madness. People occasionally would go to Vietnam and it was their first time ever being in Vietnam or in Southeast Asia, and they’d come back and they’re like, oh my God, like we couldn’t cross the street. Like it was really nerve-wracking. And you know, the Vietnamese coworkers should be like, “No, you just got to go. It’s like water.”
Gabriel: You got to go. But from my experience, there’s an important part to it too, is that you have to keep a constant speed. If you look and stop or speed up, that confuses. That’s like, water needs to flow at a constant speed.
Alex: Exactly. You just got to go and have faith that they’re taking into your speed. Honestly, at times it was a bit stressful on a bike, right? I remember being, you know, like, “Shouldn’t we have helmets?” They’re like, “Helmets? You’re just on a push bike, man. Like, no, the helmets are for people on the scooters. You need a helmet on that?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, I was just wearing a helmet at home.” But fair enough. At the end of the day, we’d stick around sometimes playing with the kids. A lot of times, you know, I would bike around the neighborhood with some of those kids after class. I really loved that way, because sometimes we would take a meandering way. You know, we would get off that major highway. We’d kind of go through some of the exterior of the urban city sprawl. You’re biking past markets and everyone’s waving at you. You know, it’s not in the center where there’s a bunch of tourists. It’s like, who are these guys, right? It was such an incredible experience, both to be able to give my time to help these kids learn about geography, but also just to get outside and to have an active way to move around. And so I really, really valued that experience I had for a few months. You know, I came just for a small period of time, but I loved it so much that I actually pushed my flight home back a month. I traveled a little bit, two weeks in Thailand, two weeks in Laos, and I came back for just one more week. So I went back to Phnom Penh, and I was able to surprise a lot of these youth coming back to that orphanage. I just thought I’d like left. I didn’t tell them. I was going to come back.
Gabriel: Oh, okay.
Alex: You know, gave them a good shock. After the fact, in 2018, you know, I went to school, I was studying material, graduated, didn’t really know what to do. And that was a more organization that I went with. I saw that they had a contest, essentially, to go and do research work. Now, when I was in Southeast Asia originally, I went to Elephant Nature Park, and I had done a lot of volunteering even before going to Cambodia with my grade 12 environmental class to raise awareness around elephant conservation. So I was able to visit firsthand some of these elephant parks. Elephant Valley Project in Western Cambodia, in the province of Mondulkiri, I had witnessed different forms of elephant conservation. So fast forward to end of 2017, I just graduated, applying for jobs, no one’s hiring undergrads. So I see this email come in, they applied to this scholarship. So hey, I can do that. I’d love to go Sri Lanka. So this was a trip to Sri Lanka to go study human and elephant rising conflict, and why Sri Lanka has some of the highest levels of human and elephant conflict, in terms of just like a per capita basis. So we were focusing on mitigation strategies, community-based natural resource management being a key thread and a key process to reduce conflict. And so that was another trip where I was able to bike quite a bit, mainly at the start of that trip, primarily within the city Kandy, K-A-N-D-Y, before actually we went up to the natural park, and there we had to typically move around by jeep, just with our group to get in deep to study the elephants. Really amazing opportunity. And a lot of footage both from that first trip to Cambodia and my time in Southeast Asia in 2013, I’d filmed a bunch. And it lent itself very much, complimentary in this greater story, and that came to fruition from my trip in 2018 for spending a month in Sri Lanka, which was why is there this conflict between rural farmers and wild elephants? And how can we focus on trying to reduce this, but just building bridges between having elephants live more peacefully side by side with farmers?
Gabriel: Getting back to the Tour d’Afrique episode, the founder Henry Gold was almost killed by an elephant in India.
Alex: Wow.
Gabriel: That’s part of the episode. He was very lucky to have survived. Other guests have definitely had run-ins with elephants.
Alex: They’re a tour de force. Pardon my pun there.
Gabriel: Yeah. How do you see it? What are some of the behaviors that you see the elephants doing that the farmers get really upset with?
Alex: You know, it’s a challenge. And I think a lot of my film talks, the first half kind of talks about that tension more on a local level. But then I also talk about the relationship that, as a tourist, that we have with elephants. And that can drive some of that conflict too. It’s this uncanny-ness where oftentimes it’s like, who am I to be coming in to Sri Lanka to be, shame on you farmer for trying to protect your crops that are constantly being eaten and run over by a hungry elephant? Because the elephant’s natural habitat is declining due to increased agricultural expansion. Their natural vegetation is declining because of the effects of climate change, reducing the vegetation or reducing the amount of rainfall that the land is getting. It’s such a complicated mix of so many factors.
