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Getting to the Point

“It’s over there,” said Dave, “Somewhere.” I scanned the desert horizon. It was midday and the Egyptian landscape was flattened by the overhead sun. In a few minutes, maybe ten, we would be the first people ever to be at that specific point on the earth’s crust. 28N 31E to be precise. 28 00 00 N 31 00 00E to be very precise. There would be no distracting minutes and seconds, just the pure integers of latitude and longitude. The going got tougher, the desert surface gravelly and now stretching uphill. We were climbing up the humpy left side of a wadi, or dry riverbed. There was no vegetation visible anywhere in a 360 degree circle- I scanned hard but saw nothing except low dun grey hills and dry valleys. The only sight that drew the eye was a rock breaking the skyline. We had parked the 4×4 some way back and now I was out of breath, what with the heat and going uphill. Dave strode on manfully, pulling ahead. It was then I suspected, that like Hillary and Tenzing, only one of us would get to that sacred spot first. We both had GPS machines that checked our position but Dave’s was bigger, more authoritative. Plus he had a longer stride than me. It looked like I was about to assume the Tenzing position.

We were only climbing a small hill not a mountain and we weren’t interested at all in the summit. What drew us on was the promise of bagging a confluence point. A confluence point is where a degree line of latitude and longitude meet like 50N 25W or where a whole lot of lines meet like the North or South poles. It has to be a whole number and on land or within sight of land. There are 14,029 out there. There are 11,396 still waiting to be bagged. And Dave and I were after 28N 31E , somewhere in the Egyptian desert between the Nile and the Red Sea.

Only with accurate surveying techniques could the height of mountains and their ‘importance’ be recognized. Everest only became interesting as a summit when we were able to measure it. The current craze for bagging every peak over 8000 metres is a continuation of this artificial exploration activity.

Even more abstract are the North and South poles. Not places in the normal sense- they are defined by a series of numbers- yet they have become the focus of intense interest. But only with the invention of latitude and longitude, the sextant and the accurate clock could these places actually be found.

Unfortunately to be the first to the Pole isn’t possible. And even being the 5000th is a costly and difficult enterprise. Everest can be climbed- if you have £60,000 to hand, otherwise you might consider the attractions of Snowdon or even Ben Nevis- after all, all three have been climbed by many many people before you.

If you want to be first then you have to look elsewhere. And as Roald Amundsen put it, “I cannot see the point in being faster or going a different way. For me there is only being first.” Which is tough advice to follow in a world that, at first sight, seems pretty well explored.

Then in 1996 confluence hunting was invented, thanks to the ubiquity of two new technologies- Global Positioning Satellites and the internet. At last it was possible to visit all those other confluence points apart from the poles. The race was on.

You can go confluence hunting anywhere. But the UK, USA and much of Europe are pretty well ‘pointed out’ There are only 4 confluence points left in the UK and all of those require a boat journey into our chilly coastal waters. In the USA, only Alaska still has points remaining to be claimed. Though, of course, many people enjoy collecting points others have already been to.

But for me, the whole point of pointing, was to be first. The organizing force behind confluence hunting, the Degree Confluence Project tends to play down the competitive aspect of the activity. There are no lists, as you get with twitchers, of who has the most ‘firsts’. This is one of the many good aspects of the Project. Naturally I wanted to know who had the most firsts but was glad that someone had decided not to pander to this cheap desire. There is something out of the ordinary and far sighted about the DCP. The website itself is a model of clarity, emphasizing visiting and making reports from points rather than mere bagging.

I heard about all this from my friend Dave, who works for an oil exploration company in Egypt. Dave was a bit wary when I first started probing about “confluence hunting”. He’s used to people scoffing, or not seeing the point, so to speak. I was like that at first. It seemed nuts to me to spend a lot of time and money just to go to an imaginary spot.

After I visited the DCP website I was converted. Suddenly it seemed like the most exciting thing you could do. I even got anxious that someone would rush out and do all the remaining points in Egypt that very week. What convinced me was the nature and the extent of the reports on the website. Because of the strict reporting procedure required by the degree confluence project, the abstract point becomes real. You have to take a photograph of the scene, plus photos in all the cardinal directions and one of the ‘zeroes’, the screen of the GPS machine that shows you are bang on the criss-cross of latitude and longitude. Then you submit a written account. If you peruse the thousands of reports of visits to confluence points the world over you begin to understand the grandeur of the whole thing. This is an amateur enterprise yet they, or we, will achieve something no government department, NGO, or monolithic UN organization could ever manage- which is- a report, both written and photographic, that covers the entire earth. These visits are self financed, self motivated, but over the coming fifty years every point will be visited- of that I have little doubt. At the equator confluence points are only 100km apart- as you get to the poles they get closer. It is the last great exploration project of the planet- until the next piece of technology comes along.

