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How do you choose your next adventure when there are so many options available?

 

How do you choose your next adventure when there are so many options available?

Wizarding up ideas for adventures is one of my favourite things to do. I find it enjoyable, exciting, but also easy. If I was a specialist I would need to search for something higher, harder and faster within my niche every time I wanted a new challenge. But because I am a generalist, I make the next adventure more challenging by making it differently challenging to previous projects. It is an important part of keeping adventure fresh for me.
I am surprised how often people tell me that they really want to do an adventure but don’t know what to do. Hopefully this walk-through of the way I come up with ideas might get your own adventure cogs whirring…

• Cycling round the world: I did not just leap straight in to this journey. I did plenty of test trips beforehand. I spent six exhausting days cycling round Scotland in the rain and down to Yorkshire. Then I spent two to three months cycling the spectacular Karakoram Highway, from Mexico to Panama and from Buenos Aires to Lima over the course of a few summers. I didn’t just leap into full-time adventuring: I tip-toed in, testing my skills, being sure whether this was really what I wanted to do.
From these rides I knew that I wanted to do more cycle touring. And I was ready to go bigger than I had done before. After that the idea just spiralled, really: ‘maybe I could cycle to India? If I get to India, I might as well carry on to Australia. If I get to Australia, I’m halfway around the planet; I might as well keep going. If I’m going to cycle round the world, I want to do the job ‘properly’. I should ride the length of the Earth’s three main landmasses, Africa, the Americas and Eurasia. I accepted that I’d need to tackle the journey alone because nobody I knew would want to pedal round the planet (though I kept nervously scrabbling around for a long time, trying to find a companion because I had never travelled solo before).
I’ll summarise this technique as ‘Test a small idea, then grow it to the limits of your enthusiasm and budget and time. Go big to avoid future regrets.’

• The Marathon des Sables: Running this 150-mile ultramarathon through the Sahara Desert was was my brother’s suggestion. He thought it would be a useful chat-up line. I was looking for a challenge and the self-proclaimed tag of the ‘toughest foot race on Earth’ piqued my curiosity and ego and overcame the stonking price tag.
‘Adventure as challenge and a fun bit of pub-boasting-fodder with your brother.’

• On foot through India: I’d never been to India and I’d never done a long walking journey. So far, so easy. But, where in India to go?! There are a million lifetimes’ worth of adventures to be had in India. I could have become paralysed by choice. Instead, I narrowed it down quickly by the Goldilocks Method. Time was my chief constraint here, so I needed to pick a route that was not too far for the time I had available, not too short; just right. Once I knew what distance I could cover, I only had to select a suitable river to follow (because following a river is always a good idea for a journey). I Googled ‘List of Indian rivers by length’, picked one, booked a cheap plane ticket and began.
‘Adventure through a process of elimination.’

• The South Pole: this is the biggest project I have been involved in that wasn’t ‘my’ baby. It is also the only one that I did not see through to completion, quitting before the expedition got off the ground. I suspect there’s a strong link between those two things. This idea began with me dreaming of Antarctica after reading loads of polar literature. But I knew that I did not have the polar credentials or the type of character needed to raise the enormous sponsorship sums required for a polar expedition.
So I began looking for an existing project I could get involved with, initially via the Royal Geographical Society in London. Around that time, I began making friends with lots of different folk in the adventure community, including Ben Saunders who was plotting an audacious return journey to the South Pole. Long story short: I partnered up with Ben and we spent five years futilely chasing sponsorship. Then I quit the team, Ben found the cash and a new partner and headed off down South.
‘Adventure through joining someone else’s idea.’

• Filming on the Arctic Ocean: Many of the best adventures are not the domain of people searching for adrenalin and excitement. Scientists venture into the earth’s most extreme environments in search of knowledge: adventure with purpose. I managed to tag along on a collaboration between explorers and scientists undertaking field research examining the surface layers of the Arctic Ocean. Whilst the scientists studied copepods and zooplankton trawls, my paid job was to use my outdoor experience and communications skills to help make the scientists’ lives easier and to tell the story of our weeks living under the midnight sun on the surface of the frozen ocean through blogs, photos and video.
‘Use your skills to get paid to have an adventure.’

