The Seven Laws of Adventure

Law 1: adventure is a decision

You decide to post a letter. You decide to go out and post a letter dressed as a giant chicken. One is very definitely an adventure. Does that mean an adventure is just another word for a new experience? Maybe. But as soon as you repeat it, it ceases to have the adventure quality. This is why thrill sports can soon cease to be adventurous- the addiction is to the thrill, not the newness of the experience. 

Law 2: the right kit can help create an adventure

If you have the right equipment, the  ‘right kit’ you can get to some interesting places. If you have ropes you can go climbing, if you have a kayak you can go down whitewater. But kit can be very limiting too. You can tell yourself you can’t do X until you have the right boots or tent. I met a guy who wanted to spend £10,000 on a landrover in order to ‘have adventurous times’ with his family. Imagine how many trips you could make for £10,000? What he imagined was that merely owning a Landie put you in a ‘zone of adventurous possibility’. Just having the ability to go offroad, even if you didn’t, felt good. It was like having a military watch when you worked in an office. The zone of adventure isn’t actually adventure though. But being in the zone can get you involved in adventures as you are now edging towards the right mindset. So a big bit of kit can SOMETIMES be the right decision. It’s a hard call. When you have developed a better adventure mindset the lure of kit is less. You realise you can do things with homemade kit or cheap stuff bought on ebay.

Law 3: An adventure breaks new ground

You go on a walk for the first time- it’s an adventure. You go on the same walk a second time, it will be less of an adventure. Or maybe not one at all. Breaking new ground is essential.

You could break new ground by doing a journey in a different way. In a way ‘breaking new ground’ is the essence of innovation. You have a worthy hunch, a pretty good inspiration and you try it out; the whole experience is an adventure.

Either the challenge, or the solution to the challenge involve creativity.

An adventure sets up a challenge. This means solving a problem. The problem could be ‘which way to go’. Or it could be ‘get over this obstacle’. Or it could be ‘make this journey in a new way’. The solution could be pure luck, or a great inspiration, but it cannot be purely automatic. An adventure can occur when we deliberately limit ourselves, make things hard for ourselves. Jason Lewis spent 13 years going around the world by human power alone. No engine or even wind power allowed. This limitation created lots of problems he had to solve creatively, thus generating a vast quantity of adventures.

Law 4: an adventure takes you out of your comfort zone

Adventures can happen indoors but they usually don’t. We live indoors and this is our comfort zone. A luxury hotel is great after an adventure, but the adventure won’t happen there: it’s a comfort zone par excellence. Thrill riders like to stay in a mental comfort zone- each thrill must resemble the last. Whereas the adventurer wants to put him or herself in a place where you can’t predict exactly what you’ll experience. This place is always a little, or a lot, outside your comfort zone.

Law 5: Adventures cluster together 

Adventure can be like hitting a roll on the roulette table. You never win on a regular basis. It’s either feast or famine. When you have one adventure, when you are in an ‘adventure mindset’, then you’ll have many more. You’ll start putting yourself in places where more adventures are likely to happen, but equally as important, you’ll be looking and seeing possibilities that you missed before.

For outdoor adventure, the less uniform the terrain, the bigger the adventure cluster, the more remote the terrain the bigger the adventure cluster. 

I spent three, three month periods, crossing northern Canada by birchbark canoe. On the first section there were no rapids and one big lake crossing but we were in a very remote place. On the second there were two sets of big rapids. On the third there were rapids, lakes, ascent and descent of rivers, transporting the canoe over mountains and hiking to the sea. The third section was the most adventurous even though it was less remote than the first. Less uniform terrain trumps remoteness- but only just. Remoteness can be defined by distance from other people. This includes satphone distance. If you are rowing the Pacific but satphoning home everyday you are not remote in one sense.

Law 6: Set out without knowing where you will sleep that night.

This really is the essence of adventure. This is why a simple hitch hike over night can be more of an adventure than a carefully planned expedition. On exepeditions the adventures are caused very often by the cock-ups. With no planning of where you sleep you up the adventure level considerably.