Grand thoughts for a grand adventure, none of which I was thinking as we rolled out of Cairo at 6.30am on our way to claim my first, and Dave’s 22nd point in Egypt. Dave, usually the model of a taciturn Scot, was surprisingly skittish and cheerful that morning. We all were (his wife and son came along too). There is nothing like the promise of even a small adventure to raise the spirits, that and leaving at the crack of dawn just like going on holiday as a child.

It’s getting harder and harder to find valid alibis, one’s that stand up to more than a cursory examination, alibis to get you away from the remote control and the wide screen telly. I don’t know why we need alibis to get out and about, but we do. I suppose it used to be hunting and making journeys to barter and trade, but you can do all that on the internet now. I know from my own experience that the alibi must convince oneself, even if explaining it to others is somewhat shaming. Once you ‘get’ the idea of confluence hunting there is no better reason out there for going miles and miles, facing hardship and pain, to reach an abstract spot on the earth.

We were unlikely to suffer too much hardship and pain on our expedition. Dave had his company Landcruiser, a heavy duty 4×4 capable of traversing the worst terrain. It was also about as good protection as you could get from the effects of a car accident. The Nile road we were driving along was notorious for accidents, but until you witness one, such information is, at best, at the back of your mind.

About two hundred kilometers south of Cairo, now in the desert, we stopped for coffee. Dave had a flask, which, on an expedition is always better than stopping at a gas station or a café. Expeditions have to be self contained otherwise they become diluted, a bit less of an adventure. Of course brewing your own tea on a hastily contrived campfire is always best but since we had Dave’s flask that would have been uncalled for. Back in the cruiser we drove for about a mile before, with the dawning sense of shock that attends such things, we arrived at a scene of devastating mechanical carnage. A giant twenty wheeler was skewed across the road, water pouring from its punctured radiator. An incredible dent in the front pushed the engine and front wheels back under the cab, as if a giant fist had knocked its teeth in. A man with an anguished expression was still in the cab and several people, including one with a crowbar were trying to break him free. As with any accident I was relieved there were others doing stuff already. I’d been on a first aid course years ago but I’d probably only get in the way. Then, having crept around the twenty wheeler, we drove past a man cradling another man who was either dead or unconscious. Behind were the utterly destroyed remains of an ancient pickup, the windscreen completely smashed. “Do you think he came through that?” asked Dave. A crash seems to instantly age vehicles and this pick-up, old to start with, already looked abandoned for months. The man cradling the injured, or dead, man shouted something to the saloon car in front which hared off. People were already gathering from where it was hard to tell. I had thought we were nowhere. I looked back at the cradled man, gawping but not wanting to. This was not a crash in the JG Ballard sense of the word. Third world crashes are different to those of the first. They are grubby and sad and are symbols of a desperate scrabbling for resources rather than alienated excess. They also exist in a different zone of responsibility. In the third world it is less about recovery and rescue services and more about a brush with eternity. It cuts you quicker and deeper because you know that even if an ambulance gets to the scene the level of medical care is not going to be high. Strangely, after a mile or less we reached a roadside ambulance station and already the saloon car was up the drive and the ambulance men coming out of their building. These ambulance buildings have sprung up recently along the most accident filled roads, but, though better than nothing, they don’t halt the rate at which decrepit trucks and overladen buses ram into each other.

Seeing the crash dampened the mood of the trip considerably. It had all happened very definitely within the space of our coffee break. It could have been us, no doubt all of us were thinking, but no one said, for fear, perhaps, of tempting fate.

The desert stretched either side. Rocky desert. The Sahara east of the Nile is rocky, riven with wadis. The Western desert is smooth by comparison filled with dunes and sand sheets. In a moment, always a highpoint of any desert trip, we at last left the highway and went offroad. Dave made the symbolic gearshift to full-on four wheel drive and rumbled over the gravel plain following the LCD arrow on his GPS.

My own GPS, though good enough, was not a top of the range model. I kept it more or less out of sight. Dave not only had 22 points in Egypt he had also bagged the symbolic ‘best’ point 22N 25E which marked the intersection of the Libyan, Egyptian and Sudanese borders. Dave, though naturally modest, was obviously the man in charge.

