In the year which has just past (my gap year : academic year 2002-2003) amongst many other jobs, trips, activities, successes and disasters, I was involved - in true Venture gap year fashion - in two expeditions. The first of these was a highly organised youth expedition with BSES Expeditions, a London-based group sending out annually large numbers of Britain's 16 to 25 year-olds to remote challenging environments for a summer's worth of punishment and discomfort. I chose the Amazon rain forest as my destination and was greeted with the initial problem of raising £3,000.
The second expedition was organised between myself and one of my old Tommies buddies and as such was relatively poorly organised and generally a bolder proposition since we didn't really know what we'd be letting ourselves in for! Canada and the Rocky Mountains awaited us.
After months of fund-raising I stepped off the plane in Iquitos, Peru as a part of the BSES Amazonas 2002 Expedition. The heat was immediately over-powering, around 38°C which would've been at least bearable but coupled with sky-high humidity levels we were having to drink constantly, right from the start, just to keep hydrated. We took a coach provided by Iquitos University into the secondary jungle outside the city where we found base camp. As the first day was coming to an end at base camp I was already desperately wishing I could go home. The entire party (around fifty people) was sleeping in a huge open sided cattle shed:- flies, wasps and ants irritated unceasingly, washing facilities consisted of a stream draining away from the outskirts of the city (thus containing a fair amount of effluent), the toilets were little more than a hole in the ground. I had drunk six litres of water that day, was still dehydrated and someone had accidentally put too much iodine in the drinking water making it undrinkable and people were throwing up everywhere!
In the ensuing days everyone went through jungle training with various rainforest experts and we prepared to leave. Everyone was getting hardened and habituated to the jungle's hardships and things improved somewhat. After around a week at base camp my group (twelve young people, a group leader/scientific expert and assistant leader) was transported to Iquitos river port where we joined a research boat heading out down one of the smaller tributaries of the Rio Maranon (one of the two major rivers that meet in Iquitos to form the mighty Amazon).
We travelled for three days away from any civilisation and more than a hundred miles beyond where any tourist might be allowed access. We came to rest at the side of the channel and docked there for a little over two weeks whilst we assisted in bio-diversity research work alongside native guides. The wealth and variety of life was astounding. Of course it has become something of a cliché to highlight this but in a single day you would expect to see tens of dolphins, hundreds of macaws, a number of monkeys, lizards, poison dart frogs and insects of shapes and sizes you would scarce believe. Rarer sightings included caiman (Amazonian alligators), poisonous vipers, vampire bats, anteaters, toucans and iguanas. The almost mythically elusive jaguar left only scarce signs of its passing.
When our work on the boat came to an end we moved to an area of white sand rain forest and set up a jungle camp. To get to the proposed site involved an eight kilometre walk-in carrying all our kit, science equipment and sacks of food supplies. Give me a Cotswold Marathon any day, despite the relatively small distance the climate, the terrain and the sheer weight of kit made this one of the most arduous treks I had ever endured.
On arrival we slung up hammocks and prepared a cooking area. In the period at this second location we acted as research assistants to a study on rain forest bats, rigging up huge nets to catch them as they flew through the trees at night and then retrieving them with thick gloves as they struggled viciously to escape, so that they could be kept for identification at the university. Those who were not involved in the bat work at one time or another went on lighter weight adventure treks in the surrounding area. These were over several days so we would take some food with us, a stove and hammock kits and then head off.
The dry season was now coming to an end and overnight on one of these trips a storm the like of which I couldn't even have dreamed of broke out across the sky, lashing the forest with a torrent of rain. The following morning, returning to camp, streams we had bridged without a care and tiny, innocent puddles we had side-stepped on the way out had been transformed into huge swamp-like areas to cross. Some we could walk through by carrying our packs above our head and walking up to our necks in water but in one area it had risen so high we had to build an impromptu raft to carry our kit in stages and then swim across after it!
Sooner than we could imagine the expedition drew to a close and we were back at base camp. Between us all, four people had suffered from malaria, one had been bitten by a piranha, a group working from a dugout canoe had been tailed by a caiman, a group had a dodgy encounter with a fer-de-lance viper, an entire research group camp had been flash-flooded in a storm and various people received excruciating stings from tropical hornets (myself included). So the jungle had proved as excitingly hostile as we'd all secretly hoped!
After a few days in the Peruvian capital of Lima and a pleasant walk in the Andean foothills we returned to the UK. Having lived life at a constantly more aware and intense level in an environment that stimulated relentlessly it was a somewhat unpleasant experience to return home. The conveniences of Western living mean that you can get by from day to day with almost no effort at all. It was boring and I was depressed by it.
A month later I had booked flights to Canada and was planning an expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Unable to fill the void after my return I had sought a new project into which to drive my energies. I found a game companion in Richard Scott, an old school friend and set about feverish research. By the new year, after many dead-ends ,frustration and much re-planning I had a location, a route and a time scale.
Richard and I arrived at Heathrow on the 30th of March, we had not known each other that well at school so perhaps some of the adventure would come in living in each other's pockets for several weeks. Disaster struck almost immediately! Eagerly toasting the start of our odyssey in the departure lounge bar we came within minutes of missing our boarding for the first of our flights, to Boston! An innate quirkiness meant that on booking our routing to and from Canada I intended on flying via as many cities as possible to view them from the sky and enjoy an increased number of free meals and snacks. For the same price as a direct flight we took in Boston and Chicago en route to Calgary and for the return we had hoped to stop off in Dallas and then New York but in the time prior to the thirtieth, American Airlines cruelly rescheduled us.
