WILD AT HEART

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Habari.

By now, if you haven’t heard about the great Ohio Tiger Shoot, you probably live in the cave they originally said belonged to Osama. Several dozen top-flight predators, previously incarcerated for life without parole on some jamoke’s farm, were cut free by him, only to be cut down by lethal fire from some local sheriff and his band of trigger-happy merry men.

Let’s not even talk about how this jamoke – previously accused of animal abuse – was allowed to house (a polite word) these beasts. But to gun them down – most of them still on the property – defies my deep affection for all things wild, excluding, of course, the bloodthirsty human heart.

TigerNot that I delight in any human’s suffering (monetary or otherwise), but I was more than slightly amused to hear that one of the now-deceased Bengals took a “lion’s share” chomp out of its dead-by-suicide jailer’s hide, and that the last missing prisoner, an allegedly “diseased” monkey, was also probably snacked by one of the cats. Maybe so. But if you should live in the neighborhood, don’t go climbing any trees. I love horses, too. I ride them every Spring in the Altai Tavn Bogd, in northwest Mongolia. And still, I would’ve paid good money to see the jackass’s horses being chased by freed lions and tigers – something even the most demented screenwriter could not have dreamed, not in Ohio. No animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture. Right…

This all brings to mind the chimp mommy, in yet another dumb human trick, who was killed by her “baby”, an adult chimp, but not before she stuck a desperate kitchen knife into the troglodyte (another bizarre movie moment), followed by it attacking the responding peace officer in his patrol unit, and eating her best friend’s face off. Needless to say, the chimp was sent “home” to his ancestors by police-issue handgun, and in countless other homes in our fine land, some dumbass, somewhere, is anthropomorphizing some wild animal, to potentially disastrous consequences. If you’re moronic enough to house an adult chimp, please feel free not to give it Prozac. The animal is depressed because it’s living with you! I know we share about 98% of our DNA with chimps – but just look what that 2% difference can do: everything from operas to iPhones.

ChimpThe tiger shoot and this risible chimps-gone-bad story brings to mind a very entertaining flick I recently saw, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”, starring my favorite Aron Ralston (“127 Hours”) impersonator, James Franco (no relation, I’m told). Besides being a very clever riff on a jailbreak movie, and having a thing or two to say (a bit dogmatically, I might add) about animal testing, especially on primates, it offers a telling throwaway moment early on.

Franco, playing a scientist with a heart of gold who has an epiphany that testing on chimps is bad, takes his placid, cutesy, secretly sequestered chimp “child” for a stroll on a leash in Muir Woods, of all places. The preposterously large troglodyte, taller on his hinds than Franco, sees another robust house pet on a leash, a gorgeous Shepherd, barking his head off at them. Chimp baby, in a delightful show of primate loyalty – and strength – turns on the doggie and SNARLS. No, really snarls. Tails go between legs, involuntary wet patches in undies ensue, and suddenly we get it: chimp baby, for all the cutesy anthropomorphism, is WILD.

My Dog ChafuThe same pretty much goes for my dog, Chafu (“dirty” in Swahili; she loves to dig), a stout mix of Dalmatian and black Lab, and if you ask my neighbors and their dogs, some unidentifiable “fighting” breed. Not likely. She’s just pure dog. And if you ask Amy & me, the best dog in the world: the sweetest, lovingest, cuddliest, clowniest canine – indoors. But get her outside, where animals belong, and she’s – you guessed it – wild. Which is to say, an animal. She’ll insist on submission from other dogs less Alpha than she, and quickly submit to those moreso. She’ll defend the hearth from all intruders, including 400 lb black bears which I’ve seen her chase up a tree. More than once, fearlessly.

That’s what separates us, ultimately. For animals, when the gloves come off, they don’t know fear. They may not be dumb enough (like homo sapiens) to fight to the death, but when they do fight, they really know how to lean in. Not for blood, but for dominance. We lost that fine art, except perhaps in MMA, which at least allows the vanquished to “tap out” (submit) before the slaughter.

Well-trained as Chafu is, when I see the wild in her, I often wonder just how much domesticity she will tolerate, just how much she wants to run free. I’m ambivalent. If she broke out of jail like Franco’s chimp, never to return, and went on to lead an animal rebellion, of course we’d miss the hell out of her, but part of me would rejoice because deep inside I know she’s just on loan. A wild animal who entered into some unspoken compact with its doting feeders, on loan from some mythical forest where all the wild things are (thanks, Maurice Sendak!).

