A FRIEND OF MINE, Sophie Campbell, got up one morning, and on a whim walked out of her door in London and kept on walking until, a couple of weeks later, she reached the coast at Chesil Beach in Dorset some 250 kilometres away.
“I just grabbed a day pack, I wore my trainers, oh, and I forgot my toothbrush so I had to buy one on the way,” she says, “I got onto the Thames Path, then the Ridgeway and then the Macmillan Way, but none of it was planned. I just went. I wanted to see what it was like if I got up to go to work but then didn’t catch my bus and instead just kept walking. It was a wonderful thing to do.”
Wonderful, yes. But was it an adventure? Well, considering the trip wasn’t plotted and prepared for, then no less an authority than Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer who beat Scott to the South Pole, certainly would have thought so. Though not in an approving way. “Adventure,” he claimed, “is just bad planning.”
His polar expedition was based on extensively tested skills, equipment and clothing, and his meticulous organisation included calculating how many of his sled dogs his men and the other dogs would eat on the return journey from the Pole. There was certainly no leeway for whims and forgetting your toothbrush on that trip.
Maybe not doing too much planning is a good thing when travelling in the modern world, especially if you do want to have adventures. It’s getting harder to find genuinely remote places and have authentic experiences in the manner of the explorers of the past. Almost anywhere in the world that could only be reached by long walks 50 years ago now has a road running to it, and an internet cafe at the end of that road. But does that mean that there are no travel adventures still to be had? Of course not. It’s just a question of how to do it.
Some take the Amundsen way, by training, preparing and equipping themselves to take on geographical extremes.
At the moment I’m following Sarah Outen’s blog as she prepares to row from Japan to Canada, the next stage in her 35,000 kilometres London-to-London kayak-cycle-rowboat circumnavigation of the globe. On a previous trip she rowed 7,500 kilometres alone across the Indian Ocean, so her current expedition probably has a good chance of success.
And then there’s Chris Duff who is preparing to row from Scotland via the Faroe Islands to Iceland. It’s his second attempt at the route. And I guess he’s done even more planning this time around. Chris’s voyage I can sort of identify with. He circumnavigated Ireland in a sea-kayak in 1996, 11 years before I paddled the same 1,600km of coastline. But there the similarities end. He was a proven sea-paddler and my experience was limited. I didn’t do much planning because I didn’t know what I was planning for. But I did have one thing in my favour; I had as much time at my disposal as the trip might take. Many months if, as it turned out, they were needed. That – taking as long as it takes to achieve something, rather than racing the clock – is another way of doing things. It’s not Amundsen-style, but the way of ‘slow adventure’. Slow adventure is similar to the whole ‘slow’ movement. Slow food. Slow towns. Slow sex. Slow travel. It’s all about enjoying the process rather than the result. Maybe not actually having a goal at all. It’s about taking time to appreciate what one’s doing rather than what one is hoping to do.
Anyone can have a slow adventure. It’s as easy as deciding to step out of your door one morning and just keeping walking. Or doing something new on the spur of the moment the next time you’re abroad. Adventure will follow. Just don’t plan on it.