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Grand Adventures
Alastair Humphreys
Recommended for viewing on a colour tablet.Adventure – something that’s new and exhilarating, outside your comfort zone. Adventures change you and how you see the world, and all you need is an open mind, bags of enthusiasm and boundless curiosity.So what’s a GRAND ADVENTURE – it is the most life-changing, career-enhancing, personality-forging, fun adventure of your life.Following on from his popular Microadventures, in Grand Adventures Alastair Humphreys shines a spotlight on the real-life things that get in the way: stuff like time, money or your other commitments. Grand Adventures is also crammed with hard-won wisdom from people who have actually been there and done that: by boat and boot, car and kayak, bicycle and motorbike. People who had one epic trip then returned to normal life, or who got bitten so badly by the bug that they devoted their life to the pursuit of adventure. Young people, old people. Men, women. Mates, couples, families. Extraordinary, inspiring people. People like you.Saving your pennies, overcoming inertia, generating momentum, getting out the front door: if you want it enough, you can do it.Tiny steps to a grand adventure.Are you in?
COPYRIGHT (#u3689e309-d6a2-59bd-97c6-37b83ba5049b)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2016
Text © Alastair Humphreys, 2016
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Cover photograph © Alastair Humphreys
Cover design by This Side
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this eBook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Source ISBN: 9780008129347
Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780008131944
Version: 2016-03-03
For my parents,
Who taught me to save up, work hard
and make stuff happen.
© Alastair Humphreys
CONTENTS
COVER (#u215f21bd-c653-549e-b8fd-1b58d745b9ee)
TITLE PAGE (#u60bab3c4-2c80-5b0e-9d03-3337171d870b)
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION (#uf30357e9-dc73-5c9e-bc0b-4f2cf9dde84b)
INTRODUCTION
Part 1 PLAN
MONEY
TIME
COMMITMENTS AND RELATIONSHIPS
HATCH A PLAN
KIT LIST
Part 2 CHOOSE
BICYCLE
FOOT
ANIMAL
WATER
MOTOR
TRAVEL
CLIMB
EVERYDAY
GRANDER
BIOGRAPHIES
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#u3689e309-d6a2-59bd-97c6-37b83ba5049b)
Everyone loves adventure. Bookshops have bulging travel sections. Adventure film festivals are springing up all over the world. The web groans with exciting expedition blogs. I love adventure so much that I turned it into my job. I am a professional adventurer. It says as much on my business card, so it must be true. (Never mind that I made them myself in one of my many procrastinating-from-book-writing mornings.) I write books, give talks and make films about the adventures I’ve done, such as cycling round the world, crossing oceans or staggering through the heat of deserts. Enough people enjoy hearing these stories for me to earn a living from them. This means that more people read about adventures than go on big trips themselves. But this book aims to help you realise that grand adventures are within your grasp, that you can begin taking the steps necessary to make them happen for you, too. Why settle for reading about adventures when you could be out in the wild doing them yourself?
‘Why settle for reading about adventures when you could be out in the wild doing them yourself?’
Many of my friends are also adventurers. They’ve climbed great mountains, trekked to the Poles, exciting stuff like that. These are special experiences. I love sitting in the pub with my adventurous friends, listening to increasingly far-fetched tales as last orders approaches. But here’s an important thing: I know these guys and girls well enough to see that they are not particularly special people. They are ordinary people, but they do things that many people deem to be more than ordinary, even extra-ordinary. Being an adventurer is not a genetic gift. I know, for example, that I certainly am not brave, strong or athletic, yet I claim to be an adventurer. Usain Bolt was born fast. Albert Einstein was born brainy. Living adventurously, however, is nothing more than a choice.
© Archie Leeming
When I left university I made the choice to make the best I could of my abilities and resources and see how far I could ride my bike. I didn’t have a fancy bike. I didn’t ride fast. I didn’t spend much money. I got lost a lot. I napped under trees. I carried a bicycle repair book because I had little idea about bottom brackets or rear derailleurs. And yet I eventually succeeded in cycling the whole way round the world. I spent £7000 on the four-year trip. I did not choose to do it on such a shoestring: it’s just that this was the sum total of my worldly wealth. I preferred to get going and make it happen rather than saving and saving and never beginning. Four years of banana sandwiches was a small price to pay for eking out my money into so many memories.
When people dream of adventure they are generally not discouraged by the difficulties of the journey itself. Extremes of heat and cold; basic and uncomfortable conditions; the physical and mental struggle: these are actually often part of the appeal! The struggle, many of us feel, is preferable to boring routine.
So what is it that actually gets in the way, if not the hazards of the wild? Why do lots of people long for adventure and enjoy reading about it but not many actually get out there and do it?