Law 7: On every adventure there will come a point when you have to trust yourself

This is connected to being outside your comfort zone. You have to trust yourself and not a rule, or someone else. Most of us, when we get outside our comfort zone, repeat behaviours that worked inside our comfort zone. Or we ask for rules to follow- usually safety rules. But what you really have to do is develop self-trust. You need a nose for a good direction, a right choice. You can hone this by making instant decisions in situations where you won’t be too harshly punished. If you note your first feelings about some decision see how it pans out: was your hunch right?

the essence of adventure

I am convinced that my life has been enhanced by seeking out adventures, or, rather situations where adventures are more likely to happen. It's easy to make light of adventure seeking. Some may even try to convince you that a life based on consuming high status experiences and things is better. But I believe that without adventure we begin to atrophy. Our adventures can be homegrown and very humble in appearance, not all adventures involve foreign travel. What atrophies? I’ve noticed that if I don’t walk near any cliff edges for a long while I begin to get a little nervous of heights. But if I force myself closer to the edge I soon lose this nervousness. Something similar happens when we give up on seeking adventure or doing adventurous things and settle for programmed entertainment and games.

In this article I hope to just circle the subject and get clear a few ideas I have about adventure in general.

People often confuse a thrill ride with an adventure. An adventure can be thrilling, but not all adventures are. A thrill is repeatable, it has less uncertainty and spontaneity than an adventure.

Adventure is a little like comedy, it’s helped by having the equivalent of musical numbers or even boring bits to boost by comparison the funny sketches. A Non stop thrill- such as one can experience riding a wave train of class 4 and 5 rapids on the Zambesi is not actually much of an adventure. Whereas lining the boat through a grade 5+ rapid, involving some difficulty and a bit of danger, is actually more of an adventure as it involves your skill in solving the problem as well as just riding it out.

So an adventure for me is as much about a new experience as using my creativity to work a way round the problem.

An adventure, then, can involve solving some challenge in a difficult and dangerous environment. It doesn’t have to be THAT dangerous. I had lots of adventures on a hike I did along the Pyrenees. I may have had bigger thrills elsewhere, but no greater density of adventure. In the desert you can go a day without adventure, just trudging through sand. There the adventure is often in finding new things: rock art, old pots, fossils, stone tools. It is the same kind of adventure you have when visiting an antiques market- treasure hunting.

All of this probably stems from our inheritance: we are distance walkers and runners who needed to be exploring all the time to get new sources of food. We needed to innovate and be flexible to hunt food. We needed to be able to track (one interesting book by South African author Louis Liebenberg suggests that man evolved through tracking)- the best trackers thrived and passed on their knowledge, until of course we discovered agriculture which is when creativity suddenly shifts from being a useful tactical advantage to being a strategic tool for changing how we live. It is no surprise to me that agricultural communities evolved the modern forms of life we now use every day.

But where is the adventure in being a farmer? One farmer I knew started a book festival because he wanted something to think about while he was driving his tractor all day. Small adventures crop up all the time on a farm when things don’t go the way you plan, but it’s hard to get time off as a professional farmer.

Travel abroad allows for more adventures to happen; travel with some kind of odd form of transport also involves adventure- because of the possibility of mishap, also the planning and inventiveness to get a vehicle through hostile terrain. Even moving your boat through lock gates feels a bit adventurous.

Author Michal Phillips (he wrote the superb Seven Laws of Money) recounts his pleasure in making a sculpture visible from the moon. He hired earth moving equipment to make a huge shape in the desert. It didn’t cost much, but the best by-product, for him, was discovering how much we need adventure as a nutrition in our lives. Using the diggers was a little dangerous and exciting. Planning the shape and executing it in the waterless desert was also not altogether simple. All in all he had a real adventure, and he enjoyed that more than the satisfaction of making an art object. He remarks on how destructive boredom can be. Boredom is the result of a lack of the adventure nutrition. If boredom continues for too long we develop fear. I think this may be a kind of evolutionary response to create adventure. I know lots of writers who have developed a fear of flying. Their lives are ‘perfect’ in the sense that they can do what they want all day- write- but there is a latent and growing boredom in such lives that manifests itself in the growth of inexplicable fears. How right Philip Larkin was when he wrote ‘first boredom, then fear’.