Gabriel: Right. The animals are stressed.
Alex: The animals are stressed a lot of their natural roaming (natural roaming in quotations, because like, what does that even mean in some places, right?) – will overlap with human development. The human developments can be encroaching on national parks, but it’s also like flipside. It’s like the elephants are like going into farms. They don’t care. Like, they’re wild animals, right? Like, tasty snack over there. Those banana trees, that’d be a shame if someone were to push them all over and take all of the food. It’s absolutely an issue. You know, and on the actual tourist side, some of the problem is humans who want to see elephants. You know, like when I first went to Cambodia in 2013, a big problem was people wanting to ride elephants. This can put a bunch of strain on the elephant’s back. Their spines aren’t really made for that. And it can often actually reduce an elephant’s lifespan in half. And so this is research that’s been proven from Carol Buckley from the International Elephant Foundation. Actually, I’ve done a TED talk on elephant conservation often built from this. You can also find that both my documentary and the TED talk of the title, Humans and Elephants.
Gabriel: Well, we’ll put a link to these in the show notes.
Alex: We’ll put links. I’ll give myself a shameless plug here real quick. I do have an online course that teaches video production from that kind of minimalist mindset, from a kind of more environmental standpoint. Some of the footage there was taken, you know, I have shots of me on my bike in Southeast Asia on that treacherous commute to the orphanage. And I’ll give you a code as well. Listeners can use “creativesforclimate” to get 50% off just the roadmap and the course itself. And that’s good indefinitely, if they are curious to see a bit more, but also just, you can find me on LinkedIn, you can find me on social media through Alex Leonard. If you’re curious to learn more about that conversation on elephant conservation, I highly recommend people check out my documentary and, you know, let me know what you think.
Gabriel: Sounds good.
Alex: Gabriel, elephants are so big. I wouldn’t want to get in their way. And I saw tourists in Jeeps when I went to Kaudula National Park in northern, kind of central-northern Sri Lanka, tourists getting so close. And then elephants like running at them. And I think it’s like it’s just a natural defensive mechanism. You know, they feel endangered because people are getting super close. Like even when I was in Cambodia, at the Elephant Valley Project in western Cambodia, they talked about, you know, you should always try and be like five meters away, five to ten meters away. And like people just, they don’t know that they haven’t heard this. They’re like, “I just want to get up close to film it for my social media.”
Gabriel: Yeah, back to that.
Alex: Next thing you know, your jeep’s getting rammed and it’s not covered by insurance. And it’s a whole lot of issues you don’t want to be dealing with, let alone your life being put in danger, right? But I do want to focus on some of the really good initiatives. One, for instance, that the Sri Lankan Wildlife Conservation Society is doing, they have a Project Orange. And a big part of this is planting orange trees in the perimeter of farms. Why are they doing this? Why are we planting orange trees? Part of the reason we plant, and part of some of the volunteer work we did was helping monitor these trees, seeing how they’re doing, speaking with the farmers. But the reason that we plant orange trees, specifically orange or lemon, but a lot of times it was orange, is because citrus is a natural deterrent. Elephants don’t like the scent of citrus. And so they were staying away from the farms. They were less likely to encroach and come into a farm’s property if there was natural citrus trees. Those then citrus trees are a, sucking in carbon, right? There’s carbon sequestration happening, because we’re planting more trees. And those farmers are now, not only do they have their crops, a lot of time it was like rice or could have been more plantations, like bananas or papayas, so forth. But now they’re getting the economic benefit from, oh, now I got oranges that are part of my farming yield. And it was so successful, all these trees that they were actually selling them back into like a larger supermarket chain in Sri Lanka. So it’s like you’re keeping the elephants out, planting more trees, and the farmers are getting cross-generational economic benefits from this initiative. Brilliant. Like that’s the kind of community-based natural resource management we need more of. There’s not enough of that stuff happening. There were other projects in Africa. They’ve done this with chili plants. Chili plants are also been shown to be a natural repellent. So elephants will stay away from farms that have chili plants on the perimeters. They tried that in Sri Lanka. They weren’t as successful. It’s a bit too humid. So there’s different tactics, but it’s really interesting to see a lot of these initiatives that are just like triple-win whammies. Like just, you love to hear those stories.
Gabriel: Because you were there eight years ago or something, do you know if the project continued to be successful in Sri Lanka?
