How to make a rollickingly good adventure film

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MAKING A FILM about your own adventure has never been so easy. With the size of cameras shrinking daily, editing software so simple your granny could use it, and an ever-multiplying array of video content outlets, the climate is ripe for even the most technophobic adventurer to create their own film.

To avoid your Emmy-winning hopes ending up unwatched and unloved somewhere in the dark recesses of YouTube, have a gander at these 10 simple tips to self-filming.

1. Get the right kit for your environment and familiarize yourself with it before you go. Something small, robust, easily rechargeable, and able to withstand extremes of temperature is ideal.

2. Adventures often take place in remote locations devoid of power sources, so you need to consider how you’re going to charge your kit. In-car power inverters (for vehicle based adventures such as the Mongol Rally) and solar chargers are two options.

Doing The Adventurists Mongol Rally in style

3. Don’t shoot hours and hours of footage. Sixteen hours of fast-moving tarmac isn’t interesting for anyone and when you get home you won’t want to trawl through this to find the only three decent shots.

4. Create a story. A 10-minute film, cut to music, with no dialogue and no engagement with characters, is boring. Create a beginning, a middle and an end and as much as possible use piece to camera dialogue and voice over.

5. Film the bad bits. Jeopardy and adversity are what makes a good story. Film yourself being sick, crying, arguing with your companions…anything with a bit of drama.

6. When doing an interview or shooting something static like a view or a sunrise always use a tripod. If weight is an issue then try the Gorillapod. As well as making a sunrise look fabulous it can also be wrapped round handlebars or strapped to backpacks.

7. Keep it simple — get your subject in the frame, hold shots still, and avoid crash zooming, panning, and tilting. Unless you’re a professional or have a dolly track, anything but a still shot will generally look awful.

8. General views are always useful for editing. Get shots of scenery, clouds, sunsets, people, villages — anything that illustrates your experience and the place you are traveling through.

9. Don’t forget the sound. This is a classic amateur film-makers faux pax and can render even the most beautifully shot film useless. How are you going to record sound? Can you use a radio microphone? How good is your camera’s inbuilt mike?  If you’re using something simple like a Flip, with an inbuilt mike make sure you’re out of the wind, in as quiet a location as possible and as close to your subject as possible. If you want broadcast quality sound, be prepared to invest a bit of money in it.

10. Shoot from lots of interesting angles; shoot wide, medium and tight. Get high shots, low shots and panoramic views. This will make for a much more dynamic, visually interesting film once you cut it all together. Whatever angle you are shooting from, though, make sure the camera is as still as possible.

Once you’ve filmed and edited your adventure the next step is finding an outlet for it. Getting broadcast commissions may be harder than crossing the Darien Gap, but there are a growing number of excellent adventure film festivals out there clamoring for quality content.

You never know, you may even win a prize.

Filming the tuk tuk action in Kazakhstan

A version of this article originally appeared in Adventure Journal

UXO clearance, a Laos wedding and a spot of turbo-pampering: a sneaky peek behind the scenes of a BBC shoot

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A few days ago I crawled off the plane to England in a state of total exhaustion after nearly a month in Vietnam and Laos filming a programme for  the BBC. The show, due to air on BBC2  in May, tells the story of two female presenters driving a section of the legendary Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam and Laos.

The Trail, a 12,000 mile network of roads and tracks that cut through the jungles of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, has been hailed by many as one of the greatest feats of military engineering of all time, and the reason America were never able to defeat the North Vietnamese.

We filmed our presenters as they tackled a perilous, UXO-contaminated 800 mile section through the jungles and mountains of Laos and Vietnam.

Here are a few of the more memorable moments from the shoot.

The UXO legacy in Laos

The statistics relating to America’s bombing of Laos are hyperbole defying. In their efforts to cut the Trail the US flew 580,000 bombing missions, dropped over 2 million tonnes of ordinance and gave Laos the deadly accolade of being the most bombed country in the world. The legacy of this still exists today: 50,000 people have been killed by UXO in Laos since 1964 and around 200 people still die every year.

Inert UXO outside a cafe in Sepon, Laos

This was a key aspect of our story and near Sepon, Laos, we filmed a private UXO clearance team run by the MMG Sepon Mine. The team leader was a Swedish ex-special forces giant of a man called Magnus, cooler than a winter’s day in Magadan and harder than Rambo on steroids. Magnus has worked in every bombed hellhole on the planet, and his geographical resume reads like an FCO warning list: Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Bosnia, Kosovo. “Sudan was terrible”, he admitted, “But this is still the most bombed place on earth”. Just that day his team had uncovered two live 750 pound bombs and a phosphorus bomb, within feet of the main road to the mine.

Magnus was entirely unflappable, and had soon become the collective object of desire of the whole crew.  Even one of the presenters, who isn’t strictly into men,  was soon giggling like a smitten teenager. By the time the interview was finished we’d christened him Magnus the Magnificent. There’s something unbelievably admirable and utterly intriguing about a man who risks his life daily to dispose of bombs for a living. When we asked him out for a drink that night he replied “I never drink, not when I’m working with bombs”. What a splendid chap.

The next day we encountered a very different type of UXO clearance, two women using $10 metal detectors to illegally search for scrap metal. Despite the danger, the people in this area of Laos (Khammouane and Savankhannet provinces) are so poor that they risk their lives in order to search for UXO, which they can then sell for around 30 cents a kilo. One of the women had a cluster bomb in her basket – a potentially fatal find. It was heart-rending to see poverty driving people to take such drastic measures simply to put food on their family table.

