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08-31-2014, 10:29 PM
Read a book a year ago called 'The river of doubt'. Basically about Teddy Roosevelt going down to South America, trekking through the uncharted jungle with his son and some Brazilian explorer named Rondon and discovering/mapping a thousand mile tributary of the Amazon.
Just started on another one about Shakleton's failed Antarctic voyage a hundred years ago.
It got me thinking, does this sort of thing still happen? Or are they purely romanticized tales from the golden age of travel? It's always seemed to me like the essece of adventure, survival, and accomplishment.
Even like Antarctic cruises which are available these days seem fairly prepackaged, have been done a thousand times before, and its all very safe and predictable. Though I guess thats a facet of modern life too. Sat Phones and chopper rescue have removed part of the allure of the risk and unknown.
Some ship got caught up in the ice in Antarctica there last year. It was what, like a week before they airlifted everyone off?
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08-31-2014, 10:39 PM
There's still adventure to be had in the Brazilian rain forests.
Indigenous people who have never known outside civilizations and are using bows and arrows.
There are still people looking for Z - the lost city of the Incas.
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08-31-2014, 11:11 PM
Yeah would be cool to see how it really was back in time few hundred year ago when people went to America, Asia and Afrika. Would love to have that feeling of adventure and that you might discover something completly new. I think those days are gone.
Papua New Guinea could stil be a good choice.
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08-31-2014, 11:18 PM
We are too early for space expeditions.
Anyways those will be with the kind company of a sexbot
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09-01-2014, 02:39 AM
Both Poles have been traversed. Even the Everest hikes are so commercialized now. Exploring the Galapagos Islands presently is fairly commonplace.
You're looking at outer space exploration/ possible colonization & i'm guessing maybe deep descent towards our Earth's core (H.G Wells's Journey To The Center of The Earth) as being the next groundbreaking, human achievement setting expeditions.
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09-01-2014, 03:23 AM
I'm surprised nobody mentioned the ocean depths. There's all kinds of crazy shit at extreme depths that we have only caught glimpses of. The next frontier is the oceans, not outer space. Sure, people have been down in bathyspheres a few times, but there's a whole lot of ocean to see.
We're never going to penetrate very far into the earth itself. The reasons are varied, but put simply it's way too hot and way too high pressure.
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09-01-2014, 03:58 AM
A few years ago scientists realised that the population of lowland gorillas was about 4 times as large as they had thought. They discovered a 100,000 square kilometre area of rainforest pretty thickly populated with gorillas. Also in the equatorial rainforests of Africa, every few years an expedition tries to find Mokele Mbembe (supposedly a surviving dinosaur) in the Lake Tele area. No luck so far.
And in Indonesian West Papua, about ten years ago someone discovered a large plateau area that as far as anyone knew had never been seen by man before. The birds and animals were totally tame, and some new species were discovered.
So I'd say for the adventurous, there are still expeditions to go on. The mountains of Venezuela perhaps? It was only in the 1960s that the highest waterfall in the world was discovered in the vicinity.
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09-01-2014, 04:19 AM
I think you can still experience that same sense of adventure. Much of the earth still very raw. You just have to purposely avoid the packaged experiences and strike out on your own into lesser-known areas.
One problem could be missing some kind of sense of mission, which I think added a lot of dimension to these expeditions of the past. You could satisfy that by developing a hobby that makes these trips more meaningful. Mountain-climbing, photography, and gemology are some ideas that come to mind.
For others, the experience of being in the naked wilderness is enough, and they don't need any other reason than that.
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09-01-2014, 04:35 AM
^ Right. But where can you experience the same exoticness in terms of meeting people from distant cultures like it was a few centuries ago?
I read a letter from my great grandfather which he sent home in 1923 only to tell that he had been thrown in jail together with two black guys when he tried to cross the border from Canada to USA illegally.
Being thrown into jail was not the point or the reason why he wrote the letter.