Alex: I believe so. I do know sadly, unfortunately, that the organization that I went with, Sri Lankan Wildlife Conservation Society, had to stop some of that field placement work, just because of COVID. So I went in 2018. 2019 specifically through Sri Lanka, it was the Easter Bombings, a horrific attack on a church in the east coast of the country. I don’t want to say any exact numbers, but hundreds of people died. It’s just a terrible incident that saw the tourism just plummet. And Sri Lanka, for anyone who doesn’t know, was coming out of one of the longest-running civil wars in recent history. The country was finally just economically recovering. At the end of 2018, Lonely Planet said Sri Lanka was the number one destination for 2019. Like, go to this amazing country, beautiful people, amazing food, gorgeous views and beaches and jungle and everything. And then of course, the Easter Bombing happens and tourism plummets. And then 2020, you know, need I go on? COVID happens. The country’s had a lot of tough blows going against it. And just a few years ago, their economy crashed, people stormed their, like, parliament in the capital. And so I feel for the Sri Lankan people, man. They’re really friendly people. And they took me in with open arms and gave an amazing opportunity. I don’t know to what extent that program has continued. You know, I’m sure the trees are still giving back. Love to share that story, because I think the more that we can find ways to coexist in peace. It’s an increasingly divided world in terms of political affiliations and social media plays a part, absolutely, for creating echo chambers, where you just by default will prefer to hear and click and interact with stories that agree with the way you make sense of the world. And then if you do that enough, you just get your own twisted perspective, right? For better or worse.
Gabriel: Definitely. Another complicated issue.
Alex: Another complicated story. But important to discuss, you know, and I think it’s an important reminder for listeners here that, you know, kind of what I was saying just so honestly about share the road, share some time of day, share lunch, you know, break bed with one another. Let’s learn to speak to one another more. I think we’ve lost sight of that as a human race.
Gabriel: Well, and that’s another benefit of bicycle travel. You’re meeting people from a lot of different cultures and you’re accessible to break bread with them and break down some stereotypes.
Alex: Absolutely. Yeah. When I was in Cambodia, and I was biking to the orphanage there, there’s not too many white guys biking around, right? And they would like wave at me. They were so excited. And I would wave back. And, you know, I would think after I’m like, if I was like in a car, like you just wouldn’t have that same interaction. You know what I mean? Like it’s just so more down to earth. And to your point, like you can brake, but you can stop. I would stop, you know, when we’d come home on the back road, sometimes we’d pull off, talk to people, you know, share a little bit of hello, how you’re doing in their native language. So, you know, “Sok sabai,” things like this, right? Like people, they love to hear it. They love to see you trying to speak their language. And I always do that, when I was in Quebec is, practice my French with the local people, and they’d be like, “Yeah, your French is pretty bad. Let’s switch to English. But thank you for trying.” When I’m in Germany, “Dankeschön,” you know, “Wunderbar,” when I’m out there and trying to order things at restaurants.
Gabriel: Did you bicycle in Germany?
Alex: I did. I’ve been to Germany actually a lot, like probably one of the countries I’ve been to the most. Just, you just are such a powerhouse for Europe in terms of your economic development. And for some reason, it was probably you’re pretty centrally located, but a lot of the big trade shows happen there. So in my past work with the biotech company, we were often coming to big trade shows there. I didn’t really bike at that point, but in 2016, I was studying abroad in England and then I traveled actually around Europe. I did like the Eurail. I don’t know if young kids or young teens are really doing that these days, but…
Gabriel: Oh yeah.
Alex: I’m sure it’s still super popular. And that was a really great way to see all of Europe. But specifically, I took it and I was in Berlin and I was able to bike around Berlin. And one day I biked to this like abandoned swimming pool complex. Like it was like multiple pools and stuff. It was like somewhere in the south of Berlin. It was pretty cool though, because I come from the world of like street art and doing murals. I stayed with a local guy, who I think recommended that to me because I was like, “Where can I go see some cool murals? And just like cool street art?” And he’s like, “Oh, you need to like check out this old abandoned swimming pool.” And I was like, something abandoned? That sounds exciting and dangerous. And I was a young 20-something. I was just like, okay, cool. And yeah, I remember so much broken glass all over the place there. And I’m like, don’t injure myself. A few days after I found out that it was burnt down. Like some other German youth or somebody came in there and they burnt a lot of the big institution down. So I don’t know man, someone who’s listening who maybe knows what that old, abandoned facility was. But I haven’t been to many abandoned buildings. That was, that was a pretty unique one. But we did bike out there.
Gabriel: I wonder if it was in the former East Berlin because of course that’s been a huge thing after the reunification of Germany. Former East Germany has a lot of abandoned buildings, mostly factories but I could see that a swimming pool could be abandoned.
