Ripcord Adventure Journal #6

RAJ 2.2

Volume 2 | Number 2 | 2016

Image Š Audun Amundsen Shaman, Sarawak

A Letter from the Editor Welcome to Ripcord Adventure Journal.

Our sixth issue of Ripcord Adventure Journal is a very different beast to its five earlier siblings, whose articles and images were, in the main, submitted by adventurous travel writers and photographers; in this issue however, we have brought together 11 accomplished explorers and adventurers who write about their unique experience of life, lived to the maximum and danced to a different beat.

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In our Guest Editorial the unsinkable Alex Bellini talks about the life changing experience of rowing an ocean, followed by an account of the first Summit climb of Indian twins, Tashi and Nungshi Malik, who have beaten all the odds from the moment they were born, to achieve great successes in their chosen field of mountaineering.

We learn from Charles Foster why it is that travel writers should be badgers, a feat he endeavoured to realise in his recent investigations into life as a beast! In Utopian Fruits, norwegian explorer and filmmaker Audun Amundsen explores the mindset of cultural exploration, challenging "western" perceptions of indigenous cultures in a thought provoking and poignant article on his expeditions to Sarawak.

Kev Sidford introduces young people to the art of planning and taking part in expeditions around the world. In Iceland, the Exploration Museum founder, Orlygur Orlygsson introduces us to the historic research carried out by NASA in Iceland to enable the successful Apollo moon landings. John Moretti briefs us on what it is like to run 250km across the Namib as part of the 4 Deserts endurance race series, a feat achieved by firefighter and marathon runner, Andrea Waters.

Adventure and security expert Lloyd Figgins takes us on a rollercoaster ride of emotions as he explains what it takes to survive in hostile situations in Yemen and Syria. The origins of the IndoEuropean homeland is investigated by Sturla Ellingvag in Kazakhstan, finds that more than half of the Northern European

population can trace their paternal line back to Central Asia.

In our regular Ripcord Encounters series by Tor Torkildson we meet the legend that is Pat Morrow, who recounts his meeting with a Tibetan yogi during one of his journeys to Ladakh. We complete this issue with a painfully honest article by ice swimmer, Nuala Moore who describes the highs and lows, the trials, tribulations and eventual success of the only team in history to circumnavigate the island of Ireland by swimming.

We aim to be the home of authentic, adventurous travel, which serves as a starting point for personal reflection, study and new journeys. We hope you enjoy reading this Journal and encourage you to share it it widely.

On behalf of the editorial, writing and design team I wish to acknowledge our sponsors, the World Explorers Bureau and Redpoint Resolutions (particularly Thomas Bochnowski, Ted Muhlner and Martha Marin) and offer a special thanks to Charlotte Baker-Weinert, without whose generous spirit, this publication would never happened.

Tim Lavery Editor in Chief, Ripcord Adventure Journal Ripcord Adventure Journal Copyright © November 2016 by World Explorers Bureau & Redpoint Resolutions. All articles and images Copyright © 2016 of the respective Authors and photographers.

Cover image © Audun Amundsen.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, general enquiries or sponsorship opportunities, contact the publisher: Ripcord Adventure Journal: info@ripcordadventurejournal.com

"We are all adventurers here, I suppose, and wild doings in wild countries appeal to us as nothing else could do. It is good to know that there remain wild corners of this dreadfully civilised world."

R.F. Scott Scott's Last Expedition - The Personal Journals Of Captain R. F. Scott, C.V.O., R.N., On His Journey To The South Pole

RIPCORD ADVENTURE JOURNAL 2.2

Editor Tim Lavery

Featuring

Alex Bellini Tashi Malik Nungshi Malik Charles Foster Audun Amundsen Örlygur Örlygsson Kev Sidford John Moretti Lloyd Figgins Sturla Ellingvag Tor Torkildson Nuala Moore

Advisory Board

Shane Dallas Paul Devaney Sophie Ibbotson Terry Sharrer Jimmy McSparron James Borrell Bill Steele Charlotte Baker Weinert

Publishers World Explorers Bureau & Redpoint Resolutions

WWW.RIPCORDADVENTUREJOURNAL.COM

Contents Guest Editorial: An Ocean Deep Alex Bellini

1

Birth of a Dream Tashi & Nungshi Malik

9

Why Travel Writers Should Be Badgers Dr Charles Foster

23

Utopian Fruits Audun Amundsen

27

The Next Giant Leap Örlygur Hnefill Örlygsson

45

Around the World with 80 Kids Kev Sidford

49

Racing the Namib John Moretti

59

Sparring with Terrorists Lloyd Figgins

63

In Search of the Indo-European Homeland Sturla Ellingvåg

81

Ripcord Encounters Pat Morrow Tor Torkildson

89

The Great Ireland Swim Nuala Moore

93

Contributors and credits

105

Image opposite © Audun Amundsen

1

An Ocean Deep 2

Alex Bellini Images © Alex Bellini

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Guest Editorial: An Ocean Deep Alex Bellini

The aim of life is surely to find meaning in our existence. I’m sure we can all agree with that…

The most meaningful day of my life? It was certainly the 13th of December 2008 - the day my journey across the Pacific Ocean came to an end.

I had left Peru 294 days earlier, on the 21st of February 2008, in a 21-foot fiberglass rowing boat, heading for Australia. I was 29 and two years earlier I had rowed the Atlantic Ocean.

My journey across the Pacific have been mostly smooth, with good weather and high morale, but that day in December I realised the true adventure was just beginning.

In order to fully understand how much that day meant to me, let me go back a few months earlier to the 7th of September. In my logbook for that day, I noted a very strong northwest drift that had stopped me making headway south, despite great efforts. From then on, conditions drastically worsened, the ocean current started to go in unpredictable directions, south then east, and my daily average went from thirty miles down to a paltry ten miles.

The harder I rowed, the more the sea treated me with cruelty. Every mile that I gained by day was lost at night. What made me even crazier was that as soon as I stopped rowing, to eat or to take a short rest, the current was so strong that it turned my boat’s prow eastward and dragged me away as though I was on an escalator.

I had to fight against both the powerful, invisible force sliding under my keel and the frustration and bitterness of seeing hour upon hour of effort reduced to minimal progress. I often found myself spitting at the sea, as though I wanted to hit it straight in the ‘face’. I was driven by a long-repressed rage and had even reached the point of hurling my own excrement into the water as a sign of my disrespect.

I tried to provoke the ocean, showing it every part of my body, insulting it and cursing against it.

Why? Why was it doing this to me? What had I done to deserve this treatment? It was a meeting of hostile nature and human craziness. I

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Guest Editorial: An Ocean Deep Alex Bellini

had a feeling of omnipotence. I did not want to throw in the towel. I would not get off the boat as long as I could row, but as the days went by, I was discovering that my biggest challenge was less about surviving the perils of the sea and more about surviving myself.

It was about surviving the furious side of my make-up, which wanted to overcome every limit at any cost, and the alternate ego, which realised there are some limits which should be left untouched.

In the evening I would fall asleep with my fists gripped tight from the muscle tension accumulated within my body. Now I couldn’t even find peace when I was sleeping.

I lived the following days and weeks lost in a strange state as silence enveloped my tiny world. There was no emptiness, but there was distance and reunion all at once - the start and the end of everything. I looked at my solitary shadow stretched across two waves. I wished I could take it up from the water and hug it, tell it to keep strong, assure my shadow that everything would be over soon. During this time I capsized twice. Both times the fear of drowning was so great that I believed I would never see home again.

At times, habit made me underestimate risk. At sea, this attitude adds an additional risk of its own.

One day I was rowing on ‘autopilot’ - living in a distracted present when a wave formed out of nothing and struck the side of my boat.

I will remember as long as I live the powerful rushing of air that preceded impact, the confusion of the moment and the image of the huge wall of water about to envelope me. The sea was so violent that I instantly found myself thrown out of my boat and into the Pacific’s tumultuous waters. I had done everything I could to resist, clinging to the upwind side of my boat, but to no avail.

When I came back up to the surface, I was floating on top of my boat which was still upside down, tossed around in the waves. I turned towards the hatch and through the window I could see all my equipment jumbled together on the roof of the deck house.

What a horrible sight it made. If I had needed to call for help I could not have done so without making the boat sink. The waves and wind were making my entire craft shake, yet underneath it, the

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Guest Editorial: An Ocean Deep Alex Bellini

water was warm. It was as quiet as a tomb down there and, strangely, I felt sheltered from all the dangers. I was certain I would survive.

I expected my boat to turn right-side up at any moment but many minutes passed with no change. Then I made the crucial decision to use my body as a counterweight to right the boat. It reacted immediately and soon I was back on board. The silence. I remember the silence and a sense of total powerlessness. With my small tin pan I started to bale out the water as quickly as I could but it took me about three hours before I got the cabin into shape. There was water everywhere, inside every locker. I felt like crying. I was exhausted and did not feel I could fight anymore. I just wanted to finally give in to the force of nature, the power of the water, without resisting any longer. The stubborn obstinacy with which I’d opposed the sea until then was giving way to humble resignation.

Yet still, every morning, something pushed me to get on that damn rowing seat. The more blows I took, the stronger I seemed to get. It was enlightening to feel this stoic calm in adversity. For the entire crossing I had maintained faith in being able to reach Australia by late November. But as the deadline grew nearer, I was less certain of making it by then. I still had several hundred miles to go but for a long time I had not been covering more than fifteen miles a day.

Now, although every oar stroke was not matched by a great deal of progress, I was somehow feeling that each one was bringing me towards a new goal - a more distant goal that had nothing to do with Australia.

I recognised and started accepting that the force of life often carries us in unexpected directions. In the end, that is the pure meaning of adventure.

At the beginning of December, things started to get really weird. As I said, until this point I had been operating largely on autopilot.

Now I rose above this to a state of hyper-sensitivity and was able to assess situations very quickly and very frankly. I could not identify the source of my feeling, but my senses were definitely telling me the sea which had fed me, slaked my thirst, kept me company and

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Guest Editorial: An Ocean Deep Alex Bellini

embraced me in its immense spaces was no longer my friend. On December 12, my wife sent me a weather report via satellite phone.

It was an emergency bulletin sent to all the harbour masters of New South Wales, alerting them to a very rough sea with easterly winds of over forty knots.

And that was not all. Soon the wind would turn from the east and push me at least one hundred miles back out to sea. It sounded dramatic. At that moment, however, the situation was very different, there wasn't a lick of breeze so I decided to take advantage and row as fast as I could towards Australia.

I spent all of that night at my oars. The seascape was infused with a strange, supernatural calm. The moon was reflecting off the surface of the ocean and I could see the long wake left by my boat, splitting the water like a blade. I was playing all of my final cards together but when the sun rose, I realised I had not made the progress I’d hoped for. I knew that I would not have enough time to reach land before the wind turned. I had to do about seventy miles in thirty hours but the current was dragging me off route.

There are moments in a person’s life when our existence is no longer our own. There are moments when our very ambition, the desire to go further, forces our hand. But if there was ever a moment when I felt truly at the helm of my life and in total control of all the forces that drive me, it was when - only sixty miles from land - I decided to STOP. Stop and switch on the SOS signal.

Executing my exit plan could not have been simpler. All I had to do was flick the switch on my emergency position-indicating radio beacon (EPIRB).

For most of my journey I had kept this vital yellow box in my cabin, next to my bunk and at arm’s length from where I slept. I guess this was for safety but I soon realised the position was too tempting, especially when things got tough. Many times I laid in my bed, tired and frightened and looking at that damn yellow box. I could hear my internal voice saying ‘Press it and all this shit will be over! Don’t worry, it will be easy and there is no-one here to see you.

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Guest Editorial: An Ocean Deep Alex Bellini

Just do it!’ Then a dialogue would start in my head ‘Don’t do it. Just get rid of it!’

The box offered a safety net that I was glad to have, but it was also a temptation. In fact, that temptation had become so strong that I had decided to move the EPIRB to the front cabin, placing it behind bags of trash and equipment. Now, if I wanted to reach it I would have to make a definite decision and effort to do so. I felt suddenly safer. However, I may have solved the problem of temptation but, of course, I had added an even greater problem. If disaster struck now, I certainly could not reach the emergency switch quickly.

So, on the 13th of December 2008, I purposely moved into the front cabin, grabbed the EPIRB, took a deep breath and flicked the switch.

Two hectic hours followed and at one o’clock in the afternoon, in a sea about to swell, I glimpsed a small boat nearing me. It was Katea, the New Zealand tow boat that was making its way from New Caledonia to the town of Newcastle, one hundred miles north of Sydney. Katea had received my message and would be able to take me to land in about eight hours.

I stepped on board. It was devastating, as if someone had suddenly taken away all my certainties and everything I had. But, at the same time, it was also a relief - as if a heavy load had been lifted from my back. My journey had come to an end, but the true adventure had only just begun.

After chasing land for almost three hundred days I was tired, overwhelmed, hungry and bent by fatigue. But I had enough strength left in my mind and my body to reach Australia and go beyond. If my life had not been at stake I would have dared to go on and maybe, just maybe, I would have reached land in my rowing boat.

Destiny often prevails over our dreams and unexpected events can block the road at the last minute. But they say what stands in the way becomes the way. What impeded my actions in some way

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Guest Editorial: An Ocean Deep Alex Bellini

advanced them. In fact, what had begun as an adventure aiming to reach a physical point on a map had turned into a more personal adventure towards a profound understanding of myself and the acceptance of limits that must be left untouched.

At that moment, we need to have the humility to recognise our powerlessness. Maybe, after time has passed, we might even realise that not reaching our target was a great stroke of luck.

Do I have regrets?

Well, it may surprise you to know that I consider my Pacific Ocean voyage to be the perfect adventure. I reached out into the unknown and survived!

I survived my own dream, my ambitions and my stupidity. It was stupidity that sometimes made me commit mistakes out on the ocean. Even though I did not overcome all the challenges in the way I had intended, I emerged better and stronger and by the time my feet were finally back on solid ground, I was able to state without question, that this was the most meaningful moment and certainly the finest success of my life.

9

Birth of a Dream 10

Tashi & Nungshi Malik Images © Tashi & Nungshi Malik

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Birth of a Dream Tashi & Nungshi Malik

Our first summit and the birth of a dream We climbed our first summit just 6 years ago in 2010. A favorite with all trainees of the advanced course at a mountaineering institute in India, Mt Rudugaira is no extraordinary mountain, its height of some 19,500 ft. is scaled by hundreds of participants on the course every year. However, for some, particularly for girls, this inconspicuous mountain has served as a springboard for world record achievements. For, it is in reaching Mt Rudugaira’s summit that many girls successfully crossed socio-cultural barriers that set them free. Free to dream and to achieve. Most have moving stories of courage and good fortune to have made it so far in the largely male dominated mountaineering community. That there is a huge backstory for each one goes without saying.

Growing up in India, there are unique family and peer-group pressures, most young people develop a passion for very specific pursuits. Most have good clarity on what career they want to pursue in life. Hobbies are less valued unless they contribute to academic grades! Despite this culture however, there are a few who have too many pursuits in their ‘wish list’ to make a single choice or are surprised by a totally new passion that they may discover by chance! These few are usually the result of being raised in a very liberal, free thinking and supportive family environment. Girls make a miniscule proportion of such free floating souls.

Girls’ invisible mountains

This is the story of two of those in the last category. This is our story, which is set in a socio-cultural context the effect of which is often invisible but always most potent. Appreciating context is key to understanding why achievements such as ours are nothing less than historic on more than account. And explains why an enabling environment is vital for girls to climb their physical and psychological peaks. It is in this context that climbing a 9000 ft. mountain by girl from our Indian society may be a far bigger achievement than someone of same age from a ‘Developed’ nation scaling Mt Everest!

