A Traveller's Research

Category: Adventurers & Explorers (Page 1 of 7)

Clarisse Crémer made history sailing solo round-the-world in the Vendée Globe

French skipper Clarisse Crémer sailed around the world, alone on her sailboat, non-stop, without assistance, racing against other sailors across turbulent seas. The Vendée Globe race is often called the Everest of the seas.

The 31-year-old says her main goal was simply to complete the challenge, but in doing so in only 87 days, she smashed the previous women’s record by seven days.

It was her first time entering the competition, after six years of training.

Vendée Globe sailor Clarisse Crémer on making history in round-the-world race

Source » France24

French skipper Clarisse Cremer smashes the Vendée Globe women’s record by seven days

Clarisse Cremer broke the women’s record for the Vendee Globe round-the-world race when she completed the solo event in just over 87 days.

The 31-year-old French skipper finished the race in 87 days 2 hours and 24 minutes, smashing Ellen MacArthur’s previous mark of 94 days and 4 hours set in the 2000-01 race.

“I’m so happy to be here. It’s a big relief, we were stressed until the end,” she said on the race website. “I’m happy to have succeeded and to be back with my team. This welcome is incredible, I feel like I am dreaming.

“There were times when I wished I had pushed harder on the machine, but the goal was to finish.”

Source » France 24

French sailor Yannick Bestaven wins round-the-world Vendée Globe race

George Ramsay, CNN »

French sailor Yannick Bestaven was declared the winner of the round-the-world Vendée Globe race on Thursday following his role in the rescue of a fellow competitor.

Bestaven was the third sailor to cross the finish line in Les Sables d’Olonne, France, but a jury awarded him a time compensation of 10 hours and 15 minutes for helping to rescue stricken competitor Kevin Escoffier earlier in the race.

Escoffier was forced to abandon his yacht off South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope in November and spent more than 11 hours in a life raft. He was eventually rescued by Jean Le Cam, the nearest competitor to the scene.

Bestaven, skipper of Maître CoQ IV, achieved a finishing time of 80 days, 13 hours, 59 minutes and 46 seconds after his role in the rescue operation was taken into account.

 

Wade Davis argues exploration is a flawed notion and explorers need to shed their self-obsession

Wade Davis, writing in The Walrus »

The true and original explorers, men and women who actually went where no humans had been, were those who walked out of Africa some 65,000 years ago, embarking on a journey that, over 2,500 generations, roughly 40,000 years, carried the human spirit to every corner of the habitable world.

Since then, terrestrial exploration has rarely been divorced from power and conquest. Searching for a passage to the Indies, Jacques Cartier is said to have discovered the Saint Lawrence River in 1534, though the valley was clearly settled at the time, the waters offshore crowded with the Basque fleet, fishermen with no interest whatsoever in flaunting the location of their discoveries: a cod fishery that would feed Europe for three centuries.

History heralds Francisco de Orellana as the first to travel the length of the Amazon (1541), a journey documented by his companion and scribe, Gaspar de Carvajal, who wrote of fleets of native canoes and riverbanks dense with settlements, home to just some of the 10 million people then living in the basin. …

Read the whole essay at The Walrus »

Sam Manicom » Traveller, author, and RTW motorcycle adventure rider

BMW Motorad’s Ride and Talk podcast » #22 Sam Manicom and his spirit of adventure!

Within three months of throwing his leg over a bike for the first time, Sam Manicom set off on an R 80 GS to travel the length of Africa. But when he got to the Cape, he didn’t want the trip to end, so he just kept going. His planned one-year trip turned into an eight-year, 200,000-miles overlanding odyssey across 55 countries.

The four motorcycle travel books that came out of that trip are inspirational; his talks and presentations are truly memorable and his main ambition in life now is to encourage others to explore and learn about the world and themselves. Listen to @sammanicom.author in this podcast and be inspired!


Sam Manicom, Under the Visor Interview (2015)

Sam Manicom, Under the Visor Interview


Sam Manicom discusses his book Into Africa (2013)

Sam Manicom, motorcycle adventurer and author, discusses Into Africa

 

Gunther Holtorf’s 26 year round-the-world road trip

Globetrotter's Return | Euromaxx

In 1989, at the age of 51, Gunther Holtorf quit his job as an airline executive, packed up his 1988 Mercedes Benz 300GD he lovingly named “Otto”, and took off to see the world. A year later he was joined by Christine, 34, who later became his wife. The original plan was explore Africa for 18 months. After 5 years and about 100,00 km – 62,000 miles – exploring Africa, they decided to keep on driving.

Otto completed the journey with few modifications, retaining it’s original 3-litre 88-horsepower diesel engine. The original gearbox and transfer case have never been touched. It also the original axles and differentials. The journey was completed without electronics and little technology. They, for example, didn’t have a GPS, and only near the end of the journey did Gunther acquire a basic mobile phone.

Christine’s journey came to an end in 2010 when she passed away from cancer. Gunther continued on with her son, Martin, to honour Christine and to fulfill a promise he made to her.

In 2014, at the age of 77 Gunther returned home to Germany after being on the road for 26 years and having travelled 897,000 kilometres – approximately 560,000 miles – through 215 countries.

Gunther stated the best part of travelling independently overland is having the freedom to decide where and when to go.