Which brings to mind another news moment, which if you missed, you’re probably living in the cave next to Osama’s: man returns to Zaire, seeking in the wild an orphan gorilla he helped raise and then released. Not knowing the result going in, I fully expected the man (or the gorilla) to die, but something far more heartwarming happened.

Which all goes to show that the bond we share with animals, whether “tame” or wild, transcends any label or cute outfits we can put on them. We share something primordial. They have been with us since the very beginning of our little jaunt on this planet (a mere several 100,000 years, if that, out of a total 5 billion). Paw ShakeWith us since we were acquiring crude tool making skills and speech. Our love for them lives in the depths of our oldest and most primitive Reptilian brain , and completes a part of us. As Romaine Gary said in his underrated novel about the elephant slaughter in Africa, for us, animals hold the Roots of Heaven.

But they are not us, and certainly not like us, and because of this, they should never be thought of as our “children”. Animals, especially Tier 1 predators, should never be kept in jail because they are, praises, wild at heart.

Here’s to you, lions and tigers. May your journey home be swift.

DOCTORS GONE WILD

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I was humbled to be invited to speak at the annual ExpedMed National Wilderness Medical Conference in DC, established by Greg Bledsoe, MD, Tusker’s consulting physician. Once a year, leading experts in Wilderness Medicine gather at this conference to share research, and new developments in their fields, including High Altitude Medicine . These docs, rockstars in their disciplines, extended me the honor of an invitation. My field experience, as it turns out, is of value to their research.

Doctors Summiting KilimanjaroI have much respect for them. They are world-class experts, heavy hitters all, and many use Tusker climbs to fulfill their CME (Continuing Medical Education).

They include Michael Callahan, MD, Program Manager for Biodefense and Mass Casualty Care at DARPA in Maryland; Timothy Erickson, MD, Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of the Chicago Center for Global Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago; David Townes, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, in the Division of Emergency Medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle; and of course, Greg Bledsoe, MD, an Emergency Physician and CEO of ExpedMed, an expedition and wilderness medicine education company that provides “best of service” educational opportunities for medical professionals.

At these conferences, I always learn something new related to mountain safety.

Our shared knowledge allows us to fine-tune the high altitude safety protocols that give Tusker its outstanding safety record, and reputation. Most recently, by re-calibrating Tusker’s Diamox protocol, our climbers have been acclimatizing much more efficiently, and thus, many more are summiting with fewer symptoms.

To all you docs at ExpedMed – asante.

I don’t think there’s a word in Swahili for it, but here’s a cosmic shout-out to astrophysicist Laurance Doyle, PhD, a Principal Investigator at the SETI INSTITUTE, who’s been a pal ever since the late ‘70s, when we scouted ancient archaeological rock circles at Namoratunga in northern Kenya.

Dr. Laurance DoyleLaurance led the study that just discovered a new planet, Kepler-16b, which in a turn straight out of STAR WARS, orbits two suns! Here’s an interview of Laurance on MSNBC.COM.

He’ll be leading our Solar Eclipse Trip in Australia in November 2012.

His groundbreaking research aside (marine mammal linguistics!), Laurance has a real gift for analogy. He once equated the Apollo moonshot to the improbability of a snail crossing the street and mounting the hubcap of a car speeding by at 60 mph! His descriptions of infinity using playing cards (what exists beyond the edge of Space?), and four dimensions using a laundry closet (can you even imagine it?) reveal his gift for reducing (if that’s the right word) the most complex scientific concepts into the mundane … for morons like me.

As they say in Cajun, lache pas la patat … don’t drop the potato, or in my world, keep your eyes on the summit.

OUT THERE

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Jambo.

At precisely the same time that my first Dispatch hit the Internet, celebrated mountain-climbing author Dave Roberts took out an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times on the very same topic: how satellite tech has made it so much easier and safer to get “out there”. Thanks for the serendipity, Dave.

Roberts was writing on the death of 81-year old Italian Walter Bonatti, perhaps the greatest mountain climber the world has known. In 1955, in an escape from certain death on a solo climb on the Petit Dru in the French Alps, Bonatti pulled off what is thought to be the single most important climbing feat in mountaineering.

