Monday 25 January 2016

Travels with my eyes: Top 10 adventure books

There are adventures in faraway lands for which you need no passport, no planes, trains or automobiles, no luggage. Just eyes, the ability to read, a little imagination and words with wings.

Mongolia through my camera lens
(Read my words about it here)
“We read to know that we are not alone,” said C.S. Lewis (author of the Narnia novels, which offer adventures of a different kind). But we read to remember the world, too, to escape our local lives and explore places we've never been, and perhaps never will - as when we read about times long past.

A confession: I’m a little bit addicted to adventure books, particularly first-person accounts of extended stints in wild, natural places. 

The problem with books like this is that they satisfy and stir in equal measure. They take me up mountains and out to sea and back to Afghanistan in 1948 when I'm curled up in my comfortable bed AND they make me want to pack up my duffel bag, walk out my front door and leap into my own unknown. Not that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, that tension between vicarious enjoyment and uncomfortable restlessness is possibly what makes for great adventure writing - to me, anyway.

So I thought it was high time I wrote an ode to some of my favourite adventure travel books. Just be aware that they should all come with warning labels saying, "May cause wanderlust."

1. Consolations of the forest - Sylvain Tesson
Reading about a cabin is the next best thing to reading in one, while the snow swirls outside and a wood fire crackles under a pot of billy tea. But Consolations of the Forest takes this genre up a notch. I would have loved it for its setting alone: French travel writer spends six months in a cabin on the edge of Lake Baikal, Europe's largest lake, in Siberia. But his writing is sublime and poetic, while still waking us up to how it really might be to live in the wilds for a time. 

“To attain a sense of inner freedom," he writes, "one must have solitude and space galore. Add to these the mastery of time, complete silence, a harsh life and surroundings of geographic grandeur. Then do the maths, and find a hut.”

I loved this too: “A hermit expends intense physical energy. In life, we have the choice of putting machines to work or setting ourselves to the task. In the first instance, we entrust the satisfaction of our needs to technology. Relieved of all impetus towards effort, we devitalize ourselves. In the second case, we activate the machinery of our bodies to provide for all necessities … Backwoodsmen are power stations glowing with dynamic force. When they enter a room, their vitality fills the space.” 

2. Trawler - Redmond O'Hanlon
I read this one last month in Tuvalu in the South Pacific, where I escaped the tropically humid heat by mind-travelling to the North Atlantic - in January, during a Force 11 storm. O'Hanlon is the best kind of storyteller: witty, generous and with a broad knowledge of the natural world from all his other expeditions (to Borneo, the Congo...). 

In fact the book is a marine science lesson as much as a rollicking yarn. Also on board is his marine biologist mate Luke from Aberdeen who, in between stints at the gutting table, collects deep sea creatures as unlikely as sea bats and rabbitfish for his doctorate, and introduces us to a fantastical world out of reach of human interference (so far). 

At one point, Luke says to Redmond, "... we're off into that two-thirds of the earth which is covered by sea - and the real point, the really exciting thing is this: 90 per cent of that two-thirds lies beyond the shallow margins of the continents... and most of that lies below 2 kilometres of water - or even more! And 99 per cent of that is unexplored... the deep sea is totally unknown! It's another planet!" It’s also about tough, lonely lives of trawlermen, men with tree trunks for legs, and gives you new respect for the sea and those who work on it.


3. The Road to Anywhere - Peter Pinney
This is time travel as well as adventure travel and a purer, freer travel than most of us will ever know. My good friend John Borthwick (himself a beautiful travel writer) put together this compelling anthology of writings by Australian Peter Pinney (1922-92), author of Dust on My Shoes among other books, who spent 15-odd years crossing Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Pinney is a natural writer; his tales bound from the page, inviting you to join his free-spirited wanderings. I also love that he travelled truly light, often with just a string bag and no money, thumbing his nose at bureaucracy and border crossings. An excerpt:

"Each day [in Spanish Guinea, Africa, 1954] was a leisurely idyll of small adventures and new friendships in new and pleasant places; sometimes we slept on the beach, sometimes in village huts; we went fishing on the sea and hunted crabs in rivers, and shoals of delighted youngsters taught us how to ride their frail canoes through heavy surf." 