Illegal scrap metal collectors, Laos

Meeting the Misty Pilots

It can be hard not to instantly vilify the Americans and what they did here when you see first hand the extent of the UXO problem in Laos, a country which remains one of the poorest on the planet. But war is a multi-faceted beast and it’s only too easy to condemn with the benefit of hindsight. So it was fascinating to get the chance to interview Roger van Dyken and George Buchkowski, two members of the elite US Misty Squadron, a 157-strong force of experienced fighter pilots whose sole task during the war was to knock out the Trail.

Both men, like a number of US Vietnam veterans, have returned to the country they were once at war with numerous times. Hearing their story, and how they are now friends and ‘brothers’ with some of the men they once fought against was testament to the astonishing power of forgiveness, and how you should never judge a man until you’ve walked a few miles in their shoes.

A rather impromptu Laos wedding

One evening the whole crew somehow ended up at a Laos wedding that was going on in a field outside our hotel. Around a hundred guests were gathered around a towering stack of speakers, drinking copious quantities of Beer Lao and dancing to blaring live music. Before we knew what was going on, Tui, our translator, had grabbed the microphone and was speaking rapidly in Lao. He then switched to English, looked at us mischievously and announced ‘BBC crew, you must all get up, stand in the middle and dance’.

Shit.

There was no escape.

A hundred expectant faces swivelled towards as we shuffled into the glaringly empty dancefloor. It could have gone so wrong, but somehow, without saying anything, we all came to the same conclusion; if we were going to dance, we had to do it properly, there was no room for British reserve. As the band struck up all eight of us broke out into the most idiotic, extravagant dance moves. Hips swung, eyebrows waggled, arms were flung in the air, knees grooved – it was like some ridiculous scene from Pulp Fiction. By the end we were all weak with laughter and the audience was baying for more. It wasn’t until 2 a.m that we all staggered off the dancefloor to bed.

The End – and some much needed turbo-pampering

Suffice to say, much of the accommodation on the shoot was pretty basic, so what a joy it was to roll  up to the 5* Fusion Maia resort in Da Nang on the last day of filming. I’m not normally one for perfectly manicured resorts, I generally find them dull, claustrophobic and overly obsequious. But a day at Fusion Maia after the rigours of the last few weeks was just what we needed. Private villas with swimming pools, a luminescent white-sand beach, buckets of gin, all-inclusive spa treatments and a bath you could do lengths in. Joyous.

The Beach at Fusion Maia, Da Nang

If you want to find out more about the UXO problem in Laos and what you can do to help, please visit www.nra.gov.la.

Some of the key NGOs working in UXO clearance in Laos are:

MAG International

Norwegian People’s Aid

Handicap International

UXO Laos

2012 – a Palm Oil free year?

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I consider myself a fairly ethical individual. Not a goat-rearing, hair-shirt wearing, placard-waving vegan: but the sort of person who recycles, buys ‘ethical’ products, says no to plastic bags when I can and is generally environmentally aware. OK so I fly and I drive a petrol-powered car, so I’m no ethical saint, but I think I’m on the right track. Yet there is one thing I am doing every single day, mostly unwittingly, that’s arguably more harmful to the planet than owning ten Hummers and flying to New York fifteen times a year: using Palm Oil.

By now, most of us will have read somewhere about the evils of Palm Oil, perhaps registered something about the fact that Palm Oil = destruction of the South-East Asian rainforest. But aside from thinking ‘Oh, that’s awful’ before putting down the newspaper and carrying on with your day, how much have you really considered the matter, or thought about quite how much you  - we all – use the stuff?  The scary truth is that Palm Oil is in 50-60% of the products we use and consume. We brush our teeth with it, moisturise our faces with it, wash our hands in it, spread it on our toast, feed it to our dogs and eat it daily. This dastardly oil sneaks its nefarious way into every nook and cranny of our existence.


Take my bathroom as an example. An examination of its contents last night revealed over six products that had it lurking in their ingredients. And all the products in my bathroom are made by ethical brands who trade on being green, paraben free, against animal testing etc.

Palm Oil plantation next to virgin rainforest, Borneo

Even worse, Palm Oil comes in a number of disguises. Very rarely will it reveal itself simply as ‘Palm Oil’. Instead it hides under a confusing array of pseudonyms such as; elaeis guineensis, sodium lauryl sulphate, sodium laureth sulphate, cetyl alcohol, stearic acid, isopropyl, palmitate, steareth-2, steareth-20 and fatty alcohol sulphates. Apart from needing a PhD in pharmacology to comprehend this labelling, you also need to go around with a list of these names in order to banish it from your shopping basket. And there is absolutely no law in the UK which forces companies to state simply whether a product has the evil oil in or not.


Why should we give two hoots about Palm Oil though? Why the fuss? Well, it always helps to see things first hand, and I’ve been fortunate enough to spend some time working in Malaysia and Indonesia, and to witness the catastrophic effects of Palm Oil production with my own eyes. The South-East Asian rainforest is the oldest consistent rainforest on earth, with a biological richness and diversity unequalled even by the Equatorial or Amazon rainforests. Yet thanks to the rapacious growth of Palm Oil, these forests are being destroyed at a terrifying rate. Borneo and Sumatra, once covered in primary rainforest, now have barely any left. Rather, both islands have been covered in thousands of hectares of uniform ranks of Palm Oil plantations. Orang Utangs are vanishing, the Penan nomads have nowhere left to go, the Sumatran tiger is almost extinct and countless other species of flora and fauna are teetering on the edge of existence. Moreover, if we humans destroy all the rainforests on this planet, we are cutting down our lungs and humanity will not be able to survive. It really is that simple.

