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”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coureurs_des_bois. 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”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060011602/ref=pd_sxp_elt_l1/104-8181616-2513559, 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”:http://www.youngpioneers.com/content/pelton.shtml:

bq. 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”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767905768/ref=pd_sxp_elt_l1/104-8181616-2513559 is his inspiring autobiography, and “The Hunter, the Hammer and Heaven”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1585744166/ref=pd_sxp_elt_l1/104-8181616-2513559 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”:http://www.thelavinagency.com/usa/robertyoungpelton.html with “The Man”:http://www.thelavinagency.com/usa/robertkaplan.html.

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.”:http://www.cominganarchy.com/2005/05/09/a-letter-in-the-mail/

Some RYP links:

* Official Site: “www.comebackalive.com”:http://www.comebackalive.com/
* “Brilliant interview”:http://www.lost.art.br/ryp_e.htm by Brazilian photography site Lost Art
* “Video Interview”:http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200403/20040324.html with Tavis Smiley
* National Geographic on “RYP’s Panamanian kidnapping”:http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/01/0127_030127_PeltonQA.html
* “Great interview”:http://www.youngpioneers.com/content/pelton.shtml at new travel mag Young Pioneers