Thursday 26 May 2016

Adventure idea - Walk around the World

Some time ago I was thinking what is possibly the most amazing adventure I can imagine for myself. And my thought went along the following lines: so, there are many things I'd like very much to do, but one stands out. Its the idea of around the world travel on foot with minimum luggage and through places rarely or never visited or if visited not documented. One of the main reasons for this to be done could be to document and research places, people, flora and fauna, which will disappear soon and the knowledge about them will be lost forever.

I thought about that when I realised that the proverbial modern access to information is simply illusion. Everybody thinks that we have access to nearly all information that exists, however people are mixing quantity with quality. We do indeed can instantly get enormous amounts of information, but that information is about relatively small number of topics. To illustrate what I mean, just think how much information there is on internet about celebrities, sport, movies and compare that to how much we can find about the way of life of the native Americans before Columbus or indeed about these living until nowadays in the jungles of Amazonia. For example one of my projects is to reconstruct fully the way of life of the different groups of humans before the agricultural revolution (in my opinion it is the way of life for which we evolved, we are best adapted and the way of life most beneficial for our mental and physical health). So first I went to look for more information about the hunting techniques and what a surprise nobody bothered to even document how exactly bow is held and shot by the different tribes. There was rich information about certain topics, which were speciality of the particular researcher, but this method leaves enormous gaps in the knowledge. For example a researcher may not realise the importance of the weapon crafting techniques and to fully discard unique and mind blowing things as "well they have something like 3 feet long bows, crudely made". These "crude bows" and how they are used may happen to be actually the most important thing that need to be documented instead the description of some trinket produced by these people. So to avoid this problem I think we need to have more encyclopaedic approach, in sense the researcher needs to have enough knowledge in very wide range of fields so he'll be able at least to appreciate that certain things are important and have to be described and documented, even if he doesn't know enough to make proper research of the specific topic. Anyway, I strayed a bit from the topic. What I wanted to say is that out there is big world mostly unknown and disappearing and it is worth to go and gather  the information before its gone.

So, once we established the need these less known places, people and things to be found, seen and documented the next question is going to be: "How to get there?". Nowadays we have of course many options for travel, but the drawback for most of them is that they can get you only to places that are already often visited, by the virtue of being part of the global transport net and our only other option is to simply walk to the places we want to reach. And once we get our heads around the idea to abandon for most of the part the more conventional methods of transportation, we can start seeing the beauty of the idea to walk around the World. The walk itself is one of the most pleasant and beneficial for our physical and mental health activities that we can think of. In essence such a project is going to combine in one the useful with the pleasant.

So, these were my musings on the topic about the adventures and I thought to share them here.


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