Lonely
— Fitness / health
I found it fascinating that not one person mentioned the worry of falling down a crevasse or getting eaten by a tiger. The greatest obstacles to people’s adventures all lie before the journey even begins. In other words, getting to the start line is the hardest part!
Wrestling snakes, paddling rapids, tying a bowline with your teeth, pitching a tent in a typhoon: all this stuff is so much easier than getting off the sofa, committing to action and beginning.
© Alastair Humphreys
A similar example sometimes happens out on an expedition: leaving the tent when a blizzard is howling outside and your sleeping bag is snug can feel nigh on impossible. But when you do get out (it’s usually a weak bladder rather than a strong will that eventually forces you into action), the world is never as grim as you’d imagined it to be from the safe cocoon of your sleeping bag. The raging blizzard you’d pictured is often just a bit of windy snow. Feeling sheepish, you pack away the tent and get on with the journey.
What’s more, the practical preparations for launching a journey are also far easier than mustering the cojones to commit in the first place, to do something difficult and daunting and daring with your life.
There is a lovely Norwegian phrase that translates into ‘the Doorstep Mile’. It refers to how hard it is to begin something, how hard it is to get out your front door and commit to action. This book helps tackle the Doorstep Mile.
‘Do you dream of having a massive adventure but can’t see how you will ever get the chance to do it? If so, this book is for you!’
The first half of the book tackles the barriers that make it hard to begin. The second half helps you choose which adventure is right for you.
Do you dream of having a massive adventure but can’t see how you will ever get the chance to do it? Do you long to explore but don’t know how to begin? Do you look enviously at other people’s trips but think it’s not what ‘people like you’ do? If so, this book is for you!
My aim is to help you commit to begin planning your dream adventure, to get you in motion. That’s all. After that, the rest is easy – and up to you.
© Leon McCarron
© Alastair Humphreys
This book helps you shine a spotlight on what is getting in the way of the most amazing, life-changing, career-enhancing, personality-forging, memory-making adventure of your life. If you really, truly want to experience a big adventure, you can do it. You can do it. You can. Grand Adventures looks at the obstacles stopping you and shows that there are ways round them, if you choose to do it. Will you?
I spent an absorbing year interviewing many adventurers for this book, seeking hard-won wisdom from people who have been there and done the kind of trips we all dream of. I’m only sorry there was not space to include them all. (The in-depth interviews are all available to read on www.alastairhumphreys.com/GrandAdventures.) They’ve done it all: Everest, the North and South Poles, the Amazon and Sahara, all seven continents, the oceans – even going up to Space! All of them once took that huge step of committing to their very first adventure. I hope that you will take inspiration from them because they were once just like you: itching to hit the road but nervous about how to make it happen.
There are stories and photographs from men and women who have travelled by boat and boot, car and kayak, bike and motorbike, home-made raft and hi-tech spaceship. People who had one great trip then returned to normal life. Those bitten so badly by the bug that they devoted their life to the pursuit of adventure. There’s youngsters and old folks; men and women; mates, couples and families; fit, fat or disabled. Extraordinary, inspiring people. People like you.
The only thing that stands between you dreaming of adventure and you being an adventurer is committing to it. Together, we’ll show you that, whether it’s cycling to the Sahara, walking across Australia or rafting the Amazon, the longest journeys really do all begin with a single step. They are, in fact, nothing more than lots of tiny, easy steps. Tiny, yes; easy, yes, but you’ve still gotta take ’em.
Most people cite money as one of their big worries in life. It’s certainly seen as the largest obstacle to adventure. When people say to me ‘I’d love to do a big adventure, but…’ it is usually money that appears to be stopping them.
People who daydream about winning the lottery often say, ‘I’d go and see the world. I’d have an adventure!’ But you won’t win the lottery. That’s not the way the world, or probability, works, alas! (Especially if you’re not wasting your money on lottery tickets in the first place and instead are saving for an adventure.)
Will you just accept that because you won’t win the lottery you won’t have that dream adventure? Or maybe you’ll settle for doing something when you retire? (Gambling on the hope that you are not dead or decrepit by then…)
Before you do, there are two vital things to realise about money and adventures:
Adventures can be much cheaper than you might imagine. Not only that, it’s relatively painless to save enough money without having to rely on a lottery ticket.
If I can demonstrate that the biggest hurdle is easy to get over, hopefully it will convince you that any other obstacles in your way can be fixed, too.
When it first dawned on me, this simple little sum stopped me in my tracks – for its simplicity, and for its implications.
If you put aside £20 a week, within a year you will have saved £1,000. One thousand pounds. In all its glory, a thousand quid…
£20 is not a particularly large amount of money for me, and that’s probably the case for many of us who are in the privileged position in life of even being able to dream of adventures. I spend £20 in the pub, or on a meal to cook for a few friends. £20 is within my financial comfort zone.
But £1,000 does feel like a large amount of money to me. For much of the world, of course, it’s an impossibly vast sum. For some people it’s mere loose change. But I imagine that most people reading this book are, approximately, on a similar financial level to me: £1,000 sounds like a lot of money, but it’s more or less achievable if I set my mind to saving £20 a week.
I know from experience that £1,000 is enough to fund a phenomenal trip. I once flew to India, walked from one coast of the country to the other, and then flew back home for far less than that. I have cycled thousands of miles through extraordinary places for £1,000, a grand adventure. Almost all of the trips I have done – including canoeing the Yukon, crossing Iceland and cycling round the world – I funded by saving up my own money and then doing the trip as cheaply as I could manage.
If you travel under your own steam, eat inexpensive food and sleep in a tent then expeditions don’t cost much once you’ve bought the essential equipment and plane ticket.
Some of my more recent trips, in places such as Greenland and the Atlantic, have required sponsorship, because they’re beyond the depths of my wallet. But I’m a strong believer that you should walk before you run. Building up a solid CV of