There’s something to be said for bringing to light undiscovered places. Saying that goes against my grain. As a wilderness lover, I’m always itching to walk into territory where other people aren’t, and to keep those others from coming for as long as possible. But reading this story from the BBC has me rethinking my priorities. On official maps of the Democratic Republic of Congo, there are areas so thickly forested (or so inaccessible due to ongoing conflicts) that existent villages haven’t been ‘discovered.’

To the traveler’s mind, this automatically sounds like a pretty good thing. But it turns out that forestry and timber contracts are being handed out partly on the basis that there aren’t any living people in the areas under question. A new mapping technique, using GPS and local villagers instead of satellite, has found that an area thought to have only 30 villages actually contains at least 190. The Rainforest Foundation is behind the effort, and points out the importance of establishing prior claims before logging and mining contracts in the resource-rich Democratic Republic of Congo are handed out willy-nilly to foreign corporations.

This story seems to me to be part of a wider worldwide tale, in which travelers and travel writers have brought previously unknown cultures to the world’s attention, and in doing so have helped slow the resource-grabbing (or rape, or theft, or whatever you want to call it) of those areas by faceless conglomerates.

In our world, where there is no real undiscovered country, no real new places to explore, the intrusion of travelers has arguably led to an expansion of consciousness, where people of any geographic location are given a smidgeon more power to determine their own fate and the use of the land they live on.

I stumbled across Jon Haggins awhile back, when I found his video about Norfolk, Virginia.

Today I felt like getting a little more exotic. While poking around for a good travel video, I found Jon’s enthusiastic take on the North African country of Tunisia (it’s on his GlobeTrotterTV3 channel on YouTube.)

I just love finding random people who are holding up a camera and letting it rip!

For those reading this post on RSS/feed readers, or anyone else who can’t see the video box below, click here to go to the Tunisia video on his YouTube page.

I’ll just say this straight out, so there’s no confusion: The World Without Us is not a depressing book.

Well, not entirely.

Called “one of the grandest thought experiments of our time” by revered nature/place writer Bill McKibben, The World Without Us sidesteps the calls to action over issues such as global warming and chemical manufacturing, and instead takes us to a place that no human will ever visit: a world in which the entire species has simply disappeared. Not done ourselves in through boiling the place or nuking one another or ingesting too many miniscule plastic grocery bag particles, but just gone.

What would happen? To answer the question, Weisman travels to places that represent the forefront of Industrial Revolution technology, and to places that are the last preserves of what the world looked like without our insatiable need to dominate nature and create waste.

Weisman walks into the Bialowieza Puszcza forest in Poland, virtually the only original ancient forest left in Europe, under constant threat from development. There, he asks how the forests would recover and reclaim their land without humans to constantly cut them back. He flies over Gambe Stream National Park in Tanzania, tracking the paths of elephants whose territory is shrinking in the face of housing development and an explosion of rose farming (note to self: being a person who prefers animals to people, I am never buying flower shop roses again).

He crosses Europe, notes the return of wildlife to the Chernobyl region, pokes around the miles of chemical and gasoline refining plants near Houston (awesome in their massiveness and arrogance), plans out the demise of the Panama Canal without people to maintain its locks, gives readers a glimpse of the precarious and unkown battle of New York City’s workers to keep the megalopolis’s head above water every time it rains, and floats to the great whirlpool of the Pacific where the planet’s millions of plastic grocery sacks, Styrofoam containers, Ziplock sandwich bags, and snippets of clingfilm end up — in short, the Earth’s plastic sewer.

Weisman did not intend this book to be a travel book. It is, as Bill McKibben described, a thought experiment. What will happen to balance out wildlife without the constant sprawl of human suburbs? How long will evolution take to develop a microbe that eats the plastic grocery bags that we each use by the thousands every year with abandon? What happens to a human body in a hermetically sealed, decay-proof coffin? (Answer: I’d rather rot under a tree, thanks.) But it succeeds in doing what the best of travel stories have always done. That is, to make us look at specks of our world in a different light — in this case, the light of what our wasteful natures hath wrought, and how long it would take to unwrought it if nobody were here to shoot the endangered tigers or fix our roofs.

The World Without Us is superbly written and endlessly fascinating. It takes us to corners of the world with little to tell but stories of past existence and the destruction unfettered wilfullness leads to. And how futile our industrial energy becomes when set against our own existence.

It’s a pity that the wilderness it ultimately shows us is one that will never appear in a glossy travel magazine.

(On the book’s website, Weisman has set up a GoogleEarth tour to virtually visit most of the places he traveled to. Along with the usual GoogleEarth perspective, the links give a little history and information about each location.)