Fear is the flip side of the same coin as greed. Both are unreasoning and headlong responses, a kind of short circuit. Both are a sort of ‘giving up’. In an adventure we can’t give up; it is very plain that giving up will result in failure or even injury. By having adventures we tone the mental muscle that abhors giving up.

At the top of this site I’ve run for a while a section on 50 word micro-adventures. This started as something I did in schools. Many kids wrote about the time they broke an arm or a leg. Mishaps are always adventures, obviously not that pleasant, but in the long run always something to yarn about.

Why do explorers always recount their mistakes and cock-ups as the tales they tell? Because a good expedition probably doesn’t have too many nasty surprises, whereas a badly planned one does.

People go climbing- or complete long distance walks. This provides a sure supply of adventure and a sense of achievement at the end. If people are involved there is more adventure possible. When I went in search of the world’s longest snake this involved meeting a lot of people, and these meetings created their own little adventures.

The French take about affairs as ‘adventures’, which of course they are. Lots of people living dull and uneventful lives, jazz them up by having affairs. But there are complications and sometimes very unpleasant consequences; if we could calibrate our need for adventure better, then we might not imperil our emotional lives in this way.

Big adventures

A big adventure- such as going round the world in an open boat- is really lots of little adventures stitched together. Often they leverage each other so the success of the whole expedition may rest on a tiny thing. I remember in Tim Severin’s epic crossing of the Atlantic, retold as the Brendan Voyage, he and his crew had to restitch a puncture in their leather boat (a replica of a 6^th century Curragh). This involved a crewmember sticking his head in icy water from time to time to get the thread through the right place. A small and unpleasant duty magnified by knowing the whole trip depended on its success.

I think if you can give up too easily, the adventure element is reduced. So a big expedition ratchets up adventure possibilities by making backing out less easy. A big project acquires a kind of momentum that gives you added courage and insights to solve problems, it kind of boosts your adventurous capabilities.

Going over different kinds of terrain is more adventurous than crossing uniform terrain. When we walked all day along dune corridors it was less adventurous than going over dunes or through desert canyons. The challenge element increases with the variety of the terrain. Hence the impact of pack rafting- carrying a tiny raft enables you to combine hiking with crossing lakes and descending rivers (though nothing like as good as a kayak you can take a grade 4 or 5 rapid in a pack raft). More variety= more adventure.

One thing I’ve noticed is that taking a small stove and brewing up on a day hike is better and more satisfying than simply sipping at water all day. I think the self-sufficient aspect increases the adventure quotient- the AQ (which I am sure is a term used by some personal development coaches).

Self-sufficiency makes a walk seem like a micro-expedition. Maybe it is the expedition itself, which probably has its roots in the hunting trip, that is the very core of adventure? Self-sufficiency also attracts interest, so human interactions can occur that increase adventure possibilities.

I’ve found that travelling in an indigenous craft attracts sympathy and interest. Using a birchbark canoe in Canada meant we met all kinds of Native Peoples who usually shun canoeists. A weird craft – such as using a beach inflatable to descend parts of the Nile, as I have done, creates interest, but not necessarily the kind you’d want. You get a lot of kids splashing after you. But it can make people smile and be open to you. Maybe the rule is: travel in an unusual way and you’ll have more adventures.

A birchbark canoe is tough but fragile when it comes to spikes in the water. It imposed its own rules of travel on us. You quickly get to accept these, like having a dog that can’t walk fast, and then you make the most of it. The more rules of travel you have the more the possibilities of an adventure by transgressing, then righting, such a rule.

Hitch-hiking is always an adventure. It is uncertain, involves random new people and is ongoing. You relinquish control of your destiny in the short term to get there in the long term.

