Yesterday evening I had the great pleasure of attending an event at
the Royal Geographical Society in London. I was very excited to be able to
attend an event there, as the Society is obviously steeped in history and enshrines such famous names as Livingstone,
Stanley, Scott, Shackleton and Hillary. Greats indeed in the history of endeavour
and adventure.
The event I went to was about
expeditions on a slightly more modest scale, but adventures none-the-less. And to
make it all the more exciting, the reason that I was there was that one of the
speakers was a friend of mine and she had invited me.
‘Geographical Journeys: Microlectures’ featured seven speakers who
had all undertaken travel, either for exploration, science, work, or simply for
the journey. Each speaker had only 10 minutes in which to deliver their
adventure, and so we heard about how Emma Baker went to Sierra Leone on a
volunteer program and had the experience of a lifetime, how Faraz Shibli and
his girlfriend travelled to Laos with their new bicycles to travel the country.
The cycle journey ended when his girlfriend injured herself in a fall and they
had to turn to hitch hiking instead, but it was not all disaster as they got
engaged on the trip! And Levison Wood told anecdotes of his journey to South
Sudan, the World’s newest country, to lead a Channel 4 crew who were making a
film about fishing in a war zone.
My favourite tales were those
of:
Keith MacIntosh, who did not cancel his trip to Ladakh, a mountain desert
area high in the Himalayas where it never rains, when in the middle of the
night a rare cloudburst event flooded the area causing massive damage
to this rural, undeveloped region. Many inches of rain fell in minutes during
this poorly-understood phenomenon, and the mountainous terrain funnelled the
water into the valleys – exactly where the population all made their homes. The
flooding and mud slides caused huge damage to homes, the minimal agriculture in
the region, and uncountable loss of life. Keith still travelled to the area,
but replaced trekking with conducting any unskilled labour he could to help the
stricken area: repairing irrigation systems, helping bring in the harvest,
clearing wreckage and recovering people’s belongings from the mud slides. He
was also there when HH the Dalai Lama visited to unite the people and give them
strength. Quite an experience!
Conservation biologist James
Borrell, who told of his experiences conducting fieldwork in the remote and
beautiful Dhofar Mountains in the Arabian Peninsula. This region is an oasis of
jungle on the coast of Oman, near to the border with Yemen, where the limestone
mountains drive moist air upwards creating jungle in the desert. Here the team
collected valuable data on the surprisingly diverse wildlife, and with camera
traps they captured images of rare striped hyenas, honey badgers, and even
captured the elusive and enigmatic Arabian leopard, an extremely rare
subspecies thought to number less than 250 individuals scattered across Arabia –
even fewer than its more famous rare cousin, the snow leopard.
Malgosia Skowronska, a mountaineer
from ‘Afghanistan’s Secret Peaks’ project who described her journey through
mountain regions of Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor – the narrow strip of land at
Afghanistan’s north eastern side, pointing out towards China – to climb previously unclimbed mountain peaks. With modern-day
Pakistan to the south and modern-day Tajikistan to north, this corridor was
created when the British and Russian Empires created a buffer zone during ‘the
Great Game’, and it is extremely remote. Malgosia showed wonderful photos of
Wakhi and Kirgiz people, the women of these people unlike the common image of
Afghan women hidden under burkhas, and instead resplendent in beautifully
patterned and ornate bright red clothes and fancy jewellery. Afghanistan holds
a special place in my imagination as I have been there with work and have spent
a lot of time learning about culture there and also studying one of the Afghan
languages, Pashto. I would love to visit the Wakhan area of the country, which
has not been affected by the regime of the Taliban in the same way as other
areas of the country.
The speaker I had been invited by
was my friend Helen Spencer. Helen is fascinating. She loves travel and has
been fortunate enough to do a lot of interesting trips – she has already been
reindeer herding with the Sami people in Norway this year, and will be heading
off on an Afghan adventure in the summer. Her work as a vet has also taken her
to fantastic places and has had her working on incredibly interesting projects
with different people around the world (Jealous? Moi??)
This talk was about the time
Helen, as part of a group organised by specialist travel company Secret
Compass, took part in the first recorded coast to coast crossing of Madagascar
by foot, including summiting the highest mountain on the island (and the second
highest by mistake too due to a slight misjudgement in calculations!)
 |
| Sambava on the east coast - journey's start (photo by Helen Spencer) |
The
expedition began on the east
coast and moved west, initially on well-trodden tracks past local
villages, camping in school fields or other open patches of land. The
group
were the first foreigners ever seen by most of the people they
encountered, and
they regularly drew large crowds of curious onlookers to watch them put
up
their tents, deal with their blisters, go for a wee in the woods…
 |
| A tea break with an audience of hundreds! (photo by Helen Spencer) |
Eventually the paths petered out and the
team moved into jungle
that required them to hack their way through. Sometimes the undergrowth
was so
thick that they could only cover as little as 6km in a full day’s work.
Navigation was seriously hampered as the close-up jungle obliterates
landmarks and the dense canopy interferes with GPS systems, so the team
used rivers where possible to aid their route finding. As they encountered more hilly
terrain they broke in and out of jungle, getting treated to spectacular views
that human eyes may never have seen before. Sorely needed compensation for the
heavy packs, back breaking work, leeches, blisters and flesh eating parasites!
 |
| Breath taking views (photo by Helen Spencer) |
 |
| Making their way through the jungle (photo by Helen Spencer) |
The
Tsaratanana Massif region at the north end of the island contains,
at 2,880 metres (9,449 ft), the highest point on the island. Not quite
in the league of the Alps in Europe, though higher than our highest
British peak of Ben Nevis. The team made their preparations for the
summit, which included bringing a white chicken which they had carried
in from the start of their journey. At the top the high fives were
halted when the GPS revealed they had headed up the wrong peak, so down
they had to traipse, across the boggy patch at the bottom, and back up
the right peak.
 |
| The summit team at the highest point of Madagascar (photo by Helen Spencer) |
 |
| More incredible views, possibly never seen before (photo by Helen Spencer) |
Eventually, despite the
inaccuracies of their 1962 French Foreign Legion maps, the whole team made it
out of the jungle and down towards the western coast. No serious injuries were
sustained during the trek, which was excellent luck as with no helicopters on
the island, a casualty would have meant the team would have to carry them back
through all of the difficult terrain they had already passed! (Now there’s an
incentive to look out for your team mates!) That said, a few members did end up
in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases with leishmaniasis – the previously
mentioned flesh eating parasite, which is passed on by bites from sand flies.
Yuk!
 |
| Journey's end on the west coast, and a well-earned rest for some tired feet (photo by Helen Spencer) |
Becoming something’s dinner aside,
imagine being the first to do
something? The first to see that view, tread that path, make that achievement? Simply
a-MA-zing.
