THAT’S ME
Alastair Humphreys
37, ADVENTURER, KENT
Alastair Humphreys started questing out from his daily routine while at university. Summer holidays soon found him travelling, like most students, and going bike touring. But after graduating in 2001, he packed his panniers and set off to cycle round the world. Four years later, he made it back home again.
ince then, he’s dedicated himself to adventures of all sorts, including walking across India, rowing the Atlantic, crossing the Empty Quarter of the Arabian
Peninsula, traversing Iceland and paddling down the Yukon River. Thanks to his books, public speaking, blogging and social media, he’s now turned these adventures into professional career.
His latest venture is a concept he’s called microadventures: “At its heart, microadventures is about getting out of town and bivvying on a hill for an evening,” he explained.
Adventure is all about what it means to you. It’s everything from going somewhere new for a day to climbing Everest in winter alone. For me, it’s doing something I’ve never done or going somewhere I’ve never been – preferably somewhere wild.
Cycling round the world will be hard to beat. That was the big one for me. It was totally naïve: I just set off from my front door, no sponsors, no agenda, just went. I had no idea whether I’d even fi nish it until I was halfway round, but I decided that since I was then over halfway, I might as well keep going.
Modern adventure has been hugely changed by technology. Checking objectives on Google Earth, Tweeting experiences as you go, phoning school assemblies from the middle of the ocean, checking the satnav to see how far you’ve gone. But there’s no going back on that score.
As a kid, I was more in to TV than K2. Many people who are ‘professional adventurers’
weren’t necessarily the boldest, toughest kids at school. A lot of my early expeditions were based on trying to prove something to myself.
Rowing the Atlantic was the hardest thing I’ve done, physically. For the fi rst week I was constantly seasick. After that, a lot of the time the ocean was like a pond. The horizon is only about two miles away so you don’t get any sense of progression. There were four of us and we rowed two hours on, two off, non-stop for 45 days. We’d do it in pairs for about nine days at a time until we ran out of things to talk about and then switch partners.
Food is a very common topic of conversation on expeditions, and the gluttony you’re going to indulge in back home.
The greatest adventure ever, undoubtedly, was man going to the moon. The technological side is fascinating but, above all, the ballsyness of those three guys, strapped to a bomb, pointed at a lump of rock a quarter-of-a-million miles away.
I recently walked 900 miles across the desert from Oman to Dubai. I made a fi lm about it, and that made the experience very different. It made it hard to just enjoy a sunset without thinking I had to capture the situation. I couldn’t help but contrast it with the freedom of my fi rst adventure.
Extreme environments – oceans, ice caps or deserts – all have their own individual character. But travelling across them, the thing that strikes me is how similar they are. You’re isolated in a beautiful yet hostile place, totally dependent on your companions and equipment and constantly wishing you were somewhere else.
20 | 70TH ANNIVERSARY YEAR | FOR BRITISH CLIMBING AND WALKING SINCE 1944
Being a professional adventurer involves selling a part of your soul. You have to boast about yourself, write on your website in the third-person, promote yourself on Twitter, write and market books about yourself. It’s important to stay honest with yourself so you don’t become some sort of pantomime adventurer.
I do lots of motivational speaking, but I’d hesitate before preaching to anyone how to lead a good life – especially since I spend my life arsing around going on long holidays.
I’m a normal person. I just chose to do some things that weren’t that ordinary. People often think that adventures are something that only ‘adventurers’ can do. I started the microadventures thing as a way of breaking down that barrier, that misconception that adventure was something for ‘different’ people.
As my fi rst microadventure I circumnavigated the M25 in winter. It took a week and it was rather chilly. I remember seeing the lights of South Mimms services glimmering in the distance at night like the Promised Land. I ate there, bivvied in the car park and had a fried breakfast in the morning.
If someone in the UK had a weekend to spare and wanted an adventure then there are few things better than jumping on the sleeper train to some wild, remote part of Scotland.
I’ve travelled a lot of the world but I’ve not seen anywhere I’d rather make my home than Britain.
Interview: Niall Grimes. Photo: Alastair Humphreys: fi nding the adventure in every day. By Alex Messenger. Find out more at
www.alastairhumphreys.com.
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