Alex: It was a pretty big like facility. Like there are multiple halls. And there was like not really anyone else there. It was a bit spooky. You know, you would imagine it would be. Yeah, I wish I knew more. Berlin was such a cool city, though. I really, really liked my time visiting there.
Gabriel: Biking in Berlin is a little bit hectic, I must say. It’s not Southeast Asia, but you’ve got delivery vehicles that stop in the bike lanes and people, maybe tourists who cross without looking right in front of you. And you’ve got food delivery people who are in a hurry.
Alex: Can be a challenge, for sure. There’s a spot in the south of Berlin. I didn’t get to go to it. But it’s like an old, also abandoned kind of, but not actually abandoned, but it’s an old airport? And it’s like now been turned into like a public recreational space. You just get scorched by the sun because there’s no trees or anything. Maybe there’s trees now. I don’t know. Do you know this park?
Gabriel: It’s Tempelhof.
Alex: Is that a good spot to bike?
Gabriel: Yeah, I mean, people do it all the time. Tempelhof is the historic airport of Berlin.
Gabriel: Being a bit of an airline nerd, I can’t resist giving some background information on the unique history of Tempelhof Airport, which opened way back in October 1923. Deutsche Luft Hansa was founded in Berlin in January 1926, and Tempelhof Airport served as its corporate headquarters and primary hub. The massive, iconic terminal building was constructed under the Nazi regime between 1936 and 1941. During World War II, the airport was utilized for military rearmament and thousands of forced laborers manufactured and maintained aircraft there under inhumane conditions. During the multinational occupation of Germany post-World War II, the Soviet Union began blockading all land access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control. In response, the Western allies organized the Berlin airlift from June 1948 to September 1949, landing enough airplanes at Tempelhof to supply the inhabitants of West Berlin and defeat the blockade. Tempelhof Airport ceased to operate in October used as a recreational space known as Tempelhofer Feld.
Gabriel: It’s very unique in the sense that, not only do you have the runways, which you can run down the runways, roller skate down the runways, do anything down the runways, but you also have the perimeter area. So there is a running and biking path around the entire perimeter, which is then several kilometers long.
Alex: Wow.
Gabriel: And on top of that, you still have the terminal.
Alex: That’s awesome.
Gabriel: The old terminal. So this has been used in movies because it’s kind of like frozen in time as an airport terminal. And you even have some old-time airplanes that are parked there from the very unique and cool place. But yeah, it’s an airport. It’s runways. There are no trees.
Alex: I’d heard it’s tough if you’re there on like a really hot day because there’s nowhere to hide. You got to know what you’re getting into when you go there, but it’s like unique. You know, how many empty airports have you seen turned into a park?
Gabriel: Yeah, and it’s cool because you’ll be running down the runway or walking or whatever. And it still has the markings of the runway. So it has like the numbers and it has little markers. Yeah, it’s really well done. So it’s a…
Alex: Good spot to go for sure then.
Gabriel: Definitely an outdoors activity hotspot in Berlin and very historic as well.
Alex: So I really liked when I was there, Kreuzberg neighborhood. I don’t know if I’m probably not saying that…
Gabriel: Kreuzberg.
Alex: Kreuzberg.
Gabriel: It’s definitely a cool area with nightlife, bars.
Alex: Yeah, exactly. I mean, that’s what I was into. It’s like, you know, like a 23-year-old.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Alex: I was like, we visited there. So we actually did, I don’t know if you know this, but it’s a free walking tour called Alternative Berlin. And it kind of took you to like, this is again the Couchsurfing host that we stayed with, it was one of the only times when I was in Europe that I actually stayed Couchsurfing with someone who was like from the region. Everywhere else was like other world travelers who were just like hosting their sofa or whatever. But this guy was like a Berlin guy and he was like, oh, you highly recommend this. So I recommend it to everyone who’s ever visiting Berlin. Because as I look up the Alternative Berlin walking tour, I did a bunch of walking tours. I didn’t do any bike tours. I should have. But I did a lot across Europe as I traveled. But that was the best one because it showed you like the dark side, you can say, or the alternative side of Berlin. You know, they talked about gentrification. They talked about squatting. They talked about like the street art and the murals and cool neighborhoods like that. Not just like, here’s Berlin’s needle tower.
Gabriel: Berlin is an incredible city with so much history. Yeah, a complicated history, for sure. That sounds like a cool alternative to kind of the introduction to Berlin, which just has the top postcard sites on it.
Alex: Exactly. And we did it, yeah, like our second day there. So because we did it right away, it showed us this neighborhood and other cool neighborhoods. We’re like, oh my god, we need to like come back here. This seems like a cool spot to come for a drink and like get food.