Wild Orang Utang, Borneo, 2008

It may sound dramatic, but making a stand against Palm Oil and trying to save the last of South-East Asia’s rainforests could be the single most important thing in terms of saving our planet. So why not try and make 2012 a Palm Oil Free year? Isn’t our planet worth it?

Palm oil facts*

  • 90 per cent of Sumatra’s orangutan population has disappeared since 1900. They now face extinction
  • 90 per cent of wildlife disappears when the forest is replaced by palm, creating a biological desert
  • 98 per cent of Indonesia’s forests may be destroyed by 2022 according to the United Nations
  • 43 of Britain’s 100 top grocery brands contain or are thought to contain palm oil

How to spot Palm Oil

Palm Oil is hidden in products under numerous guises – here are a few of the main culprits.

Vegetable oil, Sodium Lauryl Sulphates, Sodium Dodecyl Sulphate, Palmate, Palm Oil Kernal, Palmitate, Stearic Acid, Glyceryl Stearate, Elaeis Guineensis, Steareth-2, Steareth-20, Hydrated palm glycerides, Cety palmitate & ocyl palmitate (anything ending with palmitate)

Some common products that contain Palm Oil

Philadephia cheese, Heinz baked beans, Pedigree Chum dog food, Hovis bread, Persil, Flora margarine, Head & Shoulders shampoo, most biscuits and chocolate.

Here’s a link to an exhaustive list of products with and without Palm Oil

A few brands that don’t use Palm Oil
It is possible to find food and cosmetic products that don’t contain Palm Oil and there are alternatives – it’s just that Palm Oil is cheaper and easier to produce than the alternatives so most brands use it. 30 years ago, it was hardly in anything…
Alpine Coffee Shop, Betws-y-Coed, Wales
Little Satsuma beauty products

Please note, many brands now use RSPO (Responsibly Sourced Palm Oil). However, there are questions over this and the best policy is to avoid it altogether.

*Source: The Independent

 

 

30,000 miles around the world in a wheelchair – put this in your adventure pipe and smoke it…

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Last month, at the Royal Geographical Society’s Explore weekend in London, I was quietly sipping on a cup of Early Grey on the Sunday morning, nursing a small hangover, when I was introduced to a chap called Andy Campbell. Well blow me down, I nearly choked on my tea when Andy told me what he was setting off to do in 2012.

Feeling that this wondrous news should be shared with as many people as possible, I tracked him down for a bit of a Q&A about what his forthcoming odyssey holds in store.

***Warning: please place any drinks safely on the table before reading the below.***

Hello Andy, so, tell me, in a nutshell, what you’re embarking on in 2012?

I’m setting off from the UK to travel 30,000 miles around the world in a wheelchair and raise £1m for charity. The world isn’t really designed for wheelchairs though so I’ll be using whatever arm-powered transport I need to keep going and complete a continuous route from the UK to China and then from Alaska to Chile.

Holy Moly, that’s one hell of a mission. Was there a definable Eureka moment when you suddenly thought, ‘By Jove! That’s it! I’m going to go around the world!’?

It’s always been in the back of my mind. I think everyone dreams about travelling around the world some day and I was no different, but ironically It wasn’t until after I became paralysed that I had the freedom to think about it seriously. I’d joined the Army straight from school which gave me a huge taste for adventure but I’d never had the chance to go out and really explore the world on my own terms. So when I was medically discharged following my injury I decided to take a year out and have a look around. Somehow, what was meant to be just a year turned into eight years of adventures and travels that have given me the experience and knowledge to make going around the world in a wheelchair attainable. Last spring, just as I was getting ready to commit to the idea of going around the world I hurt my shoulder skiing and couldn’t even push a wheelchair at times. I thought that was the end of the dream and that my shoulder would never be up to the challenge, but as I went through rehab and slowly recovered, I began dreaming again. The day after scans showed my shoulder was fully recovered I went out and did ten miles in the wheelchair for the first time in months. Before I’d gone five miles I knew I was going to go around the world.

Run me though some of the specialist kit you will be using on the trip.

There’s a huge amount of specialist kit I’ll be using on the trip where a normal wheelchair just won’t cut it. I’ve got a special all-terrain wheelchair that I affectionately call ‘the tank’ because it rolls over just about anything and is fitted with massive mountain bike wheels and off-road tires. Then there’s my handcycle, which is specially built with two gearsets and allows me to get really low gear ratios for tackling steep climbs and muddy terrain off-road. I’m also spending a good amount of time on the water so my kayak is another vital piece of kit. It’s a normal18ft sea kayak I’ve had fitted with a custom outrigger for stability and load carrying, I call it my Hawaii Five-0 boat. On top of all that I’ll be taking gear I need to paraglide, ski, rock-climb and even kite-buggy.

How the blazes do you train for this sort of odyssey?

It’s difficult! Obviously it’s a massive physical challenge which means lots of training and miles in the wheelchair, handcycle and kayak. I live in Scotland so there’s no shortage of Forestry Trails and hills to give me a good work out and I’ve been dragging an old tire behind the wheelchair to add resistance, which gets some funny looks! But it’s also really challenging technically and mentally, I’ll have to constantly adapt to the terrain and conditions along the route without ever being able to just get up and walk around things that aren’t navigable in a wheelchair or handcycle. So I’m spending a lot of time inventing and practising techniques with rope systems that will get me out of tight spots. I’m planning on paragliding throughout the expedition whenever the weather’s suitable, but reliable weather forecasts won’t be easy to find in the middle of nowhere, so I’m studying meteorology too.