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Birth of a Dream Tashi & Nungshi Malik

For those who have an interest in India, it is still a country of snake charmers and elephants but increasingly also of interplanetary satellites, Nobel laureates, scientists, doctors and now a global IT powerhouse. This latter image has caught world’s imagination while masking the darker side of our growth. Not many, for instance, know that half a dozen states in India compare economically only with the poorest of sub-Saharan Africa; that the Indian state with the highest socio-economic index compares only with that of Philippines and that nearly 70 % of India is rural and which is still rooted in traditional values and gender stereotypes. No wonder India is known as a land of extremes.

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The long term effect of female feticide is that today India averages at 944 females per 1000 males and our native state Haryana had India’s worst ratio of 879 females per 1000 males just a few years ago. Seen as a burden by society in general and by the family in particular, many girls are denied basic rights to life and dignity. Overtime they internalize their inferior status. A person with low self-esteem can only dream small. Climbing mountains does not even figure remotely in such dreams. In such a context, we two have been superbly fortunate to be able to dream big and dream freely.

Raised to live with free spirit We inherited a socio-cultural background in which to have been born as twin girls was a disaster and to be raised with utmost love and care a miracle. Our father hails from one of the most conservative rural societies up north. His birth was preceded by 3 female siblings, many prayers and visits to holy shrines by his parents! As a beneficiary of such a skewed gender perception, dad grew up with the belief that daughters represented a burden ordained by providence but best avoided if science afforded such choice! Prenatal sex determination and female feticide was an easily available option. He did neither of those. Our first summit is therefore so much tied to dad’s exemplary courage to challenge gender stereotypes and traditional practices. Most girls in India aren’t quite so lucky.

Despite his roots and very challenging socio-economic

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Birth of a Dream Tashi & Nungshi Malik

circumstances though, dad is also uniquely talented and became the first ever army officer to come from his village. None of his classmates in the village went beyond high school! Dad married soon after, outside of his caste, again a very courageous first in his village. Less fortunate souls have lost lives in honor killings in his society. His next big dream was to have a son whom he would raise to be a ‘warrior’, a strong man who the whole family would be proud of.

Raised as a ‘God sent’ child and highly pampered, he always lived life on his own terms, had achieved all that he wished so far and having a son was to be the fulfilment of another, the biggest of his dreams. But life had other plans. Dad landed up with twins, and both girls! His dream world had shattered. He admits graciously now that at his relative young age of 25 years, believing himself to be God’s preferred child, it never occurred to him that he might have a daughter. He is always very intense in whatever he does, and poor fellow he had gone into every detail of planning for his ‘soon to arrive’ son. He had even decided on his name! He told us “that morning, soon after delivery the nurses brought you both out to show me and when I heard it were twin girls I was numb. I didn’t know if I was happy or sad, it just seemed surreal”. Dad had plans to have just one child, which was in itself a break away from the norm.

While having twins was still bearable as a unique and rare occurrence, but having them both girls, he admits that his world at that moment seemed shattered. His long held hopes and aspirations for a son melted away in seconds!

But that was that. Gradually he reconciled to our arrival. Fearing that the desire for a son and pressure from parents and his in-laws would invariably lead to more children, within a year of our birth dad quietly had a vasectomy without even consulting mom! He admits that he was still occasionally tormented by the realisation that he would not have a son. It is a huge credit to him, that despite his innumerable ‘inner struggles’ Dad never made us feel we weren’t the most precious treasure in his life. In fact, despite his strong cultural roots and the narrow confines of a military life, he had gone far ahead of his times. Most notably, he allowed us the fullest freedom to ‘be ourselves’ and our extraordinary spirit of

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Birth of a Dream Tashi & Nungshi Malik

experimenting and exploring we certainly owe to him.

Early exposure to adventure We are lucky to be twins. Very lucky to survive, be nurtured with utmost care and best still, to embark on a life of adventure and exploration from very early on. We can recall scores of instances of this but two deserve brief mention. When we were about 6 years old, dad had a small car with a carrier fixed to its top. Whenever we went out on picnics, he would invariably encourage us to climb up and sit on top of the carrier saying “You know what, the world appears beautiful from higher up”. Mom was furious “You’ll kill your daughters”, “Can’t you see they’re so tiny that they can’t hold on to the bars and the damn route is so rough?”, “You’re crazy and you will make me too!” She would shout at us too but we were so excited about the idea and together we would prevail on her…! No one in our society had ever witnessed such a sight: two six-year-old girls screaming with joy, riding on top of a car. In a sense this was the first major climb and first summit of our life!

When we were slightly older, Dad was posted to the capital city of India’s southernmost state of Kerala which sees heavy precipitation for most of the year. The city of Thiruvananthapuram is usually very crowded, and its hectic unplanned roads result in heavy traffic jams on most days. There was very little opportunity for the outdoors unless we went far out of the municipal limits.

The heavy rains were a good time when entire crowds and traffic would disappear. So dad’s standard drill for the rainy season was to take us out for a long drive on his scooter. And we were to sit facing rear wards! It was a huge feeling to be out in the open when everyone was hiding under shelter along the road. We felt like stars, so proud and unique. Dad’s logic was simple “in a crowded Indian city, it’s only under heavy rain that the roads get empty, so seize the opportunity!” Mom was again a most worried soul fearing we would fall sick and dad’s “craziness” will certainly kill us one day. It is well known that our childhood experiences largely shape our later lives.

Our childhood was extraordinary!

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Birth of a Dream Tashi & Nungshi Malik

Freedom to be Those growing up years shaped our own worldview which we now realize was so uncommon. We never had pressure to perform. Even as our mom was frequently worried about where ‘such philosophy’ would land us, dad wouldn’t even ask us the result of our academic exams! He would simply remark, “You are your best judge, you know best what you like most, you set your goals, you plan your work, and whatever you achieve, you only are the ones to decide if you are happy with that or not. If the answer is ‘yes’, it’s great. If not, only you can decide what to do about it. If you want to seek my opinion, most welcome but I will never say what’s best for you. That is your privilege!” Dad put us in driver’s seat at a very young age.

Needless to say, such a privileged existence only helped us become more responsible for ourselves and more self-aware

We excelled in all aspects of school life including sports, games, extra-curricular activities and academia, passing out first and third in the girls’ section during our school leaving exams. We were not affected by the biggest preoccupation of our peers at that stage: which college to get into and what line of career to pursue! Most parents were more stressed than their wards over how best to ‘settle them’ in life. It was only when we graduated from high school that, on the drive back afterwards, dad asked “So what’s next? What do you girls want to do?” implying our choice of career.

Unlike most young people of that age who are surprisingly clear and focused on what career they will prepare for, we had so far only focused on ‘living for the moment’, putting everything into what we liked doing. And the range of such activities was only growing! We looked at each other and after brief silence, trying to sound very thoughtful Tashi replied “Well, actually we want to do everything”.

Mom gave her usual sarcastic and disappointed looks at us and before she could interject, dad said softly with a smile “Wow, welcome on board! You know what, even I want to do everything.

That’s precisely why I quit my very promising military career. We are team! If this is what it is, why don’t you do as many things as you want to? Don’t worry, one day you will find one that you like the most, follow that seriously and a career will automatically

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Birth of a Dream Tashi & Nungshi Malik

emerge out of it”. Then a long argument ensued between mom and dad, one we were well used to by now. Mom always has the final word in all domestic matters, but in matters of our education and career she usually gives up saying “I have warned you all. Don’t accuse me later of complicity in your crazy ideas”. We got our way!

Almost everything in our life from then on followed a path less travelled. To save time, we enrolled into distance education for our under graduation, took up dance classes, did a special diploma in computer applications, completed a yearlong certificate in peacebuilding from the School of International Training at Vermont in USA (where we were the youngest students ever at 19 years of age while the median age of participants was over 30 years and we had obtained this Graduate Certificate from the US even before we completed our undergraduate degree in India!)

A big adventure awaits

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Wanting to fill every day of our lives with excitement and learning, dad became a perfect team member. He never said no to any idea, always focused on how it could be implemented. He actively looked out for unique opportunities that we might benefit from. During this process, he once realized that we have a national institute of mountaineering not far from our home town up in the Himalayas.

Dad is a great believer in self-awareness as key to holistic living and especially for leadership. Even without our knowledge or agreement he applied for us to attend their basic skills course. Luckily the principal of the institute was known to dad and we were immediately selected even as the deadline for applications had already passed. It was after receiving their confirmation that he informed us of the application!

We were always excited about adventure and outdoors, but had never really heard the word ‘mountaineering’ and certainly were never excited by people climbing big mountains. Tashi, who is particularly blunt when dealing with our parents nearly shouted out “What dad? You should at least have asked us first? I am not going!”. Knowing her almost predictable reaction, dad found another time to have conversation with us. His logic was simple “I

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Birth of a Dream Tashi & Nungshi Malik

am not sending you to become climbers. This is just a basic introductory course that will expose you to some physical challenges and risky situations. It’s in confronting them that you will know certain areas of your own self that perhaps you won’t experience in the comforts of daily life. You should go with purely an education perspective”. This reasoning immediately clicked and we were all ready. First time in our life we prepared real big backpacks with the list of gear we were required to bring.

Dad drove us to the Institute, a ride of about 8 hours through some steep landscape. Early next morning we got ready to shift from guest house to trainees’ dorm. Concerned at our fragile frame (we were barely 51 and 53 kg each!), Dad offered to carry our backpacks up to the dorm which was some 500 meters away. “After this you will be on your own, so let me help you up to the dorm” he said.

Tashi is the younger of us two, and always lighter by about 2 kilos.

She is aware that our parents are always more concerned about her physical condition, and always resists such ‘protectionist’ attention from parents. She was first to respond, “C’mon Dad, we’ve come for the course, leave things to us now. In any case you are too old yourself!” As Dad walked behind both of us along a narrow trail, he noticed Tashi’s legs wobbling under the heavy pack. He again offered to carry it “Tashi, I told you that it’s too heavy for you, I am used to heavy weights, so let me carry it for you”. What she said then has stayed fresh with him to this day, “No Dad, I am ok. Actually it’s the uneven ground that’s giving you such an impression”.

A passion discovered!

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The next 3 weeks were to change our lives forever. Never did we enjoy any activity this well, felt such strong group energy, did such daring exercises, saw such strong team bonding and such amazing self-discovery! Each day was about pushing ourselves against own will, forcing body and mind to go well beyond the point of fatigue.

We felt a huge sense of pride at being able to lead the pack.

The group of 28 had 6 girls and 22 boys. Here there was no gender at play, just the rocks that the mountain pitted against us all equally.

Physical appearance didn’t matter, nor did one’s size and weight.

Many of the strongest looking boys were constantly lagging-

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Birth of a Dream Tashi & Nungshi Malik

behind, needing to be egged on or helped with their weights. As girls, we were far ahead of the other girls and amongst the strongest of the group overall. Those who had seemed skeptical about us, based on our lean frames, were in for a surprise. Very soon we earned the grudging respect of all boys and special admiration of our trainers who had found in us the best tool to motivate the boys by frequently taunting them comments like “look at you fellows, aren’t you ashamed that these twins are beating you guys in every activity?”

Time just flew by. At the end, we easily earned the highest ‘A’ grade (Recommended for the Advanced course). About 30 percent of the participants were found fit to come back for the Advanced course.

We were right on top of the list! During the course, dad never made any call. He had told us ‘on the training, no news is good news’.

Finally, the course over, we returned home like champions. When we saw dad, even before we put down our backpacks or he could ask us how it went, Tashi almost shouted with excitement ‘hey dad!

We have found our passion!’

First steps on a journey: a summit and a dream Mom was a most worried soul when we told her, “Mom, we’ve fallen in love with the mountains.” Girls falling in love with a sport associated in India as a pursuit of rustic people or the military, was not part of her plans for our future. She had far better dreams for her convent-school educated daughters. Dad of course backed us to the hilt and some months later we were off again this time for the Advanced Course. Of similar duration, this 3 week course pitted us against the ‘select’ few, all of whom had earned recommendations from the basic course based on their high performance and potential to progress further. The competition was tough. The ratio of boys to girls had gone further in favor of boys. But once again we were right on top. More intense than the basic course, here we were absolutely stretched to our limit of endurance both academically and physically. There was no sympathy, no concession and no mercy on the part of the trainers! If we were to move closer to qualifying as mountaineering instructors like them, we had to earn every bit of it.

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Birth of a Dream Tashi & Nungshi Malik

Considered an adequate qualification for one to become a member of any mountaineering expedition, the advance training course culminates in planning and executing a week long expedition to climb a selected peak at approximately 19500 ft. using a combination of rock craft, ice craft and all possible climbing techniques. As each day passes, the altitude increases and fatigue sets in. Then it’s all about you and the mountain. No age, no gender and no family background matters. Only the best reach the summit.

And reaching the top is a mandatory criterion for an ‘A’ grade.

What could be a more memorable and proud moment for two girls than to reach the summit ahead of everyone. And not just by a margin but by a huge distance! Our speed on the mountain had already been widely noticed and appreciated. Some attributed it to our ‘Gurkha’ genes from our mother’s side! Given our gender context, for a boy this summit achievement would just be a hardearned personal triumph, for us however, it was a victory of one half of our society, one that is treated inferiorly, often excluded and frequently marginalized in almost every socio economic sphere.

As we stood on top of Mt Rudugaira holding the ‘tri-color’ high with one hand, our ice axe in the other and looking down on the vast expanse of smaller mountains, we felt as if we had conquered the world. We had never before felt such sense of power and pride at being girls. In that moment, we felt we could climb any mountain anywhere, we could surmount any obstacle, any barrier whether natural or manmade.

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In reaching the summit, we had discovered what Dad had so often used to talk about: our hidden ‘inner’ resources, a glimpse into our hitherto untapped potential. We were immensely delighted at the discovery. Looking at the long line of fellow climbers slowly inching their way up, that day, in that moment, we were transformed.

The Mountaineering Institute in India is a small community, so word spreads fast including who reached the summit first. As we got back to the dorms a day later, we noticed huge admiration from fellow climbers and received generous appreciation from our

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Birth of a Dream Tashi & Nungshi Malik

trainers. As we reached the Institute’s reception area, the Senior Instructor came running to greet us jokingly telling other instructors “Hey guys, our ‘Everest twins’ have arrived!” He hugged us with immense pride. In the same breath he declared “Yyou two are our ‘Rajdhani’ and ‘Shatabdi express!” (Referring to two of India’s fastest trains).

That evening we had the closing ceremony. A boisterous event marked by a cultural program, awarding of certificates, sumptuous food and merrymaking continuing until late in the night. In the midst of all the sound and laughter, our senior trainer’s two words were echoing in our heart loud and clear, ‘Everest Twins’!

These words were etched in our heart. From that moment a dream was born and just four years later it was to turn into reality – we had become the world’s first female twins to stand together on top of the world!

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“I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.�

Michael Collins Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

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Why Travel Writers Should be Badgers

Dr Charles Foster

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Why travel writers should be badgers Dr Charles Foster

There’s a big problem with my travel writing. It’s that the writing is not about the places I purport to describe. Instead it is about the contents of my own head. And that’s a lot less interesting than anywhere in the universe.

I’ve written quite a lot. That I should have supposed anyone to be interested in my head strikes me now as monstrously arrogant.

My ancestry’s partly to blame. All humans grew up on the plains of East Africa. There was, there, a glorious and catastrophic evolutionary accident. My ancestor hoisted herself onto her hind legs. She immediately had a big view of the veldt. It brought many advantages. She had context; she could strategise; in some ways she understood the movements of the wildebeest better than they understood the movements themselves. But it imprisoned her. Her wonderful binocular vision became tyrannous. In lifting her eyes and her nose and her ears up and away from the earth she lost touch with many of the sensations that had shaped her own ancestors. The dominance of the visual made her a supreme abstractor.