Even Reinhold Messner, no slouch himself – the 1st to solo Everest without supplemental oxygen – said that as a climber, Bonatti was envied around the world because he was “too ahead of the curve, too alone, too good.”

A pioneer of granite-face routes in the French & Swiss Alps, it was Bonatti’s misfortune to be on the first successful ascent of K-2 in northern Pakistan with climbers who were so jealous of his prowess that they hid their final base camp, forcing Bonatti and a guide to spend a night out in the elements, denying them both the chance to summit. Scarred for life by the betrayal, and later sued for libel by the weasels for trying to tell the truth, Bonatti wrote that his “disappointments came from people, not the mountains.” Given the scumbaggery of his fellow climbers, you can see why he may have felt this way.

In his OpEd piece, Roberts rightly sings Bonatti’s praise as an adventurer who upheld the Code, “if you get yourself into trouble, you have to get yourself out.” (See “Petit Dru” above.) Roberts goes on to lambaste modern day adventurers who violate the Code, "Out There" in Africa Baobaband then laments that because technology makes it so easy to get out of trouble, it’s impossible nowadays to really get “out there”.

Like yours truly in my early Sahara days, when Roberts was making his bones in the Alaskan wilderness, he describes how he and his colleagues were “blissfully disconnected” and because of this, more “out there” and pure, I guess. He cites a few cases of hotdogs getting themselves into hot water and causing chaos (and in one case death) by calling in a chopper rescue. He concludes that because of the safety afforded by tech, modern day adventurers can never achieve the same “bliss” that he did, essentially pulling up the drawbridge to this great Bliss Castle behind him.

I beg to differ.

I can’t attack Roberts’ cred. I wouldn’t even try. He’s an accomplished adventurer and writer – many would kill to have just one of his careers. And though I’m Old School like him, I tend to take a more collegial, forgiving and inclusive attitude toward adventure and the people who seek it. Though I’ve seen and done a lot, I don’t think that adventurers belong to some elite club governed by arcane rules, which by their nature, are exclusive.

My only rule is simple: Do No Harm. To anything, or anyone, especially yourself.
As Bonatti’s K-2 story reveals, there are plenty of low-tech scumbags. And Roberts is not shy to point out the high-tech varietals. Both groups sink to the lowest common denominator to promote their feats, or conceal their flaws. As Bonatti so painfully knew, human nature is what it is – whether equipped with transponders, or crude mid-20th century oxygen bottles, which Bonatti and his guide were bringing up to their colleagues, when the weasels, incredibly, hid the camp. It sounds like an episode of LOST.

People do rotten things. Period. As Havard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Robert Kirshner famously said: “the strongest force in the Universe? It’s not gravity, it’s jealousy.” So let’s agree to condemn the selfish, the jealous, and the quislings, regardless their decade, and reliance (or not) on satellite. Bad character spoils more “bliss” than microchips.

Land Cruiser on barge crossing riverAnd yes, tech does allow you to take bigger risks. It does shrink the world (as I argued in my last Dispatch), making it harder to get “out there”. But you still have to go! That hasn’t changed. The Call (to adventure) is still the Call. And if it dials your number, you have to answer. In today’s world, you may have to work all the harder to find that state of bliss, but it’s all still there for the taking. You don’t have to be a card-carrying member of some exclusive “Back in the Day” club to have a real adventure. And you don’t have to risk your life! Nike had it right: you just have to do it, and leave all the judgments and rules to others.

I’ve sat on an ice shelf at 20,000 feet, eyeing the equatorial sunrise. I’ve been eye to eye with a Golden Eagle on the Mongolian Steppe, my hand feeling the iron-clad grip of its talon through the thick leather glove. I’ve seen the Milky Way shimmering like patchwork of celestial spider webs, on my back, in the sand, all alone in the Sahara. My bliss was no less intense because there was a sat phone in my pack.Equator Sunrise Bliss is bliss, Mr. Roberts, and no one can claim theirs is more pure, or greater. Do the math: the more people who get out there, safely, and feel the bliss, the better off this planet will be. Bliss is leverage against scumbaggery. And risking your life? Overrated.