We lost sight of the road and headed further into the desert. The point we were aiming for was the most accessible unclaimed confluence left in Egypt, the nearest to any made-up road but still not on a road. Why it had been ignored, or missed, I could only guess was due to the lengthy drive along an accident prone highway. The ground beneath was hard gravel and easy driving, though bumpy. We crested a low hill and saw more ahead. It was hot day, at least thirty degrees, though in the burgeoning sense of excitement I did not notice the heat. The hill got steeper and Dave thought it prudent to park. I then understood another intriguing thing about confluence hunting- what if the point just happens to be halfway up a rock face- or at the bottom of deep gorge? That’s where the challenge and adventure kick in. I lost seconds fiddling with the white balance knob on my camera and Dave was already ahead. He was the kind of expedition member who would consider it a bit wimpy to wait for stragglers so I hurried on, sweating in the noon heat.

Then, all of a sudden, after Dave had wandered around in a large circle, holding his GPS like someone trying to find a better signal on a mobile, he announced we’d arrived. 28N 31E was exactly here. There were no car tracks or footprints where we gingerly lay the two GPSs side by side showing the numbers on the screen. To this tiny spot on earth we were certainly the first confluence hunters, and very likely the first people, to have stood.

It was not a great feeling. It was an odd, different sort of feeling- not an anticlimax exactly, more like the feeling a gasman must feel when he has successfully read a meter right out in the countryside. Dave and I made up for the lack of natural elation by saying such things as, “Well, at least we did it” or “Better than staying home slumped in front of the telly”. It’s hard to imagine one of the great explorers of yore saying these things but who knows?

We took the photographs and everything needed for the report and though I knew once it was written up and made permanent I’d be happy, and though I definitely would go confluencing again, there was something missing. I decided it was a view. And driving rather than walking. I think there should be an elevated category of confluence bagging where you have walked from a bagged site to an unbagged one, unassisted by an internal combustion engine.

As if to emphasise the superfluity of cars we saw three more crashes on the way home. All had occurred sometime before we passed, so we were merely observers, but all were nasty. Two human shapes covered in newspaper lay beside a rolled truck. Trapped on top was the truck’s load of chickens in palm leaf cages, squashed crates of squawking, bloody, dead and damaged birds. We’d stopped commenting on the accidents by then. There was nothing left to say. Dave, as always, drove carefully and we were back in Cairo before nightfall.

I wrote up my ‘report’ with considerable pride. It took on the status of something semi-official, the prose a bit dry, rather dull and careful. Dave was concerned that I had missed his name off- I had, but this was easily remedied. Being named on the report is a bit like sharing authorship of an academic paper- important stuff. You can see it, along with the pictures by typing my name into the search box for degreeconfluenceproject.org. I had my alibi. Already it feels like a real achievement after all.

Dawn Potter

Confluence hunting appeals more to men than women but Dawn is one of those happy to get out there looking for a new point. She started hunting with her boyfriend Phil, who heard about confluence hunting from a radio program whilst driving in his HGV. Dawn has conquered 15 or 16 points, including some abroad. In Rumania Phil but not Dawn was arrested by border police who got one look at his google earth maps and gps and assumed he was an illegal migrant from Moldava. “We all had a good laugh in the end,” said Dawn. Another tricky call was when a point was surrounded by a herd of cattle. First they had to persuade the farmer why they wanted to get into his field and then they had to brave the cattle. Dawn visited the last confluence point left unclaimed on mainland Britain, Blakely Point. This meant a trip by boat accompanied by local press though she did concede, “Most times I go out it’s raining or I get stuck in a muddy bog.” Her job is indoors as a manager so she relishes the chance to get outside. Confluence seeking is something that fits in well with her other hobbies of hiking and camping. “It’s a nice walk at the end of the day. And you always have some kind of adventure.”

Gordon Spence

Visit Gordon Spence’s website and you get some kind of idea of what he’s like. Maths problems, computers and confluence hunting are all interests represented and arguably confluence hunting brings them all together. He is the regional coordinator for the Degree Confluence Project and, in a game that avoids competition, Britain’s top confluence hunter. He’s visited all the sites in the UK- many for the first time. The hardest point in Britain, “logistically” he added, was 55N 3W- This was the Long Pound ammo dump, Europe’s largest, home to depleted uranium missiles and the Lockerbie wreckage. It took Gordon three months to get permission to enter the camp and another three months to get permission to enter the missile store zone where the point actually was. Gordon explains he just “likes being outdoors”. And in Britain every point is outdoors. There are none in London and only one is in a building- a cowshed near Basingstoke. He’s been abroad too- in Texas he was accused of being an Iraqi spy. “But that’s Texans for you.” “I call it wandering with a purpose,” he says, “You know where you are and why you are there.”

Robert Twigger

During one of several days showing computer executives how to navigate in the desert one of them, Per, from Sweden, produced from his backpack what looked like the stone vertebra of a creature at least as large as cow. He’d found it some 3 km back, near an outcrop some 60 km north of Hara Oasis in Egypt. Hara is in the Bahariya depression and Bahariya is famous for dinousar remains, including the notorious spinosaurus feautured to grisly effect in Jurrassic Park III, if you follow that kind of thing. We jumped in the car and went back to check.

