Alastair Humphreys » Travel

The World According to… Me!

Al Humphreys — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 10:32:06 +0000

A quick series of questions to work out what sort of traveller I am.

Why not pop your own answers to a couple of the questions in the comments below? Or let me know what you think of mine…

Mountain/ocean/jungle/desert – which are you?

Hmm…I’ve been mulling this question for five minutes now which suggests I’m going to find this questionnaire tricky! Ocean wins in a photo finish.

What was your first great travel experience?

Arriving in Africa for the first time, aged 18, and driving north from Johannesburg into a land of red earth and massive skies. Still makes me smile.

Favourite journey?

Walking the length of the Kaveri River in India.

Top five places worldwide?

Arctic Ocean, San Blas Islands, Sierra Leone, Patagonia, Karakorams.

Name a special place to stay.

A log cabin in the woods in Hana, Kauai, Hawaii.

What three items do you always pack?

Reading book, silk sleeping bag, headtorch.

Which passport stamp are you proudest of?

Turkmenistan

Which passport stamp would you most like to have?

Afghanistan

What is your guilty travel pleasure?

English Pubs showing football.

Which do you prefer: window or aisle?

Window

Who is your ideal travelling companion?

Laurie Lee

Best meal on the road? And your worst?

I probably shouldn’t say barbecued whale in Iceland so I’ll go for a Lebanese iftar.

Worst – a week living on pasta and sugar after a provisioning miscalculation in the Atacama desert.

Most surprising place? And your most disappointing?

Japan – I had no interest in the country until I arrived. I loved it. Ditto Dubai.

I don’t think I’ve ever been disappointed by a country.

Where do you NOT want to go?

I can honestly say I would like to visit everywhere, if only once.

Who/what inspired you to travel?

Reading great books and wondering whether I would be capable of a great journey myself.

Any travel heroes?

So many! Scott, Fiennes et al from the expedition world. Laurie Lee, Paddy Fermor et al from the travel world.

What do you listen to on the road?

Nothing usually – silence reminds me to appreciate music when I get home again.

Does any song take you back to a particular place?

Despite my last answer SO many songs take me back. Mariposa Tracionera reminds me of happy times in Ushuaia and Patagonia.

What do you read when you travel?

Something that is nothing to do with the place I am in.

Is there a person you met while travelling who reaffirmed your faith in humanity?

SO many – this is probably the best aspect of travelling by bicycle. It brings out the best in people.

What’s the most impressive/useful phrase you know in a foreign language?

That is ‘Поехали!”, which means ‘Let’s go!’ in Russian.

What is your worst habit as a traveller?

Wishing I was back home again.

Snowbound in a tent in Antarctica, how would you entertain your companions?

A cup of tea and a game of Mallet’s Mallet.

When are where in your travels have you been happiest?

Packrafting across Iceland last summer.

What smell most says ‘travel’ to you?

That wonderful reek of sewage, smoke from cooking fires, body odour and tropical earth – that takes me back to so many wonderful places.

Given a choice, what era would you travel in?

100 years ago this year, with Captain Scott to the Pole. With the benefit of hindsight I’d give him the few tiny bits of advice that would make all the difference…

If you could combine three cities to make your perfect metropolis, which would they be?

The scenery of Cape Town (or Rio) mixed with the friendliness of Jaipur and the sense that anything’s possible of San Francisco.

This piece originally appeared in Wanderlust.

The Ten Best Places I Have Never Been To

Al Humphreys — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 09:48:37 +0000

List blogs are generally an excuse for the author to show off about something or other. Today though I am writing more of a wish list or a To Do list: the places that I have not been to but which I really, really want to get to one day. We all have those exotic places we yearn for, our own personal Timbuktus. Here are mine.

