Adventure

Recently my husband and I went whitewater rafting. No lazy river for us, we love those rapids that dump you into icy water or spin you into rocks.

After a particularly perilous stretch, our guide mentioned that a woman had drowned after becoming trapped underwater between a rock and the raft. “Drowned, as in died?” I asked incredulously.

We always sign disclaimers but – rather stupidly, in hindsight – I’d forgotten these occasional adventures could actually kill us.

Continue reading "A life worth living isn’t wrapped in cotton wool" »

Failed epic adventure stories often trump successful epic adventure stories. Especially for entertainment value when the “idea” itself was tipped for failure in the first place. Today’s open thread is devoted to an adventure story just like this.

Salomon August Andrée was a Swedish engineer, physicist, aeronaut and polar explorer. But sadly, also also a man completely lacking in common sense who attempted to reach the North Pole in an air balloon. Not surprisingly, he failed. Within the first ten hours of their expedition, the arctic winds lifted and “impeded the flight”. And the balloon crashed, killing Andrée and his companions.

But that was1897. How’s this Monday looking for you?

American adventurer Aron Ralston is just about to fly home, after a whirlwind visit of considerably less than 127 hours to promote the Oscar-nominated film 127 hours, which recounts his amazing survival story.

Ralston, you’ll recall, is the guy who got wedged by a boulder in a Utah canyon in 2003, and cut his own arm in sheer, gruesome desperation after five days with almost no food or water. So dehydrated was he, his pee literally turned black.

In countless interviews over the years, and again this week, Ralston has used words like “epiphany” and “euphoric moment” to describe the instant he decided to self-amputate. It’s hardly the overtly god-bothering language which some American athletes use. All the same, I’m convinced he experienced a “god moment”. Let me explain.

Continue reading "Ralston: Divine intervention or a bloody strong will?" »

There was always something exciting about buying a guidebook for a destination I was about to visit.

Long bus rides to work and lunch hours were spent poring over the pages, highlighting the “don’t miss” destinations and circling hotels to call when I got back to the office (when no-one was looking).

The guide was a status symbol, something I would flaunt in a “Look at me, I’m going off to some exotic location while you suckers will still be working” way whenever I was out in public. But it would also freak me out, that my entire trip’s success was so dependent on it.

Continue reading "Why the big, chunky travel guide book is dead" »

My daughter Violet celebrated her first birthday last week so naturally we bought her a yacht. 

Not just any yacht, either. It’s a 10 metre Sparkman and Stephens 34 kitted out with satellite navigation system, along with a re-furbished galley and bathroom that wouldn’t look out of place in a modern city apartment. To top it all, we had it painted pink.
There’s also an on-board computer so she can document the around the world solo voyage that she’ll be embarking on in 6 months time. (She would have gone immediately, but we figured she’d get her sea legs more quickly if she could stand unaided.)

Continue reading "10m yacht the perfect gift for the baby girl with everything" »

There’s been a lot of talk in the last few days about how Jessica Watson overcame the knockers, particularly internet-dwelling knockers, when she sailed three hours late into Sydney Harbour on Saturday.

Well, I have to admit I was one of those lazy, desk-bound cynics who laughed (once we found out she was OK), when she ran into that tanker last year about four hours into her rehearsal run down the East Coast.

I was also pretty taken aback at the time that her parents thought it was hunky dory to send her off around the world knowing there was chance she wouldn’t come back. But amid the staged-managed hysteria on the Opera House forecourt on Saturday Jessica looked like the calm amid the storm.

Continue reading "Why knocking Jessica is so 2009" »

Amidst all the manufactured excitement attached to the arrival in Sydney of round-the-world sailor Jessica Watson consider this: Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister who condemned the work of Bill Henson on the basis of its alleged exploitation of teenage girls and taxed alco-pops for the binge drinking they “encouraged” among the same, is now turning up to celebrate the fact that a teenage girl was allowed to risk her life by sailing round the world for no better reason than to “break a record”.

It is just one absurdity among many in the Jessica Watson saga, a story that every day feels more and more like an episode of Chris Lilley’s We Can Be Heroes.

Adventure is on hard times. Once, those journeying into an untamed wilderness further than any man (or teenage girl) before them excited the public imagination not merely because what they were doing was dangerous but because they wished, to quote Tennyson’s words carved in memorial to Robert Scott, “to seek, to find and not to yield.”

Continue reading "Jess’s journey a dangerous, narcissistic indulgence" »

When the shower on the bottom floor landing began sprinkling water on my face I knew our project was complete.  We had built a three-storey tree house, decked out with a cooking area, carpeted living room and water supply system.

Parents from Baradine came to admire it, the Australasian Post came to photograph and the four of us – Bimbo Kelly, Rusty Patterson, Oscar Purdy and Emu Emerson (that’s me) – came to make it our “adventure home”.

Oscar and I built on the design work of Bimbo and Rusty who, in 1968, spent days walking along the gullies of Baradine Creek in search of a gum tree big enough to cradle a tree house.  Obligingly, there it was - a magnificent soaring red gum, its roots plunging deep into the wide shoulder of the sandy creek bed.  At its back, over a fence, was a stand of native cypress pine trees – a perfect source of timber.

Continue reading "1970 was the year I was never out of my tree" »