British travel YouTuber Charles Wright drove roughly 300 miles through Ethiopia with an AK-47 bullet lodged in his right heel after gunmen fired on his Toyota Yaris near Kobo.
The 40-year-old from Buxton, Derbyshire, who posts as CharlesWorldTravel, was on a solo 32-day overland trip in his one-litre Yaris, nicknamed Dynamo — a profile now shared with the overland YouTube couple killed in a similar Toyota trip, when two men in civilian clothes tried to stop him in a conflict zone along the Tigray-Amhara border. Wright slowed at first. He accelerated hard once he saw one man raise an AK-47. The gunman ran behind the car and fired twice. One round struck the road, ricocheted through the vehicle floor and buried itself in Wright’s heel, which was pressed on the accelerator.
He did not realise he had been shot. Earlier that same day he had fractured the foot playing football and assumed the new pain was from the fracture. He kept driving for about 24 hours, covering between 300 and 500 kilometres depending on the account, before the injury forced a stop.
Days later, still carrying the bullet and heading toward Addis Ababa for proper care, Wright followed Google Maps near the Awash-Djibouti junction. He missed an unsigned mandatory customs turn-off. Two federal police officers emerged from bushes, threw a large plastic water container at the car and opened fire on the tyres, according to Dexerto’s report on the incident. Wright estimates four or five shots. He drove another four kilometres on a destroyed front tyre before the car gave out in the desert.
Police later located him after locals reported a Westerner in the area. According to Wright they confiscated his phone and forced him to run on the fractured, bullet-damaged foot while laughing. When he returned to the Yaris he found a penknife and possibly some cutlery missing from the vehicle, which had been left in police custody. He was then held under armed guard at a hotel for roughly six days. He believes the detention was intended to pressure him into paying a bribe. Wright says he was jailed three times in three different regions during his stay, once receiving a five-day sentence over possession of a Starlink terminal.
Unable to reach Addis Ababa, Wright underwent surgery at Dawa Haya Hospital in Awash. Doctors removed the bullet in a procedure that lasted about two hours. Midway through, the hospital lost power. Staff continued operating by the light of mobile-phone flashlights for roughly ten minutes. Wright, who remained awake, later described watching phones and door handles being handled during the surgery and worrying about infection or losing the foot, as the Daily Mail reported from his video statements. The bullet came out cleanly and he developed no infection.
Wright has shared video and stills of both shootings, an X-ray of the bullet in his heel, and the damaged Yaris on Instagram and YouTube. In one post he called the Ethiopia leg
“the worst four weeks of my life.”
He wrote that he lived with constant adrenaline, never knowing what would happen next, and that crossing into Kenya felt like freedom.
“There were several moments during Ethiopia when I genuinely wondered whether I would make it out,”
he said.
Wright has been travelling intermittently for about 15 years and has driven roughly 48,000 kilometres across more than 34 countries. He is a two-time unofficial record holder for the smallest car to climb Sani Pass and to circumnavigate the African continent. He grew up in Bennetston Hall, a 15-bedroom Victorian mansion in the Peak District, and has spoken publicly about losing the family home and building a life of independent overlanding. His Instagram account has about 100,000 followers; his YouTube channel sits near 23,000 subscribers.
He has stressed that several Ethiopians helped him and that he accepts responsibility for driving through an active conflict zone. He stopped short of telling others to avoid the country but urged careful research on checkpoints, police encounters, prices, theft and visas. Wright is now recovering, changing the dressing on his foot every couple of days and planning several months of repairs to both the injury and Dynamo before resuming travel. He no longer intends to push further north through Africa.
All details of the shootings, the police encounters and the hospital power cut come from Wright’s own video statements, Instagram posts and subsequent interviews. No independent Ethiopian police or hospital statements have been published confirming or contesting his account.
