The long journey to experience
It’s all about the experience, because it’s experience not things that matter. At least that’s the latest theory of present giving. After all, what do you get the man who has everything… or at least enough to make CD and paperback storage a problem.
So, this Christmas my lovely girlfriend gave me a year’s membership of the Royal Geographical Society. The society is the ‘learned society and professional body for geography and geographers’, and is the UK version of the National Geographic Society of yellow bordered magazine fame. It might seem a bit of a strange gift since I was 16 the last time I studied geography and only received a humble C in my GCSE – not very learned!
The RGS however is a broad church, and more importantly they have great lectures given by explorers with fascinating tales and profoundly knowledgeable experts. Last week I trudged the long and arduous route to their Victorian mansion headquarters, well, I took the tube and walked 10 minutes up the road.
Monday saw Robin Knox-Johnston tell us about his Solo voyage around the world in the Velux 5 Oceans race last year. If you’ve seen the documentary Deep Water you’ll know that Knox-Johnston was the first man to sail around the world both single handed and without stopping in 1968. This time he was one of seven men to start and four to finish another dash round the planet.
Knox-Johnston now gives motivational lectures, and I was suitably motivated. He said he had two reasons for sailing into blue at the ripe old age of 67. Firstly his wife had recently died of cancer and he had to get over the heartbreak, but he also wanted to show the youngsters that people at his age were not washed up and still capable of remarkable things.
The racers hit their first bad weather off Spain which damaged Knox-Johnston’s boat, but despite more mishaps on the way he managed to complete the race in one piece. To me, the most horrifying aspect of his journey was the lack of sleep. His longest sleep was only 4 hours and when sailing through the shipping lanes he woke up every 15 minutes to mount look out.
The following day the aristocratic Rosie Stancer, an lady polar explorer, told us about her trek to the North Pole. Bloomin’ heck, this was the pure RGS heaven. Ms Stancer’s journey was introduced as the equivalent of trying to drag a sledge from London to Edinburgh through storms, over small ice mountains and even swimming across water in a dry suit.
By the end of the hour long talk my current life seemed like a complete breeze. On the third day of her projected 60 day journey an arctic storm had blown up that took temperatures down to -60c. Stancer’s toes became frost bitten, but she continued on despite the pain. When she returned, three toes had to be amputated. Her first few nights in the tent meant constant shivering punctuated by seizures.
Stancer stuck to a simple path of ‘Routine and Religion’ as proscribed by her grandfather, another polar explorer, who spent time in a Japanese POW camp. Each day began with a prayer allegedly found on Christ’s shroud and passed down to Charlemagne by a pope. Her journey made her feel connected to God or “whatever you call it” as she put it.
Eventually, after 75 days and still a few hundred miles short of the pole her re-supply plane took her back to base, as the polar ice would have made landing impossible any further north. She may have only got as far as the equivalent of the border with Scotland, but it was only because continuing would have almost certainly meant death that she stopped. The journey was all told with great humour and modesty, in splendid plummy tones – just as you might expect of the Royal Geographical Society. Perhaps my ‘experience’ at the RGS was vicarious, but then it was certainly first hand experience of great story telling.
Tags: National Geographic Society, Robin Knox-Johnston, Rosie Stancer, Royal Geographical Society