Which bit of the journey keeps you awake at night?

All of it! I spend so much time concentrating on individual sections and stages, mentally zoomed in to an area I know is going to be tough, so it’s easy to forget the sheer scale of the complete trip. I’ll zoom out and see the stage I’ve just been focusing so much time on is almost a speck on the absurdly long line marking my route and it blows my mind. Seeing that line marking my route continually stretching further and further no matter how far I zoom out is a recurring night panic that started when I realised even an astronaut on the International Space Station can’t look down at the earth and see my full route!

It’s going to be brutal slogging through Mongolia and I’m convinced I’ll be reduced to counting the miles covered each day in single digits if the terrain and weather conspire against me there, so physically that’s the bit that scares me the most. One of the most important aspects of the trip for me personally is maintaining the integrity of the expedition and covering those 30,000 miles as a continuous unbroken route without any gaps, so The Darien Gap between Panama and Columbia scares me too. It’s a 100 mile section of inaccessible swampland and rainforest that essentially separates Central and Southern America, and is the only part of the route I might not be able to stick to. Trying to cross it overland would be difficult for a dedicated expedition and isn’t an option, I’d like to paddle around it but logistics, bureaucracy, FARC rebels and drug cartel gunboats suggest it might not be the best idea.

Andy on the road

What sort of support crew will you have? And are you looking for volunteers for this?

The huge amount of equipment I need to take along with me means the expedition just isn’t feasible without a two-person support crew and vehicle accompanying me along the route to carry everything. The full expedition is going to be on the road for two years which is a big commitment for anyone, so I’m opening up spaces for people to join the support crew for 3 months at a time. Applications are open to anyone with relevant knowledge and experience, details can be found at pushingthelimits.com/join-the-team.

I’ve got a UK based support crew to help with bureaucracy, logistics and ransom demands. Duncan Milligan from tourdeforceuk.com is the logistics guru who’ll track down everything from a replacement wheelchair castor in Kazakhstan to a way of evacuating the entire team from a political revolution in El Salvador. And the bureaucracy warriors at thevisamachine.com are my lifesavers when it comes to visa applications,  government permissions and overcoming all border hassles, which is pretty vital when I’m travelling through 30 different countries.

In one line, what’s your message to people out there?

Die living.

 Finally, here’s a little video from Andy……

To find out more about Andy please see www.pushingthelimits.com. He will be speaking at The Adventure Travel Show at London’s Olympia on the weekend of 28/29 January 2012.

Need some visas? Check out The Visa Machine, Andy’s Bureaucracy Warriors….

Shamans, pygmy chiefs, hospitalisations and gun-wielding bodyguards..the weirder side of international adventure wrangling

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After three years, eight months and three days of gallivanting around the globe organising ridiculous adventures, I have finally departed the cosy bosom of The Adventurists’ employ. Making the jump has felt rather like splitting up with a long-term boyfriend, and telling Mr Tom and Mrs Jen, The Adventurists’ Chiefs, of my departure, felt akin to that ghastly, gulping moment when you tell your other half it’s all over. But a freelance life of writing, adventure and no doubt far too much gin calls, hence the gusset-wrenching decision to leave the life of an International Events Wrangler behind.

Before I begin the next chapter of This Life, here’s a spot of insight into some of the weird, wonderful and occasionally dastardly aspects of setting up new adventures for The Adventurists. It ain’t all tea swilling and swanky hotels you know.

  • On my first day at The Adventurists in March 2008 Mr Tom, turned to me and asked ‘How do you feel about Africa?’ A few days later I was sitting on the runway at Paris airport, bound for Cameroon, with an escalating riot going on around me. A Cameroonian man was being deported from France, held down by eight heavily armed French gendarmes. The more he screamed and fought, the more it inflamed my fellow Cameroonian passengers. After an hour long battle the police gave up and the man was bundled off the aeroplane, back onto French soil. It was my first taste of Africa.
  • Hearing Jock Munro, the oldest rider on the first ever Mongol Derby, playing the Scottish bagpipes in the middle of the Mongolian steppe at the finish party of the Derby. The visceral, incongruous sound of the bagpipes drifting on the steppe wind was quite extraordinary.

One of the Mongolian herding families who worked with us on the Mongol Derby

  • Multiple visits to the Nouvelle Destinee Orphanage in Douala, Cameroon during the 2008 and 2009 Africa Rallies. In 2008 enough funds were raised from the Rally car sales in Cameroon to put 33 of the children through school for the year. The children were always so cheerful, and the ladies who ran it so dedicated and compassionate, being able to help them was a really brilliant feeling.

Children at the Nouvelle Destinee orphanage in Cameroon

  • Trying to convince the Malaysian Department of Road Transport that no, we really didn’t want a 250km police escort through Malaysia on the Pioneer’s ASEAN Rickshaw Run. Whilst the Malaysian Government thought they were offering our teams the ultimate token of hospitality, we had to politely tell them that being mollycoddled by a fleet of Malaysian police cars wasn’t quite in the spirit of The Adventurists.
  • Organising the first Mongol Rally Czechout party in the summer of 2008. Our original castle pulled out a few weeks before the event, leaving me to scour the entire Czech Republic for a willing and suitable replacement. After seeing over thirty castles in a week, I found Klenova, a ruined 14th century pile nuzzling in the rolling hills of Bohemia. In the end, the party was a storming success. Seeing 800 people dressed up as ‘Knights and Wenches’ was a sight to behold, even more so when they were still dancing to searing techno at 4 a.m.
  • Drinking ten bottles of vodka on a Mongolian mountain top, with four large Mongolian men, at the end of the 2010 Mongol Derby. We sat in the burning steppe sun, toasting Tengri and Gadzer (the gods of the sky and earth), drinking shot after shot of Chinggis Gold vodka, getting increasingly plastered and taking it in turns to sing. Hilarious.
  • Getting to the end of singing ‘Once in Royal David’s City’  - after drinking the aforementioned ten bottles of Chinggis Gold – violently vomiting, passing out and having to be carried to my ger by two of the drivers.