Having been dazzled by Chicago's concrete obelisks and bright lights we arrived in Calgary, Alberta in the late evening and managed a cosy night's sleep on some airport benches. The next morning substantially jet lagged and having had no sleep to speak of we set off undaunted on to the streets of Canada's wealthy, sophisticated oil capital. Calgary is a big city but with a personal feel; it heaved with entertainment for the curious visitor and after our couple of days there recharging our batteries for the big things ahead of us a sort of homely attachment developed.
Onward now though, westward, through the night and across the Great Divide to Vancouver. Travelling along a high mountain road in the Coastal Mountains, Richard and I looked out over a forested mountain valley. Many of the trees were almost frosted with icicles hanging from them and the snow looked feet deep, it must've been perishing cold out there. We looked at each other, worried, but not in the concerned way of responsible adults, in the excited, amused way of youth where one fears one may have made an error of judgement but is fascinated to see what horrors may arise from it!
Vancouver was brooding, put upon, as it usually is in spring, by its maritime climate. There were occasional starts of rain and a cloudy grey gloom hung over the city. Breaks in the cloud weren't that infrequent though and when the sun shone on this sprawling metropolis, built across numerous islands and peninsulas fringing the Pacific Ocean and back-dropped by the impressive Coastal range, you could see that it was one of those 'cool' cities, rather like Miami, San Francisco or Cape Town. Vancouver had it all, the glamorous architecture, the endless shops and services, the cosmopolitan lifestyle of the big city combined with beaches, surfing, world-class skiing and unspoilt wilderness on its doorstep.
My companion and I wanted to be Vancouverites; we did our best for three days. About-heel to the east, stocked up with supplies from Vancouver we had a thirteen hour journey to the location of our wilderness adventure. We jumped off the bus in Yoho National Park at 7am. We were flanked by soaring peaks on either side, thousands of frosted trees smothered their bases before giving way to magnificent snowy faces. We were in a tiny hamlet called Field. It seemed the Kicking Horse River had tried manfully to pass through the settlement but a winter of temperatures in the minus thirties had brought that to a ruthlessly abrupt halt.
Before heading off anywhere we needed a hearty meal to set us on our way. Out the back of a gas station a West Indian ran a café and whipped us up a breakfast which should've kept us from hunger for days. I asked him why he'd forsaken the delights of the Caribbean weather for a place like this, there were a million answers he could have given but he admitted he questioned the sanity of the decision just a few weeks back when his eyelids nearly froze shut walking from his car to the kitchens!
A cheery farewell and off we went. It was cold, but not bitterly so. We had wrapped up warm and the weight of all our kit and supplies made for hot work. Starting down the small approach road we would come to the Amiskwi River Pass, a snowbound and long disused route through a mountain valley into the heart of the wilderness. The park warden had said that we would be the only people anywhere in the fifty kilometre valley for the duration of our excursion. Once in the valley the only civilisation we could reach would be Field, north, west or east it was quite some distance and over quite a few mountains to help. We would get as far up the valley as we could with our supplies and return within ten days.
Arriving at the start of the route we found it was snowbound to perhaps more than three feet in places. We donned our snowshoes and made tiring and slow progress. The night of our first camp we lay down conifer branches on the snow and then set up the tent over them, we then organised a cooking area around a hundred metres away so that any bears that might be attracted by the smell of food would mosey around there later rather than butcher us as we slept. All the food and cooking gear was put in a day-sack which was tied to some paracord and hoisted way up high in a tree near the cook site so it couldn't be reached by Yogi and co.
The following day proceeded in the same fashion with us making a little more progress before bedding down. Before sleeping Rich gave me an earpiece, Black Sabbath, storm samples played out in the background "That's just what we don't need tonight." I said like a bore. I'd tempted fate. Very early the following morning a thunder driven downpour descended on the region. The trees around us creaked as they swayed worryingly and slowly but surely the rain broke through the tent's defences and everything was getting soaked. Wet and cold are of course a bad mix, my feet suffered worst but soon that didn't matter because I couldn't feel them to know they were there in any case. The rain continued and it was miserable, eventually it became apparent that if the rain didn't stop, or even if it did but the weather was to snap really cold again then we would be ill-equipped to live deeper in the wilderness.
At 10am we charged out of the tent into the storm and broke camp for a lightning fast hike back to Field. Disheartened by our comprehensive failure and reluctant to retrace our footsteps again, after we had dried out we spent a while travelling around the various settlements of the mountains, camping for a few days here, in youth hostels for a few days there, we snow hiked elsewhere, snow boarded one day, rock climbed another before returning to Calgary for an end of trip blast at all our favourite spots. Our return was punctuated by a stopover in Chicago, but 'the windy city' is altogether a different story.
Having been back in the UK for a few months now and after the modest but significant experience of going it alone in the wilds a far more ambitious plan is now in the offing. A rejoining of some of the old Amazon stalwarts has led to initial proposals being submitted for funding for a three hundred kilometre trek in Mongolia. I know for a fact that I wouldn't have made these trips had it not been for those Friday evenings in a converted garage in Gloucester and thanks must go to Phil Brown and all those exec teams who provided the opportunities to gain experience in the past which I am now putting to hearty good use wherever I can.