Foreign travel with an investigative edge is always adventurous. Though many of us are a bit shy of talking to total strangers, when we have a mission to find out about something it’s easier.

Your adventure reality

Everyone has their adventure ‘reality’, by this I mean the kind of adventures that happen to them. One friend is always witnessing violence, sometimes intervening. His ‘reality’ is different to mine, I find I don’t encounter such things unless travelling with other people, when I slip into their reality for a while. It is unproven, but I suspect we experience things we can cope with, that will stretch us just so far without breaking. If we push ourselves into a zone of folly then we may experience more than we can deal with. By being aware of your feelings about a project, and trusting them, you can avoid biting off more than you can chew. Trick mountain bikers and BASE jumpers relay heavily on being able to visualise a successful completion of a stunt. If they get a bad vibe they obey the feelings and change something, or put off doing the jump. Felix Baumgartner really irritated his US team who wanted him to follow a set of rules before making his parachute jump from space. But he didn’t feel right so he kept putting it off. After all it was his neck on the line not theirs. And his crablike approach eventually succeeded.

If we know what the essence of adventure is then we can work out how to get a good supply of it in our lives. Modern life tends to be more boring than life in the past. This doesn’t mean it is worse, it just means you can’t rely on adventures coming your way. When my great-grandfather went down the pub his pals would bring bat nets with them, indulging in a bit of bat netting after a pint or two (why they wanted to catch bats I have never fully understood, but it was still more adventurous than playing the slots).

Most sorts of outdoor challenge can become an adventure. I recently watched a group of top executives try and rig up a rope slide across a wadi in Oman. They had a great time, made more fun by having a series of rules they had to follow when making the rope way. But if the rules are too petty then the adventure drains away and becomes yet more rule following; it’s not always as easy as it looks.

I think a large part of adventure is managing psychological uncertainty. When Chris McCandless walked off the highway without a map he was having a much bigger adventure than if he had a map. He paid for this adventure with his life, as a map would have shown a logging wire he could have used to cross the river that blocked his exit. There are sailors who try to replicate the uncertainty of earlier explorers by deliberately eschewing map and GPS. Some call them foolhardy; what is undeniable is that too much certainty reduces the adventure element.

The Ludic Loop

Recently psychologists have worked out why games are so addictive. They feature a so called ‘ludic loop’ in which constant and controllable bursts of uncertainty (with potential rewards) are interspersed with simple and manageable stretches of rule defined certainty. I always wondered why I could play eight hours of bridge non-stop without moving from my chair, something I would find very difficult to manage with any other activity. The ludic loop of yet another hand which may spell triumph is what keeps you addicted.

Maybe we can become addicted to adventure in a similar way. Perhaps rock climbing or parachuting operates as a kind of ludic loop. What is obvious, is that uncertainty, manageable chunks of it, are needed to make an adventure happen. Yet in a world awash with information this isn’t so easy. One solution is to use technology in a different way. In the desert people traditionally follow tracks and latterly, waypoints. But actually with a GPS you don’t need to. What would be better is a more freestyle approach. Walk where you like without a care for location and only use the GPS for when you want to get home. Probably a good idea to take two GPSs in that case…

Certainly the growth of the ‘natural navigation’ movement is a move toward supplying more uncertainty, and thus adventure, in a journey, uncertainty that has been stripped out by electronic position finding equipment.

Silly missions can generate good adventures. So called ‘experimental travel’- using a dice to determine your route, or planning a weird journey such as visiting old pillboxes and bunkers across southern England (as I did once) can generate some interesting times. But if the goal is too silly and artificial your motivation to keep going wanes. And an adventure is always a balance between determination and challenge, a sort of rising above both. If the determination is absent the adventure fizzles out.