Abstraction’s a lot harder if you have many modes of information about a tree being beamed into your brain instead of just one.

Natural selection loved abstraction. It meant that large numbers of hypotheses could be tested out in the complete safety of a skull rather than in the dangerous world of teeth and horns. And so abstraction was favoured. Good abstractors bred efficiently. My ancestors were good abstractors. And so am I.

When I go into a wood I don’t smell or hear or feel or intuit the trees at all. I only see them for the time it takes for their images to flash to my retina and then into my visual cortex. Then the trees become my abstractions: less green than the trees, less old, less generally sensuous, and a lot more boring. My abstractions certainly contain much less information about the trees than is in, say, the brain of a relatively non-cognitive badger. They are, therefore, less accurate representations of the trees than the badger’s. Then I go and write about my abstractions, calling them ‘trees’. I’m a fraud.

How can I earn an honest living as a writer about place? One

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Why travel writers should be badgers Dr Charles Foster

obvious way is to try to perceive that wood as the badger sees it.

The badger has a number of advantages over me. It’s nearer the ground. It uses far more of its senses to perceive the wood. And it’s far more local than I am: most of the molecules in its body come from an area of 150 acres in and around that wood. Despite my best endeavours, many of my molecules come from China and Thailand.

The badger lives in the wood in a way that no farmer whose family say that they’ve ‘owned’ the wood for generations ever can. And (I suppose), it does rather less cognitive processing than I do. The information from the wood is relatively unprocessed. The badger gets its wood neat – or at least neater: relatively undiluted by all the synthetic neuronal slush with which I mix the wild, intoxicating world.

So I tried to perceive a wood in the Black Mountains as badgers perceive it; and the rivers of my beloved Exmoor as otters perceive them; and the parks and dustbins of London’s East End as foxes perceive them; and the north west highlands of Scotland and Exmoor as red deer perceive them; and the sky between Oxford and West Africa as swifts perceive it.

I failed, of course. But at least the failure was an attempt to do something honest and accurate, and I had great fun trying.

Look around you. You’ll probably see people. You’ll certainly see, if you look hard enough, lots of non-human species. Each head has inside it a completely unique universe – a universe far less accessible to you than the most distant galaxy. The exploration of those universes has barely begun.

Why buy a plane ticket to somewhere exotic? There are far greater challenges in parks, cafes and kitchens. Be the first to learn what that table top is really like; be the first to draw an olfactory map of that corner of the flower bed. Don’t bother with the course of that Orinoco tributary; map the basic co-ordinates of the waitress’s perspective of the washing-up room.

In all these things it’ll help if you’ve spent some time being a badger.

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"There, I believed, lay the greatest secrets of the past yet preserved in our world of today. I had come to the turn of the road; and for better or worse I chose the forest path."

Col. P.H. Fawcett Exploration Fawcett. Journey to the Lost City of Z

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Utopian Fruits 28

Audun Amundsen Images Š Audun Amundsen

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Utopian Fruits Audun Amundsen

We had been walking for a day with mud up to our knees. Each time I put my bare feet down in front of me I prepared for spikes, sharp stones and slippery roots. My shoes had disintegrated from the humidity and mud weeks ago. Aman Paksa, a hunter-gatherer from Sumatra, was walking lightly in front of me. His toes gently gripped the ground and effortlessly kept his body in balance. His long raven black hair and bronze skin perfectly blended with his surroundings. He was a young, strong man in his prime. In the jungle he was the king, but nature itself was his emperor.

We arrived at the house of Aman Paksa’s father. It was a big open wooden house on stilts with a fireplace in the middle. The smoke floated slowly through the roof that was made of tightly knit palm leaves. The sun was setting and the birds had just passed on the orchestra to the crickets. I felt hammered. I gathered my last shred of energy to balance my way up the single tree trunk leading to the porch, hoping I wouldn’t embarrass myself by falling down into the wet and greasy mud beneath. I stepped onto the porch. At last, a cool, dry and comfortable place. Suddenly, the world started spinning around me, I couldn’t walk properly, my body felt rigid and my vision blurred.

The next thing I know, I wake up with five medicine men standing around me. The shadows of the fireplace were dancing behind them.

Three of them leaned down and started rubbing my entire body with cooling extracts, while the other two stood singing comforting tones while eagerly ringing a steel bell. They were shaking wet, thick, fresh leaves over me. At some point they all started singing and I was given a bittersweet liquid from a bamboo stick. Green spirits floated through the room. I felt calm and at peace with the fact that I didn’t know the outcome of my situation. The long and hazardous trip back to modernity felt unbearable in this condition.

Three years later, and this, in retrospect, mesmerizing event has haunted me many times. And now was the moment of clarification.

I was in the same situation once again, however in a different environment. I was lying in a sterile room with needles in my veins and monitors checking my heart rate. This time I woke up looking at three people in clean white coats.

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Utopian Fruits Audun Amundsen

“We are afraid we have to inform you that you have suffered a stroke. In fact the scans show that you have had a minor stroke before this one as well. We don’t know if or when you will walk again. We just have to take our time,” one of them said, calmly.

It was such an absurd situation that I started laughing and when I saw the dumbstruck faces of the doctors, I laughed even more. The sound of laughter from a paralyzed throat made my mom cry, each and everyone’s reaction escalated the others. I was a lucky guy after all, living in the modern society of Norway and having been brought to the hospital within the opportune time limit of three hours. This time it was too big for the medicine men to handle.

After all they didn’t perform heart surgery.

‘Peigu’ is the name of an amazing fruit in Aman Paksa’s wild garden.

During ‘dura’, the fruit season above all fruit seasons, that you sometimes have to wait years for, one single peigu tree can carry hundreds of fruits. These fruits are the size of three rugby balls with a green, hard and bulky skin. When opening the fruit an irresistible aroma fills the air. Butterflies and nectar eating insects flock to the site. Inside the fruit are fifteen to twenty fist-sized soft, yellowish balls of pure pleasure dripping of sweet juice. This is the wild version of jackfruit. Each of the fruit balls have their own peculiar taste with the distinctive overall flavour of peigu. Sometimes I could taste a hint of vanilla and other times even marzipan or cinnamon.

I needed to go back to the land of peigu. A place with no money, electricity or machines. I had loved the charming paddling oars sliding through the water, the dancing shadows of the fireplace in the evenings and the chanting monkeys in the misty mornings. It was a classical paradise deep inside the jungle on an island west of Sumatra, Indonesia.

When you are driven by a dream, the brain can achieve the most unthinkable. Imagine gathering all of the power to move your immobile and unresponsive body. It is not a matter of muscle, because they are there and perfectly intact. It is a matter of intense and focused will power. After days of trying to move, I finally managed to lift a finger a couple of millimetres for some seconds

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Utopian Fruits Audun Amundsen

before it fell back down, I was mentally exhausted. It was as if I could feel the neurons building new pathways in my brain. From then on, I knew I was going to walk, talk and eat normally again.

There was no other option. Millimetre by millimetre, neuron by neuron.

After years of struggling to make a living, I was broke and felt detached from European society. I had settled in an abandoned factory and made a living space out of cardboard from discarded Ikea packaging. The ‘Teach Yourself Indonesian’ book was already worn out and the walls of my cardboard box was covered in scribbled Indonesian phrases. I slaved for money at a crappy job for fourteen hours a day, day in, day out. I needed to liberate myself from all my obligations in Norway. I wanted to document the happiness of the people living in the jungle. It had become an obsession, and that obsession had helped me survive and become well again. I was so ready to leave, but my wallet was not.

Have you ever had the feeling something was meant to be, despite the fact that you are raised to believe in coincidences, cause and effects? Well, that is how I felt when I bought a lottery ticket and won. I was in such deep shit, and then destiny plays a trick on me. It was as if the world said: “Ok, go! You have been tested enough.

There is no reason for you to stay here anymore.” I left and didn’t return to Norway until three years later.

Once more, I sat in a canoe upriver, though this time the canoe was equipped with a cheap Chinese motor. I was somehow disheartened by the violent sound of the mechanics, but at the same time I felt an immense anticipation and liberation. Aman Paksa didn’t know I was coming and I didn’t know if he was still there. It didn’t matter. I was free. The forest grew thicker and thicker on both sides of the river. I could see heavy steel-grey thunderclouds on the horizon. I looked up and opened my mouth. My body steamed from the cold raindrops. The weather had shifted from clear sky to pouring rain in just minutes and the river grew rapidly. Everything was soaked, but nothing mattered. Life was an empty book waiting to be written.

I found Aman Paksa’s daughter, Ulak, in one of the small villages

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Utopian Fruits Audun Amundsen

along the river. She had started school and learned the Indonesian language. She told me that she had been baptized and named Martina. She enjoyed the routines of school and going to church.

Her clan had been counted and given identification cards and as with all passports and ID cards in Indonesia, they had to state their religion. The spirit world wasn’t an option, so they chose Catholicism. They were now officially people of this planet.

Aman Paksa and his clan were out hunting sea turtles in the ocean and Ulak didn’t know when they were coming back. Motorisation had given rise to new opportunities. It was their third time on the ocean. Aman Paksa was a pioneer because he was the first resident of the jungle who had taken the step of learning the way of the ocean. Times had changed. Every day I saw signs of a successful culture in demise and it was hard to accept. The bittersweet smell of modern temptations was slowly spreading like the metastasis of a cancerous tumour. The forbidden fruit had ripened in the garden of Eden and the snake was lurking behind every tree.

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Aman Paksa and his clan eventually arrived with two huge sea turtles. It was enough meat to feed over fifty people. The sounds from pounding two massive hollow tree trunks rang through the forest signalling neighbours that the turtles soon would wander off into the spirit world. Aman Paksa held the turtle’s heart in his hand, read its signs and confirmed that everything was good.

The women were sitting by the fireplace inside the house, gossiping and preparing food while the men were cutting the meat on the porch. The kids were running around playing with balloons made of the turtle’s intestines and inhaling the leftovers from the grownups’ cigarette butts. It was a cheerful event and a celebration of my return to the village and the jungle. After eating we warmed the drums by the fire so the python skin would get tight and ready for banging while we all danced until dawn.

In the evenings we used to sit around an oil lamp, drinking tea. It was Aman Paksa, his wife, their little son, Ulak and I. Although the house was one big room with almost five meters to the ceiling, the atmosphere was warm and cosy. The wooden boards had to be placed in certain directions according to tradition and most importantly you couldn’t place a board vertically in the opposite direction of how the tree grows. If you did, bad things could happen and the feeling of balance and harmony was lost. I knew Aman Paksa had done everything right. As a medicine man he possessed the highest rank achievable and he was exceptionally patient and diligent. His apprenticeship to become a medicine man was long and costly. He had paid his master for years with pigs, chickens, trees and coconuts. There was a time when medicine men were far more numerous, but Aman Paksa said that the younger generation couldn’t bear the responsibility, that followed with it, any longer. They aspired to what they labelled as ‘modern life’ and people further down the river had started to follow the religion of death, the ‘Jesus-religion’.

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In Aman Paksa’s eyes there was nothing but torment and pain to be gained from such a mindset.

“Thorns on the head and hitting each other,” Ulak laughed, because

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her dad would always talk humorously about these things.

If nothing else he could always get a t-shirt or two from listening to the Missionaries, he said. But deep down Aman Paksa knew he was probably the last of his kind.

In one of our countless trips in to the jungle, we stopped at a huge tree and Aman Paksa started to clean up around its trunk. It was so old that it didn’t provide fruits any longer but I saw some marks of hands and feet carved into the bark. I could tell they were the size of a three or four year old child. Aman Paksa sat down on the ground, took some tobacco and rolled it into a banana leaf. This was the place he could come to grieve one of his lost children. He told me they had had ten children all together but now only three of them were alive.

“The jungle looks so nice and clean when I see through your camera, but in reality it is ugly and uncomfortable,” Aman Paksa stated while puffing his tobacco.

By now I knew what he was talking about. Aman Paksa had taken care of me many times, healing stings and infected wounds, parasites, stomach-aches and mosquito related diseases. It was a tough life. I realised that the natives didn’t live sustainably out of awareness. They were simply forced to do so by nature. But now the power shift had begun.

The motor had made trading with other Indonesians at the river’s mouth more accessible than ever. Even though we felt relatively cut off from everything at Aman Paksa’s house, there was one creature that reminded me of civilisation; the cockroach. Aman Paksa had planted cocoa trees around his house and used to go to the village for trading and returning to his house he had unwittingly brought the cockroaches with him. They proved impossible to get rid of.

It quickly became obvious that Aman Paksa and I was moving in different directions. In a way he was looking for the artificial and I was looking for organic.

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“We are almost living like monkeys here,” Aman Paksa laughed.

I told him that back at my place we were almost living like robots.

There is a system for everything, rules and regulations. Sometimes it seems like western intellectuals fight to preserve cultures like Aman Paksa’s for their own gratification. We project our own dreams onto the indigenous people because it gives us hope. Hope for sustainable living, relief from the loneliness of capitalism and freedom from the chains of materialism.

Aman Paksa doesn’t want to live in a wild zoo for someone else’s amusement. Yes, I was guilty as charged. I had wanted beautiful footage of the natives in their natural environment. I had wanted to document a story of unconditional happiness, so that I could show everyone what we were missing. It turned out to be a naïve fairytale dream. We are all the same. We are looking for health, wealth, love and happiness. In order to get it, we fight inner devils of right and wrong.

“If you want to become modern, we want to become modern. If you want to be boss, we want to be boss,” Aman Paksa exclaimed.

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He was certainly right. So what if my footage was ‘ruined’ by natives wearing t-shirts and boots. So what if the natives acquired watches and cell phones. So what if they used motors to help life become a little bit easier.

Aman Paksa and his clan had developed to the point of stagnation.

They were more advanced than the western world in respect of their environment. Their societal system had been working successfully for generations upon generations. Their way of belief, taboos and thoughts seemed much more congruent with their actions, than in most other cultures. They had an intricate economy, however it was based on trees, pigs, hens, land and so on. The main source of food was the sagu palm and by working for about ten days, they would have one year’s worth of food stock for the entire family, including big parties every now and then. That is a pretty good economy I would say. All their kids were thoroughly taught how to survive in their environment. There were more medicine men per person than anywhere in the world. They had adequate housing and transport.

They gained wealth according to effort. All in all, they had created a stable system with a bunch of happy people in it, resulting in low crime rates. It was a success and now it was about to be turned upside down. Aman Paksa asked me if I could take him to the big city for the first time in his life. He was curious, besides he wanted to earn money and I agreed to fulfil his wishes.

Bang Id was a liberal Muslim, formerly from Jakarta. He had moved with his family to Sumatra. They were running a student café in their home near a big university. I had befriended him by coincident on my way to the jungle about a year ago. I called him up. He told me that a tobacco company had offered to renovate his café but in return it had to look like a cigarette commercial, such a ‘generous’ offer. I asked him if he would let Aman Paksa and his clan make traditional houses on his land instead. Surprisingly he said yes. His neighbours couldn’t fathom how he could reject such a lucrative offer over some traditional houses made by what they considered to be lazy, pig-eating savages. They would soon change their minds.

Aman Paksa and three other clan members brought thousands of

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palm leaves for roofing and we used second hand timber for the structures. Students and neighbours watched in awe as they worked.

Even the head scarfed ladies had to take a glance at the clan’s sweaty muscles, shining in the sun! They earned their respect to say the least and besides being hardworking they brought a much appreciated air of excitement to the community. A meeting point between three distinct cultures was formed; the animistic jungle people, the Muslim society and a weird western white dude.

One month later, three magnificent tribal houses stood ready to greet the students. I paid them a fair salary, never before had they held this much money in their hands and now it was shopping time.

