A Traveller's Research
Kami Rita Sherpa, 48, set a new world record on Wednesday by ascending Mount Everest for the 22nd time.
Meanwhile, Lhakpa Sherpa, 45. reached the summit of Mount Everest for the ninth time, thereby breaking her own record for the most summits of the world’s tallest peak by a woman.
More: Outside Magazine // Reuters // Associated Press
Australian Steve Plain set a new speed record for climbing the Seven Summits — the highest peaks on each continent.
That it took him only 118 days to complete the circuit would be remarkable enough. However, his achievement came just four years after he broke his neck in a surfing accident and was told that he might never walk again.
More: DW.com // The Australian
Xia Boyu of China, who lost both his feet during a failed Everest attempt in 1975, and later had both legs amputated due to cancer, finally reached the summit on prosthetic limbs yesterday on his fifth attempt.
Justin Housman, reporting at the Adventure Journal:
Last December, the Nepalese government wrote a new rule banning double amputees from obtaining permits to climb Everest. At the time, it seemed like it was the end of Chinese climber and amputee Xia Boyu’s decades-long quest to summit the world’s highest peak. But on Monday, that quest was realized.
And
On Monday morning, Xia finally reached the summit, along with a team of Sherpas. Xia is the first double amputee to reach Everest’s peak from the Nepal route; a fellow double amputee from New Zealand named Mark Inglis summited from the Tibet route in 2006.
More:
Climber Who Lost Both Feet While Climbing Everest Finally Summits It 43 Years Later – Adventure Sports Network
National Geographic:
Reaching the North Pole is no small feat. While many believe the first person to accomplish this daunting task was either Robert Peary or Frederick Cook, the title might actually belong to an African American explorer named Matthew Henson.
Wired:
Ultra-endurance bicycle racer Lael Wilcox puts more miles on her bike every year than most people do on their cars. Here’s how she trains for and rides some of the toughest races on earth.
Lauren Matison, National Geographic:
As the last few clouds disappeared, the perfectly visible towers pierced the bright blue sky like a Gaudí masterpiece. I settled on a boulder by the lake with Sarah, a prison guard from Northumberland, England. “I’d never done any kind of adventure before this,” she said.
“I think the only real thing that was holding me back was me. The women on this trip always pull together and never make me feel like someone is better at something. I’m more confident now and want to experience much more of the world. I know there’s no limit to what I can do.”
Donovan Vincent, Toronto Star:
He contracted malaria, dodged bullets with government soldiers in a war zone and was jailed for several days near a small village because police didn’t believe him when he explained who he was.
Adventure traveller Mario Rigby also tested the limits of his physical and emotional stamina when he trekked 12,000 kilometres northward across eight African countries for two years, by foot and kayak. He started in late 2015 and finished in February, taking an eastern route from South Africa to Egypt.
Africa, he says is a place that has been depicted by the West only as dangerous, violent and beset by poverty.
More:
Elizabeth Weil, The New York Times:
When Aleksander Doba kayaked into the port in Le Conquet, France, on Sept. 3, 2017, he had just completed his third — and by far most dangerous — solo trans-Atlantic kayak trip. He was a few days shy of his 71st birthday. He was unaccustomed to wearing pants. He’d been at sea 110 days, alone, having last touched land that May at New Jersey’s Barnegat Bay. The trip could have easily ended five days earlier, when Doba was just a few hundred feet off the British coast. But he had promised himself, when he left New Jersey, that he would kayak not just to Europe but to the Continent proper. So he stayed on the water nearly another week, in the one-meter-wide boat where he’d endured towering waves, in the coffinlike cabin where he spent almost four months not sleeping more than three hours at a stretch, where he severely tried his loved ones’ patience in order to be lonely, naked and afraid. Then he paddled to the French shore.
Yvan Bourgnon of Switzerland sailed his small 6.5 meter (~ 21 foot) catamaran 55,000 kilometers, around the world, in 220 days on the open water. As the the little sport catamaran didn’t have a cabin or on-board accommodation, the adventurer slept exposed to the elements.
Bourgnon documented his voyage and its ups and downs with his camera.
For today’s coming-of-age generation, squishing themselves through the same hoops as their parents is much like deep-fisting a sleeping bag into its fire-retardant carry pouch – a misery-inducing act whose outcome is always disproportionate to energy expended.
So it should come as no surprise that the adventure travel market has boomed since the world went bust in 2008 –and it has mainly young people to thank. As the world went up in flames, more and more of Britain’s youth swaddled themselves in synthetic polymers, turning their backs on responsibility and waving hello to the great, wide unknown.
© 2024 Adventure Trend
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