One man I read about is visiting every single outlet of Starbucks. He said, “It may sound silly, but a goal is a goal.” He’s right; but his silly goal is made serious by its massive scope. Some students I know made a fake old style expedition to the summit of a low hill in the UK. It was more playacting than real adventure. You have to get the balance right. I have often thought of going to the source of a small little known river in Scotland, but somehow its smallness makes the goal unattractive, though I know it would be an adventure. Maybe what I am talking about is the fact of making the adventure into a STORY. Maybe that is the key here, we need to have the potential for a good story.

I am still not entirely clear in my own mind the link between story and adventure, but there is one. Our oldest epics are adventure stories- and so are the first novels- Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote. A story tells of an adventure, and whets our appetite for more adventure, but it also provides clues for dealing with our own adventures, mainly the adoption  of the correct psychological attitude for trying and testing situations.

For me it is important to emphasise the way an adventure returns control to us as ordinary people. We set up a potentially dangerous situation (say, descending a river in a canoe) and then make it safer without it being entirely predictable. One way we make it safer is to train ourselves, obtain skills and then rely on those skills and our own judgement. An adventurer knows accidents aren’t random events, they result from lapses of concentration, and chains of such lapses make for big accidents. The adventurer’s inner knowledge and certainty that he can avoid disaster in what looks to outsiders like a dangerous situation is one attraction of adventure.

I wonder if it is possible to devise ‘therapeutic’ adventures for people. Just enough of an adventure to supply the growth element for their neural circuitry. We know that brain growth factors are released during exercise and when we are deeply focused on something. There is nothing like a problem or challenge in a remote spot to focus the mind. I think that adventure provides a necessary form of learning that not only keeps us from cognitive decay, it also gives us a better perspective on our everyday lives, putting into perspective events that are actually quite trivial.

personal tactical innovation: a key element to success

Charles Upham was one of only three men to receive the VC twice- and the only one to receive two in WW2 (for non-UK readers a VC is the highest award for valour). Upham, a New Zealand farmer by origin, was not only exceedingly brave, he was a tactical innovator. Upham realised that storming a machine gun post armed with just a rifle, or even a sub-machine gun, is a very hit or miss affair. It requires near suicidal courage because the odds are very much stacked against you. However, if you are a skilled bowler- as Upham was, a hand grenade can become a much more deadly and useful weapon. Typically, in the ordinary model of infantry tactics a man will carry 3 to 5 grenades. Upham fashioned a special carry bag on his hip holding up to 20 grenades. He would then advance carefully and throw his grenades accurately, using them to knock out machine gun nests in a dynamic fashion – something a mortar team cannot manage when under heavy fire and moving fast.

But the key thing is the way this personal tactical innovation boosted his courage. Because he now had a weapon that worked really well he had a much better motive for attacking what others saw as hopeless situations.

It is this synergy between personal tactical innovation and courage that drives success in many areas including an expedition.

One of my favourite explorers is the Japanese Polar explorer Naomi Uemura, the first man to reach the North Pole solo. Uemura mainly travelled alone. He trusted himself and he wasn’t foolhardy. His personal tactical innovation for crossing crevasse fields was to wear two long bamboo poles, like a twenty foot ‘X’, attached to the top of his pack. He must have looked like a weird human helicopter. However, if he fell down a crevasse this apparatus stopped the plunge into the abyss below.

Often a personal tactical innovation looks a bit silly. I am sure many people have died because they wanted to keep looking cool.

When I wanted to explore the Sahara I had to endure a mild level of ridicule when I unveiled ‘the trolley’ – a cumbersome 4 wheeled trolley used for carrying up to 200kg of supplies (we actually carried around 120kg). But it worked, allowing two men to travel for over ten days without needing camels or 4x4s.

A personal tactical innovation addresses a seemingly ‘hopeless’ problem with more than just plain human doggedness. Scott’s response to the polar cold was to man haul his sledges. Amundsen’s personal tactical innovations were to use the skills of indigenous arctic peoples (dog sleds and skis) and apply them to the Antarctic. Scott attempted to use ponies and tractors in his attempt. But neither were tested and neither were personal. Amundsen had lived in the arctic for four years during his Northwest Passage expedition. Here he learnt the value of Eskimo ways and enjoyed using them.