We jumped into one of the small public vans. Some kind of pimped up version of ‘shake that ass’ was tormenting the speakers. We squeezed in and sat down along the walls of the car on some homemade benches. All together we were ten people, over half of them smoking some heavy Indonesian tobacco. The soot covered windows, neonlights, wunderbaums and spaced out artefacts plastered inside made it impossible to follow the traffic. The only evidence that we weren’t sitting in some shady gambler’s shack, was the seated presence of an old lady with a headscarf, holding her groceries next to the subwoofer. Each time we hit a hole in the road my head banged the roof. It was great fun. When we arrived, the jungle people looked like a bunch of drunkards puking on the sidewalk. Nobody really noticed. The busy streets were filled with salesmen waiting for their next prey. Women with babies and crippled men were begging for money. We pushed our way through the crowd looking for motors, watches and cell phones.

Indonesia is a society of beautiful diversity. It feels as though human nature plays out with no restraint. You can be as good or bad as you desire. On the outside everything is chaos, but inside my head it gives me a feeling of alert calmness. Back home in Norway it was the other way around. For Aman Paksa and his friends it was a different sensation; a feeling of fascination and fright. They saw a society with great instability; rich and poor, party and porn, and turmoil between religion and science. The world had so much more to offer than they had previously imagined. They saw that even mountains could be moved at a huge cement facility. A grey scar

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tore up the green landscape outside of the city. The government had subsidized cement production from here to build paths in the jungle between the small villages along the river. A large part of the muddy track Aman Paksa and I walked years ago, was now concrete. They had become the outermost part on the branches of a massive tree called globalisation. Economy no longer had any limits defined by how fast a pig or a fruit could grow.

Returning to the jungle they brought motors for their canoes, proudly paid for with their own hard-earned money. I decided to buy a diesel generator so that Ulak’s school could have light. Above all, these people needed knowledge from the outside world in order to protect themselves. At Aman Paksa’s house we installed solar power, which didn’t impress anyone because they had seen brighter lights at the village. However, water in pipes to the house was well received by Aman Paksa’s wife.

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“This is so convenient. Now I don’t need to carry all the water. And it will be so easy to wash the stinky pussy!” She blurted out to her daughter.

Her big smile broke into embarrassed laughter when she realised someone had already taught me the dirty words! Maybe this was a moment which would surpass the time of Semmelweis here in the jungle. I even gave Aman Paksa a chainsaw upon request. My heart cried, but who was more righteous than him, to ease his life using these modern tools. These things didn’t automatically ruin his culture. He wasn’t the destroyer. We were. He chainsawed the trees to make a new home for his family and killed some precious sea turtles for food, while huge multinational palm oil companies burned the Indonesian forest and fishmarkets sold thousands of turtle eggs. Missionaries made them go the same route as we once did in Europe. These are all classical stories that had become clichés.

We lured them into the short-lived endorphin triggered pleasures that drove capitalism forward like a massive train at high speed. The rest of the Indonesian society had jumped on the wagon a long time ago and the jungle people no longer wanted to be left behind.

I had become a progressionist. The world has become more peaceful. We have more freedom of mind. We have more choices in life. There is more equality than ever before. These are facts. We are moving in the right direction, however on a side-track towards a deep plunge. Hopefully we will figure out how to handle our primitive human attributes that lead to excessive craving and environmental demolition as well. But as for now our societal system feed on the attributes of avarice, jealousy, deceit, laziness, territorial violence and cheating. We know it, yet we can’t help ourselves. We have always struggled with the dualism of right and wrong, and maybe we always will. That is what makes us human.

But I am sure that the jungle people would be more than willing to accept if we presented a system for the sake of humans and not for the sake of money. They can very well be the first people ever to take a giant leap in their socio cultural evolution.

Aman Paksa and I developed some kind of common understanding.

I had seen the struggles as well as the qualities of life in the jungle.

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He finally understood that my money didn’t grow on trees back in Norway, but he still asked questions like: “How can I buy money?”

“Simple,” I said. “Stocks and bonds!”. Whatever that is… We both realised that we had to go back and embrace our own worlds. The rest of the people in the jungle didn’t want to listen. They were desperate for progression. The little help I had given released a landslide of begging. Sometimes I felt like they could even take the clothes I was wearing without so much as a thank you, but I didn’t blame them. I will still fight for their freedom of choice in a modern world, and access to trustworthy knowledge.

Almost three years had passed. Aman Paksa had his wilderness where time and mood steadily drift in circles. As for me I didn’t feel home in any particular place. I just feel attached to modernity.

Sometimes it feels euphoric and other times the complete opposite.

Life is a rollercoaster, too interesting to kill.

Freedom has many forms. Aman Paksa and I are so different, yet so similar. Whether robot or monkey, we are both amongst the most privileged and fortunate people coming from two of the richest societies in the world.

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The Next Giant Leap

Örlygur Hnefill Örlygsson Image opposite: Apollo astronaut training in Iceland, 1965 © NASA

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The Exploration Museum was founded in Iceland on May 25th 2011, 50 years to the day after John F. Kennedy challenged humans to reach for the moon. I could not have imagined that this project would, 4 years later, lead me and my father to stand on the edge of a cyndercone (a geological feature found only in Iceland and on planet Mars) with two Apollo astronauts and all of Neil Armstrong‘s descendants, at the very moment that New Horizon and all of humanity made its closest approach (yet) to Pluto. So how did this all start?

As a part of President Kennedy's challenge to go to the moon before 1970, NASA needed to pick and train a lot of astronauts.

Most of those astronauts came from different branches of the US military. All of them very skilled pilots, but they did however, in general, lack scientific training. Of most importance was the geology, because picking the right rocks from the moon could tell us not only how the moon was born, but also our own story.

To increase the astronauts' geological skills, NASA organized two field trips to Iceland in 1965 and 1967. In all, 32 astronauts in training got the chance to visit Iceland. The astronauts were all very

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The Next Giant Leap Örlygur Hnefil Örlygsson

competitive, so to further their interest in geology, their instructors developed a game where they would compete in geological tasks.

The young astronauts knew of course, that those who would do well in the geology training would stand a better chance of being selected for a lunar mission.

In 2009, quite by chance, I came across an article about these field trips. I was born 14 years after Armstrong’s ‘giant leap’ and had never heard about the astronauts being trained near to where I grew up. As a kid, my passion had been space exploration. In later years, my interest had shifted more towards the exploration of the arctic regions and races to the poles. But learning that my country played a small part in this giant leap made me very proud.

This discovery refueled my passion for space exploration and to a new and higher level. I felt this was an important story that needed to be documented and told. When future explorers look back, 100 years in the future, the Apollo missions to the moon will still provide inspiration. In 2011 we opened the first exhibition in Húsavík, 30 miles from the Arctic circle, focusing on the Apollo missions and Iceland's part in the training of the astronauts.

In 2013, we invited Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders to revisit Iceland and travelled back into the highlands where his training took place.

Bill was, along with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, the first to fly to the moon without landing in 1968. His photograph of the Earth rising over the moon is one of the most iconic photos of all time, and provided one of the best views from the Apollo missions. He flew to the moon but what he discovered was the Earth.

The following year, we were able to buy a building in the center of Húsavík that had housed another small museum before. We added exhibitions about polar explorers, the vikings and a room for young explorers as well.

In 2015, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Missions’ training in Iceland, we invited Walter Cunningham, Rusty Schweikarth, and Harrison Schmitt, as well as Neil Armstrong’s family to revisit the training areas. Walter flew on the first mission,

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Image opposite: Apollo 17 moonwalker and only scientist to walk on the Moon, Harrison Schmitt, with the author's daughter Aníta, aged 1. © The Exploration Museum, Husavik.

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The Next Giant Leap Örlygur Hnefil Örlygsson

Apollo 7, Rusty was the Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 9, the first test flight of the Lunar Module in Earth orbit, and Harrison Schmitt walked on the moon during the Apollo 17 mission, the last time humans visited the moon. He became the 12th and final Apollo astronaut to set foot on the moon, and as a geologist, he is the only professional scientist to have walked on the moon.

I am glad to be alive during these times and to be able to meet the people who made the challenge of going to the moon a reality. I sometimes get asked if there is anything left to explore. In my mind, we have only just gotten started. We may be putting a little too much emphasis on clever ‘firsts’ at the moment, but technology will open up new worlds to explore in the future.

I have a young daughter of my own now and I hope that the Apollo astronauts and other explorers of the past will inspire her to pursue science, adventure and exploration. I hope to be still around to see what her generation will learn and teach us. To see what great leaps her generation will make for mankind.

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The Around the World with 80 Kids 50

Kev Sidford

Image: Picnic in the Gobi © Kev Sidford

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Around the World with 80 Kids Kev Sidford

I blame it entirely on a conscripted French coastguard who, during the Franco-Prussian War, began to wordsmith a book that would eventually become an internationally recognised title, “Around the world in Eighty days.” Not that I have ever read the works of Jules Verne, but the title alone was enough to set the seed for my adventures.

My quest for adventure started in my misspent youth, plagued by teachers’ disputes, school was not the best place for me to learn, so I opted for other avenues to occupy my mind. It was on one such occasions when I was about thirteen years old, full of the skills and knowledge gained from an American Survival book and armed with a map that I had absolutely no real idea how to use, I ventured out into the White Peak of Derbyshire, UK.

Getting completely lost, I remember reading “If lost, find a stream follow it down until you reach civilisation.” This I duly did and within ten minutes of following the stream, and discovering with abject horror, that the water flowed down a sinkhole, seemingly into the bowels of the earth. Even in those days of being young and daft, I realised that I had a lot to learn. Never did I suspect that I would eventually be an instigator, leader and adviser of many an expedition.

Like many others over the years I had to learn my trade, amassing endless days in the mountains getting soaked through, thinking “Why?” and then that comic book bubble appears above my head, reminding me that I want to get qualified as a leader of expeditions.

More days in the mountains, climbing up ridges, getting snowed on, rained on, chased off the mountain by thunderstorms, all character building stuff, to eventually gain the qualification of UK Summer Mountain Leader.

By 2006, I had made it up my proverbial ladder with a handbag of qualifications including European Mountain Leader (Now International Mountain Leader), Joint Service Rock Climbing Instructor and Joint Service Advanced Mountain Expedition Leader.

I felt like a student on graduation day, throwing the Mortar Board in the air. I had earned my spurs so to speak, or so I thought,

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leading elements of military adventure training expeditions in Canada, Sardinia and 3 Himalayan expeditions already in the bag.

It was about 2007 that I applied for a yet another Himalayan Expedition, this time to the big one, Sagamartha, but the overall expedition leader politely told me to get lost and organise my own expedition – this was to be a pivotal moment. So I did.

The planning began, to take a group on my very own expedition, but I needed something different to really get my teeth into, not just a jaunt over to the Alps. At about this time I was concurrently getting involved with the commercial expedition sector. With an expedition to Kyrgyzstan on the books, I needed to remain focussed on my own endeavours. A chance meeting with Pat Parsons, a fellow International Mountain Leader, an incredibly experienced expedition specialist and all round good guy, had suggested the Fagaras Ridge in Romania. Being geographically ignorant of the region, it was time to do some research.

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Initially, I thought that it would be an excellent venture to a new destination, then I dug a little deeper to find it was 70 kilometres long, 8 peaks with elevations over 2500m, 42 peaks with elevations over 2400m and other 150 peaks over 2300m. Now that’s a challenge, I thought to myself and one that could be completed in a tight but achievable 7-day window.

Taking a group of adults would be difficult enough but I was planning on taking cadets whose age ranged 15-18 years old, carrying tents and negotiating razor sharp peaks. With the planning and logistics sorted for the Fagaras Ridge it was time to deploy to Kyrgyzstan for a non-military youth group expedition. With echoes of James Herriot’s, “It shouldn’t happen to a vet,” it totally slipped my mind that I had left myself just two days between returning to the UK and flying back out to Romania. “Good Skills Kev, Good Skills!”

So the journey begins with a jaunt out to the fascinating country of Kyrgyzstan, with a group of young ladies from Oxford, who were a powerhouse. Our journey took us to the Ala Archa National Park

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in the Tian Shan Mountains and a fantastic trek from Kochkor to the picturesque lake Son Kul. Everything was running smoothly until a catalogue of issues needed to be sorted out, including a lost passport, 3rd degree burns to a participant’s feet and a stolen camera.

Taking young people on expeditions can be a trial by ordeal, but it can be equally a rewarding experience. Throughout the years, I have observed, that the majority of young people feel that the opportunity and benefits of working in the community is more important than the hindrance of trekking through mountains. In reality, it is the experience of the journey that is most beneficial, observing the ten strong teenagers negotiate and broker their way across country.

After enjoying the magic of this Central Asian country of incredible natural beauty and proud nomadic traditions. It’s a mad dash back to the UK for the next ‘Busman’s Holiday’ and to finally get to grips with leading my own expedition, to yet another fascinating country.

Our journey begins in Bicester, Oxfordshire with last minute kit checks and back down to Heathrow for yet another flight, the air miles are beginning to rack up. We linked up at Bucharest with my good friend Florin George Bana, a former specialist in mountain warfare in the Romanian Army, who had retired to develop his own adventure trekking business.

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After a short three-hour transfer, we eventually arrived in Brasov, a picturesque city that may be described as the Romanian equivalent of Chamonix even if there is a rather large white ‘Brasov’ sign on top of Tampa Mountain that overlooks the city, reminiscent of Hollywood!

Introducing young people to the world of expeditions is a rewarding experience, getting them to procure their own food, in a foreign country, with the added caveat they have to stick within a budget and carry their own gear and food for 7 days on an unsupported trek, was an unbelievable eye opener for me. On day 2 we headed for the mountains, we started walking through a beautiful alpine forest, the track just continued up and up, until we Kyrgyzstan, halfway between Kochkor and Son Kul © Kev Sidford

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Around the World with 80 Kids Kev Sidford

popped out of the woods at 1600m, nearly 1200m of ascent.

Above the trees the route takes some rolling Nordic terrain that ended abruptly at the end of the second day of the trek when the route takes on a new level of seriousness. You will never lose the path but water is very limited due to the aspect of the slopes and the

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overall geology.

The young cadets were in for a challenge but they made it across one of the most challenging routes that Romania has to offer. There were times when you had to have a good attitude or you would go nuts, yet despite carrying heavy loads, having to drop off the ridge by 500m to camp and source water, the team wanted to return the following year for yet another challenge.

The places around the world that are in need of some help in oneway or another, never ceases to amaze me. Over the years I have led many a youth group expedition most of which had a “Project” dovetailed into the expedition; a School painted in Kyrgyzstan, another one in Ethiopia and yet another one in Ladakh; I have even got involved in the construction of a small village reservoir and a place of worship for communities in Ecuador.

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At the time, I could see that there was a need, a significant requirement to help these people. The more I reflect on the projects that I have been involved in, I have come to realise that it is like putting a plaster on a gaping wound. I have begun to question if it is actually beneficial.

Putting my own morality to one side and continuing the global push of introducing young people to the wonders of the world, it was time for another expedition to Mongolia with more cadets.

These guys had earned the expedition apprenticeship in Romania and Morocco but were now going to have an experience of a lifetime and my first experience of dealing with an individual that would test the patience of a saint!

Our flight took us to South Korea and then onto Ulaanbatar. We arrived at Ulaanbatar to be greeted by our young English-speaking guide. When introduced himself as, “Boo Boo,” I was not quite sure if he had chosen this name in reference to his favourite cartoon character or as it turned out, more accurately, a synonym for “Mistake.” After our city tour the team embarked on a train journey to the remote mining city of Erdenet. Founded in 1974 it has grown to be the third largest city in Mongolia, primarily due to

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its enriched veins of copper.

