Jon Beardmore FRGS is a New Zealand adventurer, storyteller and expedition planner whose journeys explore what happens when a clear purpose meets an uncertain route.
In 2024–25, Jon undertook The Galápagos Postman Challenge, collecting postcards from the historic barrel at Post Office Bay on Floreana and attempting to hand-deliver them around the world. Over one year he successfully completed 55 deliveries across seven continents and 52 countries, travelling around 100,000 miles while raising more than $30,000 for Motor Neurone Disease and ALS charities in memory of his father, Eric.
The challenge followed more than two decades of independent travel and several self-designed expeditions. In 2013–14, The Great Game Expedition took him driving overland through Central Asia on a 30,000-mile journey exploring the landscapes, cultures and history associated with the nineteenth-century Great Game. His later Man With No Plan project experimented with deliberately reducing advance planning and allowing people, chance encounters and local recommendations to shape the journey.
A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Jon is particularly interested in expedition design, adaptable planning, human connection and how purposeful journeys can leave enough space for genuine discovery.
At Explore 2026, he will lead The Logistics of Serendipity: How to Plan for the Unplanned.
