Benuzzi's experience parallels that of the German Heinrich Harrar, who was captured in India in 1939 when he was on his way to climb Nanga Parbat. Harrer was interned near Dehra Dun, in sight of the Himalayan foothills, the heights of which (as in the case of Benuzzi's glimpse of Mount Kenya) inspired him to escape. After repeated attempts he succeeded, in 1944, making his way to Tibet, a tale he recounted in Seven Years in Tibet (1953).
Rowing Across the Pacific
GÉRARD D' ABOVILLE ROWED a twenty-five-foot boat from Japan to Oregon in 1991 and wrote about it in Alone. He had previously rowed a boat across the Atlantic ten years earlier, from Cape Cod to Brittany. This had been done before, but no one had succeeded in rowing across the Pacific alone. He set out late in the season and was pummeled by heavy weather, tumultuous storms, and forty-six-foot waves. There are no islands in the North Pacific. A Russian freighter offered to rescue him. "I was not even tempted," d'Aboville says. But he repeatedly overturned in the high waves and nearly drowned on his final approach to the coast of Oregon.
After he completed his journey he quietly returned to teaching survival skills in his Outward Bound school in Brittany.
Riding a Horse from Buenos Aires to New York City
AIMÉ TSCHIFFELY (1895–1954), a Swiss, rode ten thousand miles by horseback to New York. He had two horses, Mancha and Gato, and it took him three years, from 1925 to 1928. He crossed the Andes, the Darien Gap, and the length of Mexico, but not until he got to the United States did he have a serious problem: he barely survived being deliberately sideswiped by a lunatic motorist. The whole story is told in his best-selling book, Tschiffely's Ride (1933).
Swimming the Panama Canal
RICHARD HALLIBURTON (1900–1939) described his swimming the Panama Canal in his second book of travel, New Worlds to Conquer (1929). He had swum the Hellespont in his first book, The Royal Road to Romance (1925). He specialized in travel feats — the first documented winter ascent of Mount Fuji, sneaking into the Taj Mahal at night and bathing in the tank by moonlight, and other efforts — some actual feats, some silly stunts. In Seven League Boots (1935) he traveled through Arabia and Ethiopia, where he met and dined with Emperor Haile Selassie. He has been described as a tormented homosexual and an imaginative traveler and thinker. In his last effort, attempting to cross the Pacific in a Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, he was lost at sea and declared dead some months later.
His exuberant books, his purple prose, inspired a generation of youngsters to become travelers. In The Royal Road to Romance he wrote, "Youth — nothing else worth having in the world… and I had youth, the transitory, the fugitive, now, completely and abundantly. Yet what was I going to do with it? Certainly not squander its gold on the commonplace quest for riches and respectability, and then secretly lament the price that had to be paid for these futile ideals. Let those who wish have their respectability — I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic."
Circling the Poles
BETWEEN 1979 AND 1982, Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes (aka Ran Fiennes) traveled fifty-two thousand miles around the world on a polar axis, the Transglobe Expedition, with a partner, Charles Burton; the trip was mostly over land. Fiennes also attempted a solo expedition to the North Pole, but crashed through the ice and took his frostbitten self away, abandoning the Arctic. Other Fiennes feats: by hovercraft up the Nile to discover the lost city of Ubar in Oman, and running seven marathons in seven days, after undergoing double bypass heart surgery. His memoir Living Dangerously (1987) is highly hubristic but a readable account of his exploits.
The Ultimate Everest Experience
GÖRAN KROPP (1966–2002) biked seven thousand miles from Stockholm to Nepal (via Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan) and then climbed Everest, making an unsuccessful assault (without oxygen) and finally a successful summiting (at the same time as the Into Thin Air disaster, described by Jon Krakauer; see Chapter 10, "Travel as an Ordeal"). Afterward Kropp biked back to Sweden, being assaulted on the way by xenophobes and stone-throwing people. All the details are in his account of the trip, Ultimate High: My Everest Odyssey (1997). Kropp died from a fall while rock climbing in Washington in 2002.
Walking from Cape Town to Cairo
EWART GROGAN TREKKED from Cape Town to Beira, Mozambique, in 1898, and continued from Beira north through Nyasaland, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Sudan, and reached Cairo in early 1900. His account of the journey is From the Cape to Cairo: The First Traverse of Africa from South to North (1900). He was said to have done this in order to impress the father of Gertrude Coleman-Watt with his manliness and determination. He later married her.
Walking Around the World
FFYONA CAMPBELL (BORN 1967), restless, despised by her father, needing approval, feeling rejected, walked the length of Britain from John o' Groats to Land's End at the age of sixteen. She followed this up by walking across the United States, coast to coast, becoming pregnant on the way by a member of her backup team; before getting an abortion in New Mexico, she accepted lifts and lied about that to the press. Later she came clean. She also walked across Australia, and through Africa, Cape Town to Tangiers. An amazing, contrary, opinionated, and admirable woman, Campbell recounted her experiences in three books: The Whole Story, On Foot Through Africa, and Feet of Clay. She recently described herself (in Outside magazine) as "a retired pedestrian."
Youngest to Sail Around the World Nonstop
PERHAPS THE FUTURE of the travel book is the travel blog, with all its elisions, colloquial tropes, and chatty stream of consciousness. It is obvious from the circumnavigation of the Australian Jessica Watson that the great advantage of the travel blog — especially one reporting a feat-in-progress — is the way in which anyone with a computer can be in touch. The highs and lows of such a trip can be experienced and shared by the world in real time. What this trip demonstrated was the exuberance, resilience, and modesty of this sixteen-year-old sailor and her successful voyage.
Jessica Watson (born 1993) is the youngest person to have sailed nonstop, alone, and unassisted around the world. She left Sydney, Australia, on October 18, 2009, on Ella's Pink Lady, a thirty-four-foot sailboat, and arrived back on May 15, 2010. Had her trip taken four more days, she would have turned seventeen.
The 24,000-mile trip was very difficult and eventful — six knockdowns (the mast underwater), towering seas (35-foot waves), 70-knot winds, engine failure, torn sails, and occasionally dampened spirits. But Jessica was never out of touch, posting messages most days, and after each of the blog entries she usually received well over a thousand replies from well-wishers. The followers of her blog grew dramatically as she neared her home port. She posted videos, updates, photos, and news; her website even sold merchandise (caps, posters, etc.) online to fund her trip. In the manner of blogging, her circumnavigation had an interactive element, as she chatted back and forth with the people monitoring her progress.
The tone of her blog is so sunny, it is obvious that such a difficult feat can best be achieved by someone with a positive frame of mind, reminding me that difficult travel is essentially a mental challenge.