The team fell out of the train to be greeted with a landscape of dilapidated tenement blocks, a couple of ageing Ladas (cars, not old men) and three Russian UAZ minibuses. These UAZ’s would be our mode of transport for the next three weeks. Our expedition intended to drive to a mountain range, walk for 5 days, then drive to the next range and repeat the process.

It soon became apparent that our drivers were the guides (but spoke no English) and we had an English-speaking guide who had no clue about the geography of his own country. He was certainly living up to his name, being heavily reliant on an out-of-date Lonely Planet Guide. Eventually we arrived at the Khangai Mountains, complete with carnivorous flies and fantastic scenery.

The team had become accustomed to the daily routine of driving all day, seeing nothing but grass and the odd Yurt and what seemed to be strategically placed empty Chingiss Vodka bottles, that appeared in small clusters across the plains, heading towards the Gobi Desert.

I had mused over the idea that they were used as way markers for the modern day version of the Yam, which had delivered mail to the four corners of Temujin’s massive empire.

Having been almost eaten alive by flies, enduring nine days of pasta and being thrown around the back of the Russian UAZ’s we eventually arrived at the Gobi Desert. With only a short detour as our Vodka infused drivers managed to drive us off the grid, rendering our ancient Russian military maps literally useless while inside the vans all the expedition participants, unaware of our predicament, snoozed peacefully as they escaped from the searing temperatures outside.

When we came to a halt, the team of cadets fell about laughing when they heard me ask our less than knowledgeable guide that fatal question.

“BooBoo, where are we?”

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Around the World with 80 Kids Kev Sidford

“I don’t know,” came the deafening response.

Any reasonably switched on expedition leader has a ‘get out of jail free card’ to get out of most situations, our trip was no exception and as they say it all worked out fine in the end. These early trips and subsequent years on numerous expeditions prepares one for most eventualities and in addition to my own skill set, I have amassed more top tips and handy hints from clients to add to my Image: Chris Cheshire IML, Fagaras Ridge © Kev Sidford

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expedition knowledge vault than I ever did from the endless courses and CPD workshops.

I am not quite sure if Phileas Fogg actually completed his journey in the end (I may have to read the book one of these days!) but I have certainly travelled to the four corners of the world and taken more that eighty days in doing so. Without the thirst and desire of the young clients and the perennial urge to visit new destinations, my passport stamps would be somewhat thinner on the ground.

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Racing The Namib

John Moretti

Image © Rebecca Walker/Ripcord Travel Protection

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Racing the Namib John Moretti

Every weighted step of her ballooned and blistered feet makes the video camera sway. The next water stop is a mere 50 meters away and now her limping pace quickens. Her dry breathing scrapes the camera’s microphone and the swinging of the frame is now pendulous, nauseating.

This is what gruelling self-determination looks like through the eyes of a GoPro camera on a 250km trek through the Namibian sand.

The camera is attached to Andrea (Andie) Waters, a 36-year-old first responder from Arizona who has felt the desert heat before. She’s finished marathons, Iron Man triathlons. She’s carried full firefighting gear up hundreds of flights of stairs, but never has she volunteered for gratuitous self-flagellation on this scale, in a panoramic barren landscape of windswept silica and dust.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said.

Work trips can be physically demanding, but rarely does your boss ask you trek 150 miles across the Namib Desert, carrying all your own food and gear with water at the end of the day reserved for drinking alone. No showers. No beds. Just your peanuts and snack bars — 2,000 calories a day, by race mandate — to power you and a sweat-stained 28-liter backpack that’s already crammed with clothes and a compass and a mirror for signaling and hopefully a first-aid kit to deal with your searing blisters.

Andie thought it sounded like fun.

It was for a good cause, at least. Her Ripcord team was competing in the 4 Deserts Sahara Race Namibia to raise money for a nonprofit organization, Next Generation Conservation Trust Namibia, that uses drones to nab poachers who kill endangered rhino and elephants. Now Andie had the weight of that commitment on top of the 22-pound pack on her shoulders as well as she faced the grueling trek ahead.

It was the feet thing, mostly. Running a marathon a day on the sand wreaks havoc on your feet. Everyone’s feet. For Andie, it started around the 18 mile mark.

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“I could feel pressure in my toes, so I knew I was getting fluid under my toenails. Plus, somewhere along the way I kicked a rock with my big toe,” she said. “So basically they started to swell so badly that I could barely bend my toes. I was not in a good way at all… just a sharp, searing blister pain adding to the ache of being on your feet for eight or ten hours.

“Somewhere along the way, I made the conscious decision I was going to enjoy the race. I said, ‘OK, I’m not going dwell on this pain…’” Instead of looking beyond the horizon and at the dirt in front of me, I wanted to appreciate this place.”

Somewhere around the second night, two sand marathons into the race, the magic materialized from the coastal desert mist. Local workers had come in to boil water for the meals: to prepare the freeze-dried foods the competitors were carrying on their backs.

They boiled the water in a series of iron caldrons, and the sea of campfires was the only thing to pierce the blackness of the starless African night.

As the food disappeared, racers turned down their sleeping bags and nodded off to the soothing tones of Namibian tribal music.

That night, I remember lying in the tent in the dark and listening to this music. It was really beautiful, Andie said. The next day, the throbbing in her feet subsiding, she was met by majestic sand dunes that stretched out to the horizon.

Another day, and another opportunity for true grit and the blissful solace of open exotic spaces to triumph over the pain, which she swallowed with a determined smile.

“To the left was flat desert for miles, and to the right were sand dunes as far as the eye could see,” Andie said. “I just thought how lucky I was to be out here.”

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Sparring with Terrorists 64

Lloyd Figgins Images Š Lloyd Figgins

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Sparring with Terrorists Lloyd Figgins

Our brief was to travel to a mass gravesite on the outskirts of the city of Jaar in Yemen. Our proposed destination was in a remote area of country that had until recently been held by Al-Qaeda. We had been given permission to visit the site by the Yemeni military; we had also been given assurances by both the military and our fixer that the route to the site and the site itself were secure.

Our preparation had been meticulous. We’d done everything we could to ensure the safety of the team. Our driver was a trusted local man who had recently taken international teams of journalists to Jaar, and we had researched alternative routes in and out of the city in case ours became compromised. The vehicle itself was deliberately inconspicuous and I had checked it over very carefully before deeming it fit for the task.

There were five of us due to travel in the vehicle: the driver, two journalists, a cameraman and myself, acting as security. The drive from Aden to Jaar would take about an hour and a half, and then it would be a further 20 minutes to the site of the mass grave.

I got into the front beside the driver and the rest of the team piled in the back. I gave a final briefing before we set off in order to recap our security procedures, with which, by now, everyone was very familiar. I did a final check to ensure that we all had our press passes to hand and we headed off.

The journey was pretty unremarkable, and we spent a lot of the time listening to our driver tell us stories about his 12 children.

Once we left the main highway, though, the mood changed and there was a notable tension in the air.

I said to the driver, “How much further to the site?”

He smiled at me reassuringly and replied, “Not far now, Mr Lloyd.

Maybe five more minutes.”

We were driving down a tree-lined track and it was difficult to see what was ahead.

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Sparring with Terrorists Lloyd Figgins

The first I knew that something was wrong was when I saw hooded gunmen appear in the road ahead. They were pointing their AK-47s directly at us and shouting in Arabic. Even without the benefit of knowing the language it was very clear they wanted us to stop.

Instinctively we all raised our hands while simultaneously trying to show our press passes.

“Journalists, journalists!� we shouted as they opened the doors and dragged us out of the car.

It was then that I spotted another team of journalists who had left in another vehicle just ahead of us. They were lying face down on the ground with black hoods over their heads and their hands tied behind their backs.

Instantly, my drills kicked in and I did a quick head count. I reckoned that there were seven gunmen in the group, and noted that they seemed highly agitated. I could see the five journalists from the other group, but not their driver.

Our own driver was then separated from us and taken behind our vehicle. Suddenly, a single shot rang out. That would explain what had happened to the other driver. These people were not in the mood to mess about. I was surprised at how well organised they seemed to be.

I was marched to the side of the track with the muzzle of an AK-47 in my back and told to kneel down. A hood was placed over my head and I was kicked to the ground, landing on my face. Another boot went into my ribs for good measure. I could feel someone going through my pockets and removing my phone, wallet, notebook and a map I had of the area. I was still holding my press pass but that was soon snatched from my fingers. Things were happening very fast.

I was given a few more kicks and I felt a pistol thrust against the base of my skull. I was conscious of just how hot it was inside the hood.

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“On your feet,” a voice ordered.

As soon as I’d scrambled up, I was marched down the track a short distance and made to kneel.

“What’s your name?” the voice demanded. He spoke good English: I guessed he was in charge.

“Lloyd.” I replied.

“What are you doing here?” he barked.

“I’m a journalist with Intrepid TV. We’re covering the situation in Yemen.”

“Hold this,” the man ordered. Something bulky was thrust into my right hand. “You are not a journalist,” he continued. “You are a spy and you mean to harm Islam. Where are you from?”

My training told me that I must at all costs remain calm and not rise to his accusations.

“My name is Lloyd, I am a journalist for Intrepid TV and I am from the UK.”

I heard him tell the person holding the gun to my head to remove my hood. I blinked at the sudden influx of light.

“If you are not a spy and you don’t mean harm to Islam, why did we find this thing you are holding in your car?”

I looked down and saw that I was holding a crude bomb made of C4 explosive with a timer attached. I also saw that there was a video camera right in front of me and an armed guard at each side. I caught a glimpse of an Al-Qaeda flag, just behind me.

The man asking the questions had his face covered but his eyes were filled with anger.

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“I am not a spy and I don’t know where this came from,” I said firmly, with the lightest of nods at the ‘bomb’. “It was not in our car.

My name is Lloyd and I am a journalist with Intrepid TV. I mean no harm to you or to Islam.”

I could feel his eyes burning into me but I didn’t look directly at him in case he saw it as a sign of arrogance or aggression.

“Look into the camera and tell me your name, where you are from and that you are a spy,” he said, his voice hardening further.

“My name is Lloyd. I am a journalist from the UK.”

He lent forward and pressed his pistol to my forehead.

“You are a spy. You are not a journalist. You are the security man.

The others have already told me so. Now tell the camera.”

He was getting agitated and if I admitted I was a spy I was as good as dead. Conceding that I was part of the security detail would most likely have had the same outcome: it’s customary to get rid of security operatives pretty quickly, in order to neutralise any threat they may pose.

“My name is Lloyd. I’m a journalist.”

This time the man didn’t respond. Instead, he turned and walked away to my right, where a man was lying on the ground, face down and hooded. He gave him a sharp kick.

“What’s your name and where are you from?”

The man on the ground replied, “My name is Jack. I’m a journalist from the UK.”

Jack and I had arrived together. He was a young freelancer and I liked him. A shot rang out and a puff of dust rose up next to Jack.

“Tell me you’re a spy or the next one goes in his head,” the man

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demanded, looking straight at me.

I looked directly into the camera lens and said, “My name is Lloyd Figgins and I’m a spy.” As the words fell from my mouth, I felt utterly defeated.

The masked man played back the recording to make sure he had what he wanted and then told one of the guards to replace my hood.

Everything went dark again. I was forced back to my feet and marched further along the path, away from the rest of the group, with an AK-47 planted firmly in the small of my back.

“On your knees, infidel,” barked a guard. I was pushed into a kneeling position. I guessed that whatever came next was not going to be good.

I heard the voice of the man who had taken the video footage calmly say, “You are a security operative and we don’t have any use for you, so now you will be executed.”

I felt his pistol pressing into the back of my neck and thought, So this is how it ends. The next sound I heard was a shot ring out close to my ear, followed by a wild laugh from my tormentor.

“Next time, spy. Next time.”

I knelt there, frozen to the spot, my hands still in the air. While overwhelmingly relieved to still be alive, I was also well aware that he was using the mock execution to spread fear among us all.

I could hear others from our group being dragged in front of the camera and ordered to read a statement that said they were infidels and enemies of Islam. They were humiliating us, one by one, but it didn’t escape my notice that I was the only one accused of spying. I was also the only one to be separated out from the rest.

A few minutes later, I heard a loud scream from one of the female journalists. Within moments she was pushed to the floor beside me.

We knelt next to one another for what seemed like an eternity before she broke the silence.

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“Are you OK, Lloyd?” she whispered. It was Jo. She and I had been in the same vehicle and she had seen me getting a bit of a kicking.

“I’m fine,” I whispered back.

There was a pause before she said, “I’m not wearing a hood.”

This was critical information.

“Tell me what you can see,” I whispered.

Speaking softly, Jo explained that there was a path in front of us. She couldn’t see where it went but there were no obvious guards.

Behind us, the commotion of the video ‘interviews’ was still carrying on.

I suspected that we were not being watched that closely, so I slowly started to lower my arms. I knew that, if someone was guarding us, I would be told to get my hands back up, and that this would probably be accompanied with a kick or a painful blow from a rifle butt. Feeling slightly more confident, I shuffled in my position. If someone was watching me they were bound to say something.

I said quietly, “Jo, we have to get out of here. If we stay, they are going to kill us.”

Her response betrayed the terror she must have been feeling.

“I don’t think I can. I’m too scared.”

I was also afraid, but I knew that if we stayed where we were, we were almost certainly dead.

“I’m going to count to three, and then we’re both going to run straight ahead as fast as we can. You can’t look back and you can’t stop. No matter what happens or what you hear, you have to keep going. Do you understand me?”

Jo didn’t respond. I knew that the longer I gave her to think about

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it, the more the doubts would creep into her mind.

“One, two, three…”

I whisked off my hood, to see Jo take off like a greyhound out of the traps. I leapt to my feet and ran full-pelt after her.

We ran for some considerable distance without stopping. I was determined to get off the path and put as much ground as possible between us and our attackers. There were likely to be other ‘unfriendlies’ in the area, and we would be easy to find along the track. After a time, I grabbed hold of Jo and dragged her into the undergrowth.

“We have to stay off the paths, Jo,” I said, panting.

My heart was thumping against my chest and I could see that Jo was in a similar state of exhaustion. We stayed still for a few minutes before I was convinced we weren’t being followed.

“Jo, we have to move and head back towards safety.”

“I can’t move,” she gasped. She seemed to be paralysed by fear.

“You go. You have a better chance of making it without me.”

They would be searching for us soon, and the longer we left it, the more chance we had of getting caught. Jo didn’t look capable of going anywhere so I told her to stay exactly where she was and not move an inch, no matter what happened or what she heard. I covered her up with some vegetation and made sure she couldn’t be seen from the path, and then I set off. I hated to leave her but I knew that if I got to safety I could go back for her with the cavalry.

I was running down a hill and hadn’t got far before I came across a small overhang to the side covered by vegetation. I carefully scaled down over the overhang and found a good hiding place against the cliff wall. I stopped there for a while to assess the situation.

I could hear traffic in the far distance, and a busy road seemed like

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the best place for finding help. The challenge was that the terrain between my current position and the road was densely vegetated, and our attackers could be anywhere. I would have to be extravigilant and move only when I was absolutely certain it was safe to do so. Ideally, I would wait for nightfall, but that would greatly reduce the chances of Jo and the rest of the group getting out.

My thoughts were interrupted by voices directly above me. I couldn’t make out what they were saying or even what language they were speaking, but it sounded like there were no more than two of them. If my original head count had been correct, there were only seven gunmen in all, so they couldn’t afford to spread themselves too thinly or they risked losing more prisoners. The fact there had been no obvious commotion suggested that they still hadn’t found Jo.

As they got closer to the cliff edge, I heard their footsteps just above me. After a few minutes they moved away and I could breathe again. Something told me that they wouldn’t find me now unless I was careless. I lay down, made myself comfortable and, for the first time since the abduction, relaxed a little.