The offending spirit

  • Chuntering across the Siberian wilderness on the back of an old Ural motorbike last winter, on a test trip for the Ice Run. Nowhere have I ever witnessed stars like it, or looked up at that diamond scattered vault and felt so infinitesimally small.

Keeping warm in Siberia

  • Being shouted at by one of the 2009 Africa Ralliers when the plates temporarily ran out at the finish party supper.  We were in the Cameroonian jungle, at a bash I had pulled together with the help of the local Bantu pygmies. The plates had run out and one of the pygmies had delved off into the jungle to find a few more. I felt the shouty chap was perhaps being a little unreasonable, given the circumstances.
  • Watching two high-ranking officials from the Cameroonian Ministry of Tourism and the Customs Department, having a fistycuffs over the auction of the Africa Rally cars in Douala in 2008.
  • Short spells in hospital in both Siberia and Jakarta. Once for being reversed in to by a drunken fool, the other time for some mystery virus.
  • Discovering that Avi Sivan, the charismatic co-director of the charity we were working with in Cameroon, was head of the BIR, the elite army unit that looks after Cameroonian President Paul Biya. He was also a former commander of the Israel Defence Force’s elite Duvdevan unit; not the sort of fellow to be taken lightly. The charity’s HQ in Yaounde was always swarming with heavily armed soldiers, one of whom, Molu, was given the task of being my personal bodyguard. Molu was a former national karate champion, muscles and guns straining at every inch of his BIR uniform. I never did quite get used to him checking his three guns were all loaded before we got out of the car to go to government meetings.
  • Spending Israel’s 60th birthday at Avi’s house in Yaounde, with a load of Israeli arms dealers, who equipped the Cameroonian military. Not the sort of thing I ever imagined I’d be doing in Cameroon.
  • Trekking into the Cameroonian jungle behind a machete-wielding local to go and meet the local pygmy chief, hoping to enlist the musical talents of his tribe for the Africa Rally finish party. His cooperation was secured upon receipt of five litres of ‘pygmy gin’ (ferocious local moonshine).
  • Somehow ending up with a self-appointed Russian bodyguard called Vassily on the test trip for the Ice Run. Vassily insisted that because of the all ‘bears, wolves and bandits’ Mr Tom, Buddy and I couldn’t possibly set off across the frozen tundra on our own. A few days later, miles from anywhere, we had stopped to fix the bike (again) when Vassily appeared from the car, a large gun in each hand, maniacal smile spread across his face, and started shooting randomly into the sky. ‘Wolf’ he said, pointing to fresh wolf tracks on the snow in front of us. At that point I’m not sure who we were more scared of, Vassily, or the wolf.

Vassily and his wife Anna

  • Undergoing a ceremony with a Buryat shaman in northern Mongolia, to ascertain whether the spirits would allow  her to do a ceremony at the Mongol Derby finish party. I was the first foreigner her spirits had been exposed to, and before I was even allowed into the room she went into trance to see if I was worthy of being in their presence. Luckily they deemed me a ‘white spirit’ and approved her participation in next day’s finish party.

To find out more about The Adventurists have a wallow at their website here.

Surviving Jakarta

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The Big Durian at night

Jakarta isn’t the sort of place you’d choose to go to on holiday. Its reputation as a polluted, heinously overcrowded city doesn’t have the same allure as say, Bali’s beaches or Yogyakarta’s temples. And with Greater Jakarta’s population tipping 23 million, it ain’t exactly relaxing. But scratch the surface of the ‘Big Durian’, as it’s dubbed, and you’ll find a vibrant, edgy city with an infectious energy and the best nightlife in South East Asia. Having just spent three weeks working in the city, here are a few ways which I found to survive, thrive and fall for the city in a way I never expected.

Eat on the street: While the burgeoning urban elite hang out in swanky bars and restaurants, where dishes regularly cost the same as a poor Jakartan’s daily income, some of the best food in Jakarta can be found on the street. You can feast on nasi goreng (fried rice), mie goreng (fried noodles), soto ayam (a sort of chicken noodle soup), satay  (meat grilled in peanut sauce) and a multitude of other delicious dishes, all for under £1. Not only is the food tasty and ridiculously cheap, but sitting at a street stall, amongst a chattering crowd, with the smell of spices and clove cigarettes wafting around you, is a truly Jakartan experience.

Street food stalls, Jakarta

Go to a nightclub… or two: Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim country, and Jakarta its beating heart. Yet quite incongruously, the city also has the best nightlife in South East Asia. Stadium,in Chinatown, holds 4,000 people and doesn’t close between Thursday and Monday. Alcohol is not the drug of choice here, and internationally renowned DJs like Sasha spin electronica to a mainly Indonesian crowd of hardcore ravers. Perhaps the fact that Indonesia is the largest producer of ecstasy in the world has something to do with its enduring popularity…

If you want something slightly less full on, try Kemang, an area packed with bars and clubs, and popular with ex-pats. Nu China is a good bet here, a bar-cum-club crammed with glamorous, well heeled types sipping on Grey Goose and Martinis.