4. Kon-Tiki - Thor Heyerdahl
You might remember I have a thing for Norway (Exhibit A: 10 green reasons to love Norway), including Heyerdahl – I loved his Kon-Tiki "adventure with a purpose", the fact that he and his crew sailed a balsa-log raft with no engine, no support boat and no working radio, halfway across the Pacific in 1947 to prove that Polynesia might have been settled from South America, not Asia. He couldn't even swim! I had seen movie versions of this story before I picked up the book at the Kon-Tiki museum in Oslo, and was expecting his writing to be a bit dated and dry. It was neither, and everything I love in adventure books: a wild ride through an awe-inspiring oceanic landscape.


5. Four Corners - Kira Salak
I read this probably 10 years ago when I was on assignment in Cape York, that jungled finger of land that points north and almost touches Australia’s nearest neighbour. And it has stayed in my mind since then, for the brutal beauty of Salak's writing and her courage in crossing the neck of Papua New Guinea from south to north, a young American woman alone, often travelling in a dugout with a machete across her lap, her only protection from men with primitive intentions. 

It’s a personal story too, as she tells how she came to be doing this journey partly as an escape from a predictable, well-mapped life. I loved this line in particular: "It always amazes me how intrusive beauty becomes when the mind allows itself to rest." 

6. My Year Without Matches - Claire Dunn
I've written about Claire here before (Girl vs Wild: Claire Dunn's solo year in the Australian bush), but I couldn't let a chance go by to mention her again. Not only am I in awe of her year-long survival adventure in the harsh Australian bush (she was about halfway between Coffs Harbour and Byron Bay), which taught her the value of reconnecting to the wild in ourselves as much as to the "wilderness" out there, her writing is beautiful, honest, open-hearted and searching, never settling for easy answers. Must read it again soon.

7. Voyage for Madmen - Peter Nichols
An adventure with a finish line, this one is about the first solo around-the-world yacht race in 1968, at a time when no one even knew it was possible to circumnavigate the globe single-handedly. It's a chilling character study as much as a seafaring tale, in which (spoiler alert) not all the nine protagonists survived. (Another exciting sea-story is Hooked: Pirates, Poaching and the Perfect Fish by Bruce Knecht, about an Australian customs pursuit of an illegal fishing vessel across the Southern Ocean, even into Antarctic sea ice.)


8. Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey
My favourite outdoor books are so vividly written they slow your reading to the pace of a stroll, all the better to take in your surroundings through the words on the page. Desert Solitaire, published in 1968, is one of those. It's about Abbey's six months as a summer park ranger in Arches National Park, Utah, and all that he observed and felt and thought, but also about the struggle between people and natural places, and how best we should experience them.

9. The Snow Leopard - Peter Matthiessen
Another classic, published in 1978. From the outside, it’s a book about a man in limbo in his life who joins a two-month scientific expedition in search of blue sheep, and snow leopards if they’re lucky, in Upper Dolpo, Nepal. But it's also a thoughtful reminder that sometimes the greatest and most interesting journeys are internal ones.

10. Eiger Dreams - Jon Krakauer
Before he wrote Into the Wild (another great adventure story, about Chris McCandless' search for freedom and his tragic end in an abandoned bus in Alaska) and Into Thin Air (about the devastating 1996 Everest season), American climber and writer Krakauer wrote these short, true stories about his formative years in the vertical world. A rock climber I was dating first gave me this book, years ago, hoping to inspire me to climb more. But Krakauer's prose got me excited about writing instead, by showing me what was possible - in terms of subject matter and style. I'm still a Krakauer fan.

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There's an avalanche of others, of course, including The Last Season by Eric Blehm (the true story of a California park ranger who goes missing), Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales (subtitled: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why), Out of Africa by Karen Blixen. Even beautifully written essays on the outdoorsy topics, from freezing to death (As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow... by Peter Stark) and The art of tour guiding by Robert Skinner. Writers are always climbing on the backs of those who have written before them. The trick is not to be so awestruck you never write another word. I'm working on that.

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