RYP: The Anti-traveller

It is high time to profile one of my favourite modern adventurers: Robert Young Pelton. Born near Edmonton, Alberta young Pelton was educated in a school bent on turning young boys into latter-day voyageurs. After graduating he travelled around South America and Europe, then headed back to Toronto to become a copywriter.

Later RYP started his own design/production company in California, and funded himself to war zones around the world. He gained fame for interviewing “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh and writing The World’s Most Dangerous Places, a sort of anti-travel guidebook to the hellholes of the Earth.

Yet he admits he is not a journalist and just enjoys finding out about far off, under-reported war zones. Here is an adventure quote:

My wife was giving me a hard time for going into Columbia. I had just come back from Liberia, and that’s a pretty gruesome war. They had given me a severed head as a gift, and there was a lot of fighting and death and people being disemboweled and their hearts being eaten, and it didn’t bother me that much. So I thought maybe I was getting tweaked. So I said, “Well, maybe I’ll just do something normal.” Of course, then I got kidnapped and a bunch of people got killed, and they killed all the people we stayed with, and it turned into a blood bath.

The Adventurist is his inspiring autobiography, and The Hunter, the Hammer and Heaven is a collection of three wicked tales of three wicked locales. I recommend ALL these books for anyone interested in countries outside the Anglosphere and Western Europe. Also, he speaks at the Lavin Agency with The Man.

Robert Young Pelton has served as an inspiration and role model to this wannabe modern-day geographer. I even contemplated following a similar route (start design biz, fund self around planet) if I couldn’t get into RMC.

Some RYP links:

• Official Site: www.comebackalive.com
• Brilliant interview by Brazilian photography site Lost Art
• Video Interview with Tavis Smiley
• National Geographic on RYP’s Panamanian kidnapping
• Great interview at new travel mag Young Pioneers