Lessons from the Road: The First Year

In June of 2010 I set off with my then wife, Helen, on my most audacious adventure to date - an attempt to complete an unbroken True Circumnavigation of the Planet overland, which involves passing around the world through every line of longitude, the equator twice, and crossing two points on the earth's surface exactly opposite each other on an imaginary line passing through it's centre. My vehicle of choice was an ageing 1995 Land Rover Defender that I prepared specifically for the undertaking.

It would take four and a half years, and many challenges, before we made our way back to the start point in late 2014.

This is quite a long read - befitting perhaps a journey of such length - but it's broken up with some cool images. It documents some of the many experiences in our first year on the road, and ultimately, what those precious first months taught or affirmed for us about the world, and about ourselves.

The text here has been reproduced from notes used in drafting my book of the Expedition, "Unbroken", to be published next year.

“ We travel that we may see new things, but also, that we might see things differently”

Reflections: "In the last year – the first of our travels - we have suffered the agony of someone close contracting a terminal illness; closed our business in the face of financial ruin, and dealt with the ensuing financial struggles; felt the anxiety of both my son, and son-in-law being placed on redundancy notice, whilst my daughter lost her job when our business closed. We’ve survived the usual smattering of minor illnesses and injuries; and, on the up side, felt the joy of two estranged brothers who have begun to heal their differences and repair their relationship.

In the same year, we have suffered the heartbreak of killing a horse in a road accident in Siberia, and the relief of completing repairs successfully without access to parts or repair shops.

We’ve successfully bodged our broken waterpump so it would take us 700 miles to safety from the desolate isolation deep in the Gobi desert. 

We’ve witnessed glorious sunsets and sunrises from the Qumdar desert in Kazakhstan, and the Gobi in Mongolia, from the Mongolian steppe, the ancient forests of Siberia, the brittle cold plains of Montana, and the breathtakingly silent and still canyons of Utah. 

We’ve spent many an hour staring in wonder at the vast black ocean of night sky above our heads peppered with a billion distant suns, and crisscrossed by satellites and shooting stars.

We’ve visited the Arctic Circle, and experienced what it is like to camp under canvas at minus 25 centigrade, and, in the wet heat of Belize, imagined we’d melt in our sleep.

We’ve travelled through the silent and isolated red rock wilderness between Moab and Needles in Utah, and ventured into places untrodden for hundreds of years.

In the Central Americas, we moved from the top to the bottom of the food chain and were feasted upon by hoards of ants, flies, bugs and mosquitoes.

We’ve spied Bison, Reindeer, Jackrabbits, Gila Monsters, Texas Horned Lizards, Spider Monkeys, Giant Iguana and a thousand other species in their natural surroundings. We've found ourselves in the midst of a herd of curious camels, and felt them nibbling our ears and huffing their vile breath in our faces. 

We’ve enjoyed observing the entire two hour process of a dung beetle stashing its hoard on the arid plains of Kazakhstan, and experienced the relentless nocturnal foraging of thousands of leafcutter ants in Belize - so monumental being their number that they wore a muddy path through the dense undergrowth in front of our eyes.

We’ve made dozens of new friends and experienced the kindness of strangers time after time. I’ve learned to be patient and understanding as my lovely wife cuts my hair, and survived a few bouts of travellers’ diarrhoea.

We’ve spent a week in the chill zone with a beach-dwelling family on the remote and primitive western coast of Mexico, with no more expectation on either side of the language barrier than we should share a little of our lives with each other.

We’ve seen the bizarre effect of inept Russian policymaking at the Aral sea, where seagoing vessels are marooned seventy kilometres from the nearest water, and where ships of the desert now use ships of the sea for shelter.

We’ve been dug out of a Mongolian bog by new-found friends, and rescued a minibus full of travellers from the middle of a fast flowing river. We’ve dragged a drunken Mexican taxi driver and his cab from a beach, and towed a tractor and its heavily laden trailer out of a sand dune in the desert.

We’ve learned how to build effective campfires and have eaten foods we couldn’t have imagined before. 

We’ve experienced kamikaze driving in Ukraine, violent, unmarked and bizarrely placed road humps in the Zonas de Topes of Mexico, and the weirdest of road systems, including paying road tax in a country with no roads, and dual carriageways where drivers randomly switch sides according to road surface quality rather than traffic flow.

We’ve explored abandoned gold mines in Death Valley, wondered at the engineering and human miracle that is the Hoover Dam, and been distressed by the human indignity and light pollution generated by Las Vegas.

We’ve swum in the Pacific and paddled in the Caribbean, and spent time discussing life and values with a Christian missionary on the run from the US police in the Hard Rock Cafe in Acapulco.

And we’ve learned that hedgehogs still get flattened by cars even in the depths of the Gobi desert.

We have learned or affirmed many things this year for ourselves too:

• That not all change is progress, and that material and financial growth cannot be sustained forever.
• That safety, security and certainty are things you find inside yourself, not outside yourself.
• That the most generous people are generally those who have the least to give.
• That there are infinitely more good people in the world than bad.
• That the most important thing to fear is fear itself, because being fearful limits your experiences. And accepting someone else’s fear is the most limiting fear of all.
• That its hard to understand the world from any perspective than your own until you stand in someone else’s shoes for a while.
• That the world is largely populated by poor people, with a few wealthy ones – its not the other way around.
• That the currency in most places around the world is kindness, not the dollar – people exchange it in order to live on what money they have.
• That life most often turns out the way we expect it to, not necessarily the way we want it to.
• That there is a big difference between what you want and what you need, and knowing what you really need moves you closer to happiness.
• That things seem to happen for a reason, and being curious about the reason opens life up to you.
• That if we keep an open heart, good experiences often flow from bad experiences.
• That life really is what you make of it, every single moment.
• In many ways, we have affirmed the phrase “life is a journey, not a destination”. 

But perhaps the two most significant affirmations are these:

That people, in the majority, no matter their fortunes, location or origin, look towards the future with hope, strive to meet their needs for today, and dream of better things for their children tomorrow, just like you and I.

And that Life, with all its delights, surprises, joys, challenges, troubles and disasters, happens wherever you are, whoever you are, and whatever you have, and whilst pain and pleasure are essential experiences of life, greed and suffering are not.

Perhaps in remembering this, we can participate more thoughtfully in shaping a future for mankind that transcends the pointless, degrading, and ultimately damaging, quest for having more and having most, and instead, resolve to be more aware and more alive each day, and take active responsibility for sustaining ourselves, each other, and our environment, so that our children’s children will consider us wise and worthy benefactors.

Paul Crittenden, October 2011