How to be an Explorer
How to be an Explorer
by Robert Twigger
American explorer Hiram Bingham discovered Machu Picchu in the Andes in 1911. Travellers started making their way there in the 1950s and 60s. Now every tourist who goes to Peru gets dragged up the mountain to view the extraordinary Inca ruins. Exploration is dead, killed by tourism. QED. Except not quite. Stephens was lead to Machu Picchu by the knowledge of local Indians. They had always known of the ancient temples. Exploration is eurocentric. What helped kill our belief in its relevance was our growing appreciation of indigenous peoples. Once we saw native knowledge as the equal of our own, the idea of being ‘first’ to visit some spot on the earth ceased to have meaning if people were already there.
Places without a local population: Antarctica and the highest mountains became the sole focus of ‘real’ exploration.
And then the scientists moved in. If relativism made a nonsense of being ‘first’, the scientists could still be ‘first’ – the first to make some dull and irrelevant observation in the tree canopy. Don’t get me wrong- science is great in the right place- but released in the wild, scientists become arrogant beyond belief, only too eager to brand all exploration ‘trivial’ except their own brand of career enhancing fact scrabbling. The one benefit of the attempt of science to hijack exploration is that the majority of scientists are too cowardly and weedy to get out there except on snow mobiles or in Landrovers. This is their great weakness obvious to all in the current DIY exploration movement.
I grew up imbibing the idea that the world was all explored. It’s encouraged by watching too much television. In one evening you can easily get the impression you’ve gone right round the globe. Or even twice, if they’re repeating Michael Palin. When I finally did start travelling I was always comparing it to television- I remember thinking in Borneo this jungle isn’t half as noisy as the one I saw on David Attenborough. Of course, when they record for TV, they enhance the sound to make it sound better than reality.
To call yourself a tourist is fairly demeaning, even if true. One up is a traveller, firmly distinguished from the kind that live in laybys in old transit vans. Then there is the crème de crème of getting out and about: the explorer.
Being a professional explorer these days is about having the right kit and lots of it. It’s about sponsorship and media interest. It’s about a ‘first’, either a new route, or an old route done faster. The things you see along the way are of secondary importance, now that we have sat photos and magnetic resonance scans. Exploration has become a variation of sport- primarily about an entertaining form of primal race under extreme conditions. It’s no accident that the forerunners of this athletic model of exploration- Scott and Amundsen were copied for a recent BBC series purporting to rerun the race under ‘fairer’ conditions. A sort of Chariots of Ice if you like.
It’s interesting, too, that Britain’s foremost professional explorer- the mighty Ranulph Fiennes- has actually become a professional athlete- of his own variety- running marathons on every continent.
But all these developments: athletic exploration, scientism and indigenous knowledge invalidating European discovery, obscure the real facts: there are vast parts of the world that very very few people have ever visited, or will ever visit. There are many places, in jungles, deserts and mountainous regions where you can be the first visitor to that precise spot. And if not the first person, the first one to write anything about that place and take a photograph. Observe it, look at it walk through it. That’s exploration.
I’ve recently been to the Gilf Kebir, an area the size of Switzerland in south-west Egypt with no water at all. Tourists go there with military escorts- it takes a week of desert travelling so not that many. However, imagine tourists going to Switzerland and only visiting Berne and Geneva and then scooting back home. That’s what the Gilf is like- the tour groups visit two sites and then leave. We stayed longer- on my last trip we discovered an ancient burial site and a new route onto a plateau unmarked with any tracks- we were the first Europeans here for sure, and possibly the first people since the rainy period in the Sahara of 7000 years ago.
This example is replicated throughout the world. In Borneo I went to a village on the Kalimantan/Sabah border. Tourists had just started visiting- a few plane loads every year. The last anthropologist had just left- it was the dawn of a new era. But when I started making longer and longer trips with local Lundaiya hunters I began to find myself beyond the area that tourists, on their tight schedules, or anthropologists, with their village based agendas, visited. I discovered a line of menhirs stretching right across the tribal territory and into Kalimantan. No one had written about these before, or photographed them. It was incredibly exciting. Suddenly I was an explorer.
Just because we’ve flown over everywhere in an airbus or a jumbo jet doesn’t mean we’ve explored it. Just because tourists queue up to gasp their lungs out on Killimanjaro doesn’t mean there isn’t exploring to do on the other side of the mountain.
Actually it’s the growth in adventure tourism that has sparked the recent surge in DIY exploration. Adventure tourism is still tourism but it happens in remote enough places that you suddenly see the potential. You start asking the guides, “Has anyone climbed that mountain? What’s through there?” Where does this river start?”
Tim Cope, a young Australian explorer, first experienced the unexplored possibilities of Siberia while on a bicycle trip across Russia. He then went back and made the first descent of the Yenisey river in Siberia, all 4500 km of it, in a renovated rowing boat he was given for free.
