Grand Adventures

© Archie Leeming

When I left university I made the choice to make the best I could of my abilities and resources and see how far I could ride my bike. I didn’t have a fancy bike. I didn’t ride fast. I didn’t spend much money. I got lost a lot. I napped under trees. I carried a bicycle repair book because I had little idea about bottom brackets or rear derailleurs. And yet I eventually succeeded in cycling the whole way round the world. I spent £7000 on the four-year trip. I did not choose to do it on such a shoestring: it’s just that this was the sum total of my worldly wealth. I preferred to get going and make it happen rather than saving and saving and never beginning. Four years of banana sandwiches was a small price to pay for eking out my money into so many memories.

When people dream of adventure they are generally not discouraged by the difficulties of the journey itself. Extremes of heat and cold; basic and uncomfortable conditions; the physical and mental struggle: these are actually often part of the appeal! The struggle, many of us feel, is preferable to boring routine.

So what is it that actually gets in the way, if not the hazards of the wild? Why do lots of people long for adventure and enjoy reading about it but not many actually get out there and do it?

I didn’t think that it could be explained by a lack of practical skills, fitness or equipment. It’s not as concrete as that. I guessed that what inhibits most people are the mental barriers in their head: it’s too hard, too scary, too uncertain…

Through my blog, I decided to ask what it was that stood between people and the adventures they dreamed of. From around 2,000 responses, here are the most common issues:

— Time

— Money

— Family / partners / commitments

— Fear

— Society pressure

— No companion to go with

— Getting time off work

— Getting work afterwards

And these were mentioned, too:

— Solo female travel / safety

— Lazy / procrastination

— School holiday system

— Lack of knowledge

— Ideas

— The unknown

— Kit / logistics

— Lonely

— Fitness / health

I found it fascinating that not one person mentioned the worry of falling down a crevasse or getting eaten by a tiger. The greatest obstacles to people’s adventures all lie before the journey even begins. In other words, getting to the start line is the hardest part!

Wrestling snakes, paddling rapids, tying a bowline with your teeth, pitching a tent in a typhoon: all this stuff is so much easier than getting off the sofa, committing to action and beginning.

© Alastair Humphreys

A similar example sometimes happens out on an expedition: leaving the tent when a blizzard is howling outside and your sleeping bag is snug can feel nigh on impossible. But when you do get out (it’s usually a weak bladder rather than a strong will that eventually forces you into action), the world is never as grim as you’d imagined it to be from the safe cocoon of your sleeping bag. The raging blizzard you’d pictured is often just a bit of windy snow. Feeling sheepish, you pack away the tent and get on with the journey.

What’s more, the practical preparations for launching a journey are also far easier than mustering the cojones to commit in the first place, to do something difficult and daunting and daring with your life.

There is a lovely Norwegian phrase that translates into ‘the Doorstep Mile’. It refers to how hard it is to begin something, how hard it is to get out your front door and commit to action. This book helps tackle the Doorstep Mile.

‘Do you dream of having a massive adventure but can’t see how you will ever get the chance to do it? If so, this book is for you!’

The first half of the book tackles the barriers that make it hard to begin. The second half helps you choose which adventure is right for you.

Do you dream of having a massive adventure but can’t see how you will ever get the chance to do it? Do you long to explore but don’t know how to begin? Do you look enviously at other people’s trips but think it’s not what ‘people like you’ do? If so, this book is for you!

My aim is to help you commit to begin planning your dream adventure, to get you in motion. That’s all. After that, the rest is easy – and up to you.

© Leon McCarron

© Alastair Humphreys

This book helps you shine a spotlight on what is getting in the way of the most amazing, life-changing, career-enhancing, personality-forging, memory-making adventure of your life. If you really, truly want to experience a big adventure, you can do it. You can do it. You can. Grand Adventures looks at the obstacles stopping you and shows that there are ways round them, if you choose to do it. Will you?

I spent an absorbing year interviewing many adventurers for this book, seeking hard-won wisdom from people who have been there and done the kind of trips we all dream of. I’m only sorry there was not space to include them all. (The in-depth interviews are all available to read on www.alastairhumphreys.com/GrandAdventures (http://www.alastairhumphreys.com/GrandAdventures).) They’ve done it all: Everest, the North and South Poles, the Amazon and Sahara, all seven continents, the oceans – even going up to Space! All of them once took that huge step of committing to their very first adventure. I hope that you will take inspiration from them because they were once just like you: itching to hit the road but nervous about how to make it happen.

There are stories and photographs from men and women who have travelled by boat and boot, car and kayak, bike and motorbike, home-made raft and hi-tech spaceship. People who had one great trip then returned to normal life. Those bitten so badly by the bug that they devoted their life to the pursuit of adventure. There’s youngsters and old folks; men and women; mates, couples and families; fit, fat or disabled. Extraordinary, inspiring people. People like you.

The only thing that stands between you dreaming of adventure and you being an adventurer is committing to it. Together, we’ll show you that, whether it’s cycling to the Sahara, walking across Australia or rafting the Amazon, the longest journeys really do all begin with a single step. They are, in fact, nothing more than lots of tiny, easy steps. Tiny, yes; easy, yes, but you’ve still gotta take ’em.

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Most people cite money as one of their big worries in life. It’s certainly seen as the largest obstacle to adventure. When people say to me ‘I’d love to do a big adventure, but…’ it is usually money that appears to be stopping them.

People who daydream about winning the lottery often say, ‘I’d go and see the world. I’d have an adventure!’ But you won’t win the lottery. That’s not the way the world, or probability, works, alas! (Especially if you’re not wasting your money on lottery tickets in the first place and instead are saving for an adventure.)

Will you just accept that because you won’t win the lottery you won’t have that dream adventure? Or maybe you’ll settle for doing something when you retire? (Gambling on the hope that you are not dead or decrepit by then…)

Before you do, there are two vital things to realise about money and adventures:

Adventures can be much cheaper than you might imagine. Not only that, it’s relatively painless to save enough money without having to rely on a lottery ticket.

If I can demonstrate that the biggest hurdle is easy to get over, hopefully it will convince you that any other obstacles in your way can be fixed, too.

When it first dawned on me, this simple little sum stopped me in my tracks – for its simplicity, and for its implications.

If you put aside £20 a week, within a year you will have saved £1,000. One thousand pounds. In all its glory, a thousand quid…