Travel

Seven generations of my family lived in India—one of them gave Kipling his first job, another narrowly missed giving his name to Mount Everest—and my oldest cousin lived in the jungle collecting moths. My father was a test pilot. One of my earliest memories was of him flying a Vulcan bomber overhead, waggling its delta wings at us as we stood in our back garden. Returning from his “tropical trials,” he’d pluck from his flight bag impossibly exotic objects: a snake pickled in meths, a weaverbird’s nest. It was natural for me to assume that I too would have adventures one day.

I was aged ten when I solemnly announced my future profession: explorer. Whereas most mothers and fathers would have smiled in the expectation that their child would grow out of it, in our household my declaration was treated with silent resignation. Only my father was excited. “But that’s a wonderful thing,” he said.

I’d long since been dragging the whole family off on fossil-hunting ventures. I’d even converted the garden shed into a museum. No one much came to see it—but it didn’t matter. And here’s the key: I was driven—there’d be no stopping me anyway.

I think this must have comforted my mother. No gormless teenager this one. I knew my future, and I’d soon be off adventuring. Although she never gave up hoping that I’d get a “proper job,” she stoically enabled my dream: allowing me to live at home through the first impecunious years. She did what she could, and off I went to the Amazon on my first solo venture aged 22 and duly almost killed myself by contracting malaria. The second expedition, to New Guinea, wasn’t much healthier.

I was living life to the full, you’d think. Along the way I was shot at by Pablo Escobar’s mob in Colombia and marooned on a rock in the Torres Strait off Australia. On and on, until one expedition to the Arctic. Alone, separated on the pack ice from my dog team and supplies, I was again facing death. But this time, it was different.

My mother had by now died unexpectedly, of cancer. I still had my father, and a brother and sister, but it wasn’t the same anymore. Out on the ice, I realised that my launch-pad was gone—the nest I’d repeatedly flown had been ripped from the trees.

When I did find my sledge again, I knew I’d never risk my life again. It was cold out here, but discomfort on my journeys had always been bearable as long as the home fires were burning. They no longer were.

Whatever my true impetus for becoming an explorer, I see now I was addicted to change, stimulation, experience. I needed a fix. Adventure, like heroin, is very more-ish.

There are children—perhaps you know some—often born of diplomats or the armed forces, who are worldly before their years. They are forever restlessness, as if seeking a memory of something overwhelming. They feel the need to move on—just as I moved on, from the Amazon to New Guinea to Sumatra to the Gobi. It wasn’t explorer zeal, it was traumatic stress disorder. I was replicating the drama but in different terrain. Explorers are traditionally seen as heroes but their inner impulse speaks not only of a great quality in them but of a great lack. Explorers are needy.

Until now it has been a male-dominated activity, and much of this might be put down to territorial behaviour, a man’s urge to show off with flags and feats. For no useful reason, he walks to the Poles and so on. But, in the 21st century, will there be any future purpose for the explorer?

Although the last great land journeys have been done by my generation, we have left a colossal task for the next. Our misused planet will require our future explorers to be specialists: the geologist probing the volcanic vent, the zoologist peering into a bat cave. And I reckon there’ll still be empty places enough to wander besides. In the Namib, elephants will still stalk the dry river beds, feasting off Ana tree pods in hideaways between the rocks. In 2030 it will probably still be possible to ride a thousand miles across Mongolia without encountering a fence, or cross the Gobi desert with a camel, hearing nothing more than the pounding of its feet and the squeak of the harness of camel companions.

Skip a few years from my last adventure and here I am in Bristol looking out of the window and my daughter Natalya is upside down in the mulberry tree. My turn to do what good parents do. They encourage their offspring; then stand back, and watch them fly which way they chose.

So—and here I feel inspired by Barack Obama to commence a disgracefully saccharine homily of the kind he afforded his own daughters—go out and be an explorer Natalya, because otherwise you’ll feel less alive. If you’re anything like me, it won’t be a choice anyway. If you don’t obey it, you quickly go mad or slowly become sad.