I started making jungle expeditions in the late 1990s to try and find and film the world’s longest snake. These trips, all over Malaysia and Indonesia taught me that the biggest lie in geography lessons is that the world is all explored. The world is not a static place, politics, economics and natural forces change it all the time, close some areas and open up others. Even global warming has changed the nature of arctic exploration, making daring forays by sailboat along the North West passage more achievable.
In 2005 a new cave so vast two helicopters could fly through was discovered deep in the Venezualan jungle. In it a new species of ‘poison dart’ frog was also discovered. If you extend exploration to include bio-exploring we are still in the infancy of the subject. Prominent writer on biodiversity, E.O. Wilson, believes 9/10 of a potential 8,000,000 species of insect, remain to be discovered.
Retracing an old explorer’s route is another form of exploration- by noting similarities and differences you explore how the world has changed over time. From 2002 to 2004 I made a three season trip through northern Canada, following exactly the 1793 route of an explorer, Alexander Mackenzie. At one point, after lugging our birchbark canoe over beaver dams and rapids we arrived at a place that was absolutely unchanged since his description two hundred years earlier. There was even a mile long logjam just as he had written in his journal. It was greatly satisfying to know that two hundred years hence the place, guarded by mountains and steep impenetrable bush, would be unchanged. Just one visit every two hundred years- that was enough.
Even being somewhere ten years after the last visitors feels like exploration. On the Canada trip I found a paddle left behind by an expedition that been made in the previous decade. It’s only finding recent rubbish that makes it feel like tourism.
Exploration is about recording an environment with fresh eyes- either because no one has been there for a long time, or because you have a different perspective. Recently I started micro-exploring England in a tiny kayak along its narrowest streams and least visited rivers, places where no other boats can go. Suddenly the utterly familiar becomes a lost world of wildlife and new discoveries.
DIY exploration is fuelled by cheap flights and cheap gear. Getting to the zone of exploration used to be the biggest cost- now it’s negligible. Gear used to be highly specialised with a price tag to match. Now that every cub scout wants a four season box baffle sleeping bag they are relatively cheap- the price hasn’t really changed in twenty years.
Secondhand gear is even cheaper: jungle explorer Tahir Shah buys all his Zodiac inflatables from Loot classified ads and feeds his jungle porters on pot noodles. DIY exploration is about using what works rather than what the gear companies want to sell you.
The only barrier to taking part in the DIY exploration movement is psychological: have you the courage, initiative and knowledge to get out there and do some exploring?
One of the first things you need is a good alibi- an excuse to be there. Tourists have the lame excuse of wanting to see something that has been photographed a thousand times before. Travellers want to see something they saw in National Geographic and explorers want to photograph something that will appear in next year’s National Geographic.
The right alibi must be sufficiently exciting to inspire you and get you into new country or old country in a new way. For my desert exploring I settled on the idea of searching for Lost Oases. It had a mythic power as well as practical consequences. I was able to investigate all the competing theories about myths for Lost Oases while visiting the supposed sites myself.
But the real exploring is always on the back of the alibi. I found stone age tools, WWII trucks, intact pottery urns and ‘water mountains’ where ancient caravans stored their water. I found long lost camel trails, engraved rock art, camel saddles left behind by Tebu tribesmen a hundred years ago, a ancient hunters cave beside a flint knapping station.
To be fair- it took a long time to get to base camp, so to speak. I have just spent the last two years living in Egypt making vehicle, camel and walking expeditions into all parts of the Sahara desert. It took ages to work out the basics. Places to get fuel and wood, where checkpoints were, who to trust, what maps were reliable. Where to start.
It was a largely psychological problem: I didn’t know where to start and there was no one there to help me. Cars were expensive and even when I got one suitable for the desert, it was hard to find people who had enough time and the inclination to visit the really remote places. Camels were another option but I had heard horror stories of unknowing foreigners being ripped off by crafty Egyptian camel men. I slowly accumulated information and experience but I had yet to make a journey that felt like exploration. For me that feeling comes from cracking some travel problem that has kept others out.
A few years before, crossing the Rocky Mountains, I found myself in a place that had defeated several expeditions before ours. The problem was the intense cold of the glacial streams we needed to wade through up to eight hours a day whilst manhandling a heavy canoe. As I had no one to tell me what to do I went back to my limited experience of fishing. Wetsuits were too bulky to carry but stocking-foot chest waders weren’t- and being made in China, my favourite country, they were exceedingly cheap. Wading all day in the icy water was no longer a problem. A very simple solution but without it the expedition might have failed.
With the desert the problem was how to carry water without the encumbrance, limitations and costs imposed by cars and camels. I went back to my experience of dragging a canoe through the wilderness. Why not drag a sledge through the sand? No need for expensive cars or difficult camels. The friction would be too great for a sledge but a wheeled vehicle, I tentatively named, in a moment of appropriate silliness, the Advanced Recreational Sand Explorer, or more simply ‘the trolley’, might work.