Some of my friends refer to me as the rainmaker: wherever I go it always seems to rain. In 2005 I spent the whole year travelling – shooting a book on Islands around the World. In all but one of these places I saw some rain. Sometimes just a few minutes – other times a few days. I have been to supposedly drought-struck Ethiopia three times, and been rained on each time! Sod Bob Geldoff, what Ethiopia really needs is me. I might not be able to feed the world, but I can certainly make sure that it is watered!

I mention this because I am currently in Marrakech, and after four clear and sunny days, it has just coded over and delivered a short sharp shower, which has sent everyone running for cover.

Marrakech is a cool place – just three hours from London, and still steeped with the mysticism of North Africa. It also has a good sprinkling of spas and decent restaurants to help the style-conscious traveller recover from a day pounding the unbelievably sprawling souk desperate to discover something that they actually want. As well as the miles of tourist tat, there are spice markets, selling all manner of medicinal herbs and spices (and even tortoises and chameleons as pets as well as worryingly a number of leopard skins)

The main square in Marrakech is the Jemaa el Fna which loosely translated means ‘the place where tourists come to watch Moroccans in funny hats mistreating animals and small boys’. Actually in means assembly of the dead, which sounds tremendously nihilistic.

All manner of crazy north African entertainment is on show here: snake charmers torment reptiles, including stuffing them in glasses of water, and shoving eggs in their mouths – then introduce them to captured chipmonks presumably to prove they are still poisonous (I didn’t wait around to find out). Caleche drivers whip aged horses to a gallop, and enterprising fellows walk around with barbary apes on chains and force them to pose with tourists. Later in the evening, young boys are encouraged to box to the delight of the locals who crowd around like they are watching a playground fight. On a non-animal theme, old water sellers dressed up in pom-pom hats and African drummers with hat tassels charge for photos. At night, scores al fresco foodstalls spring up, selling freshly cooked seafood and grilled meats.

Update: I have just got back from a particularly damp evening stroll and a selection of food from these stalls and it is still raining. But I am not worried. Luckily I invested in the Time Out Guide to Marrakech for this trip. They started off as the London weekly listings magazine and have no diversified. into guidebooks with a particular emphasis on funky lively places that people go to for long weekend breaks. Now someone I was speaking to yesterday who made the mistake of buying the (Australian) Lonely Planet guide told me that there were no bars in the ancient and holy Medina, which makes up the centre of Marrakech. My Time Out guide lists five – six if you count the Kosybar, which is mainly a restaurant. Let that be a lesson to you: buy British. We always know where to get a drink, and what to do when it rains!

Words and pictures © Steve Davey 2008

So motorcycling heroes, Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman have completed another adventure - this time biking the length of Africa. Like their previous jourrney though, this has been done with comprehensive back-up. This is no seat of the pants jaunt, the whole thing has been filmed by motorcycle outriders, and they had a number of support vehicles. On the news report I saw, there was even a flunky to wash dust out of their eyes.

Now this is a shame, as the whole point of a road-trip, especially a motorcycle road-trip is the freedom of the open road. Not to ride in a convoy with support.

This does throw up the problems though of filming a journey. You either have to film it yourself making it all but unwatchable due to the low production values, or take along a film crew and the attendent gear and support vehicles. I have done some filming and the endlessly repeated longshots do just ruin the spirit of a journey.

There are different ways of getting around this. Firstly you can fess up, and make the film and support crew into part of the film. This is the option taken by Jeremy Clarkson is his utterly unprincipled, yet stupendously watchable drunken drive in a 4WD to the North Pole. Alternatively you can still pretend that you are travelling virtually on your own and make out that you are the last action hero - apparantly the technique used by Bear Grylls in Born Survivor according to the Telegraph(even though Grylls is actually a columnist for the Daily Telegraph). Discovery Channel (who screen the show as Man vs Wild in the US) seem to admit that some of the scenes were faked for TV, according to the BBC.

Now I am sure that all Grylls has done is buckle to the pressure of filming good tv, but it is nice to know that there are some people out there ‘doing it for real’. Grant & Susan Johnson describe themselves as ‘Consultant Bikers’. They have a website called Horizons Unlimted which describes their 14 years of travels.

The site also has an extensive blog section for other travellers and links to other motorcycle traveller’s websites. Just dabbling through here and you will find any number of two-wheel lunatics out there living the dream, such as Sean Howman who rode a bike from Chennai in India to Charing Cross in London and Lois Pryce who has ridden the length of Africa and also the Americas. This site is truly a goldmine for adventurous travellers.

I wonder what they would all make of Ewan and Charley’s efforts!

Words & picture © Steve Davey 2007