I didn’t think that it could be explained by a lack of practical skills, fitness or equipment. It’s not as concrete as that. I guessed that what inhibits most people are the mental barriers in their head: it’s too hard, too scary, too uncertain…
Through my blog, I decided to ask what it was that stood between people and the adventures they dreamed of. From around 2,000 responses, here are the most common issues:
— Time
— Money
— Family / partners / commitments
— Fear
— Society pressure
— No companion to go with
— Getting time off work
— Getting work afterwards
And these were mentioned, too:
— Solo female travel / safety
— Lazy / procrastination
— School holiday system
— Lack of knowledge
— Ideas
— The unknown
— Kit / logistics
— Lonely
— Fitness / health
I found it fascinating that not one person mentioned the worry of falling down a crevasse or getting eaten by a tiger. The greatest obstacles to people’s adventures all lie before the journey even begins. In other words, getting to the start line is the hardest part!
Wrestling snakes, paddling rapids, tying a bowline with your teeth, pitching a tent in a typhoon: all this stuff is so much easier than getting off the sofa, committing to action and beginning.
© Alastair Humphreys
A similar example sometimes happens out on an expedition: leaving the tent when a blizzard is howling outside and your sleeping bag is snug can feel nigh on impossible. But when you do get out (it’s usually a weak bladder rather than a strong will that eventually forces you into action), the world is never as grim as you’d imagined it to be from the safe cocoon of your sleeping bag. The raging blizzard you’d pictured is often just a bit of windy snow. Feeling sheepish, you pack away the tent and get on with the journey.
What’s more, the practical preparations for launching a journey are also far easier than mustering the cojones to commit in the first place, to do something difficult and daunting and daring with your life.
There is a lovely Norwegian phrase that translates into ‘the Doorstep Mile’. It refers to how hard it is to begin something, how hard it is to get out your front door and commit to action. This book helps tackle the Doorstep Mile.
‘Do you dream of having a massive adventure but can’t see how you will ever get the chance to do it? If so, this book is for you!’
The first half of the book tackles the barriers that make it hard to begin. The second half helps you choose which adventure is right for you.
Do you dream of having a massive adventure but can’t see how you will ever get the chance to do it? Do you long to explore but don’t know how to begin? Do you look enviously at other people’s trips but think it’s not what ‘people like you’ do? If so, this book is for you!
My aim is to help you commit to begin planning your dream adventure, to get you in motion. That’s all. After that, the rest is easy – and up to you.
© Leon McCarron
© Alastair Humphreys
This book helps you shine a spotlight on what is getting in the way of the most amazing, life-changing, career-enhancing, personality-forging, memory-making adventure of your life. If you really, truly want to experience a big adventure, you can do it. You can do it. You can. Grand Adventures looks at the obstacles stopping you and shows that there are ways round them, if you choose to do it. Will you?
I spent an absorbing year interviewing many adventurers for this book, seeking hard-won wisdom from people who have been there and done the kind of trips we all dream of. I’m only sorry there was not space to include them all. (The in-depth interviews are all available to read on www.alastairhumphreys.com/GrandAdventures (http://www.alastairhumphreys.com/GrandAdventures).) They’ve done it all: Everest, the North and South Poles, the Amazon and Sahara, all seven continents, the oceans – even going up to Space! All of them once took that huge step of committing to their very first adventure. I hope that you will take inspiration from them because they were once just like you: itching to hit the road but nervous about how to make it happen.
There are stories and photographs from men and women who have travelled by boat and boot, car and kayak, bike and motorbike, home-made raft and hi-tech spaceship. People who had one great trip then returned to normal life. Those bitten so badly by the bug that they devoted their life to the pursuit of adventure. There’s youngsters and old folks; men and women; mates, couples and families; fit, fat or disabled. Extraordinary, inspiring people. People like you.
The only thing that stands between you dreaming of adventure and you being an adventurer is committing to it. Together, we’ll show you that, whether it’s cycling to the Sahara, walking across Australia or rafting the Amazon, the longest journeys really do all begin with a single step. They are, in fact, nothing more than lots of tiny, easy steps. Tiny, yes; easy, yes, but you’ve still gotta take ’em.
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Most people cite money as one of their big worries in life. It’s certainly seen as the largest obstacle to adventure. When people say to me ‘I’d love to do a big adventure, but…’ it is usually money that appears to be stopping them.
People who daydream about winning the lottery often say, ‘I’d go and see the world. I’d have an adventure!’ But you won’t win the lottery. That’s not the way the world, or probability, works, alas! (Especially if you’re not wasting your money on lottery tickets in the first place and instead are saving for an adventure.)
Will you just accept that because you won’t win the lottery you won’t have that dream adventure? Or maybe you’ll settle for doing something when you retire? (Gambling on the hope that you are not dead or decrepit by then…)
Before you do, there are two vital things to realise about money and adventures:
Adventures can be much cheaper than you might imagine. Not only that, it’s relatively painless to save enough money without having to rely on a lottery ticket.
If I can demonstrate that the biggest hurdle is easy to get over, hopefully it will convince you that any other obstacles in your way can be fixed, too.
When it first dawned on me, this simple little sum stopped me in my tracks – for its simplicity, and for its implications.
If you put aside £20 a week, within a year you will have saved £1,000. One thousand pounds. In all its glory, a thousand quid…