The Australian Outback – inspired by John Muir’s epic walk there and tantalising routes such as the Canning Stock Route, I am desperate for that red earth and vast skies.
The Empty Quarter - another desert choice, but a very different desert. Spanning Yemen, Oman and Saudi Arabia, this is Thesiger’s desert. A harsh, beautiful proving ground.
Antarctica – the only continent I have not visited. Pristine (except for the massive American base and gift shop at the South Pole). Increasing numbers of cruise ships and adventure tourists, plus now being able to look at Antarctica on Google Street View mean that I need to get there (and away from the crowded spots there) before my dream landscape fades to disillusionment in my mind.
Mali, and West Africa in general. I have spent a couple of years in Africa but virtually none of that has been in West Africa which is so different to the rest of the continent.
Iran. I spent 6 weeks once trying to persuade Iranian border officials to let me in. They declined. So this gracious, beautiful country with such a critical geopolitical role to play in the next few years remains on my wish list.
Afghanistan. Years ago I set off on a journey to Afghanistan. Before I reached the border 9/11 happened and the world changed. One day, one day…
Norway. I love mountains, rivers, and fjords. But I’ve never been to Norway. This must change! It’s only a couple of hours away.
Easter Island. But only if I could arrive there by sailing boat. Flying to Easter Island seems to totally remove its aura of extraordinary isolation. The folly of man and thousands of miles of empty ocean all around.
The wide-open, empty parts of America. Kerouac and Steinbeck. Monument Valley dawns and deserted late-night roadside diners, stewed coffee and faded waitresses with life stories to tell.
oh, I’d quite like to go to Timbuktu as well.

What would be on your list?

This post originally appeared on the Wanderlust blog.

Photo Friday essay: A Canine Ride Through Romania

Al Humphreys — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 08:59:36 +0000

Once upon a time, my husband and I (writes Tara) cycled through Romania.

Along the way, we fell in love with the remoteness of its mountains…

…and the generosity of the kind folk who lived in its small villages.

Perhaps most of all, we adored the stray dogs that roamed the streets in droves.

Many cycle tourists are wary of dogs, but we, perhaps imprudently, couldn’t help but develop a fondness for them. They rarely chased or barked for long; instead, they would sidle up to us for some attention. We happily fed them our leftovers and rubbed their bellies on many occasions.

One day, after a long ride, we stopped by the roadside in search of a place to sleep, just as we had every other night. What happened next was unlike any other evening we spent camped in the woods. Just as we were setting up, two pint-sized border collie pups pranced out of the woods and into our camp, as if out of thin air.

Much to our delight, they quickly made themselves at home with us.

“Where did you come from? Where is your mama!?” we asked them, as we petted their soft, fluffy fur. Even as the words escaped our lips, we knew full well the most likely answers. Their mother might be dead along the roadside, one of the many canine corpses we passed. Or perhaps she was chained up to a barn, barking her brains out, with just three feet of tether in which to live.

Life isn’t easy for a Romanian dog.

As night fell, a bitter cold descended on the Romanian countryside, and we knew we had to do something, or the pups would likely be frozen by morning. So, we brought them into our tent, where they slept like babies, breathing softly between us.

By the time the sun rose the next day, we knew we couldn’t leave them. Though we weren’t equipped to be traveling with animals, we decided to take them with us anyhow. So, that morning, I cooked them mushy pasta while my husband emailed anyone he could think of that might connect us to some Romanian version of the Humane Society.

Without a plan, we fed them a starchy breakfast and packed them each in a backpack, which we wore facing frontwards.

…and then we set off, with precious cargo against our chests.

We wound our way up hills and mountains, stopping often so the doggies could run around and play. The tough climbs were followed by precarious and nerve-wracking descents. With one hand on a brake lever and the other trying to calm a squirmy, panicking pup, we sped down the slopes as semis blasted by us on the shoulder of the road.

In each of the villages we passed, we stopped, looking for a friendly person to adopt them. Every time we were turned away, we felt more desperate, hopeless, and utterly unequipped to care for these two small lives.

And then our phone rang. It was a lady from the Daisy Hope Foundation. She put us in touch with the AULIM, who would send a veterinarian to meet us at the nearest city!

It was a small miracle when the four of us rolled into town, exhausted and sweaty, but safe and sound. We cheered to celebrate our success, and then we waited anxiously for rescue to arrive. Not long after, a blue van showed up—it was the good doctor, and it was time to say goodbye to our little puppies.

With final hugs, we bid them farewell, tearfully happy in the knowledge that they’d be well cared for, but very sad to be letting them go.

Our little border collies were loaded into a dog carrier…

…and driven away, to be vaccinated, neutered, and adopted by a loving family.

It’s been over a year since those pups waltzed in and out of our lives, and the experience remains one of the most memorable of our two year adventure across Europe and Asia. Though we’ve tried numerous times to find out how they are doing, we have yet to hear word.

I like to imagine that the pair are happy and healthy, and that somewhere in the deep recesses of their canine minds, there exists an inexplicable, dream-like memory of the wind in their faces, and of the reassuring hands of two cyclists who loved them.

