Grand Adventures. Alastair Humphreys

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СКАЧАТЬ Costs along the way: ferries, repairs, visas, an ill-advised piss-up in a dangerous but exciting port: £200

      — Daily food budget: £5 per day. You could easily live on half this amount, or twice this amount, according to how you like to travel. But £5 will buy you pasta, oats, bread, bananas, veg and a tin of tuna, even in an expensive part of the world. Never pay for water. Just refill your bottles from a tap, purifying the water if necessary.

      With £200 remaining, you have enough for 40 days on the road at £5 a day. If you set off from your front door and cycle a pretty leisurely 60 miles a day, and have one day off each week, that still amounts to an impressive 2,000-mile journey. You could cycle from London to Warsaw and back, San Francisco to Vancouver and back, or Copenhagen to Marseille and back. New York to New Orleans and back is a bit far, but York to Orleans is definitely do-able… If you choose to walk, run or swim you won’t travel so fast but your equipment costs will be lower so you will have more days on the trail.

      You might choose to spend a bit more or a bit less on different things. You’ll probably find your own budget spreadsheet to be a little more complicated than mine here. But I hope you are starting to realise that the financial element of an adventure is within your grasp.

      

      If you are in the fortunate position of even being able to dream of undertaking a big adventure, getting hold of £1,000 may not be the biggest hurdle. After all, it’s less money than many holidays, kitchen upgrades, wedding dresses or TVs cost. But not many people have both plenty of money and plenty of time (at least not whilst they are still young enough to climb Rum Doodle without their knees hurting).

      For many, the scarcest resource in life is time. That is why I wrote Microadventures, a book about squeezing local adventures into the confines of real life. Microadventures challenge you to look at how you spend the 24 hours you have each day and to try to re-prioritise things a little bit.

      But grand adventures require more than 24 hours. If you’re yearning to cross a continent, chasing the days west until the sun sets into the ocean before you, you’ll need to find a bigger chunk of time. There is never an easy time to find that time. Too many people are willing to settle for waiting until they retire, and this always makes me sad. The actor Brandon Lee’s grave is inscribed with these words:

      ‘Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless …’

      Have a look at www.deathclock.com; it’s one of my favourite websites! You add various parameters about your life (age, weight, gender, whether you smoke) and it will calculate the date you are likely to die. A big, unstoppable clock begins counting down the remaining seconds of your life.

      I have the date of my predicted death scheduled into my diary. Morbid, perhaps, but it takes deadlines to spur most of us into action, and that non-extendable deadline scares the hell out of me. I have so much I want to get done before 8 September 2050!

      Life, they say, is what happens while you’re busy making plans. Time is ticking, life is short. These days everyone is busy. We’re racing time, always chasing time. Bragging about how busy we are is one of our era’s favourite things to do. But, as the pithy viral Tweet said, ‘We all have the same 24 hours that Beyoncé has.’ It’s up to us to carve out time to make bootylicious stuff happen. When I was younger I would simply think of a trip, then go and do it. Now that I’m older and busier it’s more often a case of making a chunk of time available and then coming up with a plan that fits into that time slot.

      There is no simple solution. This book will not solve the lack-of-time conundrum. I’d be rich if it did. But it might get you excited enough to resolve to solve it yourself: to begin the conversations with the people in your life – your family, your boss, yourself – about how it might be possible to pause the racing rhythm of daily life for long enough to do something different and really memorable. After all, each hour that passes, each dreary commute, each bleary Monday morning – these are hours on the hamster wheel that you have spent and will never be able to recoup or spend again. So spend them wisely.

      One of my favourite feelings on expeditions is how much time I have. I don’t have more time, of course, I’ve just freed it up to do stuff that feels important to me. I wake at dawn, the diary is empty and the day stretches long before me. I drink tea and watch the sun rise. All I need to do today is make some miles. And then I will sit again, weary but satisfied, in some place I have never been before, and watch the sun set. The days are not busy, but they are full and fulfilling. I cherish spending that time. At home my days feel short and hurried. Yet at the end of most of them I’ve accomplished nothing memorable. What a waste!

      I hope that this book persuades you to find a way to find time to fill your days with what feels important and worthwhile to you, not with the stuff that conventional society deems you ought to be doing.

      ‘The sooner you begin to get into this mind-set, the sooner you will have that big juicy chunk of time inked into your diary and the adventure can begin’

      The first task is to think carefully about how you use your time now, and how you might be able to make some time for adventure. This isn’t about stirring your porridge into your coffee, sleeping in your work suit or other handy tips like that. For a big adventure you’ll need to clear a swathe of time – weeks at least, months, maybe even a year or two.

      Begin by asking yourself these questions. I know they are hard, but try to answer them as positively as you can rather than instantly dismissing them as impossible in the circumstances of your life.

      What is the biggest chunk of time you might be able to carve out for an adventure? Is this long enough to do what you’d like to do? Squeeze another week on at either end. Is that long enough? How much time do you need?

      When in the next year might you have time? Can you block off a non-negotiable chunk of time in your diary? It might be quite far in the future, but once it’s in the diary you can treat it as sacrosanct.

      What are your time constraints? Why can’t you go away?

      If it’s work, do they truly need you all the time? Could your colleagues cope without you for a while? How much loyalty and time do you owe them? Beware of misplaced loyalty. Talk to your boss about how you might be able to free up some time. Don’t just second-guess them by saying ‘it’ll never happen. They can’t do anything about it’. Have the conversation. Tell them how important this is to you, explain the benefits it will have for you and your work performance.

      Imagine you were suddenly bedridden for a couple of months. Would the world cope without you? How would it manage? Could you, therefore, bugger off on an adventure for a couple of months without the world collapsing?

      Could you take a sabbatical from work? Maybe you could work from the road. If you resigned, could you get your job back when you return? Could you quit, then seek a new job when you return? Or apply for a new job now but agree not to begin the position for a few months?

      If you are too financially constrained to stop СКАЧАТЬ