How to Organise an Expedition I
Later this year we aim to be the first people to cross the Great Sand Sea of the Sahara desert on bicycles. These will be special mountainbikes with huge six inch wide tyres. We are already some way into organising this expedition so I will backtrack a little and start from the beginning. I want to give as realistic an account as I can of the experience of organising an expedition. So you can do it too.
How do you get your ideas? People often ask me this and I always say- “from books”. That’s right, books are the single best source of ‘fertile soil’ for coming up with new ideas. The second source is the internet. The third is talking to people. You need a regular supply of this creative mulch in order to keep coming up with ideas. My current interest is the desert. Any book about the Sahara I will buy, within my budget, even overtly commercial coffee table books and guides. The reason is that within a coffee table book you may find one clue that will set you off. Also coffee table books and guidebooks have pictures which are essential to help you make it real in your own mind.
Because at the early stage the hard bit is taking it seriously. An expedition? That’s what other people do isn’t it? To make it real collect pictures, films, documentaries, maps, travel books, academic journals- all about the area that interests you.
So for the Egyptian Sahara I went from the Lonely Planet guide and the film The English Patient to the 1930s Geographical Journals of the original motor explorers of the Egyptian Desert. These you can now buy online from JSTOR journal archive. Here I discovered that the Great Sand Sea was first crossed from South to North in 1933- by vehicle, not camel. A slightly less difficult and direct route had first been made in 1873 by the German explorer Rohlfs. Now all this was just background- the fertile soil of creativity.
Next had to come the trigger. For some the trigger is the place- they find a mountain range and zoom in on a mountain they want to climb. They seek out rivers with certain features and then go combing the atlas for likely examples. For me the trigger is: mode of travel.
I find that when I focus on HOW I will make my exploration then I discover much more about WHERE and HOW. For example I wanted to make a journey by birchbark canoe. Once I had my method I looked around for a difficult journey seldom if ever done before. This I found in replicating the 1793 crossing of Western Canada by Alexander Mackenzie- we became the first to do it by his exact route in a birchbark canoe.
For the desert I’m always looking at new modes of transport. I got very excited when I discovered a diesel motorbike that did 100 miles to the gallon. For a while I seriously thought about exploring the desert on one of those. But I like a physical challenge too- and sitting on a motorbike is just a bit too easy.
I found myself talking to others about making a film about the explorer school. One of the film makers, Simon Ogston had already made a long cycle journey in India. I knew this but it had no impact, had no effect, until I eventually checked his website and saw pictures of him riding through India. This was the trigger- when you see someone you have met doing something adventurous you think for the first time, “hey I could do that”.
This is the key moment, when you cease to be a mere spectator and start putting yourself in the position of doing it yourself. The DIY Zen moment of enlightenment!
So seeing him I thought of moutainbiking the desert. I was already based in Cairo and had done a very limited amount of biking on sand- and given up. But this was early on in my desert career. Now I had crossed thousands of kilometres by foot, camel and 4×4 and I knew that most of the desert is hard enough to support a bike with wide tyres. I found on the internet a bike with very fat tyres but it didn’t look right as it had small fat tyres and I knew that the bigger the wheel diameter the better off you are in sand. Basically because the rolling resistance of a small fat tyre is greater than a tall fat tyre. I spoke, though, about desert riding to Simon and he searched the internet and found a number of US companies that produced fat tyre bikes- among them Speedway cycles of Alaska.
The second moment of enlightenment was seeing the possibilities inherent in these huge tyred bikes. Suddenly the desert seemed wide open.
At first I thought of crossing Egypt from East to West but then my earlier reading kicked in and the Great Sand Sea became the focus. It really helps if your idea has some magnetism to it- a name or idea that you like to repeat to others- and yourself. This again helps build the reality of the project.
So now we had an idea that we were excited about, that no one had ever attempted before, and that we thought we could do. All we had to do next was make it a reality. So that’s what I’ll cover in the next How to Organise an Expedition post- how to get others involved.
So the main point for coming up with exploration ideas is research, research, research- but in a laid back kind of way, covering far and wide, zoom around the net following up leads, ordering books, reading journals- it’s excellent for that. The net is also great for sourcing weird forms of transport that may set you off in a new direction. But to avoid going crazy first either fix the PLACE you want to go to (country, range, desert, even continent) or the MODE of TRANSPORT. With one of these fixed you will have more focus.
Robert Twigger