What was really interesting apart from the 6 or 7 obvious lines of vertebrae was the fact that a) there were so many remains and b) a group of 18 people had walked past them and through and only one person had noticed. Now we knew what to look for we saw dinosaur bones everywhere.

The concept of ‘search image’is well known to paleotologists. They look at pictures and extant examples of fossils before going to find the real thing. You truly do find what you are looking for.

In our case, of course, no one had a camera, so these few words must suffice. Apart from the vertebrae we found tube like lengths of fossil which suggested those tube like fronds found in the ocean. That this area was under the sea several times in the past is indicated everywhere by the seashells and shark’s teeth easily found.

As we looked at the seemingly vegetable fronds we began to doubt our vertebrae. Were they really dinosaur backbones or just more of the sea tubers? That we had found something was not in doubt. But what exactly?

A return visit with a more knowledgeable person is the obvious answer. And taking pictures might help. For me, though, the experience of driving back over the sand, jumping out, and seeing those bones lined up in the sand was enough. It was the essence of discovery- alone in the desert, miles and miles away from anyone or anywhere, free, finding something new, unwritten about, unphotographed. It was an experience I never want to forget.

I was an instant convert to ultralight backpacking when I first heard about it maybe seven or eight years ago. I felt I was an instinctive ultra-lighter- making my own ‘packraft’ from a beach inflatable- which worked brilliantly until I pranged it on a submerged tree stump in the River Wye. Just recently I read about Roman Dial’s first (legal ie. permitted by bureaucrats) descent of the Grand Canyon in a packraft. Ultralight mountaineering and ultralight sailing are growing in popularity too.

Why is the ultralight concept the way forward in exploration?

For many reasons, but I will outline a few that occur to me. Firstly exploration, like any outdoor activity, runs the very real risk of being submerged in gear. I love gear as much as the next geek, but I also hate the strangle hold it can wield over you, a strangle hold magnified by gear mags and sites that get free gear to use and then write nice things about it that imply you too must buy it. Top sea kayak explorer Audrey Sutherland- now in her 80s- reckons on making or adapting 90% of her kit- only buying 10%- this is the woman who pioneered inflatable sea kayaking when everyone said inflatables were beach toys. I digress. The main point is, when you are ultralighting you are going as simply as possible so there is no room for excess baggage.

Ultralighting means refining the means of exploration, which in turn, turns up new possibilities for future expeditions. Just as fat tyre bikes have made crossing the Egyptian Great Sand Sea possible (we’ll find out for sure this December) so, too, taking as light a selection of gear changes where you can go and what you see and do when you are there.

Then there are new combinations- the bike/packraft combination could be very intriguing- especially as both are now ridiculously light in weight.

Ultralight exploration also means an exploration of your own capabilities- how inventive are you in devising simple and lightweight alternatives? Somewhat low on the list of great outdoor inventions I must place my own ‘wet shorts’- cut-off over trousers that protect your thighs from all that dumped water sliding off a raincoat. The calf is protected by your gaiters. Then there was the one mess-tin for everything cook and drinking system. Or my current favourite (which I didn’t invent) using windblown ‘tumbleweed’ found during the afternoon section of a desert walk to fire up a volcano kettle to make that first cup of tea. In a place devoid of wood it’s a great feeling to steal fire from a rolling dried up weed.

Inflatable catamarans seem to me to be a way forward in island and seacoast ultralight exploration. I’m thinking a cat that is so light you can carry it on a plane to a remote place where you simply inflate and sail. There are about ten mainly European inflatable cat makers out there. The Czech Easysail is the most intriguing- big enough to take six adults it has actually crossed the Atlantic (though I believe the one used was a tad larger- not totally clear from pix). Though at 96kg it’s getting heavy. The one that looks silliest- and therfore slips best under the radar (I’m talking about getting past busybodies who want to stop you and the more ‘pro’ you look the more attention you will get and the bigger the headache) is the American SeaEagle 14- and at only $1500- a bargain. It also weighs only 40KG. Maybe a more flexible solution is a lashed frame that links two inflatable sea kayaks together. Making is always better than buying- as long as it works.