Otto is now on display at the Mercedes-Benz museum in Stuttgart.

Gunther and Christine are incredible inspirations.

Continue reading

Home By Seven

Home By Seven

Home By Seven

Steph Jeavons is the first British woman to ride a motorcycle on all seven continents. And she did it solo, all on one trip, aboard a small Honda CRF250L. Her adventure took her to 54 countries over 4 years.

And she’s written about it in an upcoming book entitled “Home By Seven – One woman’s solo journey to ride all seven continents on two wheels


Twenty years later, and armed only with a stern tone of voice she reserves for naughty dogs, drunk Turks, Iranian taxi drivers, semi-conscious British soldiers and Saudi truckers, she rides her trusty steed Rhonda the Honda solo around the world, to the highest, driest, wettest, hottest and coldest corners of the earth. She gets caught up in a Himalayan landslide on the highest road on the planet, sails her motorcycle across the Drake Passage to Antarctica, crashes it in Colombia, and claims an unwished-for title as the first person to fall off a motorcycle on all seven continents, as she heads for home up the length of Africa.

This is a powerful and honest memoir written from the perspective of a liberated single woman taking on the world with a dogged determination to complete her mission at all costs.

This is a journey of self-discovery born from a need to shed some light on the darkest crevices of the soul. An inner drive that propelled Steph forward into the unknown and forced her to find her strengths, while exposing her weaknesses.

Find out more about the book »

Jenny Davis skied 715 Miles across Antarctica completely alone—and that’s just one of her crazy adventures

Jenny Davis

Jenny Davis

Jenny Davis as told to Ellie Trice / Shape Magazine »

This passion took on a new life when I was diagnosed with a benign tumor in my abdomen five years ago. After a painful surgery and treatment, I made the decision—while still recovering in a hospital bed—to apply to run the Marathon de Sables, a 155.5-mile ultramarathon through the Sahara Desert, starting in Ouarzazate, Morocco. I moved to Morocco to train and live in a tent among other female athletes from around the world, and ended up being the 16th female to cross the finish line after five days.

Adventure to me is about being idle. That doesn’t mean you have to go on a huge expensive expedition—you can simply just set up camp in the wild close to home for the weekend. It’s about getting outdoors and disconnecting from the pressures of mundane life.

But I wasn’t going to give up. In November 2019, I strapped on my skis and made my second attempt. This time around, for the first 500 miles, I was skiing at world-record pace. Then an injury, one they call polar thigh, set in. (The motion of skiing into a headwind or tailwind can compress your legwear, and if there you don’t have enough insulation or any cold air gets trapped, you can suffer from polar thigh.) For me, it started as these small clusters of ulcers on my leg, which continued to get bigger and bigger over time.

Read the whole article »

More » Jenny Davis (web site)

Why philosophy is a good travel companion for adventurous minds

Travel and philosophy have long enjoyed a cosy affair.

Emily Thomas »

In 2019, there were 1.4 billion international tourist arrivals globally – and, given that the planet only holds 7.7 billion humans, this figure alone suggests that a lot of us are travelling. The World Tourism Organization reports two major motivations for this – “travel to change”: the quest for local experiences, authenticity, transformation and “travel to show”: the desire for Instagramable moments and destinations.

I think both trends are fuelled by curiosity about the unknown, the unfamiliar. Humans have always looked for new experiences, ways to live, things to show to others. Travel magazines are strewn with articles about visiting “overlooked” and “unknown” places – and this curiosity has a long history.

Throughout his Antarctic explorations, Apsley Cherry-Garrard yearns for “unknown” places. Mary Kingsley describes the “sheer good pleasure” of canoeing down an “unknown” West Africanriver by moonlight, and delights in places “not down” on maps. A character in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness describes how “inviting” the “blank spaces on the earth” seem and tells us about his hankering for “the biggest, the most blank”.

Philosophy can also be about exploring the unknown. In one of his groundbreaking books on idealism, 18th-century Irish philosopher George Berkeley likened his investigations to a “long Voyage”, involving difficult travel across “wild Mazes of Philosophy”. Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume offers similar reflections halfway through his most radical sceptical work A Treatise of Human Nature.

Travels on a ‘boundless ocean’: Scottish philosopher David Hume.


He imagines himself as a sailor who has struck shallow water, narrowly escaping shipwreck. Safety tempts him to remain perched on the rocks, rather than venturing out onto “that boundless ocean, which runs out into immensity”. Yet Hume decides he will put out to sea again, in the same “leaky weather-beaten vessel”. Continue reading

An update of Emil and Liliana Schmid from Argentina

Emil and Liliana Schmid have been travelling in the same Toyota Land Cruiser since they started on 18 October 1984. They are back in Argentina.

From Primera Edicion »

« Translated from Spanish »

Going back to certain places, they find it disappointing. “Now it is very difficult to enter the countries, many closed borders, many procedures,” protested Emil assuring that before, that did not happen. For her part, Liliana considered that in South America “there are a lot of people, tourists, buildings. There is a lot of garbage… people don’t care about the environment, and that hurts us ”.

However, there is something that does not change for them: people. Despite the many crises, wars and hardships, “the people are still just as friendly and happy as the first time we came.”

The journey continues.

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