Imbine a G&T at Cafe Batavia: If you want to get away from the crowds and sample almost the only remaining slice of colonial Jakarta, then get a cab to Old City and dive into the cool interior of Cafe Batavia. Most of Old City is in a ruinous state, blackened buildings literally collapsing in on themselves, but Cafe Batavia is a glorious homage to the city’s Dutch Colonial past. The teak and rattan interior and vast ceiling vans are redolent of a very different era, and even on a Saturday evening you will have the place almost to yourself. The fact that I had to explain to the staff how to make a G&T didn’t matter a jot. A really fabulous place to while away an evening.

Take an Ojek: The traffic (macat) in Jakarta is hellishly awful, allegedly the second worst in the world after Bogota. Imagine a population of over 20 million people with no trains, no metro, very few cyclists or pedestrians and one struggling Transjakarta bus network.  It’s enough to drive even the most sanguine of people utterly insane.

An alternative to sitting in hours and hours of macat, is to take an Ojek, a motorbike taxi. Most busy street corners have an Ojek stand, characterised by a gaggle of men lounging on their mopeds, smoking – as nearly all Indonesian men do. Although at times a little hairy, you’ll get around much faster by Ojek, and for very little cost. For an impatient person like me, it’s well worth the risk…

A taste of Jakarta's traffic

One night in Pattaya

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Walking Street, Pattaya

As the bus to Pattaya lurched out of Bangkok airport I took in my fellow passengers  for the first time. A sea of grey, balding and rather sweaty male heads bobbed above the seats in front of me. On my left sat a clumsy, rotund man with oversize lips, and a withering case of halitosis. ‘Var are you from?’ He asked, enveloping me in a noisome cloud. ‘England’ I replied monosyllabically, hoping my brevity would discourage much further conversation. ‘I’m from Germany’ He continued, excitedly, before he realised he was in the wrong seat and thankfully tripped off to the other end of the bus.

My other neighbour was equally unappealing. Piggy eyes were framed by thick spectacles, and a few wisps of greasy hair were stretched across a shiny, balding pate. For most of the journey his fleshy fingers fumbled nervously with a his hotel booking documents, sweat collecting in dark patches on his shirt. Every single person on the bus was male, at least fifty and travelling alone. If Pattaya’s reputation didn’t thunder before it, you could have mistaken it for a Saga or golfing holiday. But these men were coming to Pattaya for something very different. Sex. Cheap, plentiful sex.

Ever since the Vietnam war when GIs flocked to Pattaya on R&R, the city has been a global mecca for sex tourism. Every year over 1.5 million tourists flock here, mostly male – and increasingly Russian and Indian. The mere mention of its name elicits raised eyebrows, grimaces and references to Gary Glitter and ping pong.

I was here for a rather different reason,  to visit  two great friends of mine (Mr and Mrs P) who’d recently moved here from the UK to teach at international schools. With only a single night in town they (or was it me?) insisted we take in some of the sights that have made Pattaya famous.

Our night started with a stroll down the seafront, and it wasn’t long before my jaw was on the floor. In England it’s surprising if you see one prostitute loitering on a street corner, yet on this single strip in Pattaya there were hundreds, if not thousands of them. “Every single one of these girls is a prostitute” confirmed Mr P “I’ve heard that in low season you can get a shag for as little as 400 Baht (about £8).” The girls were mainly young, and mainly beautiful. They stood alone, smoking, applying make-up and exuding ennui, their feet crunched into painfully high heels, waiting for some leering lothario to pick them. “Crikey, he must think he’s hit the jackpot” nodded Mrs P towards a septuagenarian who was arm in arm with a strikingly beautiful, lithe Thai in spray on hot-pants. “Yes, until he finds out that’s she’s actually a he, then he might not be so happy.” Often the most beautiful women are ladyboys, and for the untrained eye it can be very hard to spot the difference. Until it’s too late…

At the end of the strip we turned left into Walking Street, the vortex of Pattaya’s seediness. It made Amsterdam’s red-light district look like a tea party in the Cotswolds: a sensory overload of neon lights, thumping house music, scantily-clad bodies, gawping tourists and vulpine touts. Gobsmacked groups of Sikh men stumbled out of bars. Sinewy ladyboys with supermodel figures stood alluringly in doorways. Hatchet-faced, pallid Russians eyed up the women, like bears circling their prey. Everyone was looking at everyone else, watching, waiting, selecting.

“As you’re only here for one night, we’ve got to take you to a ping pong show” said Mrs P. “Er, yes, sure” I replied, my revulsion overcome by curiosity as to quite how a lady was able to fire a ping pong ball out of her, well, interior parts. At that moment a slippery looking man appeared beside us, waving an obscenely printed flyer, “You wan’ ping pong?”  he said, before ducking away through the crowd, gesturing for us to follow.

Two minutes later we’d paid 200 Baht and were sitting in a dark, cramped bar, sandwiched between a turban-wearing Sikh and a corpulent Russian. On a podium infront of us an exceptionally bored looking girl lathered her naked body in foam, ignored by most of the clientele. Instead, all eyes were on a stunning  bikini-clad girl cavorting on a bed, being spanked enthusiastically with a giant black rubber tube by a surprisingly young Russian. He looked as if this might be the most exciting moment of his life, eyes gleaming, his long blonde hair stuck to his face with sweat. The corpulent man to our left laughed as he watched, occasionally leaning forward to give his compatriot an encouraging slap on the back. We later learned that they were in fact father and son, and that the night before they had shared a prostitute while the wife and mother slept in the hotel room next door. How absolutely revolting and utterly wrong in every possible way.

