Alastair Humphreys
By Rosanna Harvey-Crawford
Alastair Humphreys is an adventurer, author, blogger, podcaster, speaker and film-maker (perhaps the ultimate multi-hyphenate?), who has won National Geographic Adventurer of the Year and inspired many people to lead lives that are more adventurous and connected to nature.
He has cycled around the world, walked and run across deserts, rowed across the Atlantic and busked across Spain, following in the steps of Laurie Lee. He also pioneered the idea of microadventures, encouraging people to find adventure and wilderness close to home. Alastair kindly agreed to speak to us and we talked about ‘real’ careers, balancing a love of travel and new places with environmental concerns, learning to respect nature and how to lead a more adventurous day to day life.
Rosanna: Can you tell me a bit about how you decided to become an adventurer?
Alastair: So, originally I wanted to go travel the world and see lots of exciting places and do lots of exciting stuff, like a lot of young people do when they're students. This was during my time at the University of Edinburgh - I really wanted to go and see the world. So there's that part, which I think is fairly standard and similar to a lot of young people. The other part was that I didn't really have any vocation - I couldn't really think of part of adult life really, really captivated and appealed to me, and the thought of just getting a job, like all my friends, just for the sake of it, for the next 40 years, filled me with horror! I think what I wanted to do was just go and have a really big adventure, and then come home and accept the inevitability of getting a real job like all my friends. That was pretty much my thinking when I was trying to plan my first adventure - it was essentially, I’m going to be in a job for 40 years, I’ll have a massive adventure first and then I'll settle down and probably become a teacher. So, I decided to cycle around the world, and I spent four years doing that. Then, when I came home, I did just assume, now I have to get a real job because that's the way the world works. I dabbled a bit - I was a teacher for a year, but the call of adventure and having been my own boss for four years was too strong. I decided that I'd love to be a teacher, but maybe I can do that a bit later and I'll go and do a few more adventures first, and then I’ll get a normal job like everyone else. Then, probably after about a year or two of scrabbling around trying to make adventure pay the bills, I got to the point where I could just postpone the real job, and I’m still postponing it today.
There were two aspects – the positive side was really wanting adventure, freedom, wildness, and then the less positive side was running away from normal life and not wanting to do what I felt I was expected to do. I could probably divide up my inbox into people dreaming of adventure, people who've had an adventure and people regretting not having had an adventure yet. A lot of people hope they will ‘get it out of their system’, but that's rarely the case because people often discover it is a life with more purpose. Actually, one thing I used to bridle against in the early days was people accusing me of being a bum and a waster - you actually have to work very, very hard to give the appearance of being a full time bum. In fact, it was a choice of where to allocate my time, effort, resources and spending, not something that was luxury. To make money out of adventure requires you to become an entrepreneur, business person, a publicist, an accountant, a photographer and also a public speaker – you have to take on about ten different careers to pay the bills. I'm sure there's a large number of people who could make much more money being a lawyer or teacher and still have as many nights out in a tent. I always emphasise to people that if you want to make this a career, it requires a whole host of different skills, long before you ever get to actually strap on a pair of skis or get on a bicycle.
R: Do you think your perception of the words adventure and adventurer have changed since you started out?
A: My feelings about adventure have changed a lot since I was at Edinburgh and dreaming of adventure, because that was 20 years ago. I've essentially been an adventurer, in mind, if not in practice for 20 years now. So my feelings towards adventure have changed, because I changed from being a 23 year old student to a 43 year old middle aged bloke. So, I think there are the inevitable changes that go with growing older, which, in summary would be changing from a real macho, testosterone fueled, proving myself to the world and to other people, type of approach to adventure, to now, when that doesn't really interest me anymore. It's more of an experiment in curiosity, more about creative or mental journeys, rather than just trying to show how tough I am.