I couldn’t relax for long: I heard voices again, this time below me. It was probably the same people extending their search area. From my elevated position, there was little point in taking a peek over the cliff, and moving would only increase my risks of being detected. I would just have to wait until they moved on.

Once I could no longer hear them, I risked a look over the cliff.

There were no signs of people and no human-generated sounds. The birds, however, had started singing again, which was a sign that the searchers had probably moved on.

I estimated that I had a good couple of miles of no man’s land to negotiate before I reached the road. And in an area like that anything could happen. It could be mined or booby-trapped, and I could, of course, run straight into the people who were searching for me. Regardless of the risks, though, I had no choice but to attempt to cross the terrain in order to get to safety. The time for

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waiting was over and I moved as quickly and quietly as I could. My heart was pounding again and I was breathing heavily.

As I got to the edge of the vegetation, I took cover again and reassessed my options. There were at least two large fields between me and my goal and a path running between them. I opted to avoid this at all costs and plotted a circuitous route towards the road.

Apart from the hedge that ran along one side of it, it would be pretty open.

I tried to calculate how much ground there was between the place where I’d last heard the search party and the first field. I figured it to be about 200 yards. Provided they didn’t have anything more powerful than AK-47s, I would need to get at least another 200 yards away in order to be out of effective firing range. If I kept to the left side of the hedge and stayed low, I reckoned I could get out of range in under a minute, and then it would be an all-out dash to the road.

There was no point hanging around. I took a deep breath and jumped the small fence between the vegetated area and the field. I crouched down and ran for all I was worth, expecting to hear the crack of automatic weapon fire at any second. The gunfire never came, and with every step my confidence grew that I would get away.

As I got closer to the road, I became nervous again. I took cover and assessed my position. I could see a hotel I’d noticed earlier when we’d driven in, and it was no more than 500 yards away. Weighing up my options, I decided it would be safer to head there than to flag down a random car. The way my luck had gone today, I would probably wave down the bad guys. If I made it to the hotel, on the other hand, I should at least be on neutral ground and could then get together a rescue party in search of Jo and the others.

Crouched low behind the hedge, I waited for a gap in the traffic.

When the coast was clear, I darted across the road and behind another hedge that ran parallel with it. Something told me not to go to the front entrance of the hotel, so I skirted around the back and

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went in via the garden at the rear. I could see the hotel staff going about their daily business, and there was no sign that anything untoward had happened a couple of hours earlier just a few miles up the road.

I walked into the hotel, sweating heavily and covered in dirt. The first person I met was Jo.

She glanced at me and said, “I wondered how long it would take you to get here. You look a right state!”

Then one of the course instructors appeared.

“We thought you would go into escape-and-evasion mode, Figgins.

Well done. You’re the only one who made it back without being recaptured. Now get yourself cleaned up and get back to the classroom.”

The whole situation had taken place not in Yemen but in the UK in the Herefordshire countryside. The exercise had been the culmination of a long and intensive training programme in how to survive hostile environments. The course was run by former British special forces personnel and was designed specifically for those working in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of the attendees were either journalists or security operatives. The realistic nature of the course was critical in enabling participants to get some idea of what can actually happen in some of the more volatile regions of the world.

I had attended the course in order to update and refresh my skills, which is something I never compromise on. The right kind of training is crucial preparation when you’re about to enter a difficult or dangerous foreign environment.

Two weeks later I was working in the Middle East where I was able to put into practice much of what I had learnt. At this stage, I was running fewer expeditions and doing more risk-management and security work. I’d been asked to do some work in Syria, and deployment to the Middle East in December 2001 was not an

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assignment I was going to take lightly. The 9/11 attacks in the United States had taken place a few months earlier and the West’s reaction had affected the entire region. The actions of Al-Qaeda against the USA had had the effect of uniting disparate Islamic groups. Tensions were high, as were anti-western feelings.

I travelled from the capital, Damascus, to the ancient city of Palmyra. After just a short time there it became very apparent that there was a palpable tension in the air. The local people told me that Hezbollah and other groups were trying to take advantage of world events and gain influence in the area.

On my third evening in Palmyra, I went for dinner to a café I’d already visited a couple of times before. The owner was the cousin of the man who owned the hotel I was staying in and he always treated me well. My previous visits had been problem-free, but on this occasion I was in trouble the second I walked through the door.

Two men were deep in conversation over in the far corner, and as soon as they saw me they stopped talking and called the owner over.

They were clearly agitated and kept glaring at me. The owner then turned away from them and glanced over to me, looking as if he had seen a ghost.

These blokes were trouble. The lighting in the café was poor, but from my position at the table where I’d seated myself, I took as good a look at them as I could. I wanted to know what I was dealing with.

The elder of the two had an eye missing; he had made no attempt to cover the socket with a patch. The younger man looked particularly pent up. He had his back to me but kept swivelling round in his chair to eye me up and down.

They called the owner over again and the heated debate continued, this time at a much higher volume. Not being an Arabic speaker, I had no idea what they were saying, but it was definitely about me and undoubtedly far from positive.

Without warning the one-eyed man suddenly stood up and started

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shouting at the owner, making threatening gestures. Then he turned his attention to me. The words meant nothing but I could tell from the tone of his voice that his intentions were hostile. Next his mate stood up and he too started shouting at me. Now that he was standing I could see that this bloke was huge – at least six feet four and powerfully built.

The owner was doing his best to calm them down but without success. They were becoming increasingly hysterical and were clearly feeding off each other’s anger.

I was totally bemused: I’d only nipped in for a kebab. I began looking at the nearest exit.

By now the owner was trying to usher the men out of the door while they continued to hurl abuse at me. Eventually they were out and into the night. Then, inexplicably, he calmly turned to me, smiled and asked what I would like to order. The situation was truly bizarre.

“What was the problem?” I asked.

“No problem, you eat,” he said, with a dismissive wave of his hand.

I ordered my kebab along with some local bread, hummus and a salad, and I tried to put the events behind me. As I tucked into my supper, I heard a phone ring in the back of the restaurant and the owner went to the kitchen to answer it.

Within seconds he came darting out, ran outside and began to yank down the metal shutter on the outer side of the windows. When it was three-quarters of the way down he ducked back through the door and, from the inside, finished pulling the shutter all the way to the ground. He then closed the door firmly and locked it before turning to me, his only customer. His face was ashen.

“We must leave quickly,” he said.

I didn’t argue. I got to my feet to follow him through to the kitchen.

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“Quick, quick," he kept urging.

I stuck as close to him as possible as we threaded our way through the chaotic and cramped cooking area. When we got to the other end, he opened the back door, which led out into an alley. He poked his head out and had a quick look up and down and then told me to follow him. We couldn’t have got more than 15 yards down the alley when I heard the first explosion. BOOM! Another followed very shortly afterwards. BOOM!

I wanted to look behind me but there was no time to waste so I just ran. The café owner led me through a labyrinth of dark alleys at a tremendous pace. I had no idea where we were. It seemed we had been running for ages but in truth it was probably no more than a few minutes. I stopped short. There were no more explosions and suddenly Palmyra seemed very dark and very quiet and I felt very isolated.

“What are you doing?” the owner said urgently, turning to face me.

“We have to run. It’s not safe here for you.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

It was beginning to dawn on me that this man could be leading me into a trap. I didn’t know him at all. I had only eaten at his café a few times: it was hardly enough of a bond for me to place my life in his hands. Yet if I didn’t trust him, who else was there?

“Come, my brother is waiting for us, come,” he said.

Should I go, I thought? Who the hell was his brother? For all I knew his brother could be old one-eye or the giant from the café.

Damned if I did and damned if I didn’t. I reasoned, though, that this bloke had at least taken me away from the explosions, and that was a good thing. I decided to follow him.

After a few more minutes of running through the dark back streets of Palmyra we arrived at a black car. The driver, who had a cigarette clamped firmly in his mouth, gave us a slight nod and motioned for

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us to get in, which we did, still panting. He turned over the ignition and we pulled away slowly at very low revs. Whether he deliberately didn’t turn the lights on to prevent us from being detected or they simply didn’t work, I didn’t know, but he was clearly being very cautious. This was certainly unusual in Syria, where ‘cautious’ and ‘driving’ were rare bedfellows.

After crawling along for ten minutes, we arrived outside a small apartment block and I was again instructed to follow the café owner.

He led me up a staircase and into an apartment on the third floor.

Inside, a scene of absolute normality greeted me. A family sat around drinking tea and eating dates while watching TV. It was like entering a different world. The driver came in with us, introducing himself as Mohammed. It turned out that, as well as being the brother of the café owner and thus another cousin of the bloke who owned my hotel, he was also the owner of the apartment. After he’d sat me down and I’d been served with sweet tea, he tried to explain to me what had just gone on.

“The men in the café tonight were bad men,” he began. His brother nodded in agreement. “They are from a group that wanted my brother to hand you to them.”

By ‘hand me to them’ he actually meant ‘assist in my kidnapping’.

“But my brother is a good man and he refused.” The café owner smiled and nodded proudly. “After the men left the café, they threatened my brother but he thought it was just words.”

I looked at the café owner and he nodded again.

“Then they told one of my friends that they were going to kill you.

That’s when I called my brother on the phone and told him to close the café and run.”

I distinctly remembered the café owner telling me there was ‘no problem’: it was a good job he’d listened to his brother.

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“The explosions you heard were the grenades they threw at the café.” So these guys had been really serious. “They didn’t cause a lot of damage, though.”

I thanked Mohammed and his brother for saving me and then asked the obvious question: “Why did they want me? I haven’t done anything to cause trouble.”

Mohammed looked at me sympathetically and then said simply, “My friend, you represent the west, their enemy, and they saw an opportunity. Don’t let it worry you.”

I made a note to myself not to take a little thing like a targeted grenade attack personally in future. Mohammed told me that it wouldn’t be safe to go back to my hotel. He invited me to stay with his family for the night. His cousin, the hotel owner, would pack my belongings and bring them over (along with my bill) when he could. He also told me that I would need to leave Palmyra at first light, and that he would drive me back to Damascus.

The next morning at 5am, the hotel owner showed up with my belongings and my passport. I paid my bill and jumped into the car with Mohammed. He gave me a shemagh (scarf) to put over my head and advised me to put my sunglasses on too.

The drive out of town took us past the café and I could see that the metal shutter had taken much of the grenade blast. They’d need a new shutter but the building itself was largely undamaged. Without that shutter, though, and the assistance of the owner, there wouldn’t have been much left of me.

I asked Mohammed whether his brother would be safe. He assured me that he was not the intended target, and that half of the discussion in the café had been about wanting to protect the owner rather than harm him. It wasn’t in their interest to make enemies of the local population. I was relieved. The last thing I wanted was for anyone to be put at risk just because of an association with me.

The car journey was a fascinating one as I learnt much from

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Mohammed about the region and the problems it faced. When we parted, I gave him all the money I had on me to give to his brother towards the cost of a new shutter.

As we travel and continue to push the boundaries of exploration, it’s vital that we also examine the risks inherent in the regions we travel to and put in place effective mitigation measures. My experience in Syria could have turned out very differently had I not trained for operating in hostile regions. We owe it to ourselves to ensure we are as prepared as possible for whatever journeys we undertake in life.

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Norbul Baimukhan of Shejire DNA, is an important collaborator who is helping to investigate the DNA of the Golden Man. Here Norbul (left) and the author are near Issyk, where the burial mound of the Golden Man is found, along with 82 other Kurgan mounds.

Image Š Norbul Baimukhan

In Search of the Indo-European Homeland 82

Sturla Ellingvag

Image: Sturla Ellingvag

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In Search of the Indo-European Homeland Sturla Ellingvåg

In early 2015 I led an expedition to Kazakhstan in search of the Indo-European homeland. This was an experience I will never forget. I am writing these words now one year later on, as I am returning back to Almaty in Kazakhstan to renew contacts and continue our search. While there, I will meet some of our many collaborators in this huge project and together we will make new plans for more research. The renowned DNA Laboratory Centre for Geogenetics in Copenhagen is also part of this collaboration and they are currently analyzing a lot of DNA samples from our ancestors in Central Asia.

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More than half of today's Northern Europeans can trace their direct paternal family lines back to Central Asia. These forefathers who spoke Indo-European languages entered Europe more than 4,500 years ago to become Pharaohs in Egypt, ancient Greeks, Celtic tribesmen and Germanic warriors, and with their arrival they changed European history forever.

They are the reason why we speak the languages we do, such as English, German, Norwegian and Russian. They are the reason we have weekdays named Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and why we still maintain a warrior culture, albeit a modern one – though I have to say that it's easy for a Viking descendant like myself to find common warrior roots with our hosts in Kazakhstan.

These European invaders shaped society through their trade, leadership, clan culture and a strong social hierarchy in ways that still affect our everyday lives to this day. The Gupta Emperors of India, were also descendants of Indo-European speakers migrating south from Central Asia, we can see this as DNA researchers have proved that the genetics of the caste system in India started when the Guptas ruled large parts of India (by not allowing marrying outside of your caste).

Kazakhstan is about the size of Western Europe. It's a massive country full of beautiful nature, landscapes and wonderful people with so many stories to tell. For me, as a historian, it's a special experience to visit places like Pavlodar, where Solzhenitsyn was put in a Gulag camp, and which later inspired him to write “One Day in

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In Search of the Indo-European Homeland Sturla Ellingvåg

the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. It's equally interesting to meet the many people with German grandfathers who came here in 1945, and remained in the country to contribute to the multi-ethnic population of Kazakhstan. Our wonderful host and companion last year, archaeologist Emma Denisova, has been invaluable to our project and together we took the first important steps into our common past, by collecting large amounts of DNA material all over Kazakhstan from our common ancestors the Scythians, or Saka as they are called in Kazakhstan.

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The Scythian tribes were part of a great warrior people, consisting of several clans of early Indo-European speakers, many of whom wandered westwards into Europe to change European history forever. Their strong clan culture, identity and technology allowed them to conquer large areas of farming lands in a very short time and put them into a system of trade and exploitation which grew across Europe.

Our hosts this time around introduced us to the skeleton remains of the “Golden Man”. This has been a national symbol of Kazakhstan and is a warrior prince or princess of about 17 years of age, who was buried in an armour consisting of 4,500 pieces of gold. It would be interesting to see in this person's DNA who among modern day Europeans can consider this person their family. I would guess most of us.

On the steppes of Kazakhstan my Kazakh friends tell me that we, as Vikings, are nomads at sea, while they are nomads on land. This is something which I have heard many times mentioned to me while in Kazakhstan, and it has made me think. I live along the fjords of Norway, close to the Atlantic ocean. To me, sailing long distances isn't a problem at all. One thousand years ago it took Vikings five days to sail to Iceland. It still does today. It took another five days to reach the Viking settlements on the western side of Greenland.

And from there another five days to reach North America. It still does today. To me these distances aren't far at all. Similarly, the distances along the ancient trades routes from Kazakhstan on the Northern sides of the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea not great at all.

Vikings even controlled the trade in a small part of Kazakhstan for

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nearly 300 years (the trading town Atil, when the Rus overtook the Khazar Khaganate in the 10th century). This has made me think that perhaps my concept of time is not a very good one, or distances for that matter since I look favourably at longer distances only at sea.

Europe perhaps, is not such a large continent at all, geographically.

In short, my visits to Kazakhstan is opening up my eyes, giving me a bigger perspective both when it comes to time and distance.

I belong to those Europeans whose forefathers were conquered by these Indo-European tribes. I have to admit that I was somewhat disapointed that I couldn't trace my own straight paternal line back to these great warriors, but of course our families and tribes have mixed so much over the years that we are all related now, especially among the larger European Haplogroup families (mainly Haplogroups I1, R1a and R1b for Northern European males). One of the more amazing feats of the early Germanic tribes (R1a) is that they seemed to have gained control over large parts of Northern Europe in a very short period of time, some 4.900 years ago.