A personal tactical innovation is not just a good idea; it is a good idea that suits YOU. It emerges because it favours something you are already good at. It is a personal solution not a generic one. I was interested in the trolley because it involved towing, something I knew I was good at, having towed a canoe up a 1600 mile river in Canada.

During the subsequent crossing my team made of the Rocky Mountains I knew we would encounter a river that had defeated many recent attempts at descent- the aptly named Bad River, a tributary of the Fraser River system. The Bad River was not just very steep, it was ice cold from glacier melt and blocked in many places with logs. Because no native peoples lived in the area anymore there was no motive to keep the river clear. Reports of canoeists retiring with their legs blue from bruises and cold made me consider using a slight, but highly effective personal tactical innovation. I knew that we would have to manhandle our bulky 21 foot canoe over considerable debris, and also resist a powerful current. I knew that even wearing wetsuits we’d get cold after spending hours in glacial melt water. However neoprene chest waders with sock feet would allow us to remain warm and dry at the same time (though each man carried a knife around his neck in case he upended in the waders- trapped air can keep you forced underwater in some situations). This solution worked admirably- and though the Bad River, was indeed a bad river, which supplied a few close calls, it was not in the end, the Worst River.

When we learn a new skill we often neglect our own personal inclinations and aptitudes. We often try and learn something ‘the official way’. My view is to have a go on your own and see what seems, to you, to be the logical solution. Remember this and then see what the regular practitioners are doing. Finally combine both. Many times the ‘obvious’ solution to you has been overlooked because the original solution has outgrown its application, or been superseded by a new development, but people have carried on blindly copying what their elders and better do. I remember aikido students banging their toes on the mat because that is what a top teacher did. Later I discovered he only did this because he had incipient arthritic pain in his toes and this was a way to dispel it. Yet his students did it as if it was part of the technique.

why go on an expedition?

One of the reasons I started doing expeditions was that they offered the chance to create a group with a single ambition, tight knit, all working together- with none of the nonsense and politics and manoeuvring that occurs in ‘real life’, when there isn’t that same sense of urgency.

The additional benefits are that this joint sense of mission means the group becomes the centre of the universe- for each member of the group. The shared mythology of the trip displaces the outside world of television celebrities and world events, things that usually dwarf us. Without belonging to a group with a higher than average sense of meaning one is destined to be an extra in the mediaworld’s ever changing superficial show- screened across TVs and the internet the world over. People develop double-acts and partnerships- ‘contramundum sets’- two against the world. Dynamic duos who range their own smaller world and its achievements against the ever looming big bad world. But there is always something a bit desperate about such mini-groups who define themselves as ‘against’ rather than ‘for’ something. An expedition is naturally positive- it is going somewhere, and everyone on the team is ‘for’ that onjective.

How does this higher than average sense of meaning manifest itself?

1. People get up early without complaint- and not to ‘show’ they are early risers- simply because the main event of walking is …the main event, and people want to do it, and have to make a certain number of miles or face failure.

2. There is no deep grumbling, by this I mean the core mission is never really questioned except in a joking way- if you’re on a walk of 700km you’re on a walk- you cannot seriously suggest giving up unless it’s obvious you have to give up through illness, injury or some other unforeseeable accident.

3. People sacrifice ‘letting it hang out’, ‘being themselves’, ‘doing their own thing’ for the sake of the expedition. Cabin fever is always a potential problem and people steer clear of standing on each other’s corns, pushing obvious buttons.

4. There is no sense of ‘out there’ (ie. the world of celebrities) being more important than ‘in here’ (what you are doing)- on the expedition.

5. In a real sense you create your own world.

6.There is a sense of calm urgency about what you do, what everyone does.