11 Travel Books for Bums

Al Humphreys — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 09:14:42 +0000

Here’s a book list for all the bums out there. For the vagabonds and hoboes. For the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles – exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

These are the travel books I read and re-read. I fold down corners and scribble notes. They remind me that, above everything else, the things that make me happiest in life are big skies, sunsets, sleeping on beaches, the potential of the open road, and the random exciting strangers you meet along that road.

Travels With Charley – John Steinbeck

Steinbeck travels round America with his dog, Charley.
“When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult.”

Also in this book is a paragraph I often think I’d like to have on my gravestone:
“For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.”

Walden, or Life in the Woods – Henry David Thoreau

Over-read, over-worshipped and quite boring in parts. But the essence of it resonates loudly: a simple life, in tune with nature and with few possessions, is often a happy and rewarding one. “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life…” and “The prospect of what is euphemistically termed “settling down”, like mud to the bottom of a pond, might perhaps be faced when it became inevitable, but not yet awhile.”
I also like his assertion that “What old people say you cannot do – try – and find that you can.” [A good extra piece about Thoreau here.]

Roughing It – Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn should feature in any list like this, but it’s so obvious that instead I’ve picked this lesser-known gem from Twain. You can read the book online here.

“It is a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science.”

On the Road – Jack Kerouac

I first read this book in San Francisco where I was bewitched by a hippy girl with long dreadlocks and shining eyes. I also had to pause a few weeks to watch a crunch football match on TV. It ended badly (the football match): Leeds were relegated. But hey, “I felt like a million dollars; I was adventuring in the crazy American night”. And I had discovered an author who, although mad and quite annoying at times, really managed to capture the zinging love for life of all good wandering souls, the mad ones I plagiarised in the opening paragraph. “What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” And what more do we yearn for but “a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road”?

Dharma Bums – Jack Kerouac

Kerouac gets two mentions in this piece as I conceived the idea for it whilst reading Dharma Bums in a drab business-hotel on an overnight stay to give a lecture. The grim irony was not lost on me. Kerouac’s fictional hero heads into the wild for a simple life and to find himself. I’m not struck on the religiose Buddhist side to the book but I love the young man heading up Matterhorn mountain, discovering the thrill of sleeping on mountains, drinking from ice cold creeks and turning his back on “middle class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness”.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning – Laurie Lee

I don’t know how often I have eulogised this book. I do know that it’s my favourite piece of travel writing. Young man + violin, busking and walking his way across Spain. Cheap wine, dark-eyed girls, and sleeping under the stars. The life of a happy vagabond. “it was for this I had come: to look out on a world for which I had no words; to start at the beginning, speechless and without plan, in a place that still held no memories for me.”

A Time of Gifts – Patrick Leigh Fermor

Travelling on foot, sleeping in hayricks and castles “like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar”, Paddy Fermor’s walk across Europe inspired me to try to combine wandering with also using my brain and retaining my curiosity. He was expelled from school and I have long-loved a phrase from his school report that makes for a wonderful epitaph to work towards: “he is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness”.

The Happiest Man in the World – Poppa Neutrino

So bonkers was Poppa’s life that I felt sure I was reading a work of fiction until I checked him out on Google. Anyone who sails the Atlantic Ocean on a raft made of junk and also manages an obituary in the New York Times is clearly a fascinating person. From that piece: “A lifelong wanderer, he developed a philosophy that emphasized freedom, joy, creativity and antimaterialism, a creed expressed in the rafts he built from discarded materials.”

The Gentle Art of Tramping – Stephen Graham

The post I wrote about this book on my own blog clearly struck a chord – it was my most viewed post of the year. Dating back to 1927 it is a fabulous How-To guide to becoming a wanderer, a vagrant, a hobo.A brilliant addition to any vagabond’s library. A couple of snippets for you:

The less you carry the more you will see, the less you spend the more you will experience.
In tramping you are not earning a living, but earning a happiness.

Hopping Freight Trains in America – Duffy Littlejohn

I’ve always dreamed of hopping onto a freight train in America, rumbling thousands of miles from coast to coast, reading Kerouac and Huck Finn, hiding from cartoonish guards and learning the ropes from vagabonds.
This is a how-to book for dreamers. I don’t suppose now I actually will hop a train: the post-9/11 world makes it even harder than ever. So I suppose I’ll have to live with this stinging rebuke, “Sure, you can pay Amtrak to haul you across the country with a bunch of blue-haired old ladies. Or you can grow some balls and hop a train.”