Evolution wise one might think that those in my own paternal line should have been wiped out, but there seems to have been a selection process going on as these early Celtic and Germanic tribes mixed with the early Northern European farmers. We were selected based on hair and eye colour, height and lactose tolerance, which is interesting in itself. And we can now also see a bottleneck of people belonging to Haplogroup I1, as a group of them resisted the early Germanic tribes and decided to migrate into Scandinavia, replacing the ones who lived there before. This didn't last long, as both peoples with R1a and R1b Haplogroups entered today's Norway and Sweden in the following centuries,

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A recent publication shows that 50% of Western European men descend from one man who lived around 4.000 years ago. This man would surely have been some sort of a royal man belonging to Haplogroup R1b, an early Celtic warrior king of sorts. If this is correct, then the Central Asian method of spreading ones genes like we know Genghis Khan and several other Khans did, also followed along with the migrating peoples entering Europe. We now know how important role trade played to these early Europeans, as beads from Tutankhamun's glassmaker (Tutankhamun himself was R1b) have been found in 3,400 years old Danish Bronze Age burials. But

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Above: The author in search of the Indo-European homeland in Kazakhstan. Image Š Norbul Baimukhan

in another recent publication German scientists have found traces of a very large battle taking place 3,200 years ago in present day Northern Europe. What is special about this battle is not only the amount of people who participated, but that they seem to have come from all parts of Europe to join the battle. We seriously have to reconsider much of what we have known about the time periods we have labelled the Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages, as everything is much more connected than previously thought. Old labels and ways of categorizing early European history are now hindering our understanding, as we are faced with new perpectives on distances both in time and geography.

With so much exciting new research going on at the moment, who knows what more we will find out in the coming years. I am fortunate to play a small part in this. Kazakhstan is a key country for me, and hopefully we will be able to find out much more about

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these Indo-European speakers soon thanks to the Kazakh Geographic Society, our friend Nurbol and many other important scientists in Kazakhstan.

I am sure that we will soon be able to know much more about who these people were, why they started their great migrations in so many directions and where they really came from.

Below: Two brothers of the Alban Clan. Image Š Norbul Baimukhan

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“On all sides, as far as the eye could reach, rose the grass-covered heaps marking the site of ancient habitations. The great tide of civilisation had long since ebbed, leaving these scattered wrecks on the solitary shore. Are those waters to flow again, bearing back the seeds of knowledge and of wealth that they have wafted to the West? We wanderers were seeking what they had left behind, as children gather up the coloured shells on the deserted sands. At my feet there was a busy scene, making more lonely the unbroken solitude which reigned in the vast plain around, where the only thing having life or motion were the shadows of the lofty mounds as they lengthened before the declining sun.�

Austen Henry Layard Discoveries Among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon: With Travels in Armenia, Kurdistan and the Desert

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Ripcord Encounters: Pat Morrow

Pat & Baiba Morrow Š Pat Morrow

Tor Torkildson

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Ripcord Encounters: Pat Morrow Tor Torkildson

Encounters often happen when you least expect them. You might meet someone out of the blue, witness a scene in nature that leaves you stunned, read a book that turns your life around or have a raven appear to guide you down a mountain. Encounters can touch you in many different ways and have the potential, in the blink of an eye, to fundamentally change the course of your life forever.

In 1999, I read that Pat Morrow, the climber and photographer, was giving a talk and slide show in Banff. The presentation would be about his journey to Mount Kangchenjunga following in the footsteps of the mountain photographer, Vittorio Sella, and seasoned British climber and explorer, Douglas Freshfield. In 1899, the men made history by circumnavigating Kangchenjunga, which straddled the then forbidden enclave of Nepal and the Buddhist Kingdom of Sikkim.

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By coincidence, I had just returned from the region, my objective also Kangchenjunga. I never made it to the mountain, due to falling very ill with amoebic dysentery in Gangtok, yet I did see the majestic mountain from afar.

Admittedly, I was a little intimidated by Pat Morrow’s reputation as the first person to climb the Seven Summits when I approached him at the stage after his spectacular presentation. I was greeted by his endearing smile and humble persona.

I quickly babbled on about my own journey to Sikkim and how much I appreciated his photography. Pat smiled, listened and said, “How about we go have a beer and compare notes?” This was my Encounter with Pat Morrow, who would go on to become a friend and mentor.

The other day I was thinking about Encounters and decided to give Pat a call and see what interesting projects, or explorations, he had recently embarked on (Pat and his wife Baiba are on an endless peripatetic journey). After talking about our mutual journeys I decided to ask Pat if he’d had a significant Encounter over the years.

“We were in Ladakh working on a film project concerning health

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Ripcord Encounters: Pat Morrow Tor Torkildson

education with Cynthia Hunt and trekking from Zanskar to Heniskot (near Lamayuru Gompa) via the Kanj-la. We were dreaming of a hot meal and shower when we entered the village of Kanji. That’s when we encountered the yogi, a Tibetan ascetic with long hair and topknot, returning to his mountain cave. There was something in the yogi’s all-knowing eyes, a real depth and knowledge, which spoke volumes to me without having to share a common language” “Interesting, you were lusting after a hot meal and warm shower, and he was rushing away from all that to get back to the austerities of his isolated mountain cave. Didn’t you feel like doing a one-eighty and following him up the mountain?” I queried.

“No, a hot shower sounded better at the moment, it had been a long and hard film project with a strenuous trek thrown on top of it. I will never forget those eyes though; it was like he couldn’t wait to get back to his deep meditations and away from all the distractions down in the village. That was the kind of Encounter that gives birth to an experience that didn’t last more than a few fleeting seconds and elongates it into eternity” This really didn’t surprise me, as Pat has always seemed to be a mountain seeker to me. In the eyes of the mystic yogi, there was certainly a transference of knowledge and experience between two wise mountain men.

Over the years I have learned a lot from Pat Morrow about the sacredness of mountain landscapes and the spiritual nutrition they can provide us if we open ourselves up to their heights and wide open horizons. I had my Encounter with Pat Morrow due to reading his book, Footsteps in the Clouds-Kangchenjunga a Century Later, going to his slide show, and traveling to remote Sikkim. Pat had his Encounter with a yogi high in the mountains of Ladakh while seeking a hot shower after a long trek.

Encounters can happen at any time, anywhere, with anyone, you just have to be ready for them.

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“But, by the end of four dark days, we had logged eleven northerly miles. This would not sound very impressive except to someone who has also pulled a load in excess of his own bodyweight over pressure rubble in the dark and at a temperature of –40°C.” Sir Ranulph Fiennes Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know

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The Great Island Swim 94

Nuala Moore Image © Kathleen King

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The Great Island Swim Nuala Moore

Planning and purpose – the Expedition begins

As I was peeling off my immersion suit, tears in my eyes, exhausted and emotionally drained just about to swim north of the Blasket Islands heading to Loop Head, Brendan Proctor, command boat skipper, leaned over to my ear and whispered, “Remember if you feel weak, if you feel you can’t-there are a huge team pushing each arm forward, each stroke is us-we’re doing this as a team, we will finish this as a team, you are never alone out there.”

One deep breath and I lowered my broken body over the side of the zodiac, we were 36 days on this expedition to swim around the Island of Ireland, the uncertainty of the next few weeks and challenges unknown. I stared into heavy, deep and uninviting Atlantic water, bigger than I had ever swam in. As the waves crashed over my head, I kept repeating, “you are not alone - breathe and fight,” and I did.

The Round Ireland Swim, as it became known, in 2006, was much more than a relay, it was expedition and adventure to the core. It involved so much passion, expertise, trust, humility, ability to change plans, ability to accept defeat and reassess our plans but it mostly reflected a team who knew that if it was possible we would do it. We were ordinary people doing something extraordinary.

Ireland is the 20th biggest island in the world, the main vision was to be the first team to circumnavigate the 800 or so miles by swimming, without wetsuits. A team of six main swimmers, a dedicated marine unit, a command cruiser vessel, three zodiacs, a marine rescue group of four rotating teams, a marine coordinator, a communications team and a land operations team were pulled together.

The Round Ireland Relay Swim was an unprecedented expedition of epic strength and resilience that is unlikely to ever be repeated at this level. The Expedition took 56 days, with 35 swim days, the difference being accounted for, by weather and team changeover.

The logistics of each day began with the allocation of the Zodiacs,

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The Great Island Swim Nuala Moore

two swimmers per Zodiac, the ‘Rachel Marie’ and the ‘Dive Áine’, each with a dedicated marine unit, one Zodiac the ‘Abhainn Rí’ carried the Marine Coordinator Derek Flanagan, his team and with swimmer Anne Marie Ward. The Command Vessel the ‘Sea Breeze’ rotated within the group captained by Brendan Proctor.

The plan was to swim 20-24 miles a day within the group and this allowed the boats to carry their own plans and then coordinate all GPS locations pre and post swims and each swim were joined to create the day’s plan. The Command Boat skipper, the Marine Coordinator, the Comms team and the swim team were fully involved for the two months continuously.

The challenges presented by each coast gave us both expectations and often absolute confusion. I remember the statement that the North Coast, the East Coast and the South Coast are predictable but the West Coast, it’s impossible to say what is going to happen out there. My motto at the beginning was that “We are only swimming, I have no other plans for the day, dig deep and take every swim in the moment,” and this we did.

The swim started in Carrigfinn beach on July 2nd 2006 off the coast of Donegal. Swimming with the coldest water, the prevailing wind, currents and through the treacherous Northern Coastline first. The wind for the first few days was North East which made swimming into the wind a big challenge. Day 1,2 and 3 we were 4 hrs behind our schedule each evening, we got a very clear indication that plans were only guidelines and our expectations would be determined by each day’s conditions.

The Rescue Units served one week on at a time Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta. These teams are members of the Sheephaven Sub Aqua Club in Donegal. The logistics of this would allow a fresh team and a fresh set of eyes and hands to join the expedition each Sunday. One of the unspoken rules of open water swimming is the swimmer can only swim if the rescue unit can take them from the water in the unlikely event of an emergency so the value of these units was priceless. Trust is vital when you feel vulnerable to weather and conditions. Complacency can cost lives and we learned

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The Great Island Swim Nuala Moore

very early on that the bond between boat and swimmer is unbreakable.

The first week went like a textbook where each swim was predictable, the challenges and the energy required were just what we trained for. Swimming 4-6 hours a day was acceptable. The North coast was a cold average 12 degrees Celsius. The North channel is renowned for Lion’s Mane jellyfish and big seas; it did not disappoint.

As we turned south. swimming down the Antrim Coast and past Belfast Lough, the Beaufort Dyke in the North Channel is one of the biggest arms dumps from WW2 and the water temperatures drop with water depths of almost 1,000 feet. The emotion of the swim changes, as the depth of the water drops, the water becomes thicker. Constant Jellyfish stings and hypothermia accompanied by rain and wind gave us our first taste of what it was like to sit on the boats in open weather with nowhere to shelter. It was so difficult to keep our bodies from losing too much heat as we waited for our next swim. The Immersion suits were wet inside and sitting for 8 hours each day in the elements took its toll as it was not possible to eat properly under these conditions. The wind was exhausting, we learned that miles had to be continually fought for. Training for distance swimming was not equating well with expedition conditions.

Being wet and cold every day took its toll and after a week although the expedition was meeting its goals, the physical depletion, the emotional exhaustion, the realisation of not having a physiotherapist or a nutritionist or even proper cover from weather conditions was going to be a major issue. There were no alternatives, we had to soldier on.

Week Two brought us towards Dublin as Team Bravo joined us. A fresh team brought renewed enthusiasm. The challenges nightly for the Marine Coordinator, Derek Flanagan was not only to measure the distance but to plot the course and risk assess the route each day.

Brendan Proctor and Derek Flanagan, together with their team, were routing and risk assessing tides 18 hrs a day.

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The Great Island Swim Nuala Moore

Each coast gave a different emotion - a different challenge.

The feel of the water for a swimmer, down past the counties of Louth and Dublin was so light. We could breathe, the wind turned Southerly and passing inside Ireland’s Eye it was possible to see the sandy bottom. We recognised the headlands. The proximity of the 2 countries, Ireland and Britain, squeezes the water, the tides run North South, the water races up and down the coast like a river. We could see our progress from the shore, the sunshine, the southerly wind, water temperatures of 14 degrees, the lightness of the water along with being so close to the coast reinvigorated our determination. The first week had teething troubles but now we breathed again, this was possible, the East Coast was a gift.

The Arklow Banks were beautiful, the wind turbines spinning fast, so majestic, volumes of sand in our teeth as we breathed in from the surface of the water, the familiar landmarks along the coast occupied our minds so that the days passed easily. Turning past Tusker Rock, our last day in the Irish Sea-we picked up tides at 8 knots, Derek gave us 25 miles and water speed barely allowed my arms to match the speed of my body. We were flying. The Irish sea allowed us to swim a mile of only fourteen minutes and energy was as high as days were short. By day 11 we left the Irish Sea, two weeks of swimming and our arms had covered two coasts of Ireland. We celebrated, the biggest challenge yet was climbing the ladders at Rosslare Port. The ladders were designed for Ferries and our arms were weak, lifting myself up 140 rungs of a ladder was the greatest risk for that day!

The emotions from swimming west, a new direction.

Eighteen hour days filled with sunshine and water temperatures of 14 degrees seemed possible. Our bodies were starting to feel the pain of repeat immersions without rest, it was becoming difficult to differentiate between pain and injury but the heat of each day was such a bonus. When Henry asked each morning if we were OK to swim, there were no other answers except “Yes”. It was an automated reply.

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Team Charlie joined us and brought fresh energy to the group. Our emotions were surreal as the new people confirmed our excellent progress, we were on schedule. Belief in this expedition was at a premium as we broke the 300-mile mark. Cold was no longer an issue, sitting on zodiacs with heat of the sun on our backs lifted our spirits up as water temps reached 16 degrees.

Day 15 brought new challenges, we were crossing the halfway mark 360 nautical miles at Kinsale. To avoid the bays, we travelled twenty miles off shore in water that was really big. With tides running North to South, our engine on the East coast, was now our enemy.

A mile was now taking fifty minutes, so with twenty miles to complete daily this was now a sixteen-hour day. My mind broke as the progress and feeling of superiority was smashed by each mile taking twenty minutes longer than expected. It was hard to accept whether the miles were taking longer or if our bodies were getting weaker.

The knowledge that we were tiny vulnerable bodies swimming past rocks such as the Fastnet which, in a moment back in 1979, claimed fifteen lives, from freak weather during a sailing race. In water like this you actually feel so small and at times the boat seems so far away.

Our swim took us past bays like Roaring Water Bay which has claimed more than its share of wrecks such as the Kowloon Bridge, vessels the size of football pitches taken by the force of the sea and here we were, small insignificant bodies, one could only feel humbled by our achievements so far. I diverted to thinking why were the islands called Pig, Cow, Elephant, Bull, Calf, Dog, Rabbit, Adam and Eve, was it that they didn’t have any other names?

Moments of sheer impossibility get lost in the absolute privilege of the experience.

An Expedition that started as purely a physical challenge, of swimming around Ireland, was now a demonstration of human interdependence and the willingness of certain of us to go to that place that many do not dare. The following days brought Team Delta the fourth of the rescue units. I prayed for the Cork coast to

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end, even though the weather was beautiful, accumulated pain, the inability to properly manage our food and hydration intake and the lack of physiotherapy were secondary to the acknowledgement of what it would take to finish this truly epic project.

