April - June 2021 //
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In this issue 1. First BASE 13. Here be dragons 29. Out berry picking 41. The Wilder Interview: Mario Rigby 55. Hell or high water 65. Portfolio: Gurcharan Roopra 87. Coffee and dates 101. Superfood vs Super Tuskers
First BASE Climber, BASE jumper and former Royal Marine Commando, Tim Howell, attempts the first ever wingsuit flight in Kenya WORDS TIM HOWELL PHOTOGRAPHS EWAN HARVEY
At her memorial, choking back tears, panic and every other unknown emotion, I told the audience: ‘This is Here Be Dragons territory.’ This is uncharted. This is where none of us have ever walked. The grief, the trauma, the pain, the tears, the loneliness, the isolation. This is our exploration, and it may be the most difficult exploration many of us may ever dare to face. I learned later that trauma and grief are both as much universal as they are individual. By that I mean, many have walked the road before and there are sometimes cairns set by others who have come before you along the trail; but the process is fully unique to the individual. Some days the cairns help; other days they just can’t. For most of us outdoorsy-type of people, there is a siren call toward exploration and adventure. We jump at any chance to put a new pin in the map because with every external and geographic discovery, there is also a process of internal discovery that coincides. This is why we are always curious about what lies over the next hilltop. It’s never so much about the hilltop as it is about the change the hilltop affects
inside of us. For me, exploration is as much an inward looking event as it is an outward looking geographical expedition. It was Kim who always checked to make sure I was exploring the mountain ranges of my spirit as much as the geography around me. She asked me to find more of hope, more of joy, more of contentedness. She endlessly and frustratingly pushed me to keep my adventurous spirit in check with the rhythm of my own emotions. How was I going to make a way without her? In the months that followed the accident, my feet were earthbound and all the stages of grief would become my most unwelcome bedfellows. I left Africa, partly wondering if I would ever come back. I spent time away, I travelled a bit. I did my best to recover. But how do you even begin to make sense of that sort of loss? My counsellor keeps telling me that it takes anywhere between three to six years to properly grieve a loss or recover from a traumatic life-altering event. I think that number is traumatic in itself. Six years is a long time.
Top left: Zebras kick up dust in southern Kenya. Bottom left: Poling through the mangrove forests of Gazi bay along Kenya’s South Coast. Home to lots of different bird and fish species, this forest is among the last few left in the region.
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The one thing I did take from counselling was how important rhythm is in recovery from trauma. I’m not good at rhythm, but I did remember the adventures Kim had introduced me to years before, and how being in wilderness had helped me make sense of my time in the refugee camps. The rhythms I found there were much bigger than me, and helped show me a way forward. I jumped back into my harness and started flying again. Apprehensively at first, but soon pieces started to come together. I found myself spending as much time as I could on the paraglider, in the most wild places I could get to. One expedition led to another, and I felt some of the weights begin to lift. In the Western world, we control most things in our environments. We can change the temperature in our house, we can switch on and off the lights. We can even control what food we eat all year long, because we can ship it around the world on an airplane. We are in control. Nature provides us with an antithesis to this. When we’re in the wild, we can’t switch on the lights whenever we want. We don’t have control over when the sun rises, or what the temperature is, or what the weather is doing. We don’t have control over the direction the elephants move, or when the lion roars. There is a rhythm of life, death, sunrise and sunset that plays out in the beautiful story narrated by the natural world every day, and there is nothing we can do to control it. I think part of the problem with being in control of everything is that when something does go terribly wrong, the responsibility of that wrong falls on us. If we buy into the lie that we are in control, then our outcomes are our own responsibility. But if we can concede little bits of our control to the rhythm of the wild, then I think we will find so much more healing in our humility. Right: Evening light cuts through the dust from a herd of elephants moving through the Shompole basin in southern Kenya. 23
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The Approach Nairobi National Park, Kenya I was driving out of the park one evening, when I came across these three young lionesses. I drove further up the road, set up the camera, and waited. As they approached it, the two at the back were perfectly positioned between the legs of the first lioness. Unfortunately, the third one was obscured a bit by the ridge behind her. The unit used to trigger the camera remotely is custom-built, based on a pro RC transmitter — which is a specialised converter that matches the language of my Nikon SLR. Nikon D850, Nikkor 20mm f/1.8 f/5.6, 1/60, ISO500, 20mm gurcharanroopra.com @gurcharan
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Coffee and dates Bikepacking enthusiasts, Alba Xandri and Ricard Calmet, cycle 1,000 kilometres across Oman’s Al-Hajar Mountains WORDS ALBA XANDRI PHOTOGRAPHS RICARD CALMET
Superfood vs S Kenya’s avocado industry is thriving, but a new the collapse of an
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Super Tuskers farm in a crucial wildlife corridor could lead to entire ecosystem
JAN FOX