Last Dispatch, I promised to list the 11 (not ten) places I want to do before I peg out: given the amount of miles Amy I and logged this year, I’d have to say Lake Tahoe ten times … then the jungles of Cameroon, north of Nanga Eboko, on the Sanaga River, where I hung briefly in the ‘70’s.

We’re off to Everest Base Camp, then Bhutan. See you “out there”.

YOU STILL NEED THE DREAM TO GET THERE

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Welcome to Tusker Trail’s new blog, written by yours truly, company founder and, with my better half, Amy, co-owner. But this isn’t really a blog.

“Blog” makes me think of something on the digital/tech divide, and what I’m trying to do here is decidedly un-tech. Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Luddite, in fact far from it. You could call me an early Early Adopter. I even owned the first prototype Sony Walkman for cassettes. On the contrary, to the Tech Gods I owe much. I love my iPhone, was self-building my Adventure Travel website before the advent of travel aggregators like Expedia & Travelocity, and remember carting around a Sat phone the size of Shaq’s shoe.

In case you’re saying “Who am I?”, here’s my CV.

  • Crossed the Sahara Desert 33 times – first time on a dare
  • Climbed Kilimanjaro 45 times
  • Installed the world’s first and only webcam on Kilimanjaro
  • Led Trans-Africa expeditions numerous times
  • Been charged by elephants, buffaloes, hippos and lions
  • Tracked poachers in Zambia
  • Led trips to five total solar eclipses
  • Been shot by Italian Caribinieri
  • Dined with cannibal kings
  • Serenaded pygmies in Zaire.
  • Hitchhiked around the world before my 21st
  • Swam the River Nile in Juba (try that now!)
  • Had tea with Touraegs north of Agadez
  • Came off my Bonneville @ 50 mph (and walked)
  • Dined on insects before you saw it on TV.
  • Shoveled chicken shit in the Golan Heights (try doing that now).
  • Quit on Aconcagua (couldn’t summit)
  • Charted ancient archaeo-astronomical rock formations in Kenya
  • I lead folks through northwest Mongolia on Horseback
  • And trek to Everest Base Camp
  • Saw Zep at the Whisky in L.A, prior to the release of their first album
  • Saw The Doors when Morrison was so drunk, his first word to the audience
    was a burp in the microphone

So it may walk and talk like one, but this is no blog. What I’m trying to do is pure throwback: recreate in modern terms the vibe of all the Old School Adventurers who came before me, in whose giant footprints I tread. Fearless, restless men (yes, excluding Gertrude Bell & Mary Kingsley, most were men), who faced great dangers and odds as they answered “the Call”.

They didn’t have Nikons or iPhones to capture the pride and perils of their epic journeys. No video to post on “walls”, to impress the less brave souls back home. They took along sketch artists instead, the documentarians of their day, who used pen & ink to capture the exotic images for the world to see. If they didn’t, there’d be no proof of their travels. And they needed proof, because some of the unlucky ones did amazing things, weren’t believed, and died in shame (Google James Bruce, one of the first white men to explore Ethiopia). I recall in my early days sitting in a tiny library in Zanzibar deciphering 5 first edition volumes of James Bruce’s TRAVELS TO DISCOVER THE SOURCE OF THE NILE, printed in 1790. (The letter “S” looked like an “F”). But that’s another story.

Like the daring but tragic Bruce, these Great Explorers also wrote dispatches. Their writings alone would prove their journeys. Volumes, recounting in great detail their adventures on the high seas and the road, though little of where they traveled was ever on a “road”.

Not that I need to prove my journeys – the photography & testimonials do that – but in the spirit of writing for interested people who don’t get to travel as much, here are my dispatches from my true home, the road. Where by hard knocks and dumb luck, I have become a student of adventure.

A “Roads Scholar”.

Looking back I can say that Adventure Travel, or what passes for it, has never been easier. Which is not to say it’s ever easy. You still need incredible desire and commitment to summit any great peak, whether the technical K-2, or the grueling ascent on foot up Kili.

It’s never been easier because the world has shrunk – thanks to all forms of tech like satellite, and the algorithms that make Twitter and Apps and the search engines tick.

Finding the great discount air ticket? Critical destination information? Safe hostels? The correct (or cheapest) vaccines? The right gear, down to what socks or quick-dry undies to wear? Some targeted keystrokes or “touching”, and even an absolute beginner can be good-to-go in no time. First came the speciality magazines, then came what South African rappers Die Antwoord humorously call “the Interwebs”.