It was that he had seen black people with his own eyes. It was a very big thing.
Of course you can have exotic status as a gringo in some parts of the world.
But people still know how other people and races are looking. They have seen in newspapers,magzines, internet and so on.
Back in time when the white man discovered America they hadn't a slightest idea of what they would see or experience. The only thing can match that nowadays is expeditions somewhere far into the space.
But we are not there yet.
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09-01-2014, 05:12 AM
The expeditions of future will be unlike any of the expeditions of the past. In the past, you could grab a backpack and a rifle and go exploring the unknown parts of the amazon. But you can't do that for space or for ocean depths. Even the large schooners manned with hundreds that were used in Northwest passage or Antarctic expeditions pale in comparison to the enormity of exploring an ocean trench or moon, which involves thousands of people and national or global efforts.
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09-01-2014, 10:01 AM
How do these happen though? Presumably through the sphere of academia? National Geographic society? Aside from a few high profile things like the Russians going to the Arctic in a sub, I really haven't heard of much. I take it no one has ever done something like this? That said I wonder why the spirit and sense of adventure waned off after the moon landings. Yah it was expensive, but it seems that instead of blazing trails, the majority is happier sitting around eating junk food and watching reality TV. Do people even really respect explorers that much any more? I went to see Chris Hadfield speak like 12 years back, amazing. But then I bet a good portion of even Canadians have no idea who he is.
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09-01-2014, 10:18 AM
In Africa I'm sure there are still many unknown places. Congo for instance is absolutely huge and a large part of the country is jungle. Very recently (last year?), they discovered a new type of ape which looks completely different from any other type, google that shit. Imagine, if they can find new types of apes there, what else is there? Many countries there must have some very unknown areas. Think of countries like Angola, Chad, Sudan, ... these countries are as big as Colombia and Venezuela combined, but very undiscovered with plenty of poor local tribes, warzone areas, undefiled nature, etc...
And furthermore cosign on the deep ocean, check the TedX on the first visuals of the giant squid, a squid so huge it fights in the deep ocean with whales. Another interesting one is the squid that is invisible, meaning it takes all the colours of its surroundings and sort of projects it on its skin. Difficult to explain, you have to watch it, but it can morph in this way into other animals and then attacks them. For instance it morphs into seaweed, waits for some animal to approach thinking it will have a nice seaweed snack and then it attacks it and eats it. Most interesting animal for sure. There is also another one which is immortal. It reproduces itself continuously, perhaps there is one living now that somehow has escaped natural predators and is thousands of years old (in some cave or something).
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09-01-2014, 10:37 AM
Of course it is possible, but only if you were ready to face extremely harsh conditions. Forget about services or hotels, you would have to sleep outside and live like an animal.
Go to places that are largely uninhabited. There is nobody in the whole northern region of Russia, deserts, the forests of underdeveloped African nations.
Surely this will appeal to some people, but survivalism has never been my cup of tea. I enjoy travelling to explore far-away unknown cultures, but I don't get along well with nature.
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09-01-2014, 10:55 AM
adventures and expeditions take money
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09-01-2014, 08:20 PM
Ranulph Fiennes may be considered the last great expeditioner. His biography is "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know". Good read. Fascinating dude. I believe his last "expedition" was 7 marathons on 7 continents in 7 days. He also did a lot of arctic and Antarctic expeditions too including circumnavigating the globe through the poles or something like that.
If the Amazon is your thing, I believe the book is called "the unconquered" is one you may want to check out. It's about a group, like within the past decade, that goes and searches for a basically uncontacted tribe so they can know where they're at and protect that land.
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09-01-2014, 11:15 PM
You can go on many safaris. Some, from my understanding, are very intense although a lot are packaged for the typical tourist.
Yes, go in the rainforest, visit a shaman.
The most intense expeditions are the ones climbing Everest and the like. These run somewhere between 30-50k I believe.