Being in Cairo it was very easy and cheap (£28) to have the sturdy prototype built. By now I had discovered that other hardy souls were joining me in using the wheeled cart as a DIY desert exploration device. In 2006 Lucas Trihey crossed Australia’s Simpson desert in 17 days using an aluminium cart, while two Germans traipsed through the Gobi tugging a hi-tech trolley with mountain bike wheels.
The ‘trolley’ was created in the true spirit of DIY exploration, the same spirit that has carried Jason Lewis around the globe by peddle powered boat and John Harrison in a folding canoe up unexplored tributaries in Brazil. Go back to basics and try anything that looks like it might work. Instead of killing your enthusiasm with endless phone calls to potential sponsors, reduce your costs with an ingenious bit of homemade kit.
The ‘trolley’ got me out into the desert. Two weeks worth of water and supplies for a team of two could be carried on it. At last I felt I was really exploring, going where there were no vehicle or camel tracks and filling in the gaps in the old 1941 survey maps. After making several trips I met Arita Baaijens, Holland’s leading desert explorer, a female Thesiger if ever there was one, though rather better looking. She had made long solo camel trips through Egypt and Sudan before the advent of GPS. Talking to her was another turning point. I began to see that camel journeys were not as expensive or difficult as I had earlier imagined. Arita introduced me to Bedouin camel owners and I began to learn about this most traditional way of exploring the desert.
I knew there was huge groundswell of people eager to take part in real exploration when I wrote an article about searching for new examples of rock art in the desert- I was inundated with requests to join the expedition.
But instead of just another touristic holiday, I had a vision of being able to give people the basic knowledge and experience, while on a real expedition, to be able to do it later by themselves. I had reported for magazines on adventure tourist trips and I saw how the ‘clients’ were made dependent on the tour leader and his assistants. They were kept out of the kitchen on spurious ‘insurance’ grounds (really because they got in the way.). They were denied the chance to help pack vehicles because that would slow things up. But people want to learn. On one trip I accompanied an Italian woman showed me a lone GPS point she’d copied into her notebook. Never mind that she’d never visit that spot again. For her it was a proof that she was involved in a real expedition.
I saw that the skills I had learned over the last few years could easily be taught to someone directly. It was no good learning about the desert from books- I’d done that- you had to experience it. From this came the idea of The Explorer School. Research into team learning has shown you learn fastest on the job and not in the classroom dissecting the lesson before and after the experience. At the Explorer School we’ve put all the core skills you need to make a desert expedition by camel into a two week journey of real exploration in one of the least frequented parts of the Egyptian Sahara. You’ll learn navigation by night and day, survival skills, water management and expedition planning. From our Bedouin teachers you’ll master skills in packing, loading and managing camels, cooking bread in hot sand, reading tracks and avoiding the worst effects of sandstorms. Where we go the maps are just white spaces so we’ll teach you to make your own. Every expedition follows a new route so you’ll be going somewhere you, me and even the Bedouin have not been to before.
Most people with jobs do not have the time to be able to do the groundwork, the reconnaissance. So they opt for tourism- which is a pity. But at The Explorer School we’ve provided a new option by condensing and focusing all the skills you will need to become yourself a real explorer.
People cruising into their 40s might recall the best television program ever, an anti-TV show of the 1970s made by kids called “Why don’t you switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead.” That ethic is my belief: learn enough to stop consuming experiences and go out and produce them for yourself.
The future of DIY exploration has never looked brighter. The collapse of communism has left most of the world open, with a little ingenuity, to any would-be explorer. New materials and hybrid thinking are generating new ideas all the time. The mega-transect concept pioneered by Michael Fay, where the object is to log wildlife along a journey that aims to avoid all human settlement, has resulted in some interesting new journeys. Satellite phones have brought previously expensive communications capabilty to anyone with £500 to spare. Weird new vehicles can take you to places previously thought inaccessible. Super wide tyres have been fitted to a moutainbike for an attempt at reaching the South Pole, powered hang gliders have been used to ferry gear over rapids in the upper Nile and ultralight packrafts have opened up new vistas in mountain range and lake exploration. There is also a growing appreciation of the transport skills of indigenous people. Long journeys are waiting to be made by explorers using only traditional means- be it seal skin umiak or claw sailed catamaran. The internet has become a resource for non-corporate sponsorship and the cheap cost of video has lead to new ways of publicising your travels- even without the help of National Geographic.
Adventure tourism has its own logic for keeping the punter ignorant- they’ll come back again and again, ignorant bunnies lining up for another thrill ride. Isn’t it better to be someone we maybe read or hear about, a person who has made their own expedition somewhere on this vast and undervisited planet?