Twitter is awash with Adventurers isn't it? People who have (for the most part) done extraordinary things, but who proudly and wonderfully claim it wasn't the thing they did that mattered, but the experience of doing it. There are loud proclamations of independence, of freedom and of corporate distrust. It's fascinating.
Amongst all of that, I've begun to feel like a bit of a fraud. Here I am talking about something I haven't even done yet! Cheekily, I'm looking for sponsorship and encouragement from people who've done simply ridiculously tough and life-changing things.
So I think it's important to draw a distinction between those amazing individuals, and lowly old me.
I wrote a blog in 2005/2006 when my wife and I jacked everything in, sold our house, got a clapped out camper van and meandered off into Western Europe for the better part of a year. We left with no real direction, no plans and our only known goal was to be in Chamonix some time in early December 2005 so we could run a chalet (without doubt the cheapest way to do a ski season, and great fun too).
We went on that trip because our jobs were sucking the life out of us, and I was almost certainly going to have some kind of itchy-foot induced breakdown. We wrote a blog because postcards and phone calls are expensive and my handwriting is shit. Our families read it to keep track and see what we'd been up to.
What an amazing time we had. Those days will live forever in my memory as some of the best of my life.
This isn't like that.
I'm not even sure that this qualifies as an Adventure at all. It's not really about being footloose, lost, free or wild.
Perhaps a better term is 'a challenge'. I've previously called it an adventure (I probably will again), because to me it seems pretty adventurous. But really it's a sustained ordeal, with known start and end points. It's the latest in a succession of cycling challenges I've been setting myself over the past few years. I want this to be difficult, nearly impossible. It might even be more rewarding and educational if it actually turns out to be impossible!
Don't get me wrong; it's not a race. We're going to one of the most beautiful places on earth, a place I've been to before and fallen utterly in love with. But also don't mistake this for a moralistic eco-crusade, or think that I'm trying to find the inner me. I am not Bernard Moitessier. I am not especially spiritual or deep. And I have no intention of jacking in my life and job to become an Adventurer living off $5 a day and blogging about it.
So. If I'm not an adventurer, then I'm either a challenger (which feels like I should be in a boxing match) or a masochistic tourist! Either way, a couple of weeks of hardship in a fatbike doesn't quite contend with riding around the world, packrafting the Ganges, climbing above 8000m or walking the Sahara. In my mind that's adventure, this doesn't quite qualify.
Anyway, I can get adventure anytime I want. I just have to sit in a large cardboard box with my 4 year old son, and we can be anywhere, doing anything we want.
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