The costs of these projects go much deeper than in simple monetary terms. The emotional costs were mounting, the questions and the value of being away from life started to rise, as the accents on the VHF radio were those of my home county. My phone started to ring more often with work questions, I wished for the chance to be somewhere that there was no communication with the outside world. When you can see the cost of your dreams, it can strip you bare of all energy and will.

The bodies of the main team of swimmers and navigators, were truly breaking down, with no more than seven days’ rest in the past four weeks, the miles continued to take 50 minutes and days continued to be nearly eighteen hours. A phone call from my father ashore explained that once we turned past Mizen Head we would finally be released from North-South tides.

Coming home mid-expedition

Day 21 turned us into the Kerry Coast, towards Valentia and the roller coaster of emotions lifted again. Swimming across Dingle Bay was filled with panic and elation. Panic that I would not want to leave and the excitement that we were now swimming North. One more coast, one more direction, once the team turns north we are on the home stretch. Derek Flanagan offered us the choice to swim through the Blasket Sound or to swim outside the Island group.

Inside would shorten our day so we chose this route, despite the great risks we would take with it. Our bodies were now so sore, that pain and injury morphed into the same feeling. The energy of the water in the Sound was frightening and the moment when we got in the water, I turned to the team and said, “please do not take your eyes of me.”

I was on home waters, knowing the challenges of the Sound, I was terrified. The water hurled me along like an Orca playing with a

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seal, but all went well and with the final swims here completed, we were back under Sybill Head and home.

The arrival into Dingle Town was special. I would never recommend coming home mid expedition, mainly as it allows you to see the cost of your sacrifice, which on reflection, was nearly disastrous for me. We now had Team Alpha back in place and we left home for the second time.

The water on the West Coast was an animal of a different breed. The colour was green, the water was strong with a heartbeat that was thumping as opposed to beating. Every swim felt as though we were in thick green soup. Moving water under your body that comes from the Atlantic was huge. Our bodies were like plastic toys tossed and turned and progress seemed once again to elude us.

The questions about the West Coast did not have any answers.

Derek and Brendan always said that it was impossible to gauge how this coast would be and as the days passed this was proving true.

Day 25 gave us spectacular experiences off Loop Head, with dolphins joining us, what we were gaining in tide assistance, the following few days showed us the true face of battle. The water 14 miles offshore was 300m deep, as swimmers we would constantly lose sight of our boat with the height of waves and troughs. Hours of swimming and we were in the same position. Swimming is the only sport where we can commit 100% to going forward and lose distance!

Our hearts and minds were volatile and even though our bodies were willing to continue, the cost of the dream was surely enormous. We were becoming institutionalised, incapable of speaking or even being in other company. The storms of the West Coast were proving so difficult that one night, our boats broke rope and for three long hours we were standing on a pier in West Galway, the ropes of our vessels wrapped around us, as the crews risked their lives to try to secure them.

After a week of enormous battles, we finally swam past Slyne Head

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and had broken the back of the West Coast from the Bays of Galway and Achill, the headlands of North Mayo and Donegal. The most harrowing moment had been off Slyne Head, where a rogue wave crashed into the Zodiac, separating the boat from its swimmer and forcing the event to stand down for the day. What stood out throughout all of this was the courage, thinking, strength, emotional responses and the ability of a team to recognise the tiny nuggets of gold found in each of us and this support allowed us to find the strength to continue in particularly difficult locations such as the crossing of Donegal Bay when we were forty miles offshore.

The emotions of crossing our final body of water

Leaving Blacksod Bay, wondering if it would ever end, our arms and legs were broken, our ability to communicate was now muted in exchange for actions of holding and touching. The group of us small, as we were walked as one unit, always holding onto another.

We were fragile. We were sleeping in between swims on Zodiacs which had engines at full roar. We were unable to stand and sustain a conversation, we were grateful to the families in Mayo and Donegal who took us in and treated us as their own for the final week, who dried our clothes and fed us at their tables as we were no longer able to eat normal food. We were like swimming automatons, swimming on demand. There was no love left but we needed to finish. We were truly unable to function as individuals.

The team of Marine Rescue and Coordinator worked night and day to try and understand the final hurdle. It took one month to swim up the West Coast. It was as Derek had said, it was unpredictable, it was filled with emotion, but mostly it was filled with the strength that left us and filled us at the same time. We had crossed every bay, we had passed every headland, we swam in every body of water that exists.

After 34 swimming days, we walked onto the beach at Carrigfinn, the same team who had left 56 days earlier, going clockwise 830 miles of the coast of Ireland, we had returned full circle, every ounce of blood, sweat and tears were now left behind in the ocean.

If ever there was a moment where a team was responsible for an

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achievement, it was this one. All we could do was swim – it required the entire team to get us there.

The Round Ireland Swim was one of the greatest adventures to ever take place off the coastline of the island of Ireland. It was a sum of its parts; it was our arms which rotated around the island but as we say, we can only swim in these conditions, because the eyes allow us to.

We became the only team in history to have circumnavigated this island by swimming.

Ár Scath a Chéile a Maireann na nDaoine.

The Round Ireland Swim Team members:

Swimmers Nuala Moore, Anne Marie Ward, Tom Watters, Ian Claxton, Ryan Ward and Henry O Donnell.

Marine Coordinator Derek Flanagan

Command Boat Skipper Brendan Proctor

Rescue Units John Joe Rowland, Lead operator and team members

Sheephaven Dive Club Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta team members

Land Ops Neil Ahern and team

Communications and Dive Rescue Kathleen King

Images opposite Courtesy of Round Ireland Swim Team

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Contributors

Credits: All articles and images are the copyright of the their respective authors. Ripcord Adventure Journal is grateful 158 to all our writers and photographers for permission to publish their work in the digital and print editions of the Journal.

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Editor in Chief: Tim Lavery Publisher, educator and scientist, he has worked throughout Europe in various fields for corporates, NGOs and Educational Institutions over the past 25 years. In January 2012 he launched the award winning World Explorers Bureau, a speakers agency representing over 160 of the world’s most accomplished explorers and adventurers.

Since 1985, Tim has earned numerous National Awards for his contribution to environmental awareness in Ireland including three Resource Ireland Awards, several Environment Awareness Awards, Local Hero Award and Inspired IT Award. He has authored more than 20 scientific papers ranging from ecology to new species descriptions and edited numerous other publications on a variety of scientific and education technology topics.

Tim is passionate about exploration and the dissemination of the results of authentic adventures and expeditions. In 2014 Tim was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society (of London) and in 2015 became the first Irish person to be elected to the College of Fellows of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. He manages the Worldwide Expedition Professionals and Irish Adventure Association groups on LinkedIn and is a Director of the Irish Explorers Trust and World Explorers Museums’ Network.

In addition to acting as Editor in Chief of Ripcord Adventure Journal publications, he has recently joined the Board of the World Explorers Society as Director of Global Strategies.

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Guest Editorial

Alex Bellini Born in Italy in 1978, in a small village amongst the Alps, Alex Bellini is an adventurer and motivational coach. It was from the mountains that Alex was able to learn his first lesson: cling to the rock and hold on, always looking for a foothold, even when the support seems to be missing. It is this philosophy that has been the driving force behind his exploration the most hostile environments on our planet during the past 14 years.

In 2001, Alex ran the Marathon des Sables, an incredible adventure in the Sahara Desert. In 2002 and 2003 he walked across Alaska, pulling a sledge for a total of 2000km. In 2005, the adventurer rowed alone for 11,000km across the Mediterranean sea and the Atlantic ocean: 227 days, alone.

In 2008, he rowed for 18,000 km across the Pacific ocean, from Peru to Australia, in 294 days, once again alone. In 2011 Alex ran for 5300 km across United States: from Los Angeles to New York, in 70 days. He is now working to create a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, to live on a melting iceberg. The name of this new adventure is Adrift.

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Nungshi & Tashi Malik Despite roots in rural Haryana notorious for its skewed sex ratio in favor of boys, Nungshi Malik along with her twin sister has achieved several global gender iconic milestones.

They are the world’s first siblings and twins to complete the ‘Adventurers Grand Slam’ (scaling highest peaks in all continents and skiing to North and South Poles). They are also world’s youngest persons ever and the first South Asians to complete it.

They are also the youngest South Asians to scale the Seven Summits and to reach the South and North Pole on Skis. The twins were featured in 60th edition of Guinness World Records, 2015.

In 2015 they founded the NungshiTashi Foundation dedicated to advancing the lives of Indian girls and women through outdoors, adventure sports and mountaineering Recently they attended the US govt’s Global Sports Mentorship Program for ‘emerging women leaders in sports’. Nungshi and Tashi are both Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society, London. In 2016 the twins received the Leif Erikson Young Explorer Award from the Exploration Museum in Iceland.

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Dr Charles Foster

Charles Foster is a writer, barrister and traveller. His books cover many fields. They include books on travel, evolutionary biology, natural history, anthropology, theology, archaeology, philosophy and law. Ultimately they are all presumptuous and unsuccessful attempts to answer the questions 'who or what are we?', and 'what on earth are we doing here?'

His latest book is ‘Being a Beast’, which is published in the UK by Profile Books and in the US by Metropolitan Books.

He read veterinary medicine and law at Cambridge, and is a qualified veterinary surgeon. He holds a PhD in law/bioethics from the University of Cambridge.

He teaches Medical Law and Ethics at the University of Oxford. He retains an active interest in veterinary medicine – particularly veterinary acupuncture and general wildlife and large animal medicine.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Fellow of the Linnean Society.

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Audun Amundsen

Filmmaker and Renewable Energy Engineer.

Audun Amundsen is a renewable energy engineer, and the director and maker of the coming feature length documentary Newtopia which features his sojourn with the people of Mentawai in Indonesia and the CEO of Broadleaf AS which is an adventure company that explores the human condition and our environment using audio visual media.

He has travelled for long periods to different parts of the world, especially Asia. He is an eager reader of books and loves to learn new languages.

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Örlygur Hnefill Örlygsson. Image Courtesy of Arnar Ómarsson

Örlygur Hnefill Örlygsson Örlygur Hnefill Örlygsson (born 23 October 1983) is the manager of Húsavík Cape Hotel, chairman of the Húsavík Chamber of Commerce and founder of The Exploration Museum in Húsavík, North Iceland.

In 2015, he led an expedition with Apollo astronauts Walter Cunningham, Rusty Schweikart and Harrison Schmitt, as well as the family of Neil Armstrong, to the new lava of Holuhraun, created by fissure eruptions in 2014 and 2015.

The Exploration Museum is dedicated to the history of human exploration. The stories displayed here are different in periods and places, but there is one thing that unites all of them: the common need of the human being to go always beyond physical and psychological limits.

In November 2015, Örlygur announced the museum's plan to build a full size replica of the Apollo Lunar Module to unveil in 2019, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first manned flight of a Lunar Module on Apollo 9 and the first landing of a Lunar Module on the moon on Apollo 11.

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Sturla Ellingvag Sturla Ellingvag is a Norwegian explorer, off piste skier, historian and founder of Explico Historical Research Foundation.

He primarily works with DNA and history research in order to search for new revelations about who we are and how we are connected through history. His work also includes learning more about famous historical figures like Christopher Columbus, Alexander the Great, great Viking legends and many more. He works closely with some of the top DNA experts in the world.

Sturla's expeditions has given him many great and fascinating experiences to places like the Easter Island, the Atlas Mountains, the Caucasus Mountains, the Black Sea, the Canary Islands, Scandinavia, North America, Italy and France.

His specialities in history are the Middle Age, ancient history, IndoEuropeans and Vikings. Currently his work involves scientific expeditions to the Caucasus mountains, Kazakhstan, The North American coastline and Himalaya. Sturla is also involved in several Human Rights' initiatives.

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Lloyd Figgins © Fisher Studios

Lloyd Figgins Lloyd has been involved in the world of adventure all his life and has become an expert in his chosen field and has served as a police officer and a soldier, and has led expeditions all over the world. He has worked in over 80 countries and been exposed to a variety of high risk situations ranging from coups to natural disasters.

He is the CEO of LFL Global Risk Mitigation and given his background, is perfectly placed to advise others how to effectively mitigate risk.

Having worked in extreme environments ranging from deserts to jungles and mountains to oceans, Lloyd has been fortunate to have seen the world and all it has to offer. In 2012 he and his rowing partner, David Whiddon, completed a 3,200 mile row across the Atlantic Ocean. In doing so they became the first pair to row nonstop and unsupported from Morocco to Barbados.

Lloyd is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and in 2016 published his first book, “Looking for Lemons - A Travel Survival Guide.”

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Siffy & Tor Torkildson

Tor Torkildson Peripatetic traveler, Rob ‘Tor’ Torkildson, is a lifelong seeker and explorer who has worked and lived around the world for the last 30 years.

Torkildson has tramped through the Amazon, over the Himalaya, and across the Sahara in his quest to experience sacred landscapes in over 120 countries. He has worked as a diver, commercial fisherman, ship navigator, customs and immigration expert, writer and publisher, a fixer in Africa, and as a vintner and owner of The Wild Hare Winery in San’t Alfio, Sicily.

Torkildson has published three travel memoirs, a novella, and in such magazines as the Kyoto Journal, Beat Scene, Ripcord Adventure Journal, Canadian Mountain Journal, and Travelers Tales. Torkildson walks because he wonders.

Tor's latest project has just been published, The Walkabout Chronicles: Epic Journeys by Foot with an introduction by Sir Ranulph Fiennes. This is an adventure-travel anthology featuring some of the greatest explorers and walkers of our time.

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Nuala Moore Born and bred in the port town of Dingle, Ireland, Nuala Moore is an Ice Swimmer, an Extreme adventure swimmer and mostly a normal working woman who in her free time has attained some incredible achievements in the world of open water and ice swimming including being a member of the relay team that swam around the Island of Ireland in 2006.

In 2013 she became one of six women in the world to swim 1000m at 0 degrees in the Ice. She has competed in Siberia, China, Finland, Argentina, Murmansk, inside the Arctic Circle, Finland at temperatures of 0 degrees and at all times without a wetsuit. Also in 2013 she was a member of the only team in history to swim across the Bering Strait from Russia to the USA.

Nuala has continued her travels around the world including Sept 2016 traveling from Swims events inside the Arctic Circle to Swims across the Beagle Channel in Patagonia between Argentina and Chile.

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Kev Sidford Kev travels extensively around the world as an Expedition Leader and Travel Photographer.

In 2011 he completed a military career spanning 22 years of which 13 years was dedicated to youth group management. He was responsible for the design, delivery and analysis of student performance in a range of advanced skills in adventurous related pursuits and military skills.

He holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Professional Development (Outdoor Learning) and is Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. His travels leading expeditions has taken him from South Africa to Iceland and from Mongolia to Canada.

Currently, Kev is a Technical Advisor for British Exploring, a full member of the Romanian Mountain Guides and Leaders Society Societatea Ghizilor și Liderilor Montani (SGLM) and Life Member of the British Association of International Mountain Leaders.

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Publishers Ripcord is the adventure insurance arm of Redpoint Resolutions, a travel risk and crisis response company specializing in comprehensive global travel solutions. They serve government agencies, corporations and organizations that require employees to travel or live abroad. The company is owned and operated by special operations veterans and physicians who practice wilderness medicine and understand the challenges of medical and security emergencies in remote environments.

Ripcord’s global intelligence, evacuation services, essential benefits and 24/7 operations center has your back no matter where your adventures takes you.

The World Explorers Bureau (WEB) is a speakers agency that represents 170+ explorers and extreme adventurers, men and women who have lived with cannibals, dived the deepest seas, rowed the oceans, cycled the globe, lived underwater, climbed the highest mountains, explored unmapped caves, walked, skied and cycled to the Poles, walked in space and continue to explore the unexplored.

WEB Speakers inspire audiences around the world with captivating tales of their adventures encapsulating themes which include pushing boundaries, leadership, teamwork and motivation.

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