As for the word adventurer – well, I've never liked the word ‘explorer’ for many reasons. One is because I think if used properly an explorer is someone who goes off into the world and brings back knowledge. So, doing something genuinely ground-breaking and actually discovering things, so nothing I've done is anything like that. I've really resisted the word explorer for that reason, but also slightly for the reason it's a bit, sort of, posh berks. I've never liked that side of the word ‘exploring’. That’s why I've always chosen adventurer. I spent my years at university just reading adventure books, dozens and dozens of them, and the vast majority of those were from white middle class men, without a doubt. So, the background of people who've done adventure tends to be that, for all sorts of historical reasons, but that does mean that most of my early heroes and inspirations were white, middle class men, which I am myself. I think I did feel that I didn't belong in the adventure world because I hadn't done adventures but it was definitely made easy for me by not having the feelings of not belonging, because I was a woman, or black, or disabled or anything like that. So, there was that aspect to it, but I think it's changed, enormously. There are so many women doing loads of adventure stuff now. In terms of women and adventure, it feels to me like there's been a massive sea change in the last 10 years. This is brilliant, but what that has not been is a broadening of demographics to non-white, non-middle class. I think that's the big thing that really hasn't changed very much during my time in adventure. Certainly, in the ten years since I've been doing microadventures and trying to evangelize about getting more people out to try adventures for the first time, I've been very, very aware that with all my ten years of efforts, I'm pretty much always just speaking to the converted. I'm very aware that there are vast numbers of people living in big cities who've never even considered the idea of going to climb a tree and sleep on a hill for a night, and I've totally failed to make any connection with that world at all. I think that's the big change that hopefully will come. There's been more change in the last six months than in the last ten years.
R: You've travelled all over the world, and you've pioneered micro adventures, how have those experiences made you feel about how we're collectively treating our environment?
A: For a lot of years, I didn't even know there was a problem. Then, for quite a few more years, I chose to ignore the problem because I was having so much fun going to places, and I couldn't begin to imagine not going to all these places. Having said that, the biggest adventure of my life, spending four years travelling the entire world by bike, I didn't use an aeroplane once, so there are ways to see the entire planet without having to trash it. I then spent a few years trying to get an expedition to the South Pole, and getting excited about things like chartering planes to fly to the ice cap in Greenland. When I started to do quite well as a speaker, I was flying business class to America, and I felt like I was awesome and amazing, and I was thinking this is wonderful! Honestly, it probably wasn’t until about five years ago that I started having a bit of gnawing guilt, that it wasn't quite right to be someone who so loved the world, but then was trashing it more than 99% of people were. So, I then spent probably a couple more years just doing the guilty things and offsetting my flights, voting for the Green Party and then about three years ago, I just said enough is enough. So I’ve stopped, I don’t fly for work anymore. I pretty much try not to fly, full stop. I've stopped championing anything that involves people having to fly off far away around the world as much as possible. It just dawned on me belatedly that it's not just me trashing the world when I fly around, it's bigger than that, because I'm also peddling this lifestyle to other people and writing about encouraging other people to do the same. So it's a much more magnified effect, thanks to so-called ‘influence’.
R: Have you noticed peoples’ attitudes to travel changing over the years?
A: Certainly, when I began adventuring there was literally zero mention of flying off into lots of far off places was bad, and it literally didn't cross my mind for many, many years. Actually, the more flights you took, the cooler you were, because you’re jet setting around and that’s awesome. So, there were many years of just blissful ignorance, but I think there has been a change. But in the adventure community, it's fairly pitiful to be honest, it's generally people flying off to the Arctic, and claiming that their trip is to raise awareness for polar bears or something. They do a little hand wringing, and offset their flights or something like that, but there hasn't been that much meaningful change. But then, the microadventures thing has just grown and grown and grown, and for a few years after I did the microadventures, I was just hoping the whole thing would go away so I could get on with some other projects in my life, but it seems like it’s here to stay, which is a really positive sign. Then this leads on to lockdown, which has been the great accelerator of many things, lots of bad things and decline of various businesses, but there's also some very big changes in what travel means. I don’t know if other people feel this way, but now when people say, “I need to go off holiday, I need to jet off somewhere”, it seems a bit distasteful to me, when a couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. I've really discovered the joys of local adventure in recent years and I've come to feel that with enough curiosity and observation, one small country is enough for anyone's lifetime of adventuring. So, I don't really feel constrained by it anymore. I feel quite excited by all the things that I can still do and see and get to, so I have changed in that sense.
R: Were you surprised by the way that the microadventures took off, and how enthusiastic people were?