For our Fatback fat tyre bike exploring I am already thinking of a bodge to make wheeling the bike easier. Maybe some kind of handlebar frame that enables you to wheel the bike without bending down- which is the killer for mega-long wheeling sessions. Also I am thinking ahead to a way of using the bike as a trolley/rickshaw/cart for most of the time and only riding on easy non-sandy surfaces (which must be 50% of the desert). That way you mentally get used to mainly walking and riding is just a bonus. The purpose being – to enable you to carry a 100+ kilos of gear on a pushbike/trike. Mountain triking- now there’s an idea…

Back to the ultralight idea. Why it’s compelling is the way it brings us back to walking. The lighter the gear the more fun the walking and the further you can walk. And walking in my opinion is the essence of exploration. To explore is to walk through a landscape. Not fly over it, not drive through it, not even sail through it- walk through it. The rivers I walked against the current towing a canoe I feel I know. The one’s I shot down I kind of saw like on television. I feel I know the short sections of the Zambezi that I helped line a raft up or portage better than the hundred or more kilometres we shot down having a blast. And when you talk to walkers they know about birds and animals and plants. 4×4ers and whitewater rafters don’t in general- and this isn’t meant to be critical- I enjoy both- it’s just that walking is closer to the nub of it. When I drive in the desert it’s when I stop and start walking around that I feel I am exploring- even if the car got me to that point.

DIY exploring and ultralight exploration intersect at many points- but mainly where cheaper costs are involved. There is less to steal, less to be observed by border policemen, less to go wrong. Ultralight puts you under the radar, into the temporary autonomous zone of travelling. When I took my inflatable beachboat down the Nile I was supposedly breaking the law- but no one interfered- even the police and soldiers waved at me as I went by. They just didn’t ‘see me’- I was too unserious to be taken seriously.

If exploration is about finding freedom in the wilderness or even the quasi-wilderness then ultralight ideas can only benefit it. And the original ultralighters were the 1930s, 40s and 50s explorers Bill Tillman and Eric Shipman- wearing only one set of clothes (each…) and eating and drinking out of a one pint mug. Tillman’s mountain and sailing books are a great reference and inspiration for ultralight exploration today.

Leadership of expeditions

I have just finished the excellent Mysteries of the Nile by Richard Bangs and Pascale Scuttaro, an account of a descent of the Blue Nile and then the Nile from Lake Tana to the sea. This is a very considerable achievement and only a fool or someone with no experience of what is involved, or perhaps with time to kill, would dream of criticising the operation based on material drawn from a book rather than from direct experience. In one sense Scuttaro did absolutely nothing wrong since he succeeded in his objective- reaching the sea. And he got no one killed. There are many ways down a river, no single ‘right way’- in fact the right way is any way that works. The obstacles that Scuttaro and his team have to surmount, mainly the psychological ones mean there are many valuable lessons in the book and it is well worth reading if you are interested in leading expeditions, especially those involving water and Americans.

Why Americans? Well, this is, par excellance, an American expedition. It is certainly not DIY despite the best attempts of the expedition members to appear like good old boys, these are highly qualified, extremely well backed up, rich, well connected yanks who know what they are doing. They are neutral about the 1968 attempt to run the Blue Nile, which stands as a counterpoint of an old style military style expedition. But having written that I can immediately think of lots of contradictions. For example Blashford Snell gives his commanders on the ground freedom to make their own decisions as to how they achieve their objectives, as in a campaign; but expeditions since the beginning have not been characterised by a similarity to the military campaign. They are more like, well, an expedition- one group, isolated, having to make their own way.

But radios and sat phones and militias armed with AK47s change that somewhat. Scuttaro’s team, whilst not packing anything like the gear of Blashford Snell are there to make an IMAX film and have phone access to some influential diplomats and fixers. To me this is a major difference between DIY and non DIY expeditioning. Non DIY uses every means available to achieve its objectives. DIY has no external back up. It is just the team in the field alone.

Each method has its advantages and disadvantages, proponents and opponents.

But, the very presence of reassuring outside resources undermines leadership. When a team member can walk out they think about that rather than biting their tongue and shutting up. When they can phone home they phone home and people at home have no idea what you are going through.

Climbing, which Scutaro has done a lot of- including climbing Everest several times, is, contrary to popular belief, a poor training ground for leadership. Think about climbers and climbing- it attracts highly competitive loners, not team players. Very similar to high level kayaking, where the thrill is one man against a VERY DEFINED route filled with obstacles. The sheer focus of a mountain climb, the fact that each climber has to be an expert in route finding, makes leadership almost unnecessary. I am not talking about commercial expeditions where some people are more equal than others by virtue of their wallets, I am talking classic alpine style mountaineering. So you take a climber and a kayaker with incredible experience in their fields and you can also have neophytes in the everyday management of a typical expedition.

An example is the way Chris Bonnington, who was on the 1968 expedition, had huge mountain leadership experience, and yet undermined at almost every turn, the leadership attempts of those above him in the chain of command. Scutaro’s number two, Gordon Brown, an obsessive and highly skilled kayaker, is similar- disagreeing over where to camp at night and picking fights with other non-American team members. Unlike Scutaro, Brown has little experience of dealing with Africans. He becomes obsessed by the way one guy is looking at him. We later discover Brown has recovered from brain cancer so his paranoia may be grounded in unstable brain chemistry. An excuse, then, but not something you want to have to deal with 500 km from the nearest town.