7. No one drags their feet.

8. You feel that you are where you want to be in the whole wide world. Nowhere else. Doing what you want to be doing.

man is a track following creature

A human being can perish so easily in the desert. To slightly mix metaphors, it’s like being underwater, holding your breath. Sooner or later you must come to the surface. Sooner or later the desert survivor must drink, he must drink to survive. How does he find his way to water? His way out? How does he escape the certainty of a waterless death in the desert? He follows tracks. He follows any track he can find, any prints, any marks, any alem (stone markers) even the strange wavering line left by rootless dry bushes, windblown and rolling like tumbleweed in a Western. Man is a track following creature. He will follow any track, even the wrong one, to his death- or lucky escape from the burning hell, the inferno that is the desert without water.

You see it early on, driving with others. “Oh there’s a track,” you find yourself saying, pointing it out as the double line of tyre tracks unspools across faultless curving dunes. I’ve been with very very experienced drivers. They all succumb to the fond idea that the track maker must know more than they do. But chances are the track maker is just as ignorant. That doesn’t matter. The tracks are there- follow them. Westerners, Easterners, Bedouin- we’re all the same. It’s universal- see a track and follow it. Why? Because we’re followers by nature? Because we might meet the trackmaker? There is a slight practicality- if the tracks suddenly squidge out, show signs of the driver having been stuck we have a warning. But the comfort is psychological rather than real. You usually find out pretty soon that sand is too soft. And good drivers avoid areas that are risky- the tops of flat dunes, the dells and dips between boxed in dunes, also the reverse: the strange hard wave like forms of sand that look soft but are actually very hard and bumpy. Knowing this is probably as much as following a track- but still we follow. It’s psychological. Of course it’s nice to make tracks too, be the first. And its GREAT when there are NO TRACKS and you’re on a camel. Then you know you’re the first person – for a while at least- and the tracks you leave make far less impact than car tracks, though I’ve followed camel tracks weeks old across the kind of surface that fills with fine windblown sand ensuring the footprint remains. A car track is more obvious but camel tracks, with footprints alongside are also easily followed unless avoidance of people is sought. I don’t know why we do it, it’s pat of being human- following the crowd even when it’s a crowd of one.

The two people who never followed tracks in my presence were a Bedouin and an Egyptian army officer. Both knew the desert very well, both were excellent drivers. Both were cocky, probably thinking they were the best drivers around. Both were used to being the person breaking ground, making the route (though plenty of leaders follow tracks). The army officer told me that first he followed tracks, then he used a sun compass, now he uses GPS. But GPS allows some leeway and what happens is that you pick up a track that is going your way and you follow it. Then when it wavers off course you correct and drive on your own, of course looking out for new tracks. When you find one you follow it, repeating the procedure. The Army officer didn’t do this. He went his own way. And so did the Bedouin- once the general direction was decided.

I think it’s worth thinking about. We probably act like this in all walks of life. Even when we know the way, the right way for us, we look for someone else to follow, someone who may not know the way any better than we do.

donkeys of Oman

Just been 2500 metres up a mountain in Oman with some feral donkeys and executives from a big and famous company (not the same thing I must hasten to add). I was there initially to speak about leadership, adventure and the natural polymathy of a homemade expedition. After that we sat round the camp fire and heard the wild donkeys bray. One Omani told me a national proverb, "If your motive is good, a farting donkey won't hurt you." I took that to mean 'a man with a clear conscience will be untroubled by petty alarms'. Though having walked up a mountain before in the wake of a farting mule I can say it is hardly an optimum mode of travel. But windy business aside, this trip to Oman is proving a great way to get a first glimpse of a place with possibilities for all kinds of adventurous travel.

walking outside increases creativity

It's official! What we have always known - that nothing beats a good long outdoor walk for boosting and bettering ideas has now been asserted in a scientific rather than anecdotal way. Dr Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz report in the article 'The positive effect of walking on creative thinking' (Journal of Experimental Psychology, April 21 2014) that walking improves GAU measures of creativity by 81%. GAU (Guilford's Alternate Uses test) measures the subject's ability to think up as many different uses for an object- something that correlates meaningfully with being creative. The tests were performed using treadmills indoors and also going on outdoor walks- in contrast with being seated. They found that outdoor walking produced 'the most novel and highest quality' results of all.