
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
Robert is THE MAN.
Colombia, M. Pelton, “Colombia”
Hey where is Harry Flashman??? Where is Richard Francis Burton???? and Iirelou…I always spell it Colombia… Cool site.
Burton is BRILLIANT. When I was younger I was a student of Hoplology. Not sure who Harry Flashman is, but I will definitely check him out on your recommendation.
Cheers for the site kudos!
More on “Sir Harry Paget Flashman”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Paget_Flashman and his “official site”:http://www.harryflashman.org/.
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I suppose you think that for each country he reports in his book as having the dope on, you think that means he has own passport individually stamped in person accordingly to each country he reports on, huh?
I suppose you think that it is pretty cool
a guy can fly and raft into a place like
the Darien Gap and get people killed in the process, huh?
That you think that this one tough hombre may react with un-characteristic chagrin
as opposed to the rest of us if ever witnessing beheadings or human torture is
not neccesarily an admirable trait, it may jsut indicate he is significantly more de-sensitised to violence than the rest of us.
Is that some type of privelege to witness
such groteque happenings?
Watch this, hell never write about how
personally affected by it he might be, he is too busy acting cool about it.
RYP went to places and people were killed there as an off shoot of his traveling there.
Even after this, his travel companion spoke of the whole danger travel experience as worthy of the equivalent to “shits and giggles” ie fun
If you ask me he should get a new hobby and cut the divorce from reality…he has already shown that he can estrange his wife.
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