The real problem is that modern life, which means, broadly, American style comfortable living, allows us to be really sloppy about many things that are killers out in the wilderness. Bedouin, when on new ground, make a fetish of not arguing with a designated navigator about the ‘right way’. They know that even questioning the leader can upset his confidence. But big chested US style management makes few allowances for such subtle factors. The idea is that everyone is ‘allowed a say’. Sorry, democracy parks its car at the Four Seasons on any real expedition; the classic modern way is to use fear tactics- ie. safety rules become the new cover for being authoritarian. But actually it is more honest to be authoritarian. Especially if there is a single vehicle like a boat. You can only have one captain and everyone signs on with the knowledge that his word is the last word.

In everyday life you can always phone a friend. And with a satphone you can do that too, But even a satphone can’t make the friend suddenly appear to whisk you away to dinner and a movie. Expeditions are all about managing cabin fever. Climbers manage it through just turning into themselves- when you’re out leading nothing else matters and when you’re in your tent you just switch off. Also climbing expeditions are short intense hits. They last days and weeks, not months.

It is ironic that some of the hardest rapids on the Blue Nile, hairy grade V stuff, are accomplished by an rafter who has so little experience he can’t even keep the boat straight on the flat bits. But it didn’t surprise me. Scutaro’s ‘top professional rafters’ leave early, in a way they are too highly qualified for the job. Maybe they should be leading their own expeditions. What you need are not skills but a sense of humour, a willingness to learn, enthusiasm and the ability to obey. Every trip is different. You can learn almost all you need on that trip for that trip if you have a good leader. Trips get very specialised and smart, fit people pick up that specialised knowledge quickly. I have always been surprised at how quickly neophytes pick really hard stuff when surrounded by people who are already skilled at it.

One of the great things about the book is the way it flashes back to accidents and experiences of Scuttaro that inform his current behaviour. This is really valuable as it allows you to spot a pattern in accidents which you can avoid. First off there is the ‘celebrity’ expedition. Very experienced people like Scutao attract top people from allied but very different fields- what I call Landcruiser bruisers- people who have ‘seen the world’ and can talk the talk very convincingly, except they were always driving and someone else was doing the driving. These people, be they aid workers, army types, TV people are the kind of people who knock the water over into the fire. That can literally be a killer in some situations and one of the things I always look out for on a trip is how clumsy a person is. Then there are other ‘celebrity’ types- famous people or just plain successful people who haven’t paid their dues in blood and sweat and manage by their lifeskill and high status to get promoted to expeditions where they shouldn’t really be. I’m always very wary of anyone who describes what is upcoming in terms of a thrill- they are still stuck in rollercoaster mode, and rollercoasters never crash. I much prefer someone who speaks with a certain nostalgia for a wet sleeping bag and watching the sun rise.

In two of the flashbacks in Scutaro and Bangs’s book, accidents happened because of celebrity presence. What on the surface looked like similar people was actually a very diverse bunch with differing experience levels. The next lesson was the chain of minor mistakes that leads to the big accident. Rarely do accidents come like the wrath of the heavens. Mostly there is the chain- and any leader with sense learns how to spot the chain and stomp on it early. But that is hard when you have celebrities and when you have people who are top outdoor people in their own right. On one trip an expedition member smuggles a large handgun into Canada. That is mistake number one. The second is he shows it off to non-team members- a driver- who reports him. The third is that the maps are being held by someone inexperienced when the police arrive and search them. The fourth is the maps get lost. The fifth is that now it becomes hard to explain what is up ahead since there is no map to reference what the leader already knows. One boat takes the wrong route without scouting first and one of the inexperienced people excited by the thrill of it is killed.

Never let anyone hold the maps except the leader. If he loses them then he doesn’t deserve to be a leader. This is where martial arts training is better than outdoor training. In martial arts you are taught that make a mistake and you die. You are taught that mistake making is just not acceptable. We have, in over reacting to Victorian style teaching methods, actually become sloppy. And there are some people out there who make more mistakes than others- these are the folk you don’t want around in tight situation.

Usually accident chains start rolling because of a sense of being in a rush. You keep going to find a better camp spot and then it’s raining and dark and there is no where to camp and you start suffering from hyperthermia, which has happened to me. Which is why choosing the camp spot is so crucial and is the leader’s choice everytime.