If you don’t know what a ping pong show is, it sure ain’t the type of ping pong involving bats and a table. Oh no, this is a very different sort of ping pong, involving taut Thai ladies and flying ping pong balls. Not only ping pong balls, but flying darts, chains of artificial flowers, flying bananas and a host of other alarming tricks. Somehow though, watching this series of acts unfold, there was nothing remotely shocking or sexual about it. The girls looked bored, robotically popping out balls and firing darts at balloons. They did this every night after all, for them it must have been about as exciting as typing a letter or answering the phone. The most shocking thing was when men volunteered to catch the bananas, or pull out the neverending chains of flowers (how did they fit all those flowers up there?) I do hope they washed their hands afterwards.

From a voyeurs point of view, Pattaya is fascinating, a night out there a window onto a world so incredibly far removed from my own. But I was left with an uneasy feeling, that not far beneath the neon-lit surface were disturbing layers of depravity and sexploitation. As we were leaving Walking Street I asked Mr P what he thought about this. “Oh yes, definitely, there’s alot of dark stuff that goes on here, alot of mafia, and alot of very young girls. Occasionally you hear on the news that a severed head has been found washed up on the beach, normally a Russian, someone who’s perhaps found out too much.”  It didn’t surprise me at all. And on that note we turned off the strip, away from the bright lights and prostitutes and headed home for the night.

Launching the new Adventurists ASEAN Rickshaw Run in Jakarta

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One of he rickshaws...

After an epic three days of launch celebrations the Pioneer’s Adventurists ASEAN Rickshaw Run finally spluttered forth a few days ago, at possibly the grandest launch ceremony The Adventurists have ever witnessed. Organising this beast of an adventure has been rather time consuming of late, hence the slight Itinerant absence.

The epic launch celebrations took place over there days, in the sweltering heat of Jakarta. First up was two days of Test Driving – a chance for the teams to get acquainted with the brand spanking new fleet of 28 ‘Bemo Bemos’. This was followed by a grandiose programme of workshops at the ASEAN Secretariat in Blok M, Jakarta, and a football match at the Indonesian Police HQ. The workshops took place in the ridiculously snazzy ASEAN Hall, more used to hosting politicians and ambassadors than a motley crew of 64 raggle-taggle Adventurists. Amazingly, given the night out some of the teams had had the night before, almost everyone made it to the workshop, and were blessed with pearls of wisdom from a host of dignitaries. Dr William Sabandar, Director of Corporate Affairs at ASEAN, kicked off with the lowdown on ASEAN. He was followed by several highly decorated members of the Indonesian police, their shirts weighed down by medals and badges of distinction. Whilst giving advice on driving in Sumatra, the main leg of the journey, one of them proffered that although there were many wild boars, it was ‘ok to play with them’. Unfortunately the translator wasn’t quite sure what the word for wild boar was, and instead stated it was ok ‘to play with the wild whores’. He was quickly corrected, amidst peals of laughter from the assembled. Last up was Mr Nittee, Director of the Thai Tourism Authority, who informed the teams all about Thailand, including showing them the all important ‘elephants crossing’ road sign: not one most of the participants are used to in their home countries.

The workshop was followed by a splendid, exceptionally hot football game at the Indonesian Police HQ in Blok M. 11 Adventurists bravely volunteered to play, despite the 95 degree heat and a very nimble looking opposing team, three of whom were professional players. Unsurprisingly, and true to form, the home team gave The Adventurists a good roasting, beating them 6-3. Luckily there were no casualties from the heat.

The day was finished off by the launch party, held in Jalan Jaksa, the highlight of which was a performance from a debus group. This involved traditional music, dancers and a large quota of lying on glass, slicing their arms and necks with knives and generally doing things with sharp implements that one really shouldn’t try at home. I was dragged in to demonstrate the authenticity of this, having some of my hair chopped off with a saw, arms sliced with a sword and neck sawed. And yes, it was real, and my arms are still bearing large slices across them a few days later…

The Official Launch ceremony at ASEAN kicked off early on Sunday morning, and teams arrived bleary eyed from 7 a.m onwards to pack up their steeds and make last minute adjustments. The 28 three-wheeled beasts were lined up magnificently in front of the ASEAN building, the flags of the 10 ASEAN member states fluttering overhead. As 9 a.m. approached the teams were engulfed by a gaggle of media – AP, Reuters, Spanish news agency EFE, South China TV, the Jakarta Globe, Jakarta Post and Ant TV to name but a few. Team Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, from Sydney, proved a particular hit, attired as they were in full Chitty Chitty Bang Bang garb. As one Australian team were having their photo taken with their ‘extra’ team mate, an Ann Summers doll, Mr Rajarethnam, Advisor to the Secretary-General of ASEAN said with a chuckle that ‘ASEAN has never seen the likes of this before’.

Interviews were interrupted however by the arrival of a cavalcade of VVIPs in blacked-out cars; His Excellency Dr Surin Pitsuwan, the Secretary General of ASEAN, His Excellency Mr Fauzi Bowo, the Governor of Jakarta, His Excellency Mark Canning, the British Ambassador to Indonesia, and representatives from the Ministry of Youth and Sport and the Ministry of Tourism. Teams followed these rather important chaps into the main hall, where they feasted on a wonderful breakfast laid out by ASEAN, as Dr Surin, Mr Bowo and Mr Tom of The Adventurists gave speeches. Both Dr Surin and Mr Bowo have been incredibly supportive of the event, and both said they couldn’t wait for it to become a regular feature on the SE Asian calender.

