Latvian adventurer Karlis Bardelis has died at the age of 40. He passed away on November 17 after being diagnosed with a brain tumor earlier this year.
Adventure defined the last decade of Bardelis’ life. In 2016, he embarked on an eight-year journey to circumnavigate the globe under his own power. Combining rowing and cycling, he traveled 58,298km over 2,898 days, circling the Earth to return to his starting point in Namibia.
Over the course of his round-the-world journey, he became the first person to row from South America to Asia, and the first to row from Asia to Africa.
Over the years, ExplorersWeb interviewed Bardelis on several occasions, and what always came through was his positivity and the joy he found in the challenges he set himself.
“When you see a child playing around, and he’s full of energy, jumping around all over the place, you never ask, Where do you get this motivation from? It’s just there. Like internal nuclear power. It’s the same for me. I never needed any extra or external motivation. It was just there,” he explained.
Becomes an adventurer
He decided to become an adventurer after reading Nick Bullock’s Echoes: One Climber’s Hard Road to Freedom.
Speaking about that decision, he said, ”I deliberately read it really, really slowly, because I already knew what decision I was going to make by the end of this book: That I would quit my stable job and try to find my way as a full-time adventurer.”
From that moment, he didn’t look back. In 2013, he crossed Europe from North Cape in Norway to Gibraltar on Nordic skates. A few months later, he cycled from his home in Latvia to the Sochi Olympics. Later in 2014, he skied 750km from Russia to Norway. After this, he started planning his circumnavigation.
Photo: Karlis Bardelis
He started by rowing from Namibia to Brazil with a friend, then he cycled to Peru with his girlfriend. His 26,000km row across the Pacific to Malaysia was completely solo, but he did stop at several islands along the way to wait out storms and hurricane seasons.
He rowed part of the Indian Ocean with fellow circumnavigator Dimitri Kieffer. After parting ways in the Maldives, he continued on to Tanzania. Winds carried him too far and he was forced to land in Somalia. After sorting out the logistical nightmare of landing in that war-torn country, he rowed back to Tanzania and cycled across five countries in Africa to get back to Namibia.
“I never took it as a done deal before I jumped in the ocean in Lüderitz in Namibia, where I started.”
Photo: Karlis Bardelis
Falls ill
Less than a year after completing his journey, in February 2025, Bardelis suffered a stroke after a blood vessel in his brain burst. He suffered paralysis on one side of his body. During surgery, doctors discovered a malignant brain tumor.
Despite treatment, his health continued to decline. His family shared the following message yesterday: “With light and loving sadness, we would like to announce that yesterday, November 17, 2025, our beloved son, brother, husband, friend, and infinitely good man Karlis Bardelis went into his ocean of eternity.”