The other situation where accidents happen is underestimation. Experienced people go for what they think is a day trip, they take no precautions and then they have an accident. This happens with Scutaro when a doctor who is walking with him in Namibia breaks both his ankles. This account gives great food for thought. Everything is focussed on waiting for a helicopter to rescue the injured man- who is a panicked and talking about gangrene within hours of his injury. You have to ask yourself what do you do if there is no helicopter? You have to ask yourself could I, like Doug Scott and Joe Simpson, drag myself out with broken legs bumping along behind me?

My own observations on leadership and the current ‘crisis’ in leadership are simple. We don’t have a leadership problem we have a ‘followership’ problem. When I take people out into the desert and I control the water, the transport, the navigation and the food- there is never a problem. Naturally I am not going to make things hard for myself by demanding different levels of comfort and not doing everything I ask others to do. But the essence is: we have a society where everyone can do their own thing and is encouraged from day one to think they are equal to everyone IN EVERYWAY. An expedition is like a throwback to medieval times. There is one leader, or dictator, who is either benign or a tyrant. But an expedition is over all too soon. Our priviledge is to be a day tripper not a permanent resident of the old days.

So these people who have been brainwashed to believe they have a right to an equal say do not hesitate to consider first whether what they have to contribute is better put on hold, perhaps until tempers die down.

People usually have so much to do before an expedition that they neglect their fitness. Often if you have good base level of fitness you can use the early part of the trip to get in shape. For those over 35 there is in this more extreme strategy the increased possibility of injury to a tendon or ligament usually. Muscles tone up fast- two weeks can see a return to past glories but bones, ligaments and cartiledge take three months minimum, or at least should be allowed as much.

The best fitness program concentrates on brute strength rather than mere stamina if you have to choose- why? Because injuries usually occur through the sudden overstraining of your body when hefting something heavy.

But then you need stamina too if the expedition requires paddling or walking with packs or walking along river banks for hundreds of miles. The slant of a river bank can over days and weeks lead to a version of shin splints as I discovered in Canada a few years ago having walked 400 km along the north bank of the Peace River in Alberta.

Sledge towers train by towing tractor tires tied to their waists. Canoeists can train in a pool by having a bunjee tied to one end of the canoe with a scale on the pool side - they have to strain against the bunjee cord to make a certain mark. Inventiveness is key in exploration fitness acquisition because of its deadly dull (usually) nature. Climbing walls are great for upper body and fun too. Mountain biking up hills and down dales is as good as running for aerobic – or almost as good.

I have found that running truly is the ‘king of exercise’ as the master Bruce Lee put it. Unfortunately it is bloody boring even in the beautiful wadi digla area where I train in Cairo. My new and exciting solution: take the gps and turn each run into a number fest. I constantly check my speed as I go up hill and down dale. I measure the distance I have gone and have to go. I cross check this with previous speeds and times and pretty soon I’ve run 2 km then 4 then 8. That’s where I’m at right now.

Train in the hills by carrying jerrycans of water in your rucksack- climb the hill with it in and then dump it for the trip down to save your knees. Which are better built through biking and climbing and yoga than the shock impact of pounding down a hill 20kg heavier than your usual weight.

The best way to train is always with a buddy.

When is a traveller not a traveller? When he, or she, is an explorer. We all love to explore, even on a micro scale like picking over the beach after the tide has come in.

The desert is like one great beach, and in the case of the Sahara it’s the biggest beach on earth, and despite what we may believe, it is not all explored.

We aimed to set up the explorer school to put people who want to explore in touch with the skills they need. As I had just spent the last couple of years exploring the Egyptian Sahara it made sense to start there.

Typically we spend an entire day preparing to leave for a ten day desert journey. It is always very hectic- Bedouin are, on the surface, disorganised. But we have learnt that each trip breeds its own organisation. We start off with all the bags thrown on the camels higgledy piggledy and then over the next hours and throughout the first two days we perfect a system for that journey. Every trip is different and it makes sense to not be too rigid- take weather for example: the packing will be different if we expect sand storms and high temperatures or whether we are stomping through the chill of a January morning.

Despite cold starts, the Sahara in winter is the best time to visit. Sunny and clear by day but never more than 25/26 degrees. By night it can be freezing and if you sleep out without a tent, which is the best way to see the stars move through the night sky, you may wake to find frost on your sleeping bag.

The Bedouin teachers/guides get the fire going before dawn. It is built with any sticks and brushwood we find during the day together with slow burning acacia wood carried in camel bags as a reserve. The trick is to stand the pot downwind actually in the fire so the wind blows the flames around it. No petrol or gas stoves allowed! Bread for breakfast is another skill we learn: scrape away the embers and lay out unleavened dough on the hot sand. Cover with more sand and embers and cook for fifteen minutes. Uncover again and dust it off with a clean paintbrush (or your hand) and you have delicious bread. Surprisingly the sand doesn’t stick to it at all.