Gabriel: Kreuzberg is definitely one of the hip neighborhoods. But gentrification is part of it because it’s so desirable now to live there. And it used to be kind of like this working-class place.
Alex: It was becoming that hip and happening place when I was there. I mean, that was 10 years ago, 2016.
Gabriel: All of Berlin is becoming much more expensive in general. Any other bicycle locations that we should talk about?
Alex: Really appreciate Gabriel, this conversation. I think I just love talking about bicycling and getting out there and cycling as much as people can. In closing, maybe I would advocate for the importance for myself, exploring my own neighborhoods here and now a bit new neighborhood as I’m new to living in Etobicoke. I think that the lesson that I would maybe want to pass on to people listening is, you can hear me biking in cool crazy places in Southeast Asia and other guests of yours biking across Africa or other places. And then you come home and then you like drive in your truck. You know what I mean? It’s like that’s there and this is here. Why do we love to travel abroad? But when we’re at home, it’s a nuisance. I just want to drive. And I understand, I’m fortunate I live in Toronto and despite the initial notes about Doug Ford coming after the bike lanes, we do have pretty good bike infrastructure here. And not everyone can say that wherever you’re listening in from. I don’t think we need to be traveling across the world to have a great bicycle ride. I think we can find that bicycle ride in our own backyards. We don’t necessarily need to travel across the world to go see elephants. Well, maybe we do for wild elephants, that’s a bit different. But can we find the joy in seeing the skunk? Can we find the joy and taking a bike ride to the grocery store? Get some panniers, load up. The bike that I ride is my parents’ old bike from living in the UK. And they have panniers. I still use their old panniers. They would fill those with groceries and I do the same. And that’s a pretty special thing, that I’m able to literally ride that same bike. I took it in to get it repaired the other day and it’s always the headache. People are like, “Damn, we don’t even make tires that size any more. This thing’s a relic. And I’m like, “Yeah, is there anything you could do?” They’re like, “You got to leave it here for a week. We got to order parts in.” I’m like, “That’s all right, man. Let’s get it fixed. Let’s keep this thing rolling.”
Gabriel: What brand is the bike?
Alex: Dude, I couldn’t even tell you. Ancient is the brand.
Gabriel: Brand ancient.
Alex: The brand’s long faded away. It’s like a nice 10-speed. Just a good old city bike. Especially with your listeners, there’s so many people that will travel the world to do amazing bike rides and all the power to them. There’s nothing wrong with that. But learn to find the beauty in the mundane. It doesn’t need to be a massive exploration. And if you can, by all means. I love to go on recreational bike rides, just biking along the bike path by a river or get to the bike path just to be on your recreational trails. Me and my partner, we love to bike. We bike all the time every weekend we can. Right now, we’ve been biking a lot down to Lake Ontario. And we’ve been going swimming in the lake there and spending time outdoors as much as we can. We’re increasingly living in this age, of course, of social media and everything where we idolize being abroad. We bemoan our daily commutes. And I’m like, have you taken a bike ride and, hey, that cafe you always bike by that, you know, it’s just a blip on the radar. Stop there. Make a pit stop next time and grab yourself a croissant. Take it for lunch, whatever you need to do, right?
Gabriel: Ironically, people from other parts of the world are going to that cafe and posting about it on Instagram as, “Oh my gosh, the best croissant ever.”
Alex: Totally.
Gabriel: You know, it’s in your backyard and you don’t think about it.
Alex: That old dusty cafe? Never once been there, right? Like, find that passion even in your backyard.
Gabriel: The transcript for this episode is available on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist website. I welcome feedback and suggestions for this and other episodes. You’ll find a link to all contact information in the show notes. If you would like to rate or review the show, you can do that on your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow the podcast on Instagram. Thank you to Anna Lindenmeier for the cover artwork and to Timothy Shortell for the original music. This podcast would not be possible without continuous support from my wife, Sandra. And thank you so much for listening. I hope the episode will inspire you to get out and see where the road leads you.
Alex: Now, this local galaxy cluster is part of a bigger region of space that’s part of something that we can see called like dark matter and dark energy. And you know, most people kind of struggle, even the experts in this field.
Show Notes
You can find Alex Leonard Media on Instagram.
You can watch Alex’s film (Humans and Elephants) and his TED Talk on YouTube.
Alex offers a Green Video Essentials: Production Course and Roadmaps (use the code”creativesforclimate” for 50% off all products)
Don’t forget to vote for your favorite episodes from this past year and give feedback on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist Podcast 2026 Survey.