Adventure has been in my blood since I was a small boy living on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales in northern England. After leaving school, I hitch-hiked alone from Cape Town to Cairo and visited Afghanistan in 1976, before the Russian invasion.
I emigrated to Canada in 1980 and in 1983-84 walked the entire length of the Ganges, India’s holiest river, raising money for Save the Children Fund. The fascinating journey took seven months and was the subject of my first book, “A Walk along The Ganges”. From 1985 to 1991 I travelled extensively in the Amazon in a canoe, carrying little more than a rain canopy, mosquito net and a hammock, and wrote about the experience in “Amazon”. During these travels I was fortunate enough to met and eventually stay with Yanomami Indians in a remote area of the rain forest north of the river Amazon.
At that time their land was being invaded by illegal goldminers, with government sanction. I was able to chronicle their fight to survive in “Savages, The Life and Killing of the Yanomami”. I was so intensely involved in their struggle that afterwards it was difficult to find any project equally compelling. So I took a break from travelling and writing and in 1995 built and operated Still Life Retreat in southern Ontario, Canada, offering peace and quiet to the “wilted and the wired”. I also edited and published two editions of the “Canadian Retreat Guide”.
I left Still Life just before the new millenium and soon took up sailing. Have boat, will travel! I now live most of the year on my 32-foot steel sailboat “Kuan Yin”. This summer (2010) I’ll be sailing in my 32-foot steel sailboat “Kuan Yin” on a 3000-mile voyage around the Labrador Peninsula in northeastern Canada. The project is to retrace the remarkable adventure in 1811 of an Inuit (Eskimo) sea captain and his family and two missionaries who sailed into Ungava Bay to meet Inuit who’d never before seen Europeans. The voyage promises to be both very challenging and fascinating. I’ll be posting regular photos and updates to my blog, so please sign up if you want to see what this immense wilderness looks like and meet some of the people living there.
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