Then it’s time to load the camels. This is the main skill we learn from the Bedouin who have practised the art since camels were first brought to Egypt about 500BC. The key is balance. Each load is done with a balancing load on the opposite side of the saddle. A female can take 150Kg, a male over 250kg. Mostly we take females as they are less unpredictable and more friendly. The key knot is very simple- just a stop knot threaded through the weave of the rope held in place by tension. This basic fastening is used in place of complicated straps everywhere on the camel’s saddles. It has the great advantage that if a rope breaks you can repair it easily.

Our journeys take us into the Western Desert around Dakhla oasis, the longest continually inhabited area in the Sahara- there are house remains in Dahkla over 13,000 years old. It has been a trade route centre for as long as there have been trade routes, and it is these old routes that we set out to explore. Curiously it is our exploring, not Bedouin knowledge, that has revealed new information about this remote area. The local Bedouin previously only visited the land to the East, not the West and South West. This was because of banditry in previous centuries closing the old West-East Sahara routes which caused a decay in local knowledge. Those old routes are still marked by ‘alem’ or stone men, literally several flat stones piled on a prominent rock and indicating a route. Often we find the tell tale furrows left behind by very ancient camel routes and always we find stone age tools, pottery, bones and closer to Dakhla even human bones and winding cloths from disturbed graves that date at least from Roman times.

The terrain of the Western Desert is sandy, real desert, with dunes and sand sheets, mirages and dried lakes crusted with salt. But Egypt has the most varied desert terrain of the whole Sahara. In a typical day we will cross a dune barrier, wind our way through buttes and mesas as in Monument Valley, made famous by cowboy films, dip into canyons and file through rocky outcrops. The sheer variety hides old water depots full of broken pots, burial sites and the hidden nesting sites of Saker falcons.

The main part of the day is spent walking and learning new skills such as navigation and desert survival. Bedouin only ride their camels when they are in a hurry, either on a raid or taking them to market, or making a short journey. Walking is the best way to appreciate the desert and to find treasure beneath your feet. But, if you disdain boots, make sure your sandals don’t rub your Achilles tendons as mine did at first- it’s a real killer.

One of the exercises we devised was locating the buried water drop. Camels can go for many days without water in winter (months if there is vegetation to eat) though they do need time to recover. To save the camels we give them a drink after five days. A camel can guzzle fifty litres in five minutes so the water is hidden before we set out. As a test of compass skills (no GPS allowed) we give only the bearing and distance in paces (each person having already measured their pace) and then, like the search for buried treasure, which it is, in a way, the race is on. We haven’t failed to find one yet so increasingly we do this exercise using only the sun as a compass having first learnt how from the Bedouin.

The Bedouin who accompany us are the true teachers of desert exploration. Any time of the day I would ask Ali which way was north. Even without the sun he could tell me within five degrees. At night it is the camels who show the right direction. By some homing instinct they always go to sleep with the bodies pointing towards the starting point of the journey, however many twists and turns we may have made on the way.

One of the great lessons of desert exploration is travelling by night. This is highly dangerous by car but safe by camel, if there is a moon. By lining up the two side stars of the Great Bear and moving a short distance up the sky one always finds the Pole star and so true north. By watching the way stars revolve around the Pole star it is possible to tell the time at night with considerable accuracy.

Our exploration goals are simple: make a map of the journey, record what you find, and be the first at a confluence point. Confluence Points are whole integer intersections of lines of Latitude and Longitude. The first person to record their presence at one wins a place on the extensive Degree Confluence Project website, a kind of Royal Geographical Society for amateur explorers.

Map making is possible because the only accurate maps of this desert are 1:500,000 made in the 1940s. Sat photos, though useful after you’ve been somewhere, are too confusing in place of real maps. We made our first expedition without any map at all, just using a compass and GPS to record bearings and positions on a sheet of graph paper. Over time we have added information to make a detailed record of the area we aim to explore. Each trip, though, we go a new route, very often one which rarely crosses camel or vehicle tracks for days at a time. One set of tracks we were happy to find: the tiny narrow tracks of a baby Ford left by Laszlo Almasy in 1932- he was the real life Hungarian explorer on whom the English Patient was based. His car tracks were preserved in the surface of black gravel lying on sand that he had disturbed but the wind could not erode.

Coming into the oasis after ten days in the desert, the sudden green is like a dream. There are springs where you can dive into clear water and feel your body suck up moisture again. But all too soon the pleasures of the Oasis wear off. As the Egyptian explorer Hassanein Bey wrote: “When the desert smiles there is no place to be but the desert.”

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?