Start line of The Adventurists ASEAN Rickshaw Run

A quick group photo and it was time for Lift Off. As the teams got into their ‘shaws and the air was filled with the throaty roar of 28 175 cc engines choking into life, the VIPs and media chatted to the teams, whilst drummers and girls scattering rose petals followed them down the line. A quick cut of the start ribbons and they were off! Dr Surin and Mark Canning greeted every single team as they drove out, accompanied by a police escort. Dr Surin even gave his business card to every team…. does he know he’s now going to be getting phone calls from teams stuck in the Sumatran jungle?

In true Adventurists style, one rickshaw didn’t want to start – and only left an hour later after our team of mechanics had tended to it’s needs.

A few days after the launch and the teams are struggling through the Sumatran jungle, although 4 teams have already capitulated. To follow their progress see www.theadventurists.com

Bristol’s pioneering street art project

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This weekend saw the much anticipated launch of Bristol’s pioneering  See No Evil street art project. Involving 70 acclaimed artists from as far afield as Los Angeles, New York, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Italy and of course Bristol, the project has transformed a notoriously unattractive, run-down area of the city into Europe’s largest street art project.

Here are a few photos of the superb artwork on display.

LA's El Mac's Mother and Child

This was definitely one of my favourities – LA’s El Mac’s fantastic Mother and Child, which covered four stories of a drab catering building.

This bowler hatted man by Bristol’s own Nick Walker is a marked improvement to the 1970′s concrete nightmare it adorns.

Spain's Aryz' five-storey high wolf

As yet I can’t find out who this piece is by, and the See No Evil website sheds no light. But it was one of the most artistically impressive pieces of the project.

Shanghai Night's restaurant is transformed into a beehive

A vast improvement on an otherwise unmemorable eatery….

Excellent graffiti sketches by London's Nathan Bowen

This is just a small selection of the panoply of fantastic artwork on display. To find out more about the project and the artists who have taken part please see the See No Evil website. Even better, totter down to Nelson Street and feast your eyes on the artwork itself.

 

Afternoon Tea with Charles Brewer Carias

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The largest quartzite caves in the world, one of Charles' many discoveries

On a sweltering afternoon last Saturday, 130 people gathered in the oak-panelled surrounds of Philadelphia’s Union League Club for The Adventurists Afternoon Tea with a true legend of adventure. Word had got out that the speaker, Charles Brewer-Carias, was rather splendid, and people had travelled from as far afield as Minnesota, Delaware and New York to hear him. And my, did he not disappoint.

Speaking for the first ever time outside his native Venezuela, Charles, a septuagenarian naturalist and explorer, is a man of multiple talents and incarnations. One time national swimming champion, former Venezuelan Minister of Youth, author of 11 books, acclaimed photographer, naturalist and explorer are just a few of the things on his CV. Moreover, he is a veteran of over 250 expeditions and would put even the most prolific of Victorian explorers to shame. Caves, scorpions, sunken fleets, biospeleothems, frogs….. his long list of discoveries is so impressive it almost beggars belief. He seems like an anachronism; a throwback to the age of Von Humboldt, Waterton, Stanley, Kingsley and other Victorian men and women who poked around the far corners of the earth in drawing-room dress. People like this simply don’t exist anymore.

Dressed in jungle-ready khaki Charles smoothed and tweaked his magnificent moustache and took to the stage in an atmosphere of palpable anticipation. Listening to him talk was like being transported back to the Royal Geographical Society circa 1859, hearing Darwin expound his discoveries in the Galapagos. It felt surreal, in this age when the world has long been mapped, explored and proselytised, to be sitting listening to someone talking about multiple new discoveries. When Charles had written to The Adventurists a few months earlier that he ‘‘would give a talk that would make people choke on their tea’, he wasn’t far wrong.

Although this real-life Indiana Jones has discovered, and had named after him, a whole host of flora and fauna, it’s perhaps his recent discovery of the largest quartzite cave complex in the world that is the most impressive. In 2004, Charles spotted an unusual looking hole in a tepui (flat topped mountain) whilst in a helicopter flying over Venezuela’s Guyana Highlands. The pilot dismissed Charles’ sighting as irrelevant and refused to land. But Charles’ intuition was right. On returning several months later he found that the small hole was infact the entrance to a 23 km network of underground caves. Inside the caves, Charles and his team found several new species of fauna, including a giant, water-dwelling carnivorous cricket and a bizarre amphibious scorpion. Even more extraordinary was the discovery of  what Charles has named biospeleothems; living silica organisms that have been dated to over a million years old, making them the oldest known living organisms on earth.

One of Venezuela's Tepui

As if this wasn’t jaw-dropping enough, Charles then went on to discuss his theory about the fabled golden city of El Dorado. The city, first written about by Sir Walter Raleigh in his 1596 tome Discoverie, has long been a magnet for explorers, myth-makers and treasure hunters. Generally dismissed today as no more than a fanciful legend, Charles claims to know of this city’s whereabouts, stating it to be the old Royal Inca stronghold of Manoa. Since the site is located deep in the jungle in a region well known for guerrilla soldiers and cocaine processing laboratories, any expeditions there are currently impossible. But one day, Charles says, either he or his son will find it.

Charles’ talk was mind-bendingly fascinating, and he left the stage to rousing applause and looks of wonderment. The assembled crowd were quite literally gobsmacked, and surrounded Charles, wide-eyed and clamouring for questions, until the end of the evening. Suffice to say, he now has a whole legion of new fans and a long list of people eager to partake in his next expedition, including me, if I can stomach the tarantula-filled Guyana Highlands.

Charles and friend