• Iceland: I love to pick up a map and dive in. I ‘read’ maps like books, searching for patterns, oddities, round trips, beginnings and endings, mysteries and uncertainties. Look for where you have never been. Look for where people have been and told their tales, then tweak their story to create your own, or perhaps even look where nobody has ever been. Look, look, look and you’ll find ideas galore.
My idea for crossing Iceland came from such staring at maps. Oh look, a conical-shaped country of manageable size. What if I started at one shore, went up to the high land in the middle, then down to the other side? Beginning and finishing an adventure at the sea is always satisfying.
Once I had the framework for the trip I could fill in the details according to my whims: why not packraft the ‘downhill’ section? Why not carry a month’s food supply to make it all pleasantly self-contained?
‘Pick up a map and start scheming.’

• Rowing the Atlantic: In a similar vein to launching a polar project myself, I knew that I didn’t have the logistical gumption to ever put together an Atlantic row by myself. Therefore, when I received an email out of the blue asking if I fancied joining an expedition that was starting mere weeks from now, I knew this would be my only chance to row an ocean. I was more than happy to join someone else’s project and just do what I was told to get the job done. So I said, ‘yes’ even though I was busy, etc., etc.
‘Seize opportunities at the expense of regrets, even when they are inconvenient or expensive.’

• The Empty Quarter desert: This journey was a direct attempt to replicate a spellbinding story I had read in a book. Inspired by Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands, I dreamed of this trip for many years. But the logistics, faff and expense of dealing with camels kept putting me off. So in the end, I accepted my limitations and went for the dumb human-camel approach, swapping Thesiger’s wonderful camels for a ramshackle, homemade cart.
‘Pragmatic compromise based on a hero’s wonderful journey.’

• Busking through Spain: Yet another trip inspired by a book that I loved. But this time, I wanted zero compromise on the initial premise of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. I too would play the violin to earn money in Spain, even though I had never busked before. This trip was about specifically seeking a different set of challenges to the usual adventures I went on.
‘Ask what living adventurously means to you these days. Go and do that.’

• Walking around the M25: I hate the M25. Everyone does. Its humdrum tedium is the very antithesis of ‘adventure’. And yet, I was becoming increasingly convinced that ‘adventure’ was more about your attitude than your latitude. In which case, could I find adventure in the least-adventurous place I knew?
‘Adventure via hypothesis. Imagine how something less obvious might pan out.’

• Packrafting to Muckle Flugga: I was listening to the cricket on the radio when the lighthouse keeper at Muckle Flugga was interviewed during the lunch interval. I had never heard of Muckle Flugga. I learned that this was the northernmost tip of the British Isles. Somewhere extraordinary in my own country that I had never even heard of? I was hooked.
Adventure hatched through curiosity. Look close to home for newness, surprise and a romantic-feeling quest.’

• Sleeper train to Suilven: Suilven is my favourite mountain. It is a stunning, jagged shark fin that I had often looked at but never got round to climbing. Suddenly, an opportunity arose to get up to Scotland and do it. So I phoned a good friend who is always up for an adventure (so long as I come up with the ideas and sort out the boring logistics). After that it was just a greedy feast like when you pile chocolate ice cream on top of strawberry on top of vanilla and then douse the lot with double cream. We piled all our favourite means of transport on top of each other and were left with a pleasing-sounding mission: to get from central London to a tent on top of Suilven by sleeper train, bicycle, packraft and boot. Perfect!
‘Think of the places you love, the people you love, the adventures you love. Mix them together and make them happen.’

• A Single Map: I had been encouraging local exploration, microadventures, for many years. But I decided to go further after asking myself a series of questions. How can I help put nearby nature into everyday lives? If I love wild places so much, am I willing to not visit them in order to help protect them? Is a single map enough exploration for an entire lifetime? And so I decided to explore a single map. To search closer to my front door than ever before for the things that matter to me: adventure, nature, weather, wildness, exercise, surprises, silence, new people, wanderlust and curiosity. Far from feeling constrained, I immediately began seeing interesting-looking routes, possibilities for circular runs, secluded sites for overnight bivvies.
‘Adventure through a tight series of constraints and a focussed priority.’

If you found this post helpful, you might also benefit from reading The Doorstep Mile newsletter which discusses turning dreams into reality in detail. And in my book Grand Adventures I go into specific detail about planning expeditions.

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