The Way of the World – Nicolas Bouvier

The tale of two young Swiss men who take to the road, driving east to Afghanistan in the 1950s. They fund their search for new experiences by writing articles and painting. A beautifully written book. “Traveling outgrows it motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you.” “We denied ourselves every luxury except one, that of being slow.”
The book’s epigraph is an apt conclusion for this entire list of books,
“I shall be gone and live, or stay and die.”

What have I missed out? Please recommend and other great books in the comments below…

This post originally appeared on the howies blog

A far more Glorious Feeling than for a God to feel Godlike

Al Humphreys — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 09:47:25 +0000

I could write one hundred blog posts and give one hundred lectures. And I would not be able to sum up everything that this website is about better than Jack London does here as he prepares to set sail in his home-built boat, the Snark. Wonderful writing and wise words indeed. I urge you to spend five minutes reading this through twice. Thanks to Ben Saunders for showing it to me.

I took the wheel. The sailing-master watched me for a space. He was afraid of my youth, feared that I lacked the strength and the nerve. But when he saw me successfully wrestle the schooner through several bouts, he went below to breakfast. Fore and aft, all hands were below at breakfast. Had she broached to, not one of them would ever have reached the deck. For forty minutes I stood there alone at the wheel, in my grasp the wildly careering schooner and the lives of twenty-two men. At the end of the hour, sweating and played out, I was relieved. But I had done it! With my own hands I had done my trick at the wheel and guided a hundred tons of wood and iron through a few million tons of wind and waves.

My delight was in that I had done it -not in the fact that twenty-two men knew I had done it. Within the year over half of them were dead and gone, yet my pride in the thing performed was not diminished by half. This delight is peculiarly my own and does not depend upon witnesses. When I have done some such thing, I am exalted. I glow all over. I am aware of a pride in myself that is mine, and mine alone. It is success.

Life that lives is life successful, and success is the breath of its nostrils. The achievement of a difficult feat is successful adjustment to a sternly exacting environment. The more difficult the feat, the greater the satisfaction at its accomplishment. Thus it is with the man who leaps forward from the springboard, out over the swimming pool, and with a backward half-revolution of the body, enters the water head first. Once he leaves the springboard his environment becomes immediately savage, and savage the penalty it will exact should he fail and strike the water flat. Of course, the man does not have to run the risk of the penalty. He could remain on the bank in a sweet and placid environment of summer air, sunshine, and stability. Only he is not made that way. In that swift mid-air moment he lives as he could never live on the bank.

As for myself, I’d rather be that man than the fellows who sit on the bank and watch him. The trip around the world means big moments of living. Bear with me a moment and look at it. Here am I, a little animal called a man- a bit of vitalized matter, one hundred and sixty-five pounds of meat and blood, nerve, sinew, bones, and brain,-all of it soft and tender, susceptible to hurt, fallible, and frail. I strike a light back-handed blow on the nose of an obstreperous horse, and a bone in my hand is broken. I put my head under the water for five minutes, and I am drowned. I fall twenty feet through the air, and I am smashed. I am a creature of temperature. A few degrees one way, and my fingers and ears and toes blacken and drop off. A few degrees the other way, and my skin blisters and shrivels away from the raw, quivering flesh. A few additional degrees either way, and the life and the light in me go out. A drop of poison injected into my body from a snake, and I cease to move- for ever I cease to move. A splinter of lead from a rifle enters my head, and I am wrapped around in the eternal blackness.

Fallible and frail, a bit of pulsating, jelly-like life- it is all I am. About me are the great natural forces -colossal menaces, Titans of destruction, unsentimental monsters that have less concern for me than I have for the grain of sand I crush under my foot. They have no concern at all for me. They do not know me. They are unconscious, unmerciful, and unmoral. They are the cyclones and tornadoes, lightning flashes and cloud-bursts, tide-rips and tidal waves, undertows and waterspouts, great whirls and sucks and eddies, earthquakes and volcanoes, surfs that thunder on rock-ribbed coasts and seas that leap aboard the largest crafts that float, crushing humans to pulp or licking them off into the sea and to death- and these insensate monsters do not know that tiny sensitive creature, all nerves and weaknesses, whom men call Jack London, and who himself thinks he is all right and quite a superior being.

In the maze and chaos of the conflict of these vast and draughty Titans, it is for me to thread my precarious way. The bit of life that is I will exult over them. The bit of life that is I, in so far as it succeeds in baffling them or in bitting them to its service, will imagine that it is godlike. It is good to ride the tempest and feel godlike. I dare to assert that for a finite speck of pulsating jelly to feel godlike is a far more glorious feeling than for a god to feel godlike.