A: Yes, completely. It started in 2010 or 2011, when I decided to do a year of microadventures as a blogging project. I had this hunch in my mind that I could get much of what I was looking for from adventure and travel, close to home. So, the idea was a year of microadventure – but, I was very worried at the time because I was trying to become the archetypal type of adventurous guy, who's the big tough guy going off to do big tough stuff. I was still trying to get to the South Pole at the time and I was really worried that from a career point of view, no one would be interested at all in me walking around the M25 or going on little bike rides. I really wasn't sure anyone would be interested in it and I certainly didn't think it was going to be good for my career. Then, at the end the year of the campaign of trying to get people to do a microadventure month, I got the National Geographic Adventurer of the Year award, which is ridiculous – it’s something I would never have imagined I would get, even doing big tough stuff, and I was getting it for going to sleep on a small hill in Hampshire. It was quite odd. Then, when I wrote the book, it immediately sold exponentially more copies than my books that I cycled around the world in order to write, which is slightly galling. It took me quite a long time to realise that microadventures were actually interesting because they're relevant and applicable to everyone's lives. Whereas books about cycling around the world or crossing oceans, they're just vicarious adventure. They're not actually applicable to the real world, most for most people.
One of the things that prompted me to make an effort with microadventures was that by this time I was making my living from my adventures: I was doing talks that hundreds of people would turn up to and the small thousands of people were buying my books. It made me realize there are a lot of people who are interested in having adventures, but when you're cycling through Tajikistan, you don't really see all these people. It gradually dawned on me that's because for most people, real life gets in the way. So, I started trying to think about how you can fit adventure into the pockets of real life, so adventure can be part of a rounded, whole, normal life rather than just doing a radical acting out of normal life, or a radical departure from what you do for a brief period of time. Another aspect I see now, with hindsight, is that it fits into how we can persuade people to behave differently for the environment – not talking about things in terms of giving things up and making their lives boring, no one's going to do that for the sake of something 100 years down the line. But, if you can say to people that you can do these things and still have fun and excitement and adventure and all the things you're dreaming of in life, but in a way that's cheap, and doesn't trash the planet, then I think that's when you’re able to start gaining some traction.
R: It’s an interesting situation now, with a lot of news about fly-campers and high levels of littering, which is obviously negative, but does show that people who may not have ventured out into the countryside before are doing so.
A: Most of the people doing this have never had an experience of nature, they're used to being in a town where if you drop your crisp packet, it'll be cleared up by someone by the morning, or they’re used to flying to somewhere for the holidays, and everything's sorted, organised and gets cleaned away when you go home. I think it’s an education thing really, of how to behave in wild places, which sounds quite patronising, but I think if you've never done it, then you understandably don’t know. Occasionally, I’ve taken people camping who’ve never done it before, and what astonishes me is so many things that to me are 100% obvious and normal, they have no idea about and that's just because they've never done it before. In a way I see all the fly tipping and trashing as quite a positive thing because it's proof a new type of people are trying to have experiences in wild places. So, I see it sort of as a hopeful thing really. I think until you go out and spend time in nature, with all the best will in the world you don’t care about it. If all you know about nature is watching an occasional David Attenborough about polar bears, that's more just like an experience of going to the cinema. It's hard to really feel as connected to the natural world as you'd get if you've gone out, even just walking or camping, close to home. I think in that sense, the adventure community has a stronger role to play than its size might suggest, creating people who actually give a shit, who can make changes in their own lives.
R: My last question is, which I'm sorry, you probably get asked all the time, what would you say to any budding adventurers, old or young?
A: Well, normally I would answer that by saying, just go and do it, and that the first step is the hardest one, and with big dreams people often get put off by not knowing how to commit to it. I think that microadventures is great for just giving people a tiptoeing step into smaller adventures, which can lead them on to bigger ones as their skills and confidence build. But, I think in connection with our conversation, I'd say that any of us who love the outdoors have a greater responsibility to actually care for it, and not trash it ourselves and to really evangelize about the changes that are needed. And I think the best way to do that, in defence of Instagram type people, the best way to do all these things is by sharing stories. I think storytelling of responsible adventuring is a really powerful thing for change. That’s what I'm trying to do anyway.