Back in the day, not only did you not have quick-dry undies, you had none of these unbelievably helpful travel resources that are available today. All you had, in the truest sense of the word, was Word of Mouth. And with whatever “words” you could muster, you had to be baptized by fire and learn the hard way: by mistakes. And trust me, I made my share. Some life threatening, others just plain embarrassing.

Like the time I got shot (in the knee) by Italian Caribinieri in near Rome because I slept on a “sensitive” road – (the Red Brigades, don’t ask). Today, a simple iPhone search could have prevented that. There’s probably some Theme Park there now, anyway. Or when I got arrested in the bush as a spy by Zambian military during the border wars with South Africa, or in Benin, or Nigeria (both in the same year, 1977). GPS could’ve kept me clear of that strategically vital (not) bridge. And if that dinner with dead-and-buried Emperor Bokassa, butcher and reputed cannibal happened today? Because of his notoriety (a lesser Idi Amin), I’m sure I’d get posted on some global wall of shame and ruin my business and reputation forever. But that was then, and I rationalize by saying the King paid dear for those surplus German Army trucks, which, when down to my last 20 bucks, I rebuilt in In Salah in Algeria, with a paint scraper and a wire brush.  And that’s no lie.

The world seemed so much larger and so much more difficult to navigate back then. Before cell phones and Sat Phones. Before the PC, Mac or otherwise, (let alone the Internet), GPS, or iPad. Perhaps a time before many of you were born. The world was bigger back then because there were real mistakes to be made, mistakes you had to make in order to learn from. Other peoples’ lessons (good or bad) just weren’t there for the taking like so much low-hanging fruit.

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not here to look with nostalgia to “back in the day”, dining out on old stories. I live a life of risk and reward, driven by adventure, a life I could have only dreamed of as a kid. I’ve been there and done that and I’m still doing it. I’m looking back as a way of looking forward to the road ahead. And from where I sit right now, in Tahoe, it looks pretty damn good.

And I’m “dispatching” about it. Past, present and future.

What’s different now, and what a lot of people who did not travel pre-Internet may not know, is that information brings the world closer, makes it safer by illuminating all the pitfalls and potholes that are out there. As you start to realize your dreams of adventure, bear in mind how much all that data makes it easier to get there. And add my voice to the data – to information that may help. What hasn’t changed is that you still need the desire, the dream, to get there.

Here’s what I’ve been dreaming of: next July, Amy and I are going again to one of my favorite new spots: northwest Mongolia. With our company, Tusker, we’ve put together an ancient archaeology and photography workshop to UNESCO’s newest World Heritage Site, in the Altai Sayan EcoRegion in northwest Mongolia.

They call this area “the last great wilderness on Earth”. It’s so remote, so untouched and unspoiled by the last two centuries that it’s just you and the deep green valleys, eternal snow and glaciers, and the odd nomad, right where China, Russia, and Mongolia all meet.

And of course the thousands of ancient stone monuments, dating back 12,000 years (to the early Bronze Age), as well as exquisite, rarely-seen petroglyphs that bring this ancient pre-history to life. Did you see Werner Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”? You should. 40,000 year-old rock art in 3-D. It may get you cranked to come with us.

For this trip, Amy & I have teamed up with Dr. Esther Jacobson-Tepfer, one of the world’s leading experts on ancient archaeology in Mongolia, and her husband, Gary Tepfer, a professional photographer with broad international experience, specializing in landscape and art. Check out their gorgeous new atlas on the topic.

Between now and then, we’ll be trekking Kilimanjaro & Everest Base Camp, scouting a new trek to Bhutan and exercising my new bottlecap opener on our new boat, on Tahoe.

Before I forget: the dumbest Adventure Travel mistake I ever made was driving a truck across Africa with the wrong-sized lug wrench (for my wheels). I discovered this too late with a flat tire near Lisala in the middle of Zaire (now the Congo), and had I not “confessed” before a Roman Catholic missionary priest  – for the right tool, I could still be there today.

Next time I’ll tell you about the 11 places (not ten) I want to do before I take the ultimate journey, from which, as Hamlet so aptly said, “no